Fighting Chance(20)

Janice went through the plate glass door and looked around. There was a waiting area with cheap plastic chairs and no one in them. There were three even cheaper desks where one man and two women were working away at computers. The computers were anchored to the desks with thick chains.

One of the women looked up from whatever she was working on and said, “Oh! Janice. Are you all right? We’ve all been so worried about you. And Kasey wants to talk to you. We’ve been calling you and calling you, and you never answered your phone.”

“I don’t have my phone,” Janice said, the indignation rising up in her throat like bad shellfish. “I had to leave it at the door. And then I ran out of there and I forgot it. And now I don’t know if I’m ever going to get it back.”

“Oh, my God,” the other woman said. “Are you all right? Did they get rough with you?”

There was a rumble and a bump and another woman came out from the back, where the private cubicles were. She was extremely tall, and extremely slender, extremely electric. Her hair was a cascade of red that ended at her waist.

“Oh, Kasey,” Janice said. “Oh, thank God.”

“They took Janice’s cell phone,” one of the women said. “Just look at her. She’s shaking.”

Kasey looked her up and down, and Janice felt immediately better. There were people who said it was a bad idea to have Kasey as head of Pennsylvania Justice, because she fed into all the stereotypes that said no organization could succeed without playing into the sexual demands of men, but Janice wasn’t having it.

“I’m glad to see you,” Kasey said. Her voice had an odd flat tone Janice was never able to define. “We’ve been watching the news back here all afternoon. Did they rough you up? Physically?”

“Oh, no,” Janice said. “There wasn’t anything physical. But there wouldn’t have been, would there? There were security cameras everywhere.”

“Probably,” Kasey agreed. “Come on back here and talk. We’ll get you a cup of coffee or chamomile tea or whatever it is you’re drinking these days.”

“Chamomile tea,” Janice said. She was very grateful that Kasey had remembered. Most people in her position wouldn’t have. “Except maybe there weren’t security cameras everywhere, because some of them looked like they had paint on the lenses. Does that sound crazy?”

Kasey turned back toward the cubicles, and Janice followed her.

“It really was incredible,” Janice said as they wound their way to the very back. Kasey’s cubicle was no bigger than any of the others. That was the kind of person she was.

“They kept us all round forever, and they questioned us over and over and over again, and that man, the one in the video, the one who did it, all he’d do was take the Fifth. And then there was my student—”

“Your student?”

“Oh, yes,” Janice said. “That was why I was there. I drove my student. Petrak. Petrak Maldo—Maldonian? I’m sorry. It’s one of those incredibly long East European names and I can never get it right. His brother was having a hearing about something, I don’t know what. Stefan. That’s the brother. He was undocumented and it was Martha Handling he was appearing before. Petrak doesn’t have a car so I offered to drive him. And, all right, I’ll admit it. I wanted to get a look at how she operated.”

“Did you?” Kasey asked.

Janice shook her head. “It turns out that juvenile hearings are closed. Or this one was. They wouldn’t let me in.”

“So you went down to see Martha in her chambers?”

“Oh, no,” Janice said.

The cubicle was invaded by another woman, this one very small and intense. She had cup of tea. “That’ll make you feel better!” she said chirpily.

Then she went out. Janice wondered if she was an intern. Interns were often chirpy.

“Janice?” Kasey said. “How did you end up in Martha Handling’s chambers?”

“It was just an accident, really. There’s this guard at a table near the door, and he told me I couldn’t go in, and there were a lot of other people trying to get in, so he went and talked to them. And there were two halls on either side of the front door without any guards on them, so I just started wandering.”

“Just like that.”

“Yes, of course, just like that. They’ve got to know that themselves, don’t you see, because there really were security cameras everywhere. I could see them the whole time. Except there was something strange some of them. They had paint over the lenses. Little blobs of paint. Can you understand that?”