Fighting Chance(29)

“There have been rumors for months now that Martha Handling was taking bribes for giving unusually long sentences to juveniles. The contractors get paid a certain amount per inmate. The more inmates there are, the more money they get.”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “That, I’d heard about.”

“And?” John said.

Gregor sighed. “It’s the right kind of motive,” he said. “It’s better if Tibor knew that the woman was taking bribes. If she was taking bribes—”

“We’ve got someone for you to talk to about that,” Dickson Greer said.

Gregor shook his head again. “But the setup is wrong, somehow. It’s just sort of off. That probably sounds very fuzzy.”

“It isn’t much to go forward with when that video is all over the Internet and there’s that woman talking to every media outlet she can find and he won’t talk to anybody.”

“I know,” Gregor said. “But think about it. What’s supposed to have happened, exactly? He had some kind of meeting with her before the court hearing on Stefan Maldovanian, or he ran out to her office to see her before court was supposed to start? That doesn’t make any sense, because there’s no reason why he would have expected to find her in her chambers instead of in the courtroom. She was hearing another case before the Maldovanian case. And he wasn’t there then. Was there any indication that he had a meeting arranged with her—?”

“Not a thing,” George Edelson said.

“Well, then,” Gregor said, “I can’t even see a reason why he’d be there in the first place. And then there’s the crime itself. I supposed bludgeoned to death is the correct diagnosis?”

“We won’t have the preliminary autopsy reports until later this morning,” Dickson Greer said, “but that looks like the way it’s going.”

“Okay,” Gregor said. “Mr. Edelson says he thinks Tibor is capable of just about anything, but I’ve got a problem with the bludgeoning thing. It’s one of the hardest kinds of murder to commit. It’s virtually never a deliberate choice. People recoil from it instinctively. That’s why, most of the time, when it happens, it happens in a state of rage. Blind rage. It’s the rage I don’t find believable.”

“You don’t think that man could work himself into a state of rage?” George Edelson said.

“I think he could work himself into a state of rage,” Gregor said, “but I don’t think it would be blind rage. If Tibor is subject to rage, it isn’t the hot, blind, go-berserk kind of thing. It’s the cold kind. And when you are enraged but cold, you’re still thinking. And if you’re still thinking, if you’re still fully conscious, you’re going to have a very hard time standing next to someone and battering her brains out.”

“It’s a thought, Gregor,” John said. “But it isn’t much help. I don’t think a defense attorney could get it past a jury.”

“No,” Gregor said. “I agree with you. But it’s true, just the same.”

“And is that it?” John said. “Is that the reason you don’t think Tibor did it?”

“Partly,” Gregor said.

“What’s the other part?” John asked.

“I don’t know,” Gregor said. “I just can’t put my finger on it. But it hit me the very first time Bennis told me about this—hit me that something was absolutely wrong. That some part of this is not what it would be if Tibor were actually guilty. And on top of that, there’s that video. Someone must have taken that video. But when? Bennis tells me the first person on the scene was that woman who ended up screaming. But if that’s the case, where’s the person who took the video? Or did she take it?”

“I don’t think so,” George Edelson said. “They didn’t find a phone on her, and it’s a phone video. I suppose she could have ditched the phone somewhere.”

“And where was everybody else?” Gregor asked. “There should have been other people. There should at least have been secretaries.”

“That one, we’ve got an answer to,” Dickson Greer said. “The secretaries were at a funeral of a secretary for a judge who retired a while ago. The judge retired, the secretary died of breast cancer. The whole support staff was out at the funeral and the judges who were in at all were in court.”

“And this doesn’t feel wrong to you?” Gregor asked. “This doesn’t feel out of whack?”

“Gregor, I hate to tell you this,” John said, “but that’s no help at all.”