Home>>read Fighting Chance free online

Fighting Chance(58)

By:Jane Haddam


He was a boy Mark recognized.

Mark thought he was going to die on the spot.

The rule of thumb was simple. If you could see them, they could see you. He had seen this boy at the courthouse on the day Martha Handling was killed. He had seen him twice. The first time had been at the very beginning, when Mark came up the front steps. The boy had been with that ridiculous woman who carried signs at demonstrations. It wasn’t the important woman, who was the head of Philadelphia Justice, but the squat little one who shrieked a lot. She had gotten through the first barrier, only to be stopped at the courtroom door, because the court was not going to allow her to be a spectator. She talked to the boy. Mark had thought he knew what she was doing. She was trying to get the boy to tell the guard at that door to let her in. The boy was not cooperating.

The second time Mark saw the boy had been later, downstairs, in the corridor where Martha Handling’s chambers were. That was the time Mark thought the boy might have seen him. At the courtroom door, the boy had been too preoccupied with dealing with the squat woman. In that back corridor …

Well, in that back corridor, a lot had been going on. Martha Handling was already dead.

Mark got up out of his chair and went to the door of his office. The boy was talking to the receptionist. He looked up and stared right into Mark’s face, but he didn’t look as if he’d recognized anybody.

“I’m Mark Granby,” Mark said, holding out a hand. “Why don’t you come in where we can talk? I liked your résumé very much. I think we have some real possibilities here.”

The boy looked confused. The receptionist also looked confused. Mark practically dragged the kid out of the front room and into the office. Then he closed the office door and locked it.

“Sit down,” he said, not sounding as happy-crappy as he had outside. “I know who you are. You’re the brother of the kid whose case was on when Martha Handling got killed.”

The boy was looking around the office, unhappy. “It looks like the office of a bureaucrat,” he said. “It should look like the office of a capitalist.”

Mark knew what the kid meant.

“I’m Mark Granby,” he said, “like I told you outside. Who are you? And don’t tell me you aren’t going to give me your name, because I can find it out.”

“I am Petrak Maldovanian,” the boy said.

Then he didn’t say anything else. Mark stared at him. Petrak stared at the room, at the walls, at the desk, out the windows. Mark thought if this kept up much longer, he would scream.

“Listen,” Mark said. “If we’re going to do business, we should do business. It’s not going to make much sense saying this was a job interview if we take forever. People will know something is up. Especially since I don’t actually have a job opening and I’m not going to hire you for anything. What do you want?”

Petrak looked down at his hands. “I found a cell phone,” he said.

“You told me that on the phone.”

“It was not an ordinary cell phone,” Petrak said. “It was a prepaid cell phone, the kind you can get at stores and right away use without a plan.”

“Yes,” Mark said. “And you think it’s mine?”

“At first I thought it was my brother Stefan’s,” Petrak said. “It had his picture on it, and pictures of other people. The other people looked like they could be his friends. But I have talked to Stefan, and it is not his phone.”

“All right,” Mark said. This was going to take forever.

“I looked at the phone and I found things,” Petrak said. “I found the video. The video of Father Tibor with the gavel. The one that was on the Internet.”

It took everything Mark had not to react to that one. There had to be dozens of city cops looking for the source of that video. If this boy had brought that video into the office—but then, what else could he have done? And what was Mark supposed to do now?

“You think this was my cell phone?” Mark asked. “You think I took the video of the priest killing—?”

But Petrak Maldovanian was shaking his head vigorously. “No, no,” he said. “It would not be your phone. It had your name and number on the contacts list. You do not put your name and number on your own contacts list. I think this was the phone of Judge Martha Handling. I think it was not her regular phone but a special phone she had. I saw her regular phone. It was on the desk in the room where she was. Where her body was.”

“Was it?” Mark said.

“It was a nice phone, her regular phone,” Petrak said. “I envied it.”