Fighting Chance(75)

“And yet she had a very distinguished career,” Gregor said. “Somebody had to make her a judge.”

“Maybe that just tells you something about the state of things up in Harrisburg,” Mark said. “There are a lot of things that ought to be investigated up in Harrisburg.”

“Did you know Martha Handling spray-painted the lenses of the security cameras in the places she went in the courthouse?”

“Oh, sure,” Mark said. “She told me about that one herself. My God, paranoid? You wouldn’t have believed the woman. She was convinced they were bugging her house and her chambers and just about everything else, everywhere. I thought it was kind of weird. Somebody that dishonest, you’d figure she wouldn’t be that insane about getting caught. But she was.”

“Did you know that she didn’t actually get all the cameras?” Demarkian asked. “Did you know that the cameras in front, right after you came in from the street, and all the way down the corridor on the right to where the restrooms were, were functioning?”

“And they showed me coming in and going down the hall?” Mark asked. “That figures. Did they show anything important, like my going down the hall to her chambers?”

“No.”

“One point for my side.”

“But you must have gone all the way down the corridor to her chambers,” Demarkian said, “because that was the only reason you could have been there. You have no actual business in the courthouse. And you wouldn’t go there to talk to Martha Handling about bribes, or to give her bribe money. It was insane for you to go anywhere near the place. So why were you there?”

Mark considered that. “I was kidding myself,” he said.

“I don’t know what that means,” Demarkian said.

“When I first started with this, when I was first hired by Administrative Solutions and found out what we were doing behind the scenes, I told myself that I’d let it go so far and no farther, so I didn’t end up in jail. I don’t think I ever believed it, not all the way. I think I knew in the back of my mind that when the shit hit the fan, I was going to be over. But I did a pretty good job of kidding myself.”

“And it didn’t bother you that you were paying Martha Handling to give jail sentences to kids for things they’d normally only get probation for? That these kids, some of them as young as eight or nine, that you were incarcerating these kids, taking them away from their families and their schools and their friends and everything they’d ever known and probably ending any chance they would ever have for a real future?”

“It wasn’t only kids,” Mark said. “Though between mandatory minimums and the whole ‘law and order,’ ‘throw away the key’ mentality, there was no need to pay judges in the adult courts. There’s one guy in Pittsburgh they call Ninety-nine Klein because he doesn’t like to give sentences less than ninety-nine years. And then he piles on anything extra he can get away with and has them all run consecutively. We’ve got one guy in the state prison doing two hundred twenty-five. It’ll be ninety-nine years before he’s eligible for parole. And all he did was have a gun on him while he was smoking crack.”

“I still think that’s a far cry from locking up children,” Demarkian said.

“Yeah, well,” Mark said. “If you want to lie to yourself about that, you tell yourself there are predatory children. And there are. Predatory children. Born psychopaths.”

“So you went to the courthouse on the day Martha Handling was murdered to talk to her about predatory children?”

“No, of course not. I went there to retrieve a cell phone. Martha being the paranoid nutcase that she was, she wouldn’t talk to me on a regular phone. She brought prepaid cell phones, new ones every few weeks, always entirely different numbers. It was enough to want to make you shoot her on principle.”

“I don’t think it’s entirely implausible that her phone might be tapped,” Demarkian said. “There are investigations ongoing. Somebody could have gotten a warrant.”

“True,” Mark said, “but it’s like I said: She was a paranoid nutcase. We never talked about anything in plain English. If somebody had listened in on our conversations, all they would have heard was gibberish.”

“Then why try to retrieve the cell phone?” Demarkian asked. “That was a big risk to take.”

“Because cell phones store information,” Mark said. “And that wouldn’t be enough by itself, but Martha was making noises about going to the authorities. She seemed to think that if she turned herself in and gave them everything they needed to prosecute—well, everybody—that she’d be in a better position herself.”