Brand was in his office in the morning, moving files around on his desk, when Tommy returned about eleven a.m. from his conference at the court of appeals. The substance of the meeting had been largely the same as the meeting at the prison yesterday. Nobody had enough money. What do they cut?
Brand had taken the day off yesterday to interview political consultants. His opponent, Beroja, had the advantage of an existing organization. Brand would have a lot of help from the party, but he had to get his own people in place.
Molto asked what he made of the consultants he'd met.
"I liked the two women. O'Bannon and Meyers? Pretty sharp. Only guess what their last local campaign was."
"Sabich?"
"Exactly." Brand laughed. "Talk about hired guns."
"I saw him yesterday, by the way."
"Who?"
"Rusty."
That stopped Brand, who'd continued rearranging the piles on his desk. The trial cart from the Sabich case remained in the corner of Brand's office, still holding all of Jim and Tommy's files, as well as the exhibits, which Judge Yee had returned when the proceedings were over. To try a case, you ignored everything in the universe-family occasions, the news, other cases-and once it ended, all the stuff that had been pushed aside became more pressing than something as trivial as cleaning up. You could walk into the offices of half the deputy PAs and see trial boxes that had sat around untouched for months in the aftermath of verdicts. When you finally found the time to put that stuff away, it was as poignant as surveying the relics of a former love affair, these documents and pill bottles that once seemed as momentous as pieces of the True Cross and were now entirely beside the point in the flow of daily life. In a few months, Tommy would not be able to tell you how most of those objects fit into the intricate labyrinth of inference and conclusion that had been the state's case. Now it was only the outcome that mattered. Rusty Sabich was a felon in prison.
"I was out in Morrisroe," said Tommy. He briefed Brand on the meeting. Letting convicts loose was going to be a campaign issue once it hit the press, but Brand was more interested in Sabich.
"You just dropped in on him? No lawyer, no nothing?"
"Kind of like old friends," said Tommy. It hadn't even occurred to him that Sabich might have refused to speak to him. Or seemingly to Sabich, for that matter. They were both much too engaged by the long-running contest between them to want to involve anyone else. It was like fighting with your ex-wife.
"How's he look?" Brand asked.
"Better than I thought he would."
"Shit," said Brand.
"I wanted to ask him face-to-face how he screwed with the computer."
"Again?"
"He wouldn't answer. I think he's protecting his kid."
"That's about what I figured."
"I know. I ran into Gorvetich a couple of days ago. He said you got blasted together after the trial and you said you think Rusty copped to something he didn't do. I couldn't imagine what the hell you were talking about at first. And then it came to me that you thought he was fronting for his son."
Brand shrugged. "Who knows what I was thinking? I was on my ass. So was Milo."
"But I still don't see what would have given you the idea Rusty was taking the kid's weight?"
Brand pulled a mouth and stared back down at his desk. The piles were organized with military precision, edges even and spaced exact distances apart, like the beds in a barracks. He picked up a stack of manila folders and looked around for someplace to put them.
"Just a feeling," he said.
"But why?"
Brand dropped the files on an open corner on the desk where they clearly didn't belong.
"Who cares, Boss? Rusty's in the can. Where he should be. At least for a little while. What are you afraid of?"
Afraid. That was the right word. Tommy had woken up at three, and most of the time he'd been flat-out nightmare scared. He tried to believe he was just torturing himself the way he sometimes did, unable or unwilling to absorb his own success. But he knew he was going to have to find out in order to be able to live with himself.
"What I'm afraid of, Jimmy, is that you know Rusty didn't put the card on the computer."
Brand finally sat down in his desk chair. "Why would you think that, Tom?"
"I've just been putting together a lot of pieces in the last couple of days. What you said to Gorvetich. The fact that you were sitting here all night after the PC had been unwrapped. And that Orestes had showed you how it could be powered up without removing the evidence tape. That was after the banker came in and it looked all of a sudden like our case was circling the drain. And you know computers. You took programming from Gorvetich. So I gotta ask, right, Jim? We still don't have anything else that would pass as an explanation. You didn't put that card on there, did you?"
"How could I have done that?" asked Brand with disarming calm. "I couldn't have turned that computer on and messed with it without the program directory showing it had been opened. Remember?"
"Right. Except the PC was going to be turned on the next day in court, and it would be that date and time that would show up in the directory." He had Brand's attention now. Jim was watching Tommy with care.
"It's brilliant," said Tommy. "Create a defense, which explains all the evidence, so Stern has to embrace it. And then when he has, you blow it completely out of the water. And blame the defendant for the fraud. It's just absolutely brilliant."
Brand looked across the desk for quite some time with a dead expression. And then slowly, he began to smile, until he was grinning at Molto in the familiar way he so often did, as the two of them appreciated the clowning, the irony, the flat-out comedy, of human misbehavior and the law's futile efforts to curb it.
"It woulda been pretty fuckin brilliant," he said.
Inside Tommy, something broke, probably his heart. He sat in a wooden chair across the office. All Brand had needed to tell him was no. In the meantime, Jim's smile had slackened as he registered Tommy's mood.
"That man killed somebody, Boss. Two somebodies. He's guilty."
"Except of what we convicted him of."
"Who cares?"
"I do," said Tommy. For all the years he'd worked in this office, he'd listened to one PA after another lecture his deputies about a prosecutor's duty to strike hard blows but fair. Some of them meant it; some of them said it with a wink and a nod, knowing how hard it was to play redcoats and Indians, to march in straight lines down the center of the road while the bad guys hid in the bushes and attacked. Tommy had probably wavered on all of that before Tomaso was born. But you had a different stake in the future with a child. You had to teach him right from wrong. Without quibbling or qualification. The murky truth would always be on the street. But there was no hope at all if the prosecutor didn't draw hard lines and stand behind them.
"The man stood up in court and admitted he was guilty," said Brand.
"Would you do that to protect your son? He knew he didn't do it, Jim, and his kid would be the only other person with a motive to try to take him out that way. So he pled to put an end to all of it."
"He's a murderer."
"You know," said Tommy, "I'm not even completely sure about that anymore. Tell me why that woman, who was already struggling, didn't just give up the ghost when she found out about her husband's affair and kill herself?"
"His fingerprints are on the pill bottle. He searched about phenelzine."
"That's our whole case? You really telling me we wouldn't have thought twice about proceeding if we knew Barbara had been to the bank?"
"He didn't deserve to walk away again. Not to mention you. You've been wearing Rusty as lead ankle weights for twenty years."
He didn't want what Brand had done. It was no gift to him. But even as he'd sat there in the dark in the middle of the night, hearing the sobbing, sleeping breaths now and then of his son, and occasionally his wife, often in an inexplicably close rhythm, he'd understood this much: that if Brand had done it, he'd done it for him.