After gently closing the door, Dineesha rendered a brief but vivid portrait. The stucco bungalow, in which John’s parents had raised him, had visible cracks in the outer walls and a patch of shingles missing from the roof. But the true bedlam was inside. It was not dirty, Dineesha said, but so dense with piles that she could barely get into the front hallway. It was as if he had a recycling center in the house. He did not appear to have thrown out a newspaper or magazine in the last ten years. They were piled in columns to the ceiling in the living room, where there was also a virtual fortification of books, in eight-foot ramparts as if to form a bunker. Under the load, the hardwood floor had literally begun to sag. Two parakeets flew free throughout the house and made a squeaking racket.
George is taken from these thoughts by a buzz arising somewhere in the room. The unfamiliar sound spooks him a bit until he realizes it’s Patrice’s cell groaning intermittently as it vibrates. Fishing it from the suit jacket that hangs behind him, the judge sees letters on the gray screen. A text message, his first ever. He’s mildly pleased to have caught up with the times, until he reads what’s there.
“Number One,” he murmurs, “you are starting to get on my nerves.” But he cannot kid himself. It’s the first moment that requires a conscious effort to contain his fears. It’s not so much the words-‘Will get u’-that scare him. The threat is nothing new. What’s frightening is the number from which the message comes. It’s his, George’s. Number one has the judge’s missing cell phone.
11
At 3:00 P.M., Marina, who’s been working with the phone company for several hours, arrives with one of her deputies, Nora Ortega, a thin, dark, silent woman whom Marina has brought along on a few occasions in the past to take notes. George makes it a point to offer Marina his hand, and she exerts her entire boxy form as she shakes.
“That was over the top, Judge, putting that tail on without telling you. Sorry.”
He apologizes too, using the term ‘grouchy old man.’ They settle in familiar poses, George behind his desk, Marina in the black wooden armchair in front of it.
“So what did we learn about number 1?” he asks. “Anything good?”
“We’ve got some idea where he was. Which basically comes down to Center City.”
They’ve assumed all along that George’s tormentor is local, but this is the first proof. Nonetheless, the new information seems sparse compared with what he expected.
“I thought they could position a cell phone better than that.”
“If it’s turned on, Judge. But not if the phone is off. Which yours is, of course. It was probably off as soon as you got that text message.”
“So how can they tell he was in Center City?”
“My guy over there wouldn’t get very specific. They’ve got the government on one side and the ACLU on the other. He sort of explained all this by humming. But how I think this may go is that a cell phone actually puts out signals on two channels, and the company has a record of the second one, what’s called control channel data, which includes the location of the cell your phone connects to. The best they can do is tell us that the message went through the tower in the steeple at St. Margaret’s. He could have been anywhere within two square miles of there.”
“So you’ve narrowed it down to about two hundred thousand suspects?”
“Exactly.” Marina smiles. “We’ll have them all interviewed by morning.”
George is relieved that she has recovered her sense of humor with him. In the meantime, she holds up Patrice’s spare cell phone, which she’s brought back after getting all the info from it the telephone company needed.
“What I’m wondering is how he got this number.”
“Because I was nice enough to give it to him,” says George. “I was trying to find the phone I lost. So I called it. Made sense to me. When I got voice mail, I left a message. ‘This is Judge George Mason. If you’ve picked up this cell phone, please call me at the following number.’ I tried a few times.”
“And how would he have gotten into your voice mail without your password?”
“The whole sequence is programmed into the phone when you hold down the one key. Obviously he figured it out.”
“Obviously,” answers Marina.
“Any idea who else he called? Did he give himself up in some way?”
“Not really. The company says there’s no detail in the last two weeks.”
“Meaning?”
“If he used the phone, the calls are free under your plan. Voice mail. Stuff like that. He’s smart,” she says. “But we already knew that.”
Next, she wants to replay how George’s cell turned up missing and the steps his staff and he took to find it. After some talk, it makes more sense to include in the conversation everyone who had a role in the search, and George summons them. Dineesha and Cassie take places on the gray sofa beside Nora. Marcus, tall and bearded, stands at the door, working over a toothpick. Not to be overlooked, Abel wanders in last and with much effort puts himself down on a low colonial boot bench, next to John Banion.
George had noticed that the phone was not in his suit jacket pocket as he was leaving the Hotel Gresham after the Kindle County Bar Association’s Judges’ Day event, two weeks ago yesterday, but his last clear recollection of having it went back to his departure from chambers the evening before. The staff and he attempted to retrace his steps over the intervening period. Banion called the hotel lost and found. Marcus checked to make sure George had not left it at the courthouse metal detectors that morning. Cassie phoned the restaurant where George had dinner the preceding night, and went out to search his car. Dineesha combed the chambers. The judge himself looked everywhere around his house when he returned there.
“Truth is, Marina, until today, I’ve been convinced I was going to lift some pile of papers and see it there.” In the last few hours, fitting things together, George has been spinning another theory: Zeke took it. He now suspects that what Zeke was up to yesterday was an effort to lift something else. As George envisions the first episode, the road dog Khaleel must have walked up and down the corridor until he could see that everyone was out of chambers for a minute, then signaled Zeke, who came up and grabbed the phone. That way, if anyone returned and found Zeke inside, he could say he had just come by to visit. The judge is reluctant to try out this notion on Marina, however, until he’s forewarned Dineesha. That’s not a conversation he’s looking forward to.
“Maybe I can help,” says Marina. “According to the records the company pulled, your last charged call was the day you lost it at 12:12 P.M. One minute.” She reads the number he’d dialed. It’s Patrice’s, her other cell.
“I must have been checking to see how she was,” says the judge. “One minute means I probably got her voice mail.” That’s why he forgot making the call.
“And where were you?”
He cannot recollect. There have been so many stolen moments in so many corridors in the last months, brief, hushed conversations to let Patrice know she’s on his mind.
“Do you remember when we left for the hotel?” George asks Cassie. He’d invited both clerks to the Judges’ Day event, but John, as he does every year, had shunned the crowd.
Cassie searches her handheld.