“What about his wife? Is she getting some of it?”
“Nope. He signed over his retirement to her. He only had nineteen years in, but he was vested and she lives cheap. Just beer and McDonald’s.”
“Any way to link the million to TIMCO?”
“Hawkins said the money went through a Caribbean account. Even if he could’ve remembered the name and the island, we’d never get the records, but we’re going through Charlie’s computer and all his files, not just for that but, for anything suspicious.”
“That links to Brandon?”
“He’s just one of the names. Charlie left lots enemies behind.”
Gage joined Skeeter in leaning against the car, then folded his arms across his chest.
“Let me try something out on you,” Gage said.
“Shoot.”
“Just between us.”
Skeeter nodded.
“Everybody seems to agree that some of Brandon’s rulings are bizarre, but they’re always solid enough to withstand appeal.”
“He’s a master of making a record that boxes in the Ninth Circuit,” Skeeter said. “His main trick is to make uncontestable factual findings that force appeals court judges to frame the issues exactly the way he wants them to. But his so-called facts of the case are usually pure fantasy. Fan-ta-sy… that asshole.”
Gage looked over at Skeeter. “You ever wonder if Brandon is taking payoffs?”
Skeeter whistled. “That’s heavy.”
“I know.”
“You mean through Marc Anston?”
“He’s the attorney of choice for nearly every company that either gets sued or criminally charged in Brandon’s court. An inflated fee, then a wink and a nod and the money ends up in Brandon’s bank account.”
“Sure would explain a lot,” Skeeter said. “But really hard to prove. Maybe impossible.”
“You have a couple of associates you can trust with something like this?”
“What do you have in mind?”
“We’re putting together a list of all of the companies that have appeared in Brandon’s court. Maybe your people can analyze Brandon’s rulings in those cases and can detect a pattern.”
“I’ve got a couple of kids who can do it, but…” Skeeter raised his eyebrows.
“But you’re wondering if they’ll end up like Shakir.”
“Yeah, I heard about what happened. How’s he doing?”
“He’ll be out of the hospital in a couple of days. I wouldn’t worry about your associates. The guys who went after Shakir were after something secret, not something anybody can find in a court file-”
“But only if they knew what they were looking for.”
“Right. If they knew what they were looking for.”
Chapter 31
Finally.” Joe Casey leaned back in his desk chair, gazed heavenward, and spread his arms. “Thank you Lord and the skies above.”
Judge Brandon Meyer had signed the OptiCom search warrant.
Casey called the agents to reassemble at the staging area, then walked from his office to the elevator. He glanced at his watch. Eleven-thirty A.M. Given the size of the OptiCom facility and the breadth of the authorized search, he knew he wouldn’t be getting home until the following morning.
Meyer’s clerk was standing at her office door as he approached, hand outstretched holding the warrant. She shook her head like she was watching a mudslide sweep away a hillside of houses.
“This is a big one,” she said when he came to a stop in front of her.
Casey nodded as he took the warrant from her hand. “A multibillion-dollar bubble will burst as soon as the media learns we’ve shown up at their door. Watch the news tonight.”
She pointed at the packet of papers. “Check the signature. The judge’s hands were shaking when he signed it.”
Casey figured he’d take a look later. “You know what the delay was?”
She looked over her shoulder toward the door to Meyer’s chambers, then lowered her voice. “You’re asking to search the whole facility.” She cocked her head toward the end of the hallway. “You hear what happened to Judge Spurling last week?”
Casey shook his head.
“The Ninth Circuit slapped him silly in a drug case, ruling he let the DEA go on a fishing expedition. They ridiculed him, wondering in writing whether he’d never read the Constitution, then tossed the whole indictment. It’s got all the judges nervous. Judge Meyer went over your affidavit line by line, making sure there was specific probable cause for each place you want to search.”
Casey felt a wave of annoyance, not because Meyer was second-guessing him, but because the first thing he’d always think about after a judge signed a search warrant was whether a defense attorney would later find a way to get it tossed. It pissed him off. Mostly because it got him second-guessing himself.
“I don’t care if it gets suppressed,” Casey said. “These gals are going to get their invention back, and OptiCom isn’t going to make a dime off their sacrifices.”
I t was hours after daybreak when Casey walked into his silent Peninsula home. His kids were long grown and out of the house. His wife was at work. The cat was on its neighborhood prowl and the dog had already begun its first nap of the day. He went into the kitchen where his vacationing neighbor’s bug-eyed goldfish swam in anticipation to the surface of its small bowl, then hung there in disappointment as Casey passed by the counter on his way to the refrigerator.
He felt like drinking a beer, but pulled out a V8, then glanced over at the kitchenette where a San Francisco Chronicle lay spread out, along with a bowl of cereal, a spoon, the TV remote, and a note from his wife.
I waited as long as I could. Have a snack, then get some sleep. XX
He traded the juice for milk, then sat down at the table and reached for the television remote and located CNBC. An OptiCom stock trading chart filled the screen. A female voice-over announced that the SEC had suspended trading after the share price crashed on the news of the raid.
A male voice chipped in,
“By my calculation, Chelsea, it would be a loss of… let me see… three point two billion dollars.”
“Do you think it’ll recover?”
“Of course. As soon as OptiCom cuts FiberLink in on the European contract, the price will regain most of its value.”
“When will it happen?”
“My guess? In about an hour-if there’s anyone with half a brain left running the show at OptiCom.”
C asey stared at the television as he decided whether to eat or sleep. It regained his attention with crashing music and an explosion of red and yellow with the words “News Alert” pulsing at the bottom of the screen. The woman appeared next to an inset box displaying a profile of President William Duncan.
“We’ve just received word the president is planning to announce his nominees to fill the soon-to-be-vacant Supreme Court seats.”
Casey felt a wave of tiredness, even relief, glad as always that his part of doing justice was merely to return things to the way they were, not remake the world to match somebody’s political imaginings. He flicked off the television, then returned the cereal to the box and the milk to the refrigerator, and went to bed.
Chapter 32
President Duncan emerged from a side door and strode to the podium in the East Room of the White House; trailing him were alias Starsky and Hutch, his nominees to the Supreme Court. All three met with a racket of applause from staffers, party leaders, and members of Congress that overwhelmed the collective gasp from the press.
Starsky was forty-two-year-old Judge Phillip Sanford from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Hutch was thirty-nine-year-old Judge Julian Heller from the Fifth Circuit, covering Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.
Landon Meyer watched on television from his Dirksen Building office. He smiled as the cameras panned the audience, the faces of the White House press corps, feeling themselves the victims of a mechanized assault, transforming from shock to awe. He understood what they thought they were seeing: two white males who melded the extremes of their personal religion and their personal politics into a determination to remake the country in their judicial image.