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  The question was moot, since he was already bearing down on her like a train on a crossing while the courtroom slowly emptied behind him.

  “What is it, Mr. Wilkerson?” Grace asked wearily. He was tall, fair, balding, with a long nose and sharp features. She had once thought him handsome, in a William Hurt kind of way. His navy suit, like all his clothes, looked expensive. His blue shirt and tie had no doubt been selected to match his eyes, which at the moment were narrow with anger as they met hers. His fingers twitched at his sides in a compulsive way she had noticed before.

  “This wouldn’t be personal, would it, Your Honor?” he asked, voice soft so that he wouldn’t be overheard. His mouth curled into an unpleasant smile. His fingers twitched again.

  “What?” She was really, really not in the mood for histrionics at the moment. In a nutshell, that was why she had stopped seeing him. He took nothing lightly. Everything was a matter of life or death to him. Such as where they went for dinner, or what movie they saw, or whether it was the right weather for boating on the Scioto.

  Life was too short to have to deal with that kind of personality on a daily basis. It was bad enough to have to deal with it in her courtroom.

  “You’ve ruled against my clients every time I’ve appeared before you since you stopped seeing me. I don’t think it’s just coincidence.”

  Grace regarded him steadily. “It is, Mr. Wilkerson, I assure you.”

  “I don’t believe it. What did I do to make you mad at me, Grace? Was it my ties? My aftershave? The way I drive? Not that I care. All I ask is that you don’t take your personal animosity toward me out on my clients.”

  “You’re skirting very close to contempt of court right now, Mr. Wilkerson.” Her voice was cold, her eyes hard. What had she been thinking, she asked herself, to get involved with this man, even for so brief a time?

  All right, she’d been lonely. But as she had learned, and was still learning, loneliness was sometimes preferable to the alternative.

  “Oh, that’s right, hide behind your judge’s robes. But I’m putting you on notice right now: I’m not going to let you punish my clients because you’ve got a grievance with me. I’ll file a complaint with the Judicial Oversight Board first.”

  “File a complaint with anyone you please, Mr. Wilkerson. And now I’m putting you on notice: If you don’t leave my courtroom right now, I will cite you with contempt of court, and you will spend the night in jail.” She stared coldly at him. His face turned red, then purple. His hands clenched at his sides. For a moment the issue hung in the balance.

  Then he swung on his heel and stalked away, pausing only to collect his client before exiting the courtroom.

  As the heavy oak door at the rear of the courtroom closed behind them, Grace permitted herself a mental sag.

  “Rough day,” the bailiff said sympathetically. Walter Dowd was sixty-two, with the wrinkled, jowly face of a basset hound atop the massive build of an NFL linebacker. Grace considered him a good friend.

  “Aren’t they all.” Grace’s smile at him was wry as she stood up, eager to reach her chambers and indulge in a much-needed jolt of caffeine. She would allow herself ten minutes to relax. Then she needed to call Chief Mapother of the Bexley Police Department and inquire about the status of their investigation into the intruder in her house the previous night. On the way home she had to stop by the dry cleaners and the grocery. After that came supper and Jess’s homework. And sometime tonight, she had to have a serious discussion with her daughter, to which she wasn’t looking forward one bit.

  All on the approximately three hours’ sleep she’d had before discovering that Jessica was missing from the house.

  That old saw about a woman’s work never being done was certainly right on target in her case. Exhaustion on a daily basis seemed to be her lot.

  The door at the back of the courtroom swung open, and a man walked into the now hushed and echoing chamber. Already on his way to lock that same door, Walter stopped in his tracks in the center aisle and looked at the man.

  “Court’s over for the day.” He tended to be protective of Grace, which most of the time she appreciated. His voice was gruff, his stance meant to block the intruder from advancing farther.

  “I know that. But I was hoping to catch the judge before she left.” He looked over Walter’s head at Grace, who still stood on the dais behind the bench. “Got a minute?”

  Grace recognized him at once: the cop from the night before. Mr. Obnoxious himself. Grace’s eyes narrowed and her lips compressed, but she nodded. To Walter she said, “It’s all right. You can let him in. And you can go ahead and lock up and leave. I know you need to get home. He can go out the back with me.”

  “Thanks, Your Honor.” Walter’s wife of forty years, Mary Alice, was recuperating from a hip replacement and needed him at home, Grace knew.

  As Walter again headed for the courtroom door, the cop walked past him toward Grace, who was stepping down from the bench.

  “What can I do for you?” she asked coolly as he came up to her. He was still half a head taller than she was even though she was wearing heels, and as scruffy-looking in jeans and a battered army jacket as he had been the night before. His gaze swept over her. Grace thought with satisfaction that she must present a far different picture in her solemn black judge’s robes than she had in her previous incarnation as a frightened, harried mother. A picture more deserving of respect.

  “Sorry to keep you late, Your Honor,” he said. Grace thought she detected a hint of irony in the honorific, and her frown intensified. But it was impossible to be sure. He continued, “I thought you might want to know under just what circumstances we found your daughter last night.”

  Grace sighed inwardly. She did want to know, of course. No, correction, she didn’t really want to know, but she needed to know. Oh, the joys of motherhood.

  “Come into my chambers,” she said with resignation, and led the way through the door in the wall behind the bench.

  Chapter

  8

  CHAMBERS WAS REALLY nothing more than fancy judicial lingo for an office, and not much of an office at that. The floors were brown-speckled linoleum, the walls ancient plaster painted beige, and the furniture—a desk, three chairs, a credenza, and a pair of glass-fronted bookcases—was all of heavy dark walnut. There was an ancient black leather couch against the wall through which the door opened, a green-shaded pharmacy lamp on her desk, and a framed, faded print of a long-ago foxhunt in shades of brown and red and green on the wall over the couch. Except for the assortment of family pictures and mementos scattered on the shelves of the bookcases, and the photograph of herself and Jessica perched on one corner of her desk, the room was completely impersonal.

  “You want a cup of coffee?” Glancing over her shoulder as she spoke, Grace headed directly toward the Mr. Coffee machine on the credenza directly behind her desk. If she didn’t ingest caffeine soon, she would die, she thought.

  “No. Thanks. You go ahead.” Standing just a few steps inside the door, he was looking around the room.

  Pouring herself a cup of coffee—the smell alone was to die for—Grace cradled the cup in both hands and then took a sip. God, it was strong, so late in the day! Beginning to revive, she sipped again and turned around to find that he was watching her now, in the same judgmental way that she remembered from the night before. What was with this guy, anyhow, she thought with growing resentment as she sat down in the chair behind her desk, placing the coffee cup on the glass-covered wood surface in front of her. If she was the worst mother he had ever run across, he sure didn’t get out much.

  She looked up at him. “You know, I don’t think I caught your name last night.” Her voice was cool, her manner very much that of the person in charge.

  “Tony Marino. Detective.”

  Marino. That was the name of the other police officer, the one who had first told her that Jessica had been found. So they were related. Grace wasn’t surprised. Their looks and manner
isms were very similar, although this one was the more unpleasant.

  A quick tap sounded at the door, distracting them both. He looked around and she looked past him as Nancy Lutz, one of the pool secretaries she shared with the other four Juvenile and Domestic Court judges, appeared in the doorway.

  “Need anything before I leave?” Nancy was a slender, attractive blonde of twenty-something with a wide, ready smile, which she turned on in full force after a quick appraisal of Grace’s visitor. Recently divorced, she was vocal about her newly restored interest in men.

  “No, thanks, Nancy. Good night.” From somewhere Grace summoned up an answering, if somewhat dry, smile.

  “ ’Night, Your Honor.” She turned and left, her pert bottom in its snug black skirt swaying with every step, her blond hair swinging saucily about her shoulders. Marino was so obvious about checking her out that Grace’s smile vanished. By the time he turned back to her, faintly smiling in lingering appreciation, her mouth was set in a thin, straight line and her eyes were cold.

  Pig’s the word for you, all right, she thought, taking another sip of her coffee. Of the male chauvinist variety.

  The coffee was faintly bitter on her tongue, but welcome nonetheless.

  “Mind if I shut the door?” he asked, gesturing toward it.

  “Not at all.”

  He closed the door, then turned back to face her. His army jacket was open. Beneath it he wore another plaid flannel shirt, this one in shades of brown and blue. Five o’clock shadow darkened the lines of a lean jaw and shaded the sides of his cheeks. His black hair was longish on top, short at the sides, and untidy. All in all, she decided, he was good-looking enough to merit Nancy’s come-hither sway—if one liked blue-collar types. Personally, she had never been too partial to big, cute, and macho. In her experience, those elements usually added up to stupid. And arrogant. And anti successful, competent women.

  “Have a seat.” Her tone was not exactly that of someone making an invitation. It was too abrupt for that, and the nod with which she accompanied it was abrupt, too, but he sat in one of the straight-back chairs in front of her desk, leaning forward so that his elbows rested on his thighs. Without Nancy to prompt it, he had lost his smile. His gaze met hers, and suddenly he didn’t look any more friendly than she felt.

  “You wanted to talk about my daughter,” Grace prompted.

  He nodded. “For starters, she goes to Hebron, right?”

  “Yes.” Hebron was the big public high school that was the bright and shining star of the city’s educational system. Grace would have preferred a smaller, private school, but Jessica had begged to go there. And Grace, as she usually did where Jess was concerned, had given in.

  “You know anything about her friends?” he asked. The question was almost accusing. His tone was the final straw.

  “Wait a minute.” Grace held up a hand to stop the conversation right there. She fixed him with her judge’s stare, perfected over three eventful years on the bench and guaranteed to pin miscreants to the spot like bugs in a collection until she saw fit to release them. “Stop right there. Your attitude ticks me off, Detective. I don’t know you from Adam, and you don’t know me. Who are you to sit in judgment of how I raise my daughter?”

  For a moment he returned her stare without speaking or altering his elbows-on-knees posture by so much as an inch.

  “I’m the narc who didn’t bust your daughter last night, Your Honor,” he said at last in a measured way. Straightening, he reached down into his jacket pocket. “Even though she had just paid twenty bucks for this when we came across her.”

  He pulled a Baggie from his jacket pocket and held it up so that Grace could see it. The clear plastic bag held a small amount of what appeared to be dried, ground-up grass.

  Harmless looking, unless you knew what it was.

  Grace knew what it was. She audibly caught her breath. All the vinegar went out of her, just drained right away along with her spine, so that she was left sitting there like a jellyfish, gazing speechlessly at him and the hideous, horrible, terrifying thing that dangled from his hand.

  “I see you recognize it.” His voice was dry as he restored the Baggie to his pocket. “Top grade Colombian by way of Mexico, by the way.”

  “Oh, my God,” Grace said. She felt as if she’d been socked in the gut by a huge, invisible fist. She could hardly draw breath.

  He nodded. “Hebron was more or less clean up until about five years ago. Then somebody figured out that these kids have the resources to buy drugs and started a campaign to penetrate the high school. Bingo! Now Hebron’s got a real drug problem, and Dom and I got the job of catching the creeps responsible. I’m hoping your daughter can help us.”

  “Oh, my God.” Grace felt as if she were suffocating. Jessica had bought pot. She was smoking pot. The night before, she’d been drunk. Grace saw all her bright dreams for her daughter wavering like a mirage in her mind’s eye. One wrong move and they would vanish. “My God.”

  His lips tightened and his eyes narrowed as he registered her distress.

  “If it’ll keep you from hyperventilating, I’ll start out by telling you I don’t think your daughter’s in very deep.” His voice was not unsympathetic. “At least, not yet. I’ve never run across her before the last couple of weeks, and I would have if she was out there regularly.”

  “How . . .” Grace swallowed, then tried again. “Where did you find her?”

  “We were following a car full of kids from Hebron last night. They drove to Brandeis Park, where they met up with a group of kids in another car. We had surveillance set up. Your daughter got out of the first car, walked over to the second. She handed a twenty through the window, got this in return, started to walk back to her group, and passed out cold on the ground midway there. A patrol car cruised by about then, and turned on its lights to go after a speeder. It must have scared the daylights out of everybody because both cars hightailed it out of there, leaving your daughter lying where she fell. One of our cars tailed them. Dom and I checked on your daughter. About the time we put her in our car, her description came over the radio, so we took her home.”

  “You’re sure she was the one who bought—that.” Her gaze touched on his pocket. Her lawyer’s instincts were to search for the loophole, to find a way out for her daughter at all costs. Her mother’s instincts were muddier. More on the lines of Jessica needing to take responsibility for what she had done.

  “I’m sure.”

  “Why didn’t you arrest her?” Grace was still having trouble talking.

  He glanced away from her then, very briefly. Then he looked at her once more. “Like I said, I’ve never seen her around before. She’s new to this group, and they’re using her to score. Dom and I aren’t out there to bust a bunch of kids, anyway. We want the big guy, the guy who’s selling it to the little dealer who’s selling it to them. I’m hoping your daughter might be persuaded to help us.”

  “How could she help you?”

  “For starters, she could give us the names of the kids in the cars. A couple we know, the rest we don’t. She could tell us who set up the deal. Who she gave the twenty to. Who that person gives the money to, if she knows.”

  “In other words, you want her to act as an informant.”

  “We’re asking for her help.”

  “She helps you or you charge her, is that the deal you’re trying to make?” Grace remembered the coffee then. Her hand moved to the cup, curled around it. But she couldn’t summon up the will to lift the brew to her mouth. She felt numb, as if her body had been shot full of Novocain.

  “Nope. Consider last night a freebie. We’re not going to charge her. She can help us, or not. But if I were you, I’d think about that ‘not.’ She doesn’t help us, that drug ring’s going to stay right where it is, where she is exposed to it constantly. This time, when we caught her, she’s not a stoner, not a cokehead or a crackhead, doesn’t score smack, is not heavily involved in the drug scene. Next time, whether it’s
us or someone else, who knows? She could face big-time jail time—or worse.”

  “I’ll take her out of Hebron. . ..” Grace was talking more to herself than him. Her right hand was clenched tight around the cooling coffee cup. Her left hand was clenched into a fist in her lap.

  He shrugged. “If you think that’ll help.”

  “I’ll put her in private school, and ground her for the rest of her life, and hire someone to be at home when she gets home, and . . .”

  “Watch her every minute of every day?” he finished for her. “Not possible. According to what I read in the police report, she managed to sneak out on you just last night. For the third time in . . . what was it, three months? That you know about.”

  Silenced, Grace could do no more than look at him. The sheer impossibility of watching Jessica twenty-four hours a day until she was an adult overwhelmed her. It could not be done, not without locking her daughter up in some kind of prison. Anyway, given Jessica’s nature, the more restricted she was, the more she could be counted on to rebel the moment she got the chance.

  “So just how would helping you help her?” Grace asked finally.

  “We’d be able to break up the drug ring that’s targeting her school, for one thing. It would help us get rid of the bad guys. And it would put her on notice that she has already come to the attention of the authorities and had better watch her step in future.”

  Grace stared at him fixedly while she turned the problem over in her mind. In law school, her keen analytic ability had always been touted as one of her strengths, but for a moment, swamped as it was by terror and panic, it threatened to fail her. When it did begin to function, however, one thing became perfectly clear almost at once.

  “My daughter would be in danger. If anyone found out that she was helping you, she would be in danger.”

  His eyes narrowed. “We would protect her. Guaranteed.”

  Grace laughed. The sound was short, staccato, unamused. “You can’t guarantee that she would be protected. You can’t watch her twenty-four hours a day for the rest of her life any more than I can. You think I don’t know what happens to kids who rat on dealers? Get real. I’m a judge, for God’s sake. I’ve seen it, and it’s ugly.” She took a deep breath. “No. I thank you for your forbearance in not arresting her last night, but no. She cannot help you. I’m sorry.”