The Intern(68)
Behind her, a credenza gleamed in the moonlight, its dark gray enamel surface as sleek and perfect as the judge herself. The face of it was flat, without handles or pulls, but a vertical line suggested it was divided into two compartments. She pressed a spot at the top right, and a door sprang open. The cabinet was divided into two sections, each outfitted with three levels of pull-out shelves full of file folders. She spent the next half hour going through the judge’s files. They were meticulously organized, containing memos and draft opinions, all perfectly legitimate. Nothing of interest there. She stood up and looked around. There were no other filing cabinets in the office. Just rows of bookshelves lined with Federal Reporters, their spines crisp and shiny with gilded stripes. She pulled out a volume at random and rifled the pages, looking for documents tucked inside. All she got was the smell of books and a jolt of melancholy, thinking about how far she’d sunk—from learning the law to breaking it.
She’d struck out in chambers. The evidence better be in Nancy’s office, or it was hidden somewhere else entirely, and she’d never find it.
The case manager’s office was not part of chambers but was located behind the courtroom on the other side of the floor. Madison walked down the public hallway on tiptoe, trying not to make a sound. One of the keys on Kelsey’s ring opened the courtroom doors. Inside was hushed and dim, with a row of small windows placed high up on the towering outer wall, making the space feel almost like a cathedral. She walked down the center aisle with a lump in her throat. If she couldn’t figure out a way to save herself, her future as a lawyer was dead.
A door behind the judge’s bench led to a small hallway containing the jury room, a restroom, and Nancy’s office. The office was locked. She found the key on the key ring and let herself in. It was windowless and pitch-black, but she was afraid to turn on the light. Shining her phone flashlight around, she saw a narrow room sparsely furnished with a desk, a chair, and a bank of metal filing cabinets. The cabinet drawers were all locked. None of the keys fit. This was a dead end if she couldn’t get them open. Maybe the key was in Nancy’s desk? She tried the top drawer. But it was locked, too.
She couldn’t afford to abandon her search without finding the evidence. She had to get into those filing cabinets.
A glass dish full of paper clips on Nancy’s desk made her think about picking the lock. That seemed far-fetched, like something from a film that would never work in real life. Then again, this was just a desk drawer, not Fort Knox. She watched a quick how-to video on her phone. It looked simple enough but required two hands, which meant she couldn’t hold her phone flashlight. She closed the office door and flipped on the light. A gap at the bottom of the door would let the light shine through, but that shouldn’t be a problem. She highly doubted the security guards patrolled the private hallway behind the judge’s courtroom after hours.
She unraveled a paper clip, straightened it out, and bent a second one at a ninety-degree angle to make a rough lever. So far, so good. Taking a deep breath, she inserted the flattened paper clip into the keyhole on the top drawer of Nancy’s desk. There should be pins in there that she could locate by probing. But she couldn’t feel a thing, probably because there wasn’t enough tension with just one clip. Inserting the second clip on top of the first was supposed to ratchet the tension. Okay, yeah, there we go. She felt it now. She could turn the bent clip like a key. A little more, a little more. Click.
Surprise. It worked.
Pulling open the desk drawer, the first thing she saw was a gun. She stared at it for a second. It seemed strange for a bureaucrat to keep a gun in her desk, even one as paranoid about threats as Nancy. It supported the conclusion that Nancy was implicated in the corruption. Better get what she came for and get out of this office before she got caught. Ignoring the gun, she lifted up the plastic pencil tray and found a set of keys to the filing cabinets. Starting with “A,” she reviewed file after file of legal documents for the cases assigned to Judge Conroy. Indictments, guilty pleas, sentencing reports, case dispositions. Duplicates of every paper Nancy sent to the Clerk’s Office for recording. A place for everything, everything in its place—the woman was a marvel of organization. Under “C,” she did find one unexpected item, a file called “COMM AVE HOUSE” containing the deed to Judge Conroy’s town house on Commonwealth Avenue. Except, turned out it wasn’t the judge’s house. Judge Conroy didn’t own her home in her own name. The town house was held by something called Gloucester LLC. Madison had learned about limited liability corporations in school. They shielded owners from liability for taxes, debts, criminal acts, you name it. It could be virtually impossible to find the man behind the curtain of an LLC, which made it the perfect form of ownership for people with something to hide. It was suspicious that the judge’s house was owned by an LLC, but not proof of a crime in and of itself.
Why did Nancy have the deed in her files?
Just in case it was of interest to the feds, she snapped a photo before moving on. It was all a big nothing burger until “P” for “Pe?a,” the file on Danny’s case. At first glance, everything looked neat and tidy like the rest, with the level of organization she expected from Nancy. Documents on each defendant organized alphabetically by last name, and chronologically by date of filing with the court. Except that where Danny’s documents began, an oversized manila envelope protruded, marked “Rivera Photos” on the front in thick black marker.