Clean Slate

Chapter 35

The problem with the court records was that they were old. In the full ream of fastener-clasped pre-computer hand-written forms, Mac had found documents detailing Diana Privette's offense and the outcome, plus employment and address information. But all of it was stale – at least eight years old. The company she'd worked for no longer existed (and, considering her offense, it was not likely she'd still be working there anyway). And she'd long since left the address of record.

But in the past couple of weeks Mac had learned, partly from coaching by Abigail and partly from experimenting on his own, the usefulness of Look-M-Up and Google. The former gave him a residential address in Montcalm, the same suburb he'd lived in with Suzanne. And when he googled Privette's name, he found it mentioned on the staff list included in the web site for hospiceofthehills.com, which billed itself as a non-profit agency providing end-of-life care for St. Marys County residents and their families.

The address led Mac to an older clapboard house on Brown Boulevard, halfway up the steep slope of Mount Jackson on the city's east side. The house was a steeply gabled place with gray metal roof and pale blue siding set off by dark blue window trim and porch posts. The small lot it dominated was etched into the side of the hill, with a couple of big willow trees for shade. What had once been the front yard had been scraped bare and graveled for car parking.

Mac wedged his Suburban between two sedans, walked up the wood steps and across the deep porch, and entered the house through the two massive leaded-glass double doors. Just inside, in what had been a foyer, sat a reception desk attended by a thirties-ish woman with long fashionably tangled auburn hair, collating papers and talking into a phone receiver clamped between her jaw and shoulder. She flashed Mac a nice smile and a single wait-a-minute index finger, then finished, hung up, and smiled again. "May I help you?"

"I'm looking for Diana Privette."

She beamed. "I'm Diana! And you're?"

"Mac McGladrey. I work at the Court House."

She blinked, and her beaming, welcoming demeanor ramped down a solid notch. "Oh. What's up?"

"I'd like a minute of your time," Mac said, "if it's no trouble." The foyer was connected by archway to a large well lighted living room, in which were arrayed several long tables with people, mostly women, stuffing envelopes. From elsewhere in the cavernous house Mac could hear the muddled buzz of phones and computer printers and conversing voices. "Maybe," Mac added, "somewhere private?"

She had a thin face, thin lips, looks that aged as you got familiar with them. She nodded, and picked up the phone. "Blanche? I'm going on break, okay?" She hung up and stood as a heavy-set older woman with electric orange hair swayed into the foyer. "Back in a minute," Diana told her, and led Mac out onto the porch.

It was getting hot, but this close to the river it was reasonably comfortable in the shade of the deep wood porch. Mac's companion was attractively rounded and professionally clad in blue pants suit and small pearl necklace and dangling earrings that sparkled amid the tangle of hair, which in the outdoor light took on a more reddish hue, reminding him of Libby. Privette gave off the wariness that Mac would expect, but she exuded something else that interested him: an air of confidence and self-possession. Thinking it over -- and this was only a theory; they hadn't even really spoken yet -- Mac ventured the notion that perhaps these were signs of something he did not see much in his line of work: a clear conscience.

She led him to the far end of the porch, where a big rhododendron grew halfway up. An old park bench sat there, and she took a seat, crossed her legs, and looked up at Mac. "How much trouble am I in?" she asked, the question half humorous.

"None, far as I know."

"There's a relief."

"Unless you have something to confess."

Her look told him he'd pushed the whimsy too far. "You're not really at the Court House. You work at Fannie Annie, don't you."

"What, do I have some kind of pinched look or diseased pallor or something?"

"What you have," she replied, "is the ability to make me feel immediately and intensely self conscious."

"Well, I tell people ‘the Court House' because a lot of folks --"

"Don't know what Fannie Annie really is," she finished for him, and smiled ruefully. "As opposed to people like me, who know exactly what it is. How's Mr. Pipestone doing?"

"Joe was your guy?" Mac asked, surprised.

"At the end, when I went on nonreporting."

"Well, he's the same old."

"I always liked him."

"He's a good guy." Mac eased himself onto the wood balustrade, facing Privette. "You've stayed out of trouble, from what I see in the records."

Her smile was half modest, half assertive. "Not so much as a speeding ticket."

"Indeed." Mac groped for words. "It's what I hope for, in everyone I work with."

Privette's slim hands were fidgety. She looked away from Mac, into the middle distance between the house and the faraway river. "Your being here, it just yanks me right back."

"I'm sorry if it makes you uncomfortable."

She laughed nervously. "Makes me realize how very far I've come. You know, I look back, and I can't believe that was me back there."

"I understand."

"It's just unbelievable," she breathed. "I stole all that money. From a man who employed me, who trusted me. To buy things for myself."

"Well, you turned it around. Did your bit, inside and out. And made restitution, from what I see."

"And I'm about to finish college," she told him, "and I got a great job here. And I got married last year – to a wonderful man – who," she said, with a look for Mac, "knows all about me and my wicked, evil past."

"Good stuff." Mac reflected on how different this perspective was. In his day to day job he tended to deal only with the trouble-makers, the repeaters, the ones who didn't get it. Once someone changed their ways, they exited the system. Made for a warped perspective, from Mac's point of view. "Congratulations," he added.

"So," she said, "is that why you're here? To congratulate me on being a good citizen? Some new Fannie Annie Offender-Gone-Good award?"

"Actually, your name came up in another matter, and I'm looking for some information. You're not in trouble," he added.

"I can't imagine what it would be. But what?"

Mac had thought long and hard about how to broach the subject. And had decided, as he usually did, just to get in there and wing it. "I've been talking to Jessica Miller about an old friend of hers who died."

Privette's dark eyes widened. "Jessie! My God, I hadn't thought of her in years. How is she?"

"Some parts better than others," Mac answered. "Anyway, she was telling me about some things that happened to her back when she was, ah, under our purview."

Privette hadn't been all that animated before, sitting on the park bench, one leg thrown over the other. Now she seemed to go absolutely still. "Okay."

"She was victimized," Mac said, "by a. . .by a senior Court House management person."

"Uh-huh."

"And, she, uh," Mac added, looking down at his hands, "said the same thing happened to you."

Long silence. Beyond the porch, in the rhododendrons and trees, birds chirped. From the most extreme distance came the bay of a tugboat on the Sabbath River, far below.

"She's wrong," Privette said.

"You know something," Mac said, tone even, conversational. "People react to personal violence in different ways. Jessica, she's one of the really unlucky ones. She's got scars on her, scars right up top – they're red and raw, you can practically see them pulsating. She's never been the same. She never got what she needed to heal, and of all the things she needed, one of the most important was justice."

"It's sad," Privette said tonelessly.

"Other people," Mac went on, "they seem able to put things like that into a compartment, and slam the lid down. They like to think it's gone, or even that it never really happened. They put on the best possible face."

"People do what they have to," Privette said, "to go on."

Mac looked at her for a long moment, knowing full well there was no forcing anything out of her. "Jessica says she was repeatedly raped," Mac said, "by Earl Bucaro, who was and is superintendent of the Bureau of the Bailiff. It happened while she was in the work program, which B of B runs. She's the only complainant we have. She has not gone official with it. We have no supporting evidence so far. But," he added, "I believe her."

"Okay."

"She told me Bucaro also raped you. And I believe that, too." Privette was looking away, and said nothing. "I mean to bring Bucaro to account," Mac went on. "I intend to see that justice is done for Jessica, and for you, and for everyone else that this – this animal victimized. I'm doing it for them, and I'm doing it to keep others from becoming his victims."

Privette looked lost. God alone knew what was churning below the surface. She seemed to work hard at managing her expressions, facial and vocal. "What do you want from me."

"Is it true?"

She shook her head violently. "What do you want."

"We need for as many of his victims as possible to come forward, in concert, and go public."

Her mouth worked soundlessly, and she rose. "Well, it's not true," she said, voice thick and tremulous. "You've got the wrong girl. I don't know why Jessie would say something f-f-filthy like that about me."

"You know," Mac said, "you get out in front on this, you'll be the better for it. You'll have done your duty to yourself, to the other victims. And you'll be preventing what happened to you from happening to others."

She faced him, posture rigid, eyes wide and hot. "My duty?" she asked sourly. "I'm pregnant, okay? My husband and I are going to have our first baby. I just found out. My duty," she said, eyes flashing, "is to my baby and my husband. I am not. . .I can't. . .I have too much going for me now to go meddling into something that's been put to rest."

"But that's the point, Diana. It hasn't been put to rest. Not for you or for anyone else. And it won't until you come clean." Privette turned and started across the porch for the door, hard soles clicking on the plank porch floor. "He doesn't know, does he," Mac said. "Your husband."

She gave him one fierce glance, grabbed the brass door handle, and disappeared inside.

Mac remained half-seated on the balustrade, thinking. Secrets can be lethal, he'd wanted to add. They can kill relationships -- and even love. After a long moment he rose, retrieved a business card out of his pocket, and went inside. Diana Privette was nowhere to be seen, but the woman with the orange hair agreed to hand her his card.

---

Katie Killeen, Judge Wildern's longtime secretary, always treated Mac, as she treated everyone, with motherliness tempered by a fanatical yet well concealed desire to protect her boss from distractions large and small. When Mac called earlier in the day, Katie had told him that the Judge was away from the Court House till 2. She offered Mac the Judge's mobile phone number, but Mac told her his was a face-to-face errand. So she suggested that Mac show up around noon at the Castle, where the Judge would be speaking at the noon Business Roundtable luncheon.

Thanks to his morning meetings and the visit to Privette, Mac did not arrive till the luncheon was winding up. The setting was the Great Room of the Horace Harris Hunt and Equine Conservation Society and Country Club, which most people called "the Castle." It was quite the architectural anomaly out there in the wooded farm country north of St. Marys: a three story pile built of brown stone and complete with narrow windows, garrets, turrets, defensive barmkin walls, and a moat with drawbridge, capstan, and chains. Story went that it was built century before last by the feckless heir to a St. Marys lumber fortune, who, while wandering around South America, met, bedded, and married a young stunning Bolivian beauty possessed of hot temper, flamboyant tastes, and a habit of getting her way. Disgusted at and dismissive of the sturdy plainness of St. Marys area architecture – particularly the grim downtown brownstone the heir had thoughtlessly assumed would be their home – she demanded an estate more original, dramatic, suitable to their place in the pecking order. Hence the Castle. Though the marriage ended long before the drawbridge first clanked down into position, the heir made good use of the place down through the years, and in his will left it tax-free to the Country Club, which till then had been housed rather plainly in a building by the Bend.

Mac reached the Great Hall level just as the applause from the Judge's address was waning. Standing on the cobblestone floor by a gleaming suit of armor, Mac waited patiently while the Judge glad-handed his way across the mob of several hundred of the St. Marys business and political elite – well fed, well groomed, and mostly white. The judge was cordial, back-slapping, and careful to respond to every greeting -- but he never once allowed himself to be stopped. When he spotted Mac, the short hefty jurist beamed and cruised up by him, shaking Mac's hand with one and taking Mac's elbow by the other. "Keep moving," he said through smiling teeth, "and get me out of here. I'm late for a motion hearing."

"Need a minute, your Honor, if I may."

"Oh sure," the Judge puffed, waving and beaming at exiting luncheoners as they trotted down the vast stone stairway. "You can drive me back downtown. I'll send my car on."

Which he did, with a peremptory wave to the anonymous young copper at the wheel of the county-owned Caddy. Presently Mac found himself back behind the wheel of his Suburban, the Judge unbelted in the passenger seat. For a not especially large man, Wildern more than filled any space he was in. Today he wore the prototypical blue business suit, white shirt, muted red tie with George Bush-issue American flag pin. His flashy gold watch, multiple rings, and platinum ID bracelet were in place, and right on cue, and without asking permission, he retrieved a stogie from his jacket pocket and fired it up with a small silver lighter. Smoke wreathed the crags of his face and Mac cracked all four windows to give himself a fighting chance. "Could I get you to buckle up?" Mac asked, wheeling them onto the interstate.

"I like to be thrown clear," the Judge grumbled. "You know that."

Mac did know that. But he always felt compelled to ask. He let it go. "Talk go well?"

"Fine," the Judge rasped. He turned to face Mac, eyes penetrating under the heavy dark brows. "One of those automatic pilot jobs. What about you? All settled in on the job?"

"Fine, as far as it goes."

"Heard you butted heads with our friends from Homeland Security."

"Paperwork beef."

"They got too many people, too much time, not enough threat to go around," the Judge declaimed. "They have to do something to justify their existence."

Ever diplomatic, Mac just smiled.

"What about Clare?" Wildern asked. "You worked things out with her?"

"Nothing to work out," Mac said mildly. "She's the boss, I'm the grunt."

"Takes time to resolve personality issues," the Judge rumbled, "especially when the boss becomes the worker bee and vice versa. It'll work out eventually." He shot Mac another glance. "And Suzanne?"

Mac's smile was wintry. "Discussions proceed apace."

"Aha. Aha." The Judge puffed quickly on his cigar. "Got a line on a nice Le Mat revolver."

"Oh wow. The two-barrel job?"

"Nine-shot revolver cylinder," the Judge said proudly, ".42 caliber, and then a .63 caliber shotgun barrel."

"Gonna make a run at it?"

"First need to talk Ruthie into letting me invest in another display case. One thing at a time, my boy."

They motored for a bit, the highway wending its way through the treed hills that augured the frontiers of the city of St. Marys. Mac, who as before had not really scripted his approach here, took the plunge. "I'm here to give you a head's up of sorts."

"What's the story, Mac?" the judge asked, tipping gray ash out the window.

"It's about somebody who works for you," Mac said. "I've kind of stumbled onto something --"

"Yes?" the Judge barked.

"Something bad."

"About what?"

"More like ‘about who'." Mac hesitated. "Bucaro." Silence. "Earl Bucaro."

The Judge squinted, studied his cigar, took a hit. "Without specifics -- without details of any kind -- what kind of stuff?"

"Felony-level stuff."