A Darker Justice Read Online Free Page B

vacation. The husband drove down to her office and found her himself. The photo more or less says it all.”
    Jim scowled at the picture. The body of a woman sat in a tall leather chair, clad in a judicial gown. On her lap rested her severed head, a baffled expression of astonishment frozen on her lifeless features. “I read about this in the paper.” Jim handed the picture to Mary. “Of course they didn’t say she’d been beheaded. Who do you guys think did it?”
    “Someone strong enough to administer a single blow to the back of the neck, with an extremely sharp sword approximately six millimeters thick, perhaps four feet long.”
    “But how did he get her to stand still long enough to chop off her head?” asked Jim.
    “Poison,” replied Safer. “Judge Klinefelter had been injected with some kind of hemlock derivative, laced with something we haven’t identified yet. Depending on the dosage, hemlock’s either instant death or a slow, fully conscious paralysis that ends in death. Our boy had some fun with Rosemary Klinefelter.”
    “Your
boy
?” Mary looked up from the last grisly file, hoping the wedding cake she’d consumed an hour ago would stay in her stomach. Judge Klinefelter’s was the most sickening crime photo she’d ever seen.
    “He, almost certainly. The amount of upper body strength needed to sever a head in one blow is enormous—beyond that of most females, even if they were pumped up and on steroids. The good Dr. Guillotin used gravity and a heavy blade in his machine for that very reason.”
    “Have you gotten any other physical evidence?” asked Jim.
    “Just some partial prints off Klinefelter’s desk and one of these.” Safer tossed a plastic bag on the desk. Mary picked it up. Inside was a sleek ebony feather.
    “Crow?” She lifted an eyebrow at Safer.
    He shook his head. “A common starling. And the MO doesn’t match anything on anybody’s computer, either here or on Interpol.”
    “How do you like that,” Jim muttered. “All those wonderful computers and they still can’t tell you a damn thing.” He sat back in his chair, studying Safer through narrow eyes. “Okay. Now tell me what all of this has to do with Deckard County, Georgia.”
    Safer fumbled in his briefcase again, then pulled out a single sheet of yellow paper. “I work in the Cincinnati office, so the Klinefelter case was assigned to me. I happened to be in New York at the time of Judge Fitzgerald’s murder, so I remembered that case and did some digging on my own. I came up with this.”
    Safer put the paper down on the desk between Jim and Mary. “Statistically, the federal court system loses about 2.3 judges a year to death. Since most federal judges are white males over forty, most succumb to heart attacks. In each of the past eleven months, a federal judge has died unexpectedly. Five have had fatal accidents, two have had heart attacks. One’s an apparent suicide. Three have been murdered quite obviously.”
    “Mmmm.” Jim ran his finger down the list. “District Judge Bryan Woody thrown from his horse in Casper, Wyoming. District Judge Kendrick Eaton lost in a boating accident off the coast of California.” He frowned over his glasses at Safer. “Have you guys gone back and done toxin screens on these victims?”
    “We’re in the process of doing that. Unfortunately, three were cremated and two drowning victims have not been recovered.”
    Jim grunted. “I still don’t see what this has to do with us. We’re in the Eleventh District. According to your chart, our judge died in a wreck in Decatur, Alabama, back in March.”
    “I don’t think it has anything to do with the Eleventh District, Jim,” said Mary. She looked at the agent. “It’s about the Fourth District, isn’t it?”
    Safer nodded.
    “You’re thinking the next one could be Irene Hannah, aren’t you?”
    “You got it,” he replied.
    “Wait a minute.” Jim sat up in his chair. “Who the hell’s Irene