Read Reversible Errors for Free Online

learned that. The past was the past, always eluding the full grasp of memory or the best forensic techniques. And it didn't matter. The essential information had reached the present: Three people had died. Without dignity. In terror. And some cruel fuck had exulted in his power each time he pulled the trigger.
    Standing by the spot where Luisa had been murdered, Larry closed his eyes to transmit one more time. He was certain that somewhere, probably not far away, a man had just experienced a painful twitch in his heart.
    I'm coming for you, motherfucker, Larry told him.

    Chapter 3
    may 4, 2001
    The Former Judg e g illian sullivan, forty-seven, recently released from the Federal Prison Camp for Women at Alderson, West Virginia, sat with a cigarette in a small Center City coffee shop, awaiting Arthur Raven. On the phone, Raven, whom she had known for well more than a decade, had made a point to say he wished to see her for business. Like so many others, he apparently did not want her to think he would be offering consolation or support. She was reconsidering her decision to come, not for the first time, when she saw Arthur, charging through the glass doors of the restaurant vestibule with a briefcase bundled under his arm.
    "Judge," he said, and offered his hand. It struck a false note instantly. Even before her disgrace, it had been unlikely he'd call her 'Judge' in private.
    " 'Gillian' will do, Arthur."
    "I'm sorry." "It's awkward." She crushed out the cigarette, thinking only now that the smoke might bother him. Inside, no one ever complained about smoke. It remained a privilege.
    In her time, Gillian had gone from prosecutor to judge and then to convicted criminal defendant. It was an extreme example, but even her wayward career reflected the nature of the criminal bar, which was much like a repertory theater company in which every attorney was apt to have a turn at each part. The prosecutor against whom you tried a case was on the bench the next time you saw her, and in private practice hustling your clients a decade after that. Rivalries and friendships were fortified or forgotten in the parade of years, while ever\T achievement or failure endured somewhere in the memory of the community.
    Understanding all that, Gillian nonetheless found the fortunes that had brought her together again with sad, driven little Arthur Raven somehow indigestible. Thirteen years ago, after twenty months on the bench, Gillian had received her first assignment in the criminal courts, presiding over misdemeanor cases and probable cause hearings. Arthur Raven was the Deputy Prosecuting Attorney delegated to her courtroom. They were each new to their jobs, and at that point she was certain her prospects were far brighter than Arthur s. It was common in trial practice to find men and women skilled in making themselves appealing, people who had mastered the outward gestures of candor and humility, even when they masked a volcanic core of egocentricity and ambition. With Arthur, what you saw was what you got: relentless intensity and a desire to win that bordered on the desperate. Half the time he was before her, she wanted to tell him just to take a pill. She probably had, since, even by her own reckoning, she'd never been especially kindly or patient as a judge. But who could blame her? Beneath it all, Arthur seemed to cling to the unlikely belief that victory would at last impart the more triumphant character he so clearly yearned for.
    As if it was not a ridiculously loaded question, Arthur now asked, "And how have you been?"
    "So-so," she answered. The truth was that after several years of coming to grips, she was realizing she had not come to grips at all.
    There were periods-most of the time now, and always for several years-when the sheer shame of her situation left her mad, mad in the sense that she knew every thought was disrupted by it, like a vehicle bouncing down a cratered road.
    "You still look terrific," he offered.
    In Gillian's