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Officer Norbert wouldn’t leave until he was satisfied that Judge Jefferson had everything she needed. He cleared the large dining room table. She recalled the days when twenty people would be seated around it for one of her famous Thanksgiving dinners. He moved all the chairs to the room’s sides to give her as much wheelchair access, as possible. She stood up using her two sticks and began to organise the piles of documentation with his help.
She knew Los Banos had inadequate administration procedures. Their Judge had a reputation of taking the police at their word, and if you were white, you’d get a limited hearing, but if you were black, you would go straight to jail. This meant there was little requirement to be scrupulous in record keeping. She tried to make sense of indexing. It wasn’t always clear, but it gave her a framework to start with. If in doubt, then the papers would be placed into date order across the table. Even the dating of documents wasn’t always completed.
She eyed with suspicion, the number of redacted passages in the FBI and CIA notes, but even more so, the notes from the Boulder Creek departmental files.
They completed the stacking of documents just before darkness fell. The lack of daylight ruled her world in a town which hadn’t had a power supply for sixteen years. She didn’t mind. She was tired and needed sleep. She told Officer Norbert to go home and thanked him for his help. She went to the living room to her bed - it had been many years since she had been upstairs, and there were times when she lay in the near silence that she was sure she could hear dripping water after a period of rain.
She noticed that he had left her a jug of water and a glass next to her bedside. He had left before she had time to thank him for yet another gesture of kindness from the old man.
She looked at the jug of clean water. We are so close to utter annihilation.
She struggled, as she did every night, to get undressed and into her nightgown, but it was a matter of self-respect for her. She lay in bed and thought of her strange relationship with Brady Mahone.
He always had a childlike view on life. That’s why I had to lock him up on every occasion he appeared before me. He never understood the world as a place for mutual respect. In his mind, the world boiled down to the basest of reasoning. I want, and therefore I’m going to have. The fact that it doesn’t belong to me, or whether the item had sentimental value to his victim, none of this mattered. It was there, he saw it, so he took it.
I need my sleep. I don’t want to think about it now. Why do I always think about these things at night?
She tossed and turned, even though this caused her pain. I couldn’t with good conscience put Brady Mahone back into society. He would never change his ways. In fairness, I can’t recall him ever promising to do that. He just stood there and took his punishment on the chin.
She thought about what the prison system had done to him. He had been kind - now. Had she mis-judged him all along? She remembered reading the prison reports if Brady Mahone was being assessed for parole or early release due to prison overcrowding.
He behaved in prison in precisely the same way as on the outside. He was institutionalised. I wonder if he ever cared that much whether he was in jail or not.
From the old days, Judge Jefferson would have agreed with any psychiatric report that suggested that Brady Mahone displayed psychopathic or sociopathic tendencies. Has he changed in this new world order? Is it possible for sociopaths to change? She weighed him up on the scales of justice which had been entrusted to Judge Audre Jefferson.
I’ve witnessed him murder, in cold blood, Manuel Fargo - he decapitated him without any hint of emotion. He’d also exploited every Trad area on the Western Seaboard. However, those were genuine tears he shed for Yuan, and although he tried to hide it as if a sense of giving was a sign of weakness, it was a knowing act of kindness.
She cursed that she couldn’t slip off into sleep. Her sleep brought her relief from pain. I’m sure my brain is supposed to work for my wellbeing, so why won’t it let me get the rest I dearly need. I have work to do in the morning. Even this thought kept her awake, as she hadn’t had legal work to attend to in many years. She was highly regarded in disseminating the most complex of cases. She deduced that now she was becoming excited and the rush of cortisol and adrenaline pumping through her body would make sleep impossible, now - at least until she could regain an element of calm. She was annoyed at the lack of power in her home. In the past, she would have risen and worked through the night. Whereas now, all she had was the frustration of a racing mind defending against the forces of slumber.
She tried to pretend to herself that she was giving up the fight to sleep. If I tell my mind that resting with my eyes closed will suffice, maybe then I would go to sleep by accident. In reply to her plan, her restless mind jumped back to her analysis of Brady Mahone. Why is he so important? He must be important, or is he just lucky? Is it in his nature? Is it the way he was raised? She refused to open her eyes to look at the clock, as she knew the added stress of clock watching through the night wouldn’t help. In the long minutes of obstinacy, she thought she was winning the battle with time, but she succumbed to temptation. Her eyes opened, she peeked at her trusty old alarm clock - she couldn’t remember the last time she set the alarm. The clock leered at her like demon’s eyes in the dark, its red luminous hands announced balefully it was 1:42.
She thought of Archie Mahone.
Archie Mahone and his wife were outsiders. He was a conspiracy theorist and a survivalist. She remembered them becoming foster parents for the first and only time, to the child, in the form of Brady Mahone. She recalled that it was strange that they should ever be considered as worthy of such responsibility. She remembered how it was sanctioned by the authorities in Boulder Creek. She made a mental note to look for any references to Child Services in Boulder Creek. She never ignored her unconscious mind pointing her in the right direction when working on a case. Even if her brain was her sleep enemy, she knew it was her friend when seeking out patterns.
She blinked as if she was taking a photo of her mind from behind her eyes. Brady Mahone, Archie Mahone and Boulder Creek Child Services.
Many of her contemporaries warned against pre-judging investigations, but she always disagreed. She went into the casework with an open mind and she constructed frames of references to propel her thoughts onto. She considered the FBI and CIA involvement. She deduced that the FBI saw an internal threat. It’s unlikely to be drug related, I don’t feel its presence here. Brady intimated at fraud and corruption, but did the FBI consider this a terrorist plot? She thought about this further. With hindsight this is obvious, but did they suspect this prior to the Green Revolution? She then added the international factor because of the CIA files dwelling in the Los Banos files. They had paper copies in their offices when the Internet was used for virtually everything, in those days.
She added Los Banos, FBI and CIA to her frame of reference.
Judge Audre Jefferson awoke to the Californian sunlight streaming through her windows. She wondered what the time had been when she had actually fallen asleep. She remembered glancing at her clock at 1:42am, it now displayed 8:05am through the spread of the mechanical hands on the face of the clock.
She painfully tried to stretch out her stiff joints and got out of bed. She grabbed her Zimmer frame, which was useful in the first hour until she loosened up a little. She went to the sink and washed, before setting herself a bowl of cut-up fruit and a glass of water. She dressed in her tracksuit and old sneakers, which didn’t need lacing-up. She looked wistfully at the staircase. I would have loved to have got dressed for a day’s work at the office, but any of my old work clothes are up those damned stairs. For a moment, she wondered if she could crawl up the stairs to explore the contents of her abandoned wardrobe, but then thought better of it. The damp has probably got to them after all these years. She then considered her thin body. They probably wouldn’t fit me, anyway. I must have been at least forty pounds heavier back then. Still, I might have been able to make do with my old white silk blouses. Oh well, beggars can’t be choosers.
She looked around the decaying and damp remains of her home. It made her think of her own past. She remembered the day when Sattva Systems™ moved into West McFarland. They had done a deal with the California Governor to instil state-of-the-art FusionEnergy™ power, in a drive to make California the capital of the energy-saving world. It was part of their New Green Deal for the Planet. She thought about how proud California was of Silicon Valley leading the world out of the climate change crisis. It wasn’t until much later, when it was found that FusionEnergy™ wasn’t compatible with seemingly anything to do with the Internet - or so they said - whether via, Broadband, Fibre-optics, Bluetooth or even Wi-Fi. She considered the war of words and lawsuits with the rest of the big tech in Silicon Valley. She had a small part to play in these. She loved her old home in West McFarland, but there, she didn’t have a viable Internet connection, so, she had no choice but to relocate to East McFarland into this home. She had flashbacks to the mocking dinner party conversations where East McFarland’s booming house prices compared so favourably to those on the Westside. Once it was clear that West McFarland would never have a working Internet, the house prices plummeted, and distressed sellers sold their homes for a pittance, while there was still a chance of recouping anything.
At that point the Green Hippies moved in and slowly took over the whole of the Westside. She remembered the lawsuits from embittered ex-residents, and then the class actions from across the United States of America. Sattva Systems™ settled out-of-court on such favourable terms that speculators were second-guessing which districts would be next for the Sattva Systems™ makeovers. Then the Green Communities spread across the world. Sattva Systems™ had a trillion-dollar cash pile, and it dominated the global travel industry - but if they wanted to waste their own money, then whose business was that for anyone interfere with them.
Sattva Systems™, FusionEnergy™ and Internet Disruption were added to the budding climbing frame of Judge Audre Jefferson’s mind.
She went to her wheelchair and rolled herself to the head of the table, to begin her investigation at the lowest numerical reference numbers, and those files that didn’t have them - the earliest dates. This will take a long time, but it sure feels good to be working my legal mind again.