PEOPLE LIKE YOU,” Casey said. “Everything about you is a lie.”
“Do you have any idea the good I’ve been able to do?” the judge asked. “Have you read a single decision? My work on women’s rights? The environment? Unless you’ve seen my body of work, you should know better than to stand there sounding like some hick from Texas.”
“I know your kind,” Casey said, lowering her voice. “Happy to punish anyone who does anything against the law, unless it’s you or your own.”
“And I know yours,” the judge said bitterly. “A gunslinger. You think the law is a contest, winning and losing. Box scores. Who cares about the truth? Justice? Well, I do, and sometimes the law needs some help. That’s what a judge does, she inserts common sense into the equation to get justice in the end.”
“You?” Casey said, snorting. “You call putting an innocent man behind bars for more than twenty years justice?”
“Dwayne Hubbard?” the judge said, her brow darkening. “He killed that girl like he killed the others.”
“Others? You need more help than I thought.”
Judge Rivers nodded her head fervently. She picked up her drink and removed the file from beneath it, handing it to Casey. “Good. You have no idea. So I’ll show you the others.”
Casey accepted the file and opened it, fascinated at the ranting of a woman of Patricia Rivers’s stature, wealth, and power and believing more every minute that she’d come completely unhinged. The first page was a copied newspaper article from 1988.
“Another rape and murder,” Casey said as she read.
“Keep going,” the judge said. “Read the details. Pretend you found out that someone planted my son’s DNA in those hospital records.”
Casey’s stomach soured as she read on. The murdered girl had been not only stabbed but mutilated. Pictures showed that her ears and nose had been sliced off, her eyes gouged out with the point of the same razor-sharp knife before the killer unleashed a frenzy of stabs into her lower abdomen. The coroner said the rape took place between the mutilation and the stabbing.
“Horrible,” Casey said, noting the location of the crime as Wyoming, New York, “but I don’t see the relevance.”
“Look at the other two,” the judge said.
Casey sat back down and read on. They were similar to the first, varying only in location and time and that one was a teenage boy, also sodomized after his face had been mutilated but before he’d been stabbed. The murders were spread out across the two years previous to Cassandra Thornton’s, all at varying towns in New York that Casey hadn’t heard of. Cassandra Thornton would have been the fourth if the crimes were put into sequence.
“These happened close by?” Casey asked.
The judge remained rigid, her chin tilted up. She blinked and nodded. “Small towns, small police forces. Each of them just far enough apart. Small media markets. None of them overlapping. No leads in any of the cases, although we believe that the killer had some kind of personal contact with each of them. No one ever connected the dots.”
“How did you find these?” Casey asked, handing back the file of police reports and crime scene photos. “What do they have to do with Dwayne Hubbard? There was nothing about any of this in his case.”
“Because I didn’t let it,” the judge said.
Casey shook her head. “You’re talking even crazier.”
“Come with me,” the judge said, standing up and motioning for Casey to follow. “Let me show you.”