Ice Fire: A Jock Boucher Thriller Read online

  There was movement under the man’s bushy gray beard. It was a smile. Rather than hold his hand out for the cuffs to be unlocked, the prisoner dropped his arms, and the cuffs fell and clanked to the floor.

  The judge cracked a smile himself. “What’s your name, sir?”

  “Bob Palmetto, Your Honor.”

  “Have you eaten lately, Mr. Palmetto?”

  “I had something yesterday, sir.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “I wouldn’t mind a bite.”

  “Good. Tell you what I’m going to do. One of these two gentlemen is going to my office to get on the computer and check the records to see if there are any other warrants or outstanding enforceable judgments against you. The other marshal is going to stay here while you tell me about this contempt order Judge Epson entered against you all those years ago.”

  “I’d be happy to, Your Honor.”

  “Good. Sandwich and a Coke all right? I’ll have someone bring them here.”

  “Could you make that a Diet Coke, Your Honor?”

  Disposition of the matter took about as long as it took to eat the sandwich. Palmetto had been held in contempt for failure to appear and produce documents in a case that was later dismissed on plaintiff’s motion about a year after the contempt was ordered. He stated that his business had been burned to the ground about that same time and any documents he might have had were long since destroyed, thus rendering moot any basis for contempt. The marshal returned and admitted that he could find no other judgments against him. The two marshals and court reporter were dismissed. Only the judge and the former fugitive were in the courtroom, the judge escorting the frail man to the exit.

  “Off the record,” Judge Boucher asked, “why didn’t you appear in court that day?”

  “I’d have been killed, just like my lawyer was,” Palmetto said.

  “Oh? And just who might have killed you?”

  Bob Palmetto turned and pointed his bony finger toward the now empty bench where, for the last twenty-five years until this morning, District Judge Epson had presided.

  CHAPTER 2

  EARLY THAT EVENING, JOCK Boucher sat in the hallway outside Judge Epson’s hospital room. There was a small army of people there, mostly lawyers. There were one or two people from city hall, and a man he recognized but couldn’t name.

  “Who is that?” he asked a man standing near him. “I’ve seen him somewhere.”

  “John Perry,” the man said, “CEO of Rexcon Energy.”

  A doctor came off the elevator and saw the crowd. He shook his head.

  “Folks, I’m sure Judge Epson appreciates you all being here, but he’s recovering from a heart attack. I’m going to have to ask you all to leave.”

  He began herding the group toward the elevator. Jock approached him.

  “Doctor, I’m Judge Boucher. I’ve taken over Judge Epson’s responsibilities. I just wanted to assure him everything’s—”

  “Thank you, but you’re the last person I want him talking to, at least now. I want him to forget he’s a judge, if that’s possible. Please, I don’t mean to be rude.”

  “I understand,” Boucher said.

  “Now,” the doctor said to the group, “I’m afraid you’ll all have to leave.”

  As he got on the elevator, Boucher noticed John Perry speaking to the doctor. The CEO was allowed admission to the judge’s hospital room.

  A widower, Judge Jock Boucher lived alone, which meant that despite his judicial stature, he still had to take out the garbage. He was engaged in that task after returning from the hospital later that evening. Foot traffic was common on Chartres Street and he had not yet equated his new position with the need for enhanced security. He did not notice the man who approached him from behind in the dark until the man reached out and tapped him on the shoulder as he bent over the massive plastic refuse bin he had wrestled to the curb. Boucher spun around, fists clenched, ready to defend himself with his bare hands.

  “It’s me, Judge.”

  He could barely make out the figure in the dark, but the man was close enough for him to notice how skinny he was. “Palmetto?”

  “I shaved my beard. Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “What do you want?”

  “A favor.”

  “Let’s go in the house.”

  “No, sir, I’d rather not. This will just take a minute. My lawyer was murdered twenty years ago and they never found who did it. He had prepared a report he was going to deliver to the FBI the next day, but he was shot. The report was about Judge Epson.”

  “What about Judge Epson?”

  Palmetto looked around. “I don’t want to go inside your house. Do you have someplace we could sit down outside?”

  “I have a courtyard around back. Come on.”

  They walked up the drive to the back of the house. The courtyard of the old home was dense with foliage, some plants the off-spring of two-hundred-year-old bushes and trees, part of what the earliest residents of the French Quarter had called, with disdain, “the jungle.” Palmetto took a seat on a bench facing a stone statuette. He looked up at the star-filled sky and said, “Energy. It’s all around us, everywhere in the universe. Someday . . .” He sighed. “But we’re addicted to oil.”

  “Mr. Palmetto . . .”

  “Have you ever heard of methane hydrate?” Palmetto asked.

  “Methane is a gas, sometimes called natural gas. It’s a relatively clean-burning fuel, but can be dangerous. It has caused explosions in coal mines and offshore wells. A hydrate is when a gas combines with water and freezes.”

  “I’m impressed, Judge. Methane hydrate is the gas trapped in ice under the seabed and formed under high pressure and low temperatures. It could be the largest source of energy on earth. There’s at least twice as much of it as all the other fossil fuels combined. It could replace oil and make offshore drilling a relic of the past, and could meet all our energy needs for the next two hundred years, maybe more. But extraction is complicated.” He looked to make sure his audience of one was listening. The judge wasn’t missing a word. He continued. “It’s volatile and a greenhouse gas. If it escapes in quantities, it could cause climate change beyond any scale yet imagined. I invented a way to exploit it safely. Then people got killed. They died trying to protect me and my discovery. I’m a geophysicist. I invented a way to get the gas up to the surface safely. You understand?”

  “I’m not a scientist, I’m a jurist,” Judge Boucher said.

  “Well, you’ll understand this next part. In a lawsuit the judge can force parties to produce testimony, documents; right?”

  The judge looked at his watch. “It’s getting late, Mr. Palmetto.”

  “Here’s what happened. Rexcon Energy learned of my discovery. They brought a groundless lawsuit against me claiming what I discovered about methane hydrate extraction, I’d stolen from them. They got the court to make me produce evidence of my own discoveries, and the judge just turned it over to them. They stole it. They had the judge in their pocket. My lawyer—his name was Dexter Jessup—got tired of losing every time he went to court to fight their demands. He discovered the judge was being paid a lot of money. Dexter was going to go to the FBI. He was with me the day before the meeting. He left my office and was never seen alive again. No killer was ever found. The case was never solved.”

  “This happened twenty years ago,” the judge said.

  “Yes.”

  “Is Rexcon, or any energy company, extracting methane hydrate today? I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of it as an energy source.”

  “I’ve been waiting twenty years for this and the time has finally come. The Mideast is a mess, we can’t do a damn thing about it. We lose the Suez Canal and we’ve got to take our tankers around Africa—through pirate-infested waters. Our biggest Mideast supplier, Saudi Arabia, may not have as much oil as it wants us to believe. They refuse to publish estimates of their provable reserves, and their major field is now pumping out more
salt water than oil. The demand for natural gas keeps rising. There are new industrial and commercial uses, but demand is going to explode when we start using it as a transportation fuel. There already are truck and bus fleets that run on natural gas, and the big automakers say they will have cars that will run on this fuel in the next few years. Then watch demand outstrip supply. Also, new methods of onshore drilling may present a threat to our most valuable—and most vulnerable—natural resource, fresh water. An abundant clean-burning fuel off our own shore starts to look pretty good—especially when it won’t cause oil spills. Political instability of our foreign suppliers, ecological dangers of offshore oil drilling—it’s the perfect storm. There’s going to be a lot of attention paid to methane hydrate now, just you wait and see.”

  “You said it was a greenhouse gas.”

  “That’s if too much of it escapes into the atmosphere. I also said I knew how to extract it safely. My process for the extraction of methane hydrate will be much more like mining than drilling, more ecologically friendly. No oil spills. Now it’s economically viable. It’s taken twenty years to get to this point.”

  “And you think Rexcon is going to use the information they stole from you with Judge Epson’s help.”

  “I know they are. The problem is, they don’t know everything. Remember, I didn’t produce certain documents.”

  “Which you swore under oath were destroyed in a fire.”

  Palmetto said nothing. He leaned forward and tapped his temple with his index finger. “Nobody ever asked me to produce what was in my head. I stopped putting anything on paper a long time ago. I’ve also done a lot of work on this over the past twenty years.”

  Jock Boucher sighed and leaned back in his chair. “This has all been very interesting. But you asked me for a favor. What is it?”

  “The FBI looked into Dexter’s allegations of Judge Epson taking bribes. They wrote their findings in a report. Guess what they did with that report? They gave it to Judge Epson, that’s what, and it never saw the light of day. Now that you’re running his court, I thought maybe you could find out what he did with it.”

  “And just why do you think I should look for this report—if it exists?”

  “Because a good man lost his life when he saw wrong and tried to right it. I want to believe that you have the same values.”

  Judge Boucher sat shaking his head.

  “Okay.” Palmetto stood. “Just do this one thing for me. Look at the background, the family of Dexter Jessup. That’s all I ask. Will you do that for me?”

  “I’m handling the dockets of two federal courts,” Boucher said.

  “Ask your law clerk to do it. It won’t take half an hour. If you don’t feel like going further after that, I won’t bother you again.”

  “I’ll think about it,” the judge said. “Now you’d better be going. You take care of yourself, Mr. Palmetto.” Boucher extended his hand.

  “And you, Judge,” Palmetto said, grasping Boucher’s hand with both of his.

  Then he was gone.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE NEXT MORNING ROLLED over Judge Boucher like thunder. He had a stack of motions from Judge Epson’s court to review and sign, and an emergency hearing in his own court: a plaintiff seeking a temporary restraining order. He didn’t have time to catch his breath till noon, and it was then he recalled his previous night’s visitor. He called for his law clerk.

  “Julie, see what you can find out about an attorney by the name of Dexter Jessup. He was murdered about twenty years ago. And see if you can find out anything about his family. I know you’re busy, but I’d like to get this off my mind.”

  “Of course, Your Honor.”

  She returned in two hours.

  “Dexter Jessup was shot in a roadside killing twenty years ago,” she said. “He was a prominent and respected attorney, from a long line of lawyers. His father wrote Jessup on Evidence. It’s still the leading textbook on the subject.”

  “That’s why that name sounded so familiar to me,” the judge said. “I used that book in law school.”

  “Dexter’s grandfather was prominent as well. He was a member of the state supreme court back in the fifties. I couldn’t find much about the man’s murder. There was an investigation by the FBI, and his death did apparently lead to some kind of an inquiry of the district court, but I could not find any record of it. That’s about all I could find. I could dig deeper.”

  “That’s all right. Thanks for your help.”

  He jogged, he lifted weights, but the favorite exercise of Judge Jock Boucher at the end of a demanding day was the punching bag. He’d done some boxing in the army and had been a pretty fair pugilist, but he’d put all that behind him when he became a state judge more than a decade ago. Practice bouts sometimes left cuts and bruises and it just didn’t do for a jurist to appear in court with a lacerated face. It distracted the jury. But the punching bag, that was a great outlet for frustration and aggression, and still one of the most complete workouts there was. A judge’s day utilized one body part only. Even vocal cords were rarely used. The lawyers did the arguing, his response was limited to one or two words. At the end of a full day, the mind was numb. Many judges anesthetized the brain with the liquor bottle kept in their desks. That wasn’t his way—not that he didn’t enjoy a sip of bourbon or a glass of wine when the occasion merited. But to wind down from the pressures of work at day’s end, his choice was a seedy gym in a black neighborhood where nobody knew or cared about position, because none there could claim one. Except for those working out in the ring, no one ever even bothered to look at anyone else, each in his own private world. He had a crummy old locker with a cheap combination lock. He stripped and changed into his gym shorts, T-shirt, and boxing shoes, put on his gloves, and for the next hour he whaled.

  After this brutal session, the bag shown no mercy, he returned to his locker for his shower flip-flops and a towel. There was an envelope at the bottom. He picked it up and looked around. Intent on the bag, he hadn’t seen anyone near his locker. He opened the envelope and took out the single page. The handwriting was illegible, but he knew the author. Like doctors, scientists had horrible handwriting, as if it were a part of their training. In this case it was a geophysicist. He read:

  They want me dead. I have to go. Marcia Whitcomb was also killed, just a poor legal assistant. Ruth Kalin disappeared, lawyer in his office. The Jessups are a pretty impressive family, right? Where’s the justice, Judge?

  P.S. If I were you, I’d stay out of places like this.

  B.P.

  The old man had spunk. Boucher was sure that he’d gotten himself picked up yesterday after learning of Judge Epson’s heart attack and had followed him home last night, and followed him to the gym this evening. Timid men didn’t go around tailing federal judges. But Palmetto was scared enough now; scared enough to run. He put the letter in his pocket. Looking around the gym, Jock Boucher realized the scientist was right. If a stranger off the street could walk in and access his funky old locker with no one noticing—or caring—maybe this was no longer the best place for him. Anonymity minimized security concerns, but federal judges were not exactly anonymous. He emptied his locker for the last time.

  Arriving home, he didn’t even make it ten feet before the phone rang; Judge Epson was calling.

  “Hello,” Boucher said. “How are you feeling? I tried to stop by yesterday evening, but your doctor said you couldn’t have any visitors. He said he especially didn’t want you discussing any court business. . . . Well, I’ve got to get something to eat first. . . . Eight o’clock? You sure that’s not too late? . . . Okay, see you then.”

  The hallway outside of Judge Epson’s hospital room was deserted when Boucher arrived. He knocked on the closed door.

  “Jock, that you?”

  “It’s me, Judge.”

  “Come on in.”

  The patient was sitting up in bed. He was clean-shaven and his gray hair was neatly combed. He looked like he could g
et up, put on street clothes, and walk right out. He motioned his visitor to take a seat in a recliner next to the window. “Thanks for coming,” he said.

  “You’re looking really good, Judge,” Boucher said, “but is this okay with your doctor? He sure didn’t want me talking to you last night.”

  “He worries too much. How are things going?”

  “Better than I expected, at least for me. I’m afraid you’ll have a plateful when you get back. Just about every lawyer has rescheduled pending your return. At least the newly filed cases are being split evenly with the other judges.”

  “I heard you handled one of my bench warrants, an old contempt case.”

  “I did. The judgment was void. I dismissed it and let the fellow go.”

  Epson frowned and looked straight ahead. “Wish you hadn’t done that. You know where this fellow is now?”

  Boucher wondered if he’d made himself clear. He’d dismissed the matter. Epson’s court no longer had jurisdiction over the man. He studied the judge’s face and answered simply, “No.” He decided not to tell of his subsequent run-in with Palmetto. The interest in this single matter, with everything else the senior judge had going on, not the least of which was his heart attack, was unsettling. He didn’t like the feeling. Judge Epson seemed to sense this and forced a smile.

  “Well, it’s water under the bridge,” Epson said. “Probably best to get that ancient history off the books. How did the old guy look? I have a vague memory of him being an odd sort.”

  “He was skinny as a stick, with a beard halfway down his chest. Looked like he’d been living in a cave. After he shaved the beard, he looked almost normal.”

  “I expect to get out of here day after tomorrow,” the judge said, changing the subject. “I’ll convalesce at home. Get some work done from there. My situation shouldn’t be too much of a burden on the rest of you.”

  “The important thing is for you to get well. Like I said, everything is under control. Maybe you should think about taking some time off.”

  “I might,” Epson said.