The Rivers Run Dry by Sibella Giorello

Author:Sibella Giorello
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2010-03-28T16:00:00+00:00

chapter sixteen

Twenty-two minutes after the faxes blistered back and forth between me and the U.S. attorney’s office, I walked north on Fourth Avenue to Stewart Street. The wind felt damp, full of a cool mist that seemed pressed out of the clouds. But it did not rain.

Inside the U.S. District Court House, I found the federal magistrate’s office. Two suited attorneys ahead of me checked cell phones that were supposed to be turned off. When the attorneys left the magistrate’s office, they looked equally frustrated.

The judge’s chambers smelled of thick cottony paper, the kind bound with thread into old books, and I closed the door behind me, smoothing down my wind-beaten hair as the judge read the warrants. He was somewhere in his sixties and wore the long-suffering expression of a bassett hound, the corner of every facial feature drooping. When he glanced up, his eyes appeared green-gray, like glacial lakes. He nodded at an empty Windsor chair. I sat down.

Behind his teak desk, volumes of federal tortes bound in red leather stretched across the shelves, and I stared at a series of tugboat pictures in which the sturdy elliptical vessels pulled barges several times their size. His chambers felt like a ship—teak desk, Windsor chair, large brass hook holding the black robe—but my mind kept flashing to my father’s judicial chambers. I didn’t understand why until the judge started scrawling notes on a yellow legal pad, reading my minor petitions as if they were the Magna Carta.

My father used to say his job description was “to seek justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.” When I joined the FBI’s mineralogy lab, I took his mission statement as my own, but less than a year later, after examining forensic evidence that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt what horrors man would inflict on his fellow man—and woman and child—the words of the minor prophet rang hollow to me. Murder. Rape. Child molestations that made the term perverted sound too polite. Mercy? For a guy who raped his three-year-old niece at knifepoint?

My father shook his head. “God sees evil, Raleigh. His wrath is real. But his mercy equals his wrath. He won’t send one without the other. And neither should we.”

I protested; an entire industry took advantage of mercy, purging psychopaths and pedophiles from prisons, extending paroles, unleashing brutalities on the innocent in crimes that grew worse with leniency.

“I agree,” he said. “Mercy without judgment is pathetic. But judgment without mercy brings despair.”

“But how do you know, how do you figure out what they deserve?”

He had smiled at me. “I pay attention to the last part about walking humbly with God.”

The judge cleared his throat. I glanced up. He stared at me over his reading glasses.

“Indian land,” he said.

“Pardon?”

He held up the affidavit for the casino search. “You’re talking about Indian land here. We get into some hair-splitting legal boundaries where tribal rights are concerned. Indian land receives different interpretations under the law.”

“Do we need more probable cause?”

“Just be prepared,” he said.

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