The stories of the five murders Karloff committed as a child were terrifying, jaw-dropping, but he prided himself on having had the discipline never to have told of a single one, not to anyone. They would have created more fear of him, perhaps amplified his reputation, his myth. But they could have been used to understand him, to analyze him, to predict him, and he didn’t want that. The stories, though startling, were more useful to him untold.

Yes, Karloff has seen the weaknesses, fragility, and surprising malleability of the criminal justice system, which is supposed to be pure and transparent, based on case law, precedent, regulations and rulings available for all to see.

But another thing Karloff doesn’t mention to anyone—and even less to himself—is how he has seen it from both sides. How he has been the beneficiary of bending the law, twisting it, manipulating it, escaping it, but how he has also been a victim of it.

How his encounter with the Bulgarian court system as a child murderer was not his first legal encounter.

How he was recruited as a murderer in the first place because of a court mix-up involving his birth mother and birth father, and lost paperwork, and incompetent representation, and payoffs, and subsequent inept administration and foster care, how he slipped through the cracks, and how he was recruited by a gang because he had nowhere else to go.

How their expert procurers, their human snares, were hanging around at the courthouse with cash and treats, and snatched little Karloff and others like him right out of the criminal justice system. Broken homes, domestic disturbance cases, abandoned children—they were there to scoop up this human detritus, to train them and put them to work.

He was six. Six years old.

And he learned in the ensuing years in Bulgaria, growing and hardening into a professional criminal, about the collusion, the bribery, the trafficking system between the lawyers and the court officers and, worst, the judges. Symbols of probity. Symbols of corruption.

He will never forget the judge’s name in his own mixed-up custody case or his physical appearance, although his memory has gone hazy in the intervening lifetime.

Surprisingly young, he remembers. Boyish black bangs hanging to his wire-rim glasses. A hawk nose. And most of all, the young judge’s high-and-mighty attitude.

Applying the law to his struggling, troubled parents, only dimly remembered now.

Handing the six-year-old—unwittingly? knowingly?—into a life of crime.

The father of the dark path of his life.

Litvinov.

58.

58.

Zack keeps thinking about that phone Joey is carrying.

If it’s a remote trigger, presumably it works when you enter a certain numerical sequence. A certain code. A code that sends a radio signal to the bomb. Or maybe it’s simply triggered when a call is received from a certain number and the phone is answered? Zack shudders.