Page 16 - An Evening with Maxwell's Daemons

Justice in Limbo

“What she has to do is create a sort of crime scene with clues
pointing to her survival after a plane crash. She has studied the map
and chosen the location with care. First, the plane has to crash in
deep water, delaying its discovery. Divers will discover she is not in
the cabin, and a parachute is missing. Thus, after that aerial and
aquatic search in a quadrant pattern taking several days or weeks,
another search will have to begin spiraling out from the crash site.
That will take the searchers another few days until they get closer to
islands with sparse human habitation. Land parties scour the
beaches and caves. Finally, after two or three weeks have passed,
they find a loosely-folded parachute under a rock near the
windward coast of a large island in an archipelago with very few
people. The chute clearly belongs to the missing justice of the
Supreme Court. Nothing else is there. The search goes on
fruitlessly. The election comes and goes, and lawyers on both sides
of the political spectrum get to work on either forcing a declaration
of death or denying it.”
“You, the author, cannot leave the reader totally in a lurch. This
is where you can use the investigative journalists. They may suspect
the judge committed what looks like a perfect crime—a real suicide
that cannot be proved—but they keep on digging, even after
returning to the States. Finally, they retrace the custody of the
seaplane prior to its departure for the South Pacific. It really doesn’t
matter if it is one or two reporters. One might be simpler, as the
story is about the judge, in this version. And the answer is found at
the judge’s seaplane hangar. The maintenance crew kept records of
purchases for the aircraft. With nothing else to examine, the
reporter scans them, stopping on a line item, dated one week before
the plane was shipped out: two ten-pound dumbbells. The
mechanics cannot explain them; they knew the lady was athletically
inclined, and plenty of other sports equipment had been delivered
to the hangar for her use over the years. They are not in the hangar,
so they must have been in the plane. The reporter checks: they were
not found in the wreckage.”
“A theory forms in his or her mind: the judge turned off the
transponder and radio, flew off course to the archipelago, landed in

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