The Simple Truth

by David Baldacci

  On the shore, the owner of the glowing cigarette had departed just as Sara had drawn close to Fiske.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Fiske and Sara docked the boat, walked in silence to the golf cart and climbed in. The footsteps made Fiske look around. “Pop? What are you doing here?”

  His father didn’t answer but kept coming toward them. Fiske walked to him, his arms outstretched. “Pop, you okay?”

  A puzzled Sara watched from the golf cart.

  The men were about a foot apart when the elder Fiske lunged forward and punched his son in the jaw.

  “You bastard,” Ed shouted.

  Fiske fell back from the blow, as Ed pounced on his son and hammered away with both fists.

  Fiske pushed himself away from his father and staggered backward, blood coming from his mouth and nose. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he screamed.

  Sara was halfway out of the cart, but she froze when Ed pointed at her.

  “Get that slut and your ass out of here! Get the hell out of here, you hear me?”

  “Pop, what are you talking about?”

  Enraged, Ed rushed his son again. This time Fiske sidestepped the charge, wrapping his arms around his father and holding tight as the older man spun wildly, trying with all his might to hit him again.

  “I saw you, damn you both. Half naked, kissing, while your brother lies dead on some slab. Your brother!” He screamed the words so loudly his voice broke.

  Fiske’s voice cracked as he realized what his father had seen. Or thought he had seen. “Pop, nothing happened.”

  “You bastard.” He tried to pull his son’s hair, clothing, anything to get at him again. “You heartless sonofabitch,” he kept screaming, his face brick red, his breathing becoming more and more labored, his movements sluggish.

  “Stop it, Pop, stop it. You’re gonna have a coronary.”

  The two men struggled fiercely as they slipped, pitched and swung around in the loose dirt and gravel.

  “My own son doing that. I don’t have a son. Both my sons are dead. Both my sons are dead.” Ed spat out these words in a crescendo of fury.

  Fiske let his father go, and the old man spun around and dropped to the ground in exhaustion. He tried to rise, but then slumped back down, his T-shirt stained with the sweat of his efforts, the merged smells of alcohol and tobacco enveloping him. Fiske stood over him, chest heaving, his blood mixed with salty tears.

  A horrified Sara stepped out of the cart, knelt down next to Ed and put a hand gently on his shoulder. She didn’t know what to say.

  Ed swung his arms around blindly and struck Sara on the thigh.

  She gasped in pain.

  “Get the hell out of here. Both of you. Now!” Ed screamed.

  Fiske gripped Sara’s arm and pulled her up. “Let’s go, Sara.” He looked at his father. “Dad, take the cart back.” As they entered the forest, Fiske and Sara could still hear the screams of the old man.

  Her leg aching, her tears half blinding her, Sara said, “Oh, my God, John, this is all my fault.”

  Fiske didn’t answer. His insides were on fire. The pain had never been this bad, and he was scared. The dispassionate warnings of scores of doctors engulfed him. He kept walking faster and faster, until Sara had to half trot to keep up.

  “John, John, please say something.”

  She reached over to wipe some blood from his chin, but he quickly pushed her hand away. Then, without warning, he started to run.

  “John!” Sara started to run too, but she had never seen anyone accelerate as Fiske had. “John,” she screamed, “please come back. Stop! Please!”

  In the next moment, he had rounded a bend in the forest path and disappeared completely from her sight.

  She slowed down, her own chest burning now. Then she stepped on a loose clod of dirt and fell heavily to the ground amid the scattered pine needles. She sat there sobbing, her thigh already bruised and aching from where Ed had hit her.

  A minute later she started as a hand touched her shoulder. Terrified, she looked up, certain that Ed had come to beat her too, for blackening the memory of his dead son.

  Fiske was breathing hard, his T-shirt soaked in sweat, the blood already hardened on his face. “Are you okay?”

  She nodded and stood up, gritting her teeth as the pain in her leg increased. If Ed’s blind swipe at her leg had caused so much hurt, she could hardly imagine what John was feeling, after taking a direct blow to the face. She balanced against him while he bent down, edged her skirt up and examined her thigh.

  Fiske shook his head. “It’s bruised pretty good. He didn’t know what he was doing. I’m sorry.”

  “I deserved it.”

  With Fiske’s help she was able to walk pretty normally.

  “I’m sorry, John,” she said. “This … this is a nightmare.”

  As they neared the trailer, she heard him say something. At first she thought he was talking to her, but he wasn’t.

  He said it again, in a low voice, his eyes straight ahead, his head slowly turning in disbelief. “I’m sorry.”

  The apology was not directed toward her, she instinctively knew. Perhaps to the screaming man back at the dock. And maybe to the dead brother?

  When they reached the trailer, Sara sat down on the steps while Fiske went inside. He came back out a minute later with some ice and a roll of paper towels. While she held the ice wrapped in a paper towel against her bruised thigh, she used one of the ice cubes and another paper towel to wipe the blood from his face and clean the cut on his lip. After she had finished, he stood, went down the steps and headed down the dirt road.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “To get my father,” he said without turning around.

  She watched until he disappeared into the forest. While he was gone, Sara limped into the trailer and cleaned herself up in the small bathroom. She spotted Fiske’s suit and shoes and carried them out to her car. She ran her hand along the smooth metal surface of the flagpole and wondered if Ed would manage to raise the Stars and Stripes today. Maybe he would, at half-mast, in memory of his son. Perhaps mourning both sons?

  She began trembling with that thought, moved away from the flagpole and leaned up against her car. She scanned the woods nervously as though anticipating the abrupt charge of all sorts of terror from its underbelly.

  An elderly woman came out of the trailer next door and stopped when she saw Sara.

  Sara smiled in an embarrassed fashion. “I’m, uh, a friend of John Fiske’s.”

  The woman nodded. “Well, good morning.”

  “Good morning to you too.”

  The woman disappeared down the road toward the cottage.

  Sara looked anxiously back toward the woods, clutching her hands together. “Come on, John. Please, come on.”

  Fifteen minutes later the golf cart came into view. Fiske was driving. His father was slumped in the rear, apparently asleep.

  Fiske pulled up to the trailer, got out, carefully lifted his father and put him over his shoulder. He marched up the steps and disappeared inside. He came out a few minutes later carrying the shotgun.

  “He’s asleep,” Fiske said.

  “What’s that for?” Sara pointed at the weapon.

  “I’m not leaving it here with him.”

  “You don’t think he’d shoot anybody.”

  “No, but I don’t want him sticking it in his mouth and pulling the trigger either. Guns, alcohol and bad news don’t mix real well.” He put the shotgun in the back seat of the car. “You’d better let me drive.”

  “Your clothes are in the trunk.”

  They climbed in the car and a minute later were back at the owner’s cottage. Fiske went in and slapped four singles down for the guest fee. He bought some pastries and a couple cartons of orange juice.

  The woman who had greeted Sara was also there. “I saw your lady friend, John. Real cute girl.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You leaving a
lready?”

  “Yep.”

  “I’ll bet your daddy wishes you were staying longer.”

  Fiske paid for the food and didn’t wait for a bag. “I’ll take that bet,” he told the puzzled woman, before heading back out to the car.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Samuel Rider arrived at his office early after being away a few days for business. Sheila hadn’t come in yet. It was just as well, since Rider wanted to be alone. He picked up his phone and called Fort Jackson, identified himself as Harms’s attorney and asked to speak with him.

  “He’s no longer here.”

  “Excuse me? He’s serving a life sentence. Where exactly could he have gone?”

  “I’m sorry, but I’m not allowed to give out that information over the phone. If you would like to come down in person or make an official inquiry in writing — ”

  Rider slammed down the phone and collapsed in his chair. Was Rufus dead? Had they somehow discovered what he was up to? Once Rider had filed the appeal with the Supreme Court, Rufus should have had instant security.

  Rider clamped his fingers around the edge of his desk. If it had reached the Court. He tore open his desk drawer and pulled out the white receipt with the tracking number on it. The green receipt should have come back to his office. Sheila! He jumped up and raced to Sheila’s work area. Normally, any return receipts would be included in the appropriate case file. However, there was no case file for Rufus Harms. What could she have done with the damn receipt?

  As if in answer to his thoughts, the woman herself walked in the door. She was surprised to see him.

  “Why, you’re in awful early, Mr. Rider.”

  Rider assumed a casual tone. “Trying to catch up on a few things.” He edged away from her desk; however, she had picked up on his intentions.

  “Are you looking for something?”

  “Well, now that you mention it, I was, actually. I had sent a letter out and, you know, I had sent it return receipt requested, and then it occurred to me that I hadn’t told you anything about it. Stupid of me.”

  Her next words brought an inward sigh of relief.

  “So that’s what that was. At first I thought I had forgotten to open a case file. I was meaning to ask you about it when you got back.”

  “So you got it back, then,” Rider said, trying to veil his eagerness.

  Sheila opened a drawer of her desk and pulled out a green receipt. “The United States Supreme Court,” she said with awe, passing it over to him. “I remember thinking, are we going to be doing something with them or what?”

  Rider put on his best lawyer’s face. “Naw, Sheila, just something to do with a bar function. We don’t need to look to Washington for our daily bread.”

  “Oh, here are your phone messages that came in while you were out of town. I tried to prioritize them for you.”

  He gave her hand a nice squeeze. “You’re the essence of efficiency,” he said gallantly.

  She smiled and started to fuss at her desk.

  Rider went back to his office, closed the door and looked down at the receipt. The filing had been delivered. The signature was right there. But then where was Rufus?

  Rider planned to spend much of the morning in meetings discussing the possible development of a shopping mall on a vast tract of land that had been used since the forties as an auto wrecking yard. One of the men he was meeting with had flown a prop plane into Blacksburg, Virginia, from Washington early that morning and was driving over to Rider’s office. With everything on his mind it was all Rider could do to act normal when the man arrived at his office a while later. The man had brought with him a copy of the morning’s Washington Post. While the man accepted a cup of coffee from Sheila, Rider idly ran his eye over the Post’s headlines. One in particular caught his attention. The man noticed what Rider was doing.

  “Damn shame,” he said, nodding at the story Rider was focused on. “One of the best and brightest,” he said as Rider silently mouthed the headline again: SUPREME COURT CLERK SLAIN.

  “Did you know him?” Rider asked. It couldn’t be connected. There was no way in hell.

  “No. But if he was clerking up there, you know he had to be top of the top. Murdered too. Shows you how dangerous times have become. Nobody’s safe anymore.”

  Rider stared at him for a moment, and then looked down at the paper and the accompanying photo. Michael Fiske, age thirty. He had earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University and then gone on to the University of Virginia Law School, where he had been editor-in-chief of the Law Review. He was the senior law clerk for Justice Thomas Murphy. No suspects, no clues, other than a missing wallet. Nobody’s safe anymore. He tightly gripped the paper as he stared at the grainy, depressing photo of the dead man. It couldn’t be. However, there was one way to find out.

  He excused himself and slipped into his office, where he called the Supreme Court clerks’office.

  “We have no case with the name Harms, sir, either on the regular or IFP docket.”

  “But I’ve got a return receipt that shows it was delivered to you people.” The voice on the other end again delivered the perfunctory message.

  “Don’t you have some way of keeping track of your mail up there?” The polite answer Rider received did not sit well with him. He yelled into the phone. “Rufus Harms is rotting in the damn stockade and you people can’t keep track of your mail.” He threw down the phone.

  Somewhere between its arrival and the point where a case was actually placed in the official system, Rufus Harms’s filing had apparently disappeared. And so had Rufus Harms. Rider suddenly felt chilled.

  Rider looked down once more at the newspaper. And a Supreme Court clerk had been murdered. It all seemed so far-fetched, but then so had the story Rufus told him. Then another thought hit him even harder:If they had killed Rufus and the clerk, they surely wouldn’t stop there. If they had what Rider had filed with the Court, then they would know that Rider had played a role in all of it. That meant he could be next on their hit list.

  But come on, he told himself, you’re just being paranoid. And that’s when it finally dawned on him. The sheaf of phone messages that Sheila had collected while he had been away. He had idly skimmed through them, returning the ones he felt were most important. The name, the damn name.

  He clawed through his desk until he found the pink pieces of paper. His hands flew through them, scanning, scanning, finally ripping the pile apart in his rising anxiety, until he found it. He looked down at the name, the blood slowly draining from his face. Michael Fiske had called him. Twice.

  Oh, my God. In an avalanche of thought, visions of his wife, the condo in Florida, his grown children, all the years of billable hours, flew through his mind. Well, damn if he was waiting around for them to come get him. He punched his intercom and told Sheila he wasn’t feeling well, to convey that to his visitor and the other gentlemen who would shortly arrive, and accommodate them any way she could.

  “I won’t be back today,” he told her as he hurried through the reception area. I hope I will someday. And not in a coffin, he added silently.

  “All right, Mr. Rider, you take care.”

  He almost laughed at her remark. He had phoned his house before leaving the office, but his wife wasn’t in. As he drove along, he had already made up his mind what he was going to do. The two had kicked around the idea of taking a late fall vacation, maybe down to the islands, one last dose of sun and water before the ice set in. Only they might stay awhile. He’d prefer to pour his savings into staying alive than into securing the view of a Florida sunset he might never get a chance to see.