The Simple Truth (31 page)

“We got to, Josh.”

Josh smoked his Pall Mall down to the filter before answering.
“
I
ain’t got to do nothing, Rufus. The whole damn United States Army is out looking for your ass. And mine too. You can’t exactly melt into the crowd. Hell, you’d make George Foreman look like a damn sissy.”

“We still got to do it, Josh. Least I got to do it. If I can get that letter, then maybe I can get it to somebody who can help. Maybe write another letter to the Court.”

“Yeah, look at all the good it done you last time. Them big-ass judges just come running to help you, didn’t they?”

“It don’t matter if you don’t want to come, Josh. But I got to do it.”

“What about Mexico? Damn, Rufus, you free. For now. We try poking around this thing, they gonna take you back to prison or most likely shoot you down first. We got to go while we got the chance, man.”

“I want to be free. But I can’t leave it like this. I go to Mexico now and I’ll die of guilt, if the Lord don’t strike me down before then.”

“Guilt? You done twenty-five years for nothing. When you die you going to heaven and you gonna be sitting in God’s lap. You a lock for that.”

“No good, Josh. You ain’t changing my mind.”

Josh spit again and looked out the dirty, cracked window.
“You sonofabitchin’ crazy. Prison’s screwed you for good. Damn!”

“Maybe I am crazy.”

Josh glared at him.
“Where the hell is Rider’s office?”

“About thirty minutes outside Blacksburg. That’s all I know. Shouldn’t be hard to find out where it is exactly.”

“Probably crawling with cops.”

“Maybe not, if they think Samuel done it all.”

“Shit.”
Josh violently kicked the wall and then turned to his brother.
“Okay, we’ll wait until nightfall and then head on out.”

“Thanks, Josh.”

“Don’t thank me for helping us both get killed. That kind of thanks I surely don’t want.”

The flag at the United States Supreme Court was flying at half-mast. Newspaper, TV and radio reports nationwide were filled with accounts of the two murdered clerks. The phones in the Court’s Public Information Office refused to stop ringing. The adjoining press room was standing room only. Major TV and radio networks were broadcasting live from booths on the ground floor of the Court. Supreme Court police, reinforced by fifty D.C. police officers, National Guardsmen and FBI agents, ringed the Court’s perimeter.

The private hallways outside the justices’chambers were filled with clusters of people nervously talking. Most of the justices were secluded inside their chambers, having barely made it through the oral argument sessions, their minds far from the advocates and issues before them. The young faces of the law clerks too bore the terror inspired by the killings.

The small first-floor room normally used for the justices’ conferences was filled. The walls were dark-paneled and lined with bookshelves containing the bound volumes of two hundred years of the Court’s decisions. Another wall held a fireplace, unlit on this very warm day. A grand chandelier hung overhead. Ramsey sat at the head of the table. Justices Knight and Murphy sat in their regular chairs.

While Knight’s gaze darted around the table, Murphy, fiddling with an old pocket watch strung on a chain across his puffy middle, kept his eyes downcast. Also present were Chandler, Fiske, Perkins, Ron Klaus, and McKenna. Fiske and McKenna occasionally made eye contact, but Fiske had kept his temper under control.

Wright had been found in a park a half dozen blocks from his Capitol Hills apartment, with a single gunshot wound to the head. His wallet, like Michael Fiske’s, was missing. Robbery was the superficial motive, although no one in the room believed the answer could be that simple. Preliminary indications were that Wright had been killed between midnight and two in the morning.

On the ride over to the Court, Chandler had filled Fiske in on recent developments. He had had Michael Fiske’s autopsy expedited, although he was still awaiting the official report and the exact time of death. The cause of Michael Fiske’s death, however, had definitely been a single gunshot to the head. Chandler had tracked down the northern Virginia Wal-Mart where Fiske had had his car serviced, but no one there could give them any useful information.

Fiske had had one thought that prompted him and Chandler to make a short detour on the way to the Court: They had returned to the car impoundment lot to have another look at Michael’s Honda. Fiske had looked in the back pockets of the front seat.

“He kept a map in here, always did. He had this weird fear of getting lost. Had to plot out his whole trip before he set foot on the road. There’s no map here, but there is this.”
He held up a couple of yellow Post-its that he had found wadded up at the bottom of the seat pocket. There was writing on them, names of interstates and roads — directions, given the faded condition of the ink, from some trip taken long ago.

Chandler looked at the pieces of yellow paper.
“So why take the map book?”

“He would’ve had the directions to wherever he was going in there.”

“So the miles had something to do with his death.”

Fiske hesitated for a moment, debating whether to tell Chandler about the Harms filing. Revealing that information would open a can of worms that he didn’t want to deal with right now.
“Maybe,”
he finally said.

After that, he and Chandler had driven to the Court.

Now they were all in the conference room staring at each other. Without disclosing how he had come by the information, Chandler had just reported that there had been an intruder at Michael Fiske’s apartment the night before.

“We’re in your hands, Detective Chandler,”
Ramsey said.
“Although now I think it much more likely that we have some madman at work with a grudge against the Court, rather than it pertaining to some matter Michael was working on.”

McKenna said,
“I want you to know that the Bureau has assigned a hundred agents to this matter. We’ve also arranged around-the-clock protection for the justices.”

“What about the clerks?”
Fiske said.
“They’re the ones getting killed.”

Chandler stepped in.
“I’ve compiled the home addresses of all the clerks. I’ve beefed up patrols in those areas. Most of them live on Capitol Hill close to the Court. We’ve offered to house any clerk who so chooses at a local hotel where full-time security is available. I’ve also instructed one of our experts to talk to the clerks about ways to keep safe, be on the lookout for suspicious persons, avoid going out alone or at night, that sort of thing.”
He looked around for a moment.
“By the way, where is Dellasandro?”

“He’s trying to coordinate all the new security measures,”
Klaus reported.
“I’ve never seen him this worried. I think he’s taking it personally.”

“I’ve been on the Court for almost thirty-three years, and I never thought I would ever see the likes of this,”
Justice Murphy said sadly.

“None of us did, Tommy,”
Knight said forcefully. She looked pointedly at Chandler.
“You have no leads at all?”

“I wouldn’t go that far. We have several things to go on. I’m talking about Michael Fiske’s death. With Wright’s murder it’s still too early to say.”

“But you believe them to be connected?”
Ramsey said.

“I really don’t have a belief on that one way or the other.”

“What do you recommend that we do?”

“That you go about your business as usual. If this is the work of some nut out to disrupt the Court, then you’d be playing into his hands by canceling your docket.”

“Or we could risk infuriating whoever’s doing this, with the result that he will strike again,”
Knight said.

“That’s always a possibility, Justice Knight,”
Chandler conceded.
“But I’m not convinced that what the Court does or doesn’t do will have any effect on that.
If
the cases are connected.”
He looked at Ramsey.
“I do think it’s worth going over the cases both clerks were involved in, just to cover that base. I know it’s a long shot, but I could end up kicking myself later on if I don’t address it now.”

“I understand.”

Chandler turned to Justice Murphy.
“Will you and your other clerks still be available today to go over cases Michael Fiske was handling?”

“Yes,”
Murphy replied quickly.

“And I would appreciate if all of you would confer with the other justices and try to determine if any one case you’ve heard over the last few years may have prompted some action like this,”
said Chandler.

Knight looked at him and shook her head.
“Detective Chandler, many of the cases we deal with stir incredible emotions in people. It would be impossible to know where to start.”

“I see your point. I guess you’ve all been lucky that no one’s tried to do something like this before.”

“Well, if you want us to go about our normal routines, then I suppose that the dinner honoring Judge Wilkinson will go forward tonight,”
Knight said.

Murphy sat straight up in protest.
“Beth, if nothing else, I think the murders of two Court personnel would dictate that the dinner be put off.”

“That’s easy enough to say, Tommy, but you didn’t happen to plan the event. I did. Kenneth Wilkinson is eighty-five years old and he has pancreatic cancer. I won’t risk putting it off, unfortunate as the timing may be. This is very important to him.”

“And to you as well, correct, Beth?”
Ramsey said.
“And your husband?”

“That’s right. Are we going to have another debate on legal ethics, Harold? In front of all these people?”

“No,”
he said.
“You know my feelings on the subject.”

“Yes, I do, and the dinner will proceed.”

Fiske was fascinated by the exchange. He thought he saw a hint of a smile pass across Ramsey’s face as the man said,
“All right, Beth. Far be it from me to attempt to change your mind on any matter of importance, much less those bordering on the trivial.”

Tremaine set the Army helicopter down in the grassy field. As the circling of the copter blades slowed, he and Rayfield looked over at the sedan parked near the edge of the tree line. They lifted off their seat harnesses, climbed out and, torsos bent forward as they passed beneath the blades, headed toward the car. When they reached it, Rayfield sat in the front seat while Tremaine slipped into the back.

“Glad you could make it,”
said the man in the driver’s seat, turning to face Rayfield.

The colonel’s jaw fell.
“What happened to you?”

The bruises were purplish in the center, leaching out to yellow around the edges. One clung to the side of his right eye, the two others spread out from his collar.

“Fiske,”
he answered.

“Fiske? He’s dead.”

“His brother, John,”
the man said impatiently.
“He caught me at his brother’s apartment.”

“Did he recognize you?”

“I was wearing a mask.”

“What was he doing at his brother’s apartment?”

“Same thing I was, looking for anything that the cops could use to find out the truth.”

“Did he find anything?”

“Nothing to find. We’d already gotten Fiske’s laptop.”
He looked at Tremaine.
“And you got his briefcase from his car before you killed him, right?”
Tremaine nodded.
“Where is it?”
the man asked.

“A pile of ash.”

“Good.”

“Is this brother a problem?”
Rayfield wanted to know.

“Maybe. He’s an ex-cop. He and one of the other clerks are snooping around. He’s helping the detective investigate the clerks’murders.”

Rayfield started.
“Murders? More than one?”

“Steven Wright.”

“What the hell’s going on?”
Rayfield demanded.

“Wright saw someone come out of Michael Fiske’s office. He also heard something he shouldn’t have. We couldn’t trust him to be quiet, so I had to bluff him out of the building and kill him. We’re okay on that one.”

“Are you nuts? This thing is totally out of control,”
Rayfield said angrily.

The man looked at Tremaine.
“Hey, Vic, tell your superior to stay cool. I think Nam took away some of your nerve, Frank. You’ve never been the same since.”

“Four murders, and you say stay cool? And Harms and his brother are still out there.”

“So we’ve got two more bodies to go. The two most important. You understand that, don’t you, Vic?”

“I do,”
Tremaine answered.

The man looked over at Rayfield with a pair of very cold eyes.

Rayfield swallowed nervously.
“I guess there’s no going back now.”

“You’re right there.”

“John Fiske and this clerk: What are you doing about them? If Fiske is on some mission to find his brother’s killer, he may be a problem.”

“He already is a problem. They’re on a real short leash. And they’ll stay there until we decide what to do with them.”

“Meaning?”
Rayfield asked.

“Meaning we might have four more bodies to go instead of two.”

*    *    *

Sara sat in her new office. Chandler had declared the space she shared with Wright off limits, but he had allowed Court personnel to move Sara’s computer and work files to this overflow space. She had taken the list of state prison agencies Fiske had given her and started calling. At the end of a half an hour she hung up the phone, depressed. There was no one with the last name Harms in any prison in any of those states. She tried to remember any other helpful word or phrase from the documents she had seen, but she finally gave that up.