The Simple Truth (41 page)

“Well, I have to admit, that was pretty close.”

“John, I never, ever want to do that again.”
Sara walked unsteadily to the bathroom.

“Where are you going?”

She didn’t bother to look back at him.
“To the bathroom. Unless you want me to throw up out here.”

An hour after his conversation with Warren McKenna, Chandler climbed out of his car and walked slowly to his house. It was a comfortable brick and siding split-level set in a neighborhood of like structures. A nice, safe place to raise kids — at least it had been twenty years ago. It wasn’t as safe or as nice today, but then what was? he thought.

Many years ago, when he wanted to unwind after work, he would shoot a few hoops in the driveway with his kids using the basketball net he had hung over the garage doors. That net had long since rotted away and the hoop and backboard had been removed. Now he went into the small backyard, where he sat down on a weathered gray cedar bench, situated near a spreading magnolia and in front of a small in-ground fountain. His wife had pestered him into putting in the fountain and he had bitched and complained the whole time. It was only after he had finished the project that he had understood her insistence. Building the thing had been cathartic for him: the planning, the measurements, the selection of materials. It was a lot like detective work, meaning a jigsaw puzzle where, if you were equal parts competent and lucky, all the pieces fit.

After ten minutes of quiet he finally lurched to his feet, his coat thrown over his shoulder, and ambled into the house. He looked around the quiet, dark kitchen. It was well decorated, the whole house was, due entirely to the efforts of his wife, Juanita. Kids raised, doctor visits made, bills paid, flowers tended to, grass clipped, beds made, clothes washed and ironed, meals cooked, dishes cleaned — she did all those things while he worked horrendous hours on his way up. That had been their partnership. After the kids were gone, she had gone back to school, become a nurse and worked at a local hospital on the pediatric wing. Married thirty-three years now and still going strong.

Chandler had no idea how much longer he could continue being a detective. It was all getting to him. The stench of the work, the feel of his hands in rubber gloves, the taking of tiny, measured steps for fear of trampling a bit of evidence that might cost somebody his life or let a butcher go free. The paperwork, the slick defense attorneys asking the same questions, plotting the same verbal traps, the bored judges reading off the sentencing guidelines like they were parceling out test results. The robotic looks of the defendants who said nothing, showed no emotion, went to prison with all their buddies, their institution of higher learning, coming out much more accomplished criminals.

The ringing phone cut short these depressing thoughts.

“Hello?”
He listened for a couple of minutes, gave a series of instructions and hung up. A slug had been found in the alleyway where Michael Fiske’s body had been discovered. It apparently had ricocheted off one wall and gotten wedged in some trash that had fallen behind a Dumpster. From what Chandler had been told, the slug was in very good shape with little projectile deformity. The lab would have to confirm that it was actually the bullet that had killed the young clerk. That would be fairly easy to determine for a sickening reason: The slug would have blood, bone and brain tissue residue on it that could be linked pretty much conclusively to the head of Michael Fiske. With the bullet in hand, they could now search hard for the murder weapon. Ballistics could match the slug to the gun that had fired it with the reliability of matching fingerprints to a human hand.

Chandler rose and went into the living room, purposely leaving his own gun behind. He sat down in a recliner that matched his bulky proportions. The room was dark and he did not move to turn on a light. He had too many lights around him at work. Lights in his office beating down on him every day. Harsher lights in the autopsy room, that made every piece of flesh enormous, ominously raw, memorable to the point of Chandler’s excusing himself every once in a great while to go to the men’s room, where his stomach showed its appreciation for the polished skill of official dismemberment. The popping lights of the photographers at a crime scene or a courthouse. Too many damn lights. Darkness was quiet, darkness was soothing. Darkness was how he wanted his retirement to be. Cool and dark. Like his fountain in the backyard.

Warren McKenna’s words had disturbed Chandler, though he had tried hard not to show it. He couldn’t bring himself to accept that John Fiske could murder his own brother. But, truth be known, wouldn’t that be exactly what Fiske wanted Chandler to believe? But then he had something else to think about. Michael Fiske’s phone calls to Fort Jackson. And now Rufus Harms’s escape. Were they connected? Fiske was covering for Sara Evans, that was clear. Chandler shook his head. He would have to sleep on it, because his old brain was running on empty.

He started to get up and then stopped abruptly. The arms suddenly encircled his neck, startling him. His hands gripped the person’s forearms as his eyes popped huge. His gun — where the hell was his gun?

“Working hard or hardly working?”

He immediately relaxed and looked up into Juanita’s face. The edges of her mouth were crinkled into the beginnings of a smile. Her face always held that same look, as though she were about to tell a joke or laugh at one. That look never failed to cheer him up no matter how lousy his day had been, no matter how many bodies he had poked and probed.

He put a hand on his heaving chest.
“Damn, woman, you sneak up on me like that again, the only thing I’m going to be working is my angel wings.”

She sat down on his lap. She was wearing a long white robe, bare feet showing.
“Come on, now, a big, strong fella like yourself? And aren’t you being a bit presumptuous about those angel wings?”

He slid an arm around her waist, which, after three children, wasn’t as small as on their wedding night, but then neither was his. They had
grown
together, he often liked to say. Balance was essential in life. One fatty and one skinny was just heading for disaster.

There was no one alive who knew him better than Juanita. Maybe that was really the one important product of a successful marriage: the knowledge that there was one other soul out there who had your number, all the way down to the last possible decimal place, out there with pi, maybe more; if that was possible, Juanita had his.

He smiled back at her.
“Sure, I’m one big, strong guy, but sensitive, baby. Us sensitive types, you just never know what might knock us over. And after a life spent fighting crime, I thought the Lord would be up there right now sewing together a nice fancy pair of angel wings for me, size extra-large, of course. He’s all-knowing, so He’ll be aware of the fact that I’ve spread some in my old age.”
He gave her a kiss on the cheek and they held hands. She swept her fingers through his disappearing hair. She could sense that his humor was forced.

“Buford, why don’t you tell me what’s bothering you so we can talk about it and then you can come to bed? It’s getting pretty late. Tomorrow’s always another day.”

Chandler smiled at her remark.
“Hey, what happened to my poker face? As I look a culprit in the eye and wear him down without ever revealing what I’m really thinking.”

“You stink at poker. So talk to me, baby.”

She rubbed at his kinked-up neck and he reciprocated by massaging her long feet.

“You remember that young man I was telling you about? John Fiske? His brother was a clerk at the Supreme Court?”

“I remember. And now another clerk dead too.”

“Right. Well, I was over at his brother’s apartment tonight, going through it for evidence collection. McKenna, that agent from the FBI, showed up.”

“The one you said was wound up like a grenade ready to blow? Couldn’t figure him out?”

“He’s the one.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Well, we found a life insurance policy that pays John Fiske half a million dollars upon his brother’s death.”

“So, they were family, weren’t they? You have life insurance, don’t you? I get rich if you die, right?”
She lightly smacked the top of his head.
“You better have, anyway. Promising me all this nice stuff my whole life and never delivering. I better be rich when your sorry butt kicks off.”

They both laughed and exchanged lingering hugs.

“Fiske never told me about the insurance policy. I mean, come on, that’s a classic motive for murder.”

“Well, maybe he doesn’t know about the policy.”

“Maybe,”
Chandler conceded.
“Anyway, McKenna laid out this whole theory that has Fiske killing his brother for the money, getting another clerk at the Court to help him because she’s got a thing for him and then throwing all this misdirection at us, offering to help with the investigation and whatnot. Even lying about an intruder at his brother’s apartment. I have to admit, he put together a pretty convincing argument, at least on the surface.”

“So John Fiske was at his brother’s apartment?”

“Yep. Claims some guy hit him there and took off. Maybe stole some stuff from the apartment, something that tied in to the murder.”

“Well, if John Fiske was at his brother’s apartment and made up the story about this intruder person, and he knew about the life insurance policy, why didn’t he search his brother’s apartment for the policy? Why leave it for you to find and get suspicious?”

Chandler stared at her, wide-eyed.

“Buford, are you okay?”

“Damn, sweetie, I thought I was the detective in the family. Now, how the hell did I miss that one?”

“Because you’re overworked and underappreciated, that’s why.”
She got up and extended her hand to his.
“But if you come upstairs right now, I will show you some extra-special appreciation. Leave your sensitive side down here, though, baby, and just bring your other parts upstairs.”
She looked at him with heavy-lidded eyes that he knew did not indicate sleepiness.

Chandler quickly rose, took her hand and together they walked up the stairs.

As the Jeep raced down the road, Tremaine scrutinized the passengers of each car they passed.

“The damn luck,”
Rayfield moaned.
“We couldn’t have missed them by more than a few minutes.”

Tremaine ignored him, focusing instead on the car in front of them. The dome light of the car came on as they passed, revealing the driver and passenger. The passenger was unfolding a map.

As Tremaine stared at the car’s interior he hit the brakes, ripped the Jeep to the left and went across the median. The vehicle bumped and jostled in the grassy ditch before the tires found asphalt again and they were heading back toward Rider’s office.

Rayfield grabbed Tremaine’s shoulder.
“What the hell are you doing?”

“They suckered us. The guy and the gal. Their story was bullshit.”

“How do you know that?”

“The light in the bathroom.”

“The light? What about it?”

“It wasn’t on. The bitch was in there in the dark. It hit me when I saw the dome light go on in the car back there. There was no light coming from under the bathroom door when she was in there. When she opened the door she didn’t hit the light switch because the bathroom was already dark. She wasn’t using the can. She was standing in the bathroom in the pitch-dark. And guess why?”

Rayfield’s face went pale.
“Because Harms and his brother were in there too.”
While he looked at the road ahead he had another thought.
“The guy said his name was John Michaels. Could it have been John Fiske?”

“And the girl was Sara Evans. That’s what I’m thinking. You better call and let the others know.”

Rayfield picked up the cell phone.
“We’ll never catch up to Harms now.”

“Yes, we will.”

“How the hell can we?”

Tremaine drew on thirty years of Army training, studying what the other side would do in a particular scenario.
“Fiske said he saw them get in a car. Opposite of a car is a truck. He said it was an old car. Opposite of that is a
new
truck. He said they were going north, so we go south. It’s only been five minutes. We’ll catch them.”

“I hope to God you’re right. If they were at Rider’s office — ”
He broke off and looked anxiously out the window.

Tremaine looked over at him.
“Then that means the Harms brothers ain’t running. That means they were looking for something Rider had. And that sure as hell is not good news for us.”
He nodded at the phone.
“Make that call. We’ll take care of Harms and his brother. They’ll have to deal with Fiske and the woman.”

* * *

Because of the high-profile nature of the case, the FBI had offered the use of its laboratory to perform the analysis on the slug found in the alley. After comparing tissue samples taken from Michael Fiske’s remains, the slug was deemed to have been fired through his brain. The slug was a 9mm of a type typically carried by law enforcement personnel.

With that information, Agent McKenna sat down in front of a computer terminal at the Hoover Building and typed in a high-priority request to the Virginia State Police. Within a few minutes he had his answer. John Fiske had a 9mm SIG-Sauer registered to his name, a carryover from his cop days. Within minutes McKenna was in his car. Two hours later he turned off Interstate 95 and headed through the darkened streets of downtown Richmond. His car rumbled over the aged and uneven streets of Shockoe Slip. He parked in a secluded area near the old train station.

Ten minutes later he was standing in John Fiske’s office, having picked the locks of the building and the lawyer’s office with remarkable ease. He looked around the darkened space using a small light. He had decided to search Fiske’s office first rather than his apartment. It only took a couple of minutes until he found it. The 9mm pistol was relatively light and compact. Wearing gloves, McKenna palmed it for a moment and then put it in his pocket.