The Simple Truth

by David Baldacci

  strength to her words.

  “Grab some dinner or something,” Chandler suggested. “You two might find a lot to talk about.”

  Fiske glanced around, clearly uncomfortable with this suggestion, but he finally nodded. “You ready?”

  “Give me a minute.” She shook her head wearily. “I have to tell Steven he has to work all night,” she said, and headed off.

  Chandler said, “John, find out what you can. She was close to your brother.” He added, “Unlike you.”

  “I’m not real good at spying,” Fiske said, feeling guilty about plotting like this behind Sara’s back. He had to catch himself, though; he didn’t even know the woman.

  As if he were privy to Fiske’s thoughts, Chandler said, “John, I know she’s smart and pretty, and she worked with your brother and she’s shook up about his death. But remember one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Those are not reasons to trust her.” With that parting comment, Chandler walked off.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Jordan Knight stood in the doorway of his wife’s office and watched her. Elizabeth Knight’s head was bowed as she sat at her desk. Several books were open in front of her, but she was obviously not reading any of them.

  “Why don’t you call it a day, honey?”

  She looked up, startled. “Jordan, I thought you had left for your meeting.”

  He came over and stood next to her, massaging the back of her neck with one hand. “I canceled it. And now it’s time to go home.”

  “But I have some more work to go. We’re all behind. It’s so hard — ”

  He put a hand under her arm and helped her up. “Beth, no matter how important it is, it’s not that important. Let’s go home,” he said firmly.

  A few minutes later they were being driven in a government car to their apartment. After a relaxing shower, something to eat and a glass of wine, Elizabeth Knight finally started to feel halfway normal again as she lay on her bed. Her husband came in and sat down next to her, putting her feet on his lap and rubbing them.

  “Sometimes I think we’re too hard on our clerks. Work them too hard. Expect too much from them,” she said after a while.

  “Is that right?” Jordan Knight cupped her chin in one hand. “What, are you somehow trying to blame yourself for Michael Fiske’s death? He wasn’t working late the night he was probably killed. You told me he called in sick. His being in an alleyway in a bad part of town has nothing to do with you or the Court. Somebody, some piece of street trash, killed him. Maybe it was a robbery, or maybe he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, but you had nothing to do with it.”

  “The police think it was a robbery.”

  “I’m sure it’s early on in the investigation, but it’ll be given the highest priority.”

  “One of the clerks today asked if Michael’s death might be connected to the Court somehow.”

  Jordan Knight considered this for a moment. “Look, I suppose it’s possible, but I can’t see how.” He suddenly looked worried. “If it is, though, I’m going to make sure you have added protection. I’ll make a call tomorrow and you’ll have your own Secret Service or FBI agent, round the clock.”

  “Jordan, you don’t have to do that.”

  “What, make sure that some nut doesn’t take you away from me? I think about that a lot, Beth. Some of the Court’s decisions are very unpopular. You all get death threats from time to time. You can’t ignore that.”

  “I don’t. I just try not to think about it.”

  “Fine, but don’t get upset if I do.”

  She smiled, touched his face. “You take much too good care of me, you know.”

  He smiled. “When you have something precious, that’s the only way to go.”

  They tenderly kissed and then Jordan pulled the covers up over her, turned out the light and left to finish up some work in his study. Elizabeth Knight didn’t go to sleep right away. She stared into the darkness, a series of emotions hitting her. Right when they all threatened to overwhelm her, she thankfully drifted off.

  * * *

  “I can’t imagine what you’re going through, John. I know how badly I’m feeling, and I’d only known Michael for a relatively short time.”

  They were in Sara’s car and had just crossed over the Potomac River and into Virginia. Fiske wondered if she was trying to impress upon him that she had little information to provide.

  “So how long did you two work together?”

  “A year. Michael talked me into coming back for a second year.”

  “Ramsey said you and Michael were close. How close?”

  She looked sharply at him. “What are you implying?”

  “I just want to gather facts about my brother. I want to know who his friends were. If he was seeing anyone.” He glanced over at her to gauge her reaction. If she had one, she wasn’t showing it.

  “You only lived two hours away and you know nothing about his life?”

  “Is that your opinion or someone else’s?”

  “I can actually make observations all by myself.”

  “Well, that’s a two-way street.”

  “The observations, or the two-hour drive?”

  “Both.”

  They pulled into the parking lot of a restaurant in northern Virginia. They went inside, got a table and ordered their drinks and food. A minute later, Fiske took a swallow of his Corona; Sara sipped on a margarita.

  Fiske wiped his mouth. “So, do you come from a family of lawyers? We tend to run in packs.”

  She smiled and shook her head. “I’m from a farm in North Carolina. Single-stoplight town. But my father had a connection to law.”

  Fiske looked mildly interested. “What was that?”

  “He was the justice of the peace for the area. Officially, his courtroom was a little space in the back of the jail. More often he’d hear cases while sitting on his John Deere tractor in the middle of the field.”

  “Is that what got you interested in law?”

  She nodded. “My dad looked more like a judge sitting on dusty farm equipment than some others I’ve seen in the fanciest courts.”

  “Including the one you’re in now?”

  Sara blinked and suddenly looked away. Fiske felt guilty for having made the comment. “I bet your dad was a good JP. Common sense, fair in his decisions. Man of the soil.”

  She glanced at him to see if he was being sarcastic, but Fiske’s look was genuine. “That’s exactly what he was. He mostly dealt with poachers and traffic tickets, but I don’t think anyone walked away feeling they had been treated unfairly.”

  “You see him often?”

  “He died six years ago.”

  “I’m sorry. Is your mom still around?”

  “She died before Dad. Rural life can be rough.”

  “Sisters or brothers?”

  She shook her head and seemed relieved to see their food arrive.

  “It just occurred to me that I haven’t eaten today,” Fiske said as he took a large bite of his tortilla.

  “I do that a lot. I think I had an apple this morning.”

  “Not good.” His gaze swept over her. “You don’t have a lot of excess on you.”

  She looked him over. Despite his broad shoulders and full cheeks, he almost looked gaunt, his shirt collar loose against his neck, his waist a little too small for his size. “Neither do you.”

  Twenty minutes later Fiske pushed away his empty plate and sat back. “I know you’re busy, so I won’t waste your time. My brother and I didn’t see a lot of each other. There’s an information void I need to fill if I’m going to find out who did this.”

  “I thought that was Detective Chandler’s job.”

  “Unofficially, it’s mine.”

  “Your cop background?” Sara asked. Fiske arched his eyebrows. “Michael told me a lot about you.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes, that’s right. He was very proud of you. From cop
to criminal defense attorney. Michael and I had some interesting discussions about that.”

  “Look, it bothers me that someone I don’t know has been having discussions about my life.”

  “There’s no reason to get upset. We just thought it was an interesting career change.”

  Fiske shrugged. “When I was a cop I spent all my time getting criminals off the streets. Now I make my living defending them. To tell you the truth, I was starting to feel sorry for them.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever heard a cop admit that.”

  “Really? How many cops have you dealt with?”

  “I have a heavy foot. I get lots of traffic tickets.” She smiled teasingly. “Seriously, why did you make the switch?”

  He absently played with his knife for a moment. “I busted a guy who was carrying a brick of coke. He was a mule for some drug runners, a real minor role; just transport the stuff from point A to point B. I had other probable cause to do a stop and search. I turn up the brick and then the guy, with the vocabulary of a first-grader, tells me he thought it was a hunk of cheese.” Fiske looked directly as her. “Can you believe that? He would’ve been better off claiming he didn’t know how it got in there. Then his attorney could’ve at least had a shot at raising reasonable doubt on the possession charge. Trying to sell a jury on the fact that somebody who looks, acts and talks like a slimeball really thought ten thousand bucks worth of misery for their kids was a chuck of Swiss, well, you got problems.” He shook his head. “You put ten of these guys in jail, there’s a hundred more just waiting to take their place. They’ve got nowhere else to go. If they had, they would. The thing is, you don’t give people hope, they don’t care what they do to themselves or each other.”

  Sara smiled. “What’s so funny?” he asked.

  “You sound a lot like your brother.”

  Fiske paused and rubbed his hand across a water ring on the table. “You spent a lot of time with Mike?”

  “Yes, quite a lot.”

  “Socially too?”

  “We had drinks, dinner, outings.” She took a sip of her drink and smiled. “I’ve never been deposed before.”

  “Depositions can actually be quite painful.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, like this for instance: Something tells me Mike’s death didn’t seem to surprise you all that much. Is that true?”

  Sara instantly dropped her casual manner. “No. I was horrified.”

  “Horrified, yes. But surprised?”

  The waitress stopped by and asked if they would like some dessert or coffee. Fiske asked for the bill.

  Then they were back in the car and heading toward the District. A light rain had begun to fall. October was a quirky month, weatherwise, for the area. It could be hot, cold or mild during any given stretch. Right now it was very hot and humid outside, and Sara had the AC on high.

  Fiske looked at her expectantly. She caught his gaze, took a troubled breath and started speaking slowly.

  “Recently, Michael did seem nervous, distracted.”

  “Was that unusual?”

  “For the last six weeks we’ve been cranking out bench memos. Everybody’s short-fused, but Michael thrived under those conditions.”

  “You think it was related to something at the Court?”

  “Michael didn’t have much of a life outside the Court.”

  “Other than you?”

  She glanced at him sharply but said nothing.

  “Any big controversial cases pending?” he asked.

  “Every case is big and controversial.”

  “But he never mentioned specifics to you?”

  Sara stared ahead but again chose not to answer.

  “Whatever you can tell me will help, Sara.”

  She slowed the car slightly. “Your brother was funny. Do you know that he would go down to the clerks’mail room at the crack of dawn to get an early jump on any interesting cases?”

  “I’m not surprised. He never did things halfway. How are the appeals normally processed?”

  “The clerks’ mail room is where the filings are opened and processed. Each filing goes to a case analyst to make sure that it complies with the requirements of the rules of the Court, and so forth. If it’s handwritten, like a lot of the in forma pauperis appeals are, they even make sure the handwriting is legible. Then the information goes into a database under the last name of the party filing the appeal. Lastly, the filing is copied and sent to all the justices’ chambers.”

  “Mike once told me how many appeals the Court gets. The justices can’t possibly read all of them.”

  “They don’t. The petitions are divided up among the justices’ chambers, and the clerks are assigned to do certorari pool memos on them. For example, we might get in a hundred or so appeals in a week’s time. There are nine justices, so each chamber gets roughly a dozen appeals. Of the dozen appeals sent to Justice Knight’s chambers, I might write a memo on three. That memo is circulated to all the chambers. Then the other justices’ clerks look over my memo and make a recommendation to their justice on whether the Court should grant cert or not.”

  “You clerks have a lot of power.”

  “In some areas, but not really with the opinions. A clerk’s draft of an opinion is mostly a recap of the facts of the case and then stringing together cites. The justices just use the clerks to get the grunt work done, the paper pulp. We have the greatest impact in the screening of the appeals.”

  Fiske looked thoughtful. “So a justice may not even see the actual documents filed with the Court before deciding whether to hear the case or not? He’d just read the pool memo and the clerk’s recommendation.”

  “Maybe not even the memo, perhaps just the clerk’s recommendation. The justices hold discussion conferences usually twice a week. That’s when all the petitions screened by the clerks are discussed and voted upon to see if there are at least four votes, the minimum you need, to hear the case.”

  “So the first person to actually see an appeal filed with the Court would be someone in the clerks’mail room?”

  “That’s normally the case.”

  “What do you mean, ‘normally’?”

  “I mean there’s no guarantee that things will always be done by the rules.”

  Fiske thought about this for a moment. “Are you suggesting that my brother might have taken an appeal before the clerks’mail room could process it?”

  Sara let out a muffled groan but quickly composed herself. “I can only tell you this in confidence, John.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not going to promise you something I can’t deliver.”

  Sara sighed and in concise sentences told Fiske about finding the papers in his brother’s briefcase. “I didn’t really mean to snoop. But he had been acting strangely, and I was worried about him. I ran into him one morning coming from the clerks’mail room. He looked really distraught. I think he had just taken the appeal I found in his briefcase.”

  “The filing you saw, was it the original or a copy?”

  “Original. One of the pages was handwritten, the other typewritten.”

  “Are originals normally circulated?”

  “No. Only copies. And the copied files certainly don’t have the original envelope the filing came in.”

  “I remember Mike telling me that clerks sometimes take home files, even originals sometimes.”

  “That’s true.”