The Simple Truth

by David Baldacci

  They could drive to Roanoke, hop a commuter flight and take it into Washington or Richmond. From there they could go anywhere. He would explain it to his wife by saying he was just being spontaneous, something she had said he never was and never could be. Good old steady, reliable Sam Rider. Did nothing more with his life than work hard, pay his bills, raise his kids, love his wife and try to catch a few strands of happiness along the way. Lord, I’m already writing my obituary, he realized.

  He wouldn’t be in a position to help Rufus, but he figured the man was probably dead anyway. I’m sorry, Rufus, he thought. But you’re in a much better place, far better than the one those bastards saddled you with on this earth.

  A sudden thought made him almost turn the car around. He had left the copies of the filing he had made for Rufus back at the office. Should he go back? He finally decided that his life was worth more than a few pieces of paper. What could he do with them now anyway?

  He concentrated on the road. There wasn’t much between his office and his home except windy roads, birds and the occasional deer or black bear. The isolation had never bothered Rider until now. At this moment, it terrified him. He had a shotgun at home that he used for quail hunting. He wished he had it with him.

  He rounded an elbow-shaped bend in the road, a rusted guardrail the only thing standing between him and a five-hundred-foot drop. As he tapped his brakes to slow down, his breath caught in his throat. His brakes. Oh, my God, I’ve lost my brakes! He started to scream. But then the brakes held. Don’t let your senses run away from you, Sam, he cautioned himself. A few minutes later he turned the last corner and saw his mailbox. A minute after that he pulled the car into his garage. His wife’s car was next to his.

  As he passed by her car, he glanced at the front seat. His feet seemed to sink right into the concrete floor. His wife was lying facedown in the front seat. Even from where he was standing, Rider could see the blood pouring from the head wound. That was the next to last memory Rider would have. The hand came around and clamped across his face a large cloth that had a sickening medicinal odor. Another hand slipped something into Rider’s hand. As the lawyer looked down with eyes that were already beginning to close, he saw and felt the still-warm pistol as his fingers were wrapped around it by a pair of latex-gloved hands. It was Rider’s pistol, one he used for target shooting. The one he now also knew had been used to kill his wife. From the heat left in the metal, they must have done it as soon as he turned into the driveway. They must have been watching for him. He arched his head and stared into the cold, clear eyes of Victor Tremaine as his face was thrust deeper and deeper into the clutches of unconsciousness. This man had killed her, but Rider would be blamed for it. Not that it would matter much to him. He was dead too. As he finished this thought, Samuel Rider’s eyes closed for the last time.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Driving down the George Washington Parkway south of Old Town Alexandria, Fiske glimpsed a bike rider as he flitted, phantomlike, among the line of trees that ran along the asphalt bike path paralleling the river. Fiske nudged Sara awake and she told him where to turn off the parkway. She glanced quickly at him. The encounter with his father had not been mentioned on the drive back. It was as though they had silently agreed not to discuss it.

  With Sara directing, Fiske pulled down another blacktop road, and then turned right onto a gravel lane that ran steeply down toward the water. He stopped the car in front of the small, wood-framed cottage, which stood there prim and dour among the untidy backdrop of tree, bramble and wild-flower, like the preacher’s wife at a church picnic turned rowdy. The clapboard was layered with fifty years’worth of white paint; the structure also had black shutters, and a wide brick chimney the color of terra-cotta. Fiske watched as a squirrel sprinted across the phone line, leaped to the roof and corkscrewed up the chimney.

  Anchoring one corner of the property was a crape myrtle in full bloom, its bark the texture and color of deerskin. Wedged against the other side of the cottage was a twenty-foot holly, red berries peeping out, ornamentlike, from among the dark green leaves. In between was a hedge of burning bush, the ground underneath it sprinkled with cardinal-red leaves. Behind the house Fiske noted the stairway angling down to the water. From there he thought he saw the bob of a sail mast. From the back seat, he grabbed the clean clothes he had gotten from his apartment. They got out of the car.

  “Nice place,” he commented.

  Sara stretched and yawned deeply. “When I got the clerkship at the Court, I flew in to look at housing. I thought I’d just rent at first, but found this place and fell in love with it. So I went down to North Carolina, sold the farm, and bought this.”

  “Must have been hard selling the homestead.”

  Sara shook her head. “The two reasons it was important to me were dead. All that was left was a bunch of dirt that I couldn’t do anything with.”

  Still stretching, she headed to the house. “I’ll get the coffee going.” She looked at her watch and moaned. “I’m going to be late for oral argument. I should call in, but I’m afraid to.”

  “I’m sure they’ll understand, given the circumstances.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you,” she said doubtfully.

  Fiske hesitated. “Do you have a map around here?”

  “What kind?”

  “Eastern half of the United States.”

  She thought a moment. “Check the glove compartment.”

  He did so and pulled out the map. As they went into the house she asked, “What are you looking for?”

  “I’ve been thinking about the eight hundred miles that were on Mike’s car.”

  “You want to see what’s eight hundred miles from here?”

  “No, four hundred.” Sara looked puzzled. “Four hundred miles out, but he, or someone else, had to drive back to D.C.”

  “Although it could be a number of smaller trips, a hundred miles here and there.”

  Fiske shook his head. “Human remains inside a trunk on a hot day aren’t real pleasant to be around. I’ve found a couple that way,” he added grimly.

  While she fixed coffee in the kitchen, Fiske looked out the window that faced the river. From this vantage point he could now see the pressure-treated lumber dock and the sailboat tied up to it.

  “You get to sail much?”

  “Black or cream?”

  “Black.”

  She got out two cups. “Not as much as I used to. Where I lived in North Carolina was pretty landlocked. Some fishing with my dad, swimming at a pond a few miles down the road. But out at Stanford, I really got into it. You never know how big something can be until you see the Pacific Ocean. It dwarfs everything else I’ve ever experienced.”

  “Never been there.”

  “Let me know if you ever decide to. I could show you around.” She wiped the hair out of her eyes, poured his coffee and handed him his cup.

  “I’ll put that on my list,” he said dryly.

  “I’ve only got one bathroom, so we’ll have to take turns showering.”

  “You go first. I want to check out this map.”

  “If I’m not down in twenty minutes, pound on the door; I’ll probably have fallen asleep in the shower.”

  Fiske was looking at the map, sipping his coffee, and didn’t comment. Sara paused on the stairs.

  “John?”He looked up. “I hope you can forgive me for last night.” She stopped, as though mulling over what she had just said. “The problem is, I don’t think I deserve to be forgiven.”

  Fiske put his cup down and stared at her. The sunlight poured through the window at a graceful angle, falling full upon her face, accentuating the sparkle of her eyes, the sensual margins of her lips. Her hair was limp from the river water, sweat and sleeping on it. The little makeup she wore had long since lost its life, staining her eyelids and cheeks, her entire body pushed to the point of exhaustion. This woman had been the source of a major, perhaps cataclysmic rift between him and his father, a man he
worshiped. And yet Fiske had to fight the impulse to slip off her clothes and lie down next to her right there on the floor.

  “Everybody deserves to be forgiven,” he finally said, and then looked back at the map.

  While Sara was showering, Fiske went into a room off the kitchen. She obviously used it as a home office of sorts, since it had a desk, computer, bookshelf full of law books and a printer. He spread the map out on the desk. He found the scale at the bottom, converting inches into miles, and rummaged around in the desk drawer until he found a ruler. Using Washington as the epicenter, he drew lines outward in north, west and southerly directions and then drew a line attaching the end points. He ignored the east, since four hundred miles out would put him well into the Atlantic. He made a list of the various states within this rough circumference, picked up the phone and called directory assistance. Within a minute he was on the phone with someone from the Federal Bureau of Prisons. He gave the name Harms to the person on the other end, along with the geographic radius he might be within. It had occurred to Fiske that his brother may have gone to visit Harms in prison. The call his brother had made to him seeking some advice would then make sense. John Fiske knew a lot more about prisons than his younger brother did.

  When the bureau representative came back on the line with the results, Fiske’s face sagged. “You sure there’s no prisoner with that last name in any federal prison in the geographic area I gave you?”

  “I even went out an extra couple hundred miles.”

  “Well, how about state prisons, then?”

  “I can give you the phone numbers for each state. You’ll have to contact them separately. Do you know which ones are in that area?”

  Fiske looked at the map and rattled them off. There were over a dozen. Fiske wrote down the telephone numbers he was given and hung up.

  He thought for a moment and then decided to check messages at his home and office. One was from an insurance agent. Fiske returned the call to the agent, who was located in the D.C. metropolitan area.

  “I was very sorry to read about your brother’s death, Mr. Fiske,” the woman said.

  “I didn’t know my brother had any life insurance.”

  “Sometimes the beneficiaries aren’t aware. In fact, it’s not the insurance company’s obligation to notify the beneficiaries even if we’re aware of the insured’s death. Bluntly speaking, insurers don’t go out of their way to pay out claims.”

  “So why did you call me?”

  “Because I was horrified by Michael’s death.”

  “When did he take the policy out?”

  “About six months ago.”

  “He had no wife or kids. Why did he need insurance?”

  “Well, it’s why I called you. He said he wanted you to have the money in case anything happened to him.”

  Fiske felt a catch in his throat and he held the phone away for a moment. “Our parents could use the money a lot more than me,” he finally managed to say.

  “He told me you’d probably give the money to them, but he wanted you to use some of it for yourself. And he thought you’d know better than your parents how to deal with it.”

  “I see. Well, how much money are we talking about?”

  “A half million dollars.” She read his address to him to confirm that it was still accurate. “For what it’s worth, I write a lot of policies for people, for a lot of different reasons, not all of them good, but in case you didn’t realize it, your brother loved you very much. I wished I was as close to my brother.”

  As Fiske hung up the phone, he realized that he was not on the verge of tears. He was on the verge of putting his fist through a wall.

  He got up, put the list in his pocket and went outside, down the stairway, past the vertical rise of cattail on one side, the sprawl of fern on the other, his feet taking him to the small dock. The sky was deep blue, with dabs of cloud, the breeze encouraging, the humidity vanished for now. He looked to the north, to the four-story reach of the million-dollar town houses on the outer ring of the Old Town Alexandria area, and then at the long, serpentine shape of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge. Across the water he made out the Maryland shore, a tree-lined mirror image of the Virginia side. A jet powered by, its landing gear down as it headed into National Airport a few miles distant. The fuselage was so close to the earth that Fiske almost could have hit it with a rock.

  As the plane passed by and the silence returned, he stepped onto the bow of the sailboat. The craft gently swayed under him; the sunlight stroked his face. He sat down and put his head against the mast, sniffed the canvas of the unfurled sail and closed his eyes. He was so damn tired.

  “You look awfully comfortable.”

  Startled awake, Fiske looked around before turning and seeing Sara standing there. She wore a black two-piece business suit; a white silk blouse peeked out at the neckline. Her neck was encircled with a small strand of pearls, her hair tied in a simple bun, a touch of makeup and pale red lipstick tinting her face.

  She smiled. “I’m sorry I had to wake you. You were sleeping so peacefully.”

  “Have you been watching me long?” Fiske asked, and then wondered why he had.

  “Long enough. You can take your shower now.”

  He stood up and stepped back on the dock. “Nice boat.”

  “I’m lucky, the riverbank drops off steeply here. I don’t have to keep it at one of the marinas. I’ll take you out if you want. We have time left before it has to be winterized.”

  “Maybe.”

  He walked past her toward the cottage.

  “John?”He turned back. She put one hand on the stair rail and looked over at her sailboat, as though hoping to carve a wedge of calm from its tranquil frame.

  “If it’s the last thing I ever do, I will make it right with your father,” she said.

  “It’s my problem. You don’t have to do that.”

  “Yes, John, I do,” she said firmly.

  * * *

  Thirty minutes later, Fiske drove the car out onto the private road leading to the parkway. The two black sedans flashing in front of their car made Fiske slam on the brakes. Sara screamed. Fiske jumped out of the car. He stopped as soon as he saw the guns pointed at him.

  “Hands in the air,” one of the men barked.

  Fiske immediately put his hands up.

  Sara climbed out of the car in time to see Perkins emerge from one vehicle and Agent McKenna from the other.

  Perkins spotted Sara. “Holster your weapons,” he said to the two men in suits.

  McKenna’s voice boomed out. “Those men are under my command, not yours. They will holster their weapons upon my order only.” McKenna stopped directly in front of Fiske.

  “Are you all right, Sara?” Perkins asked.

  “Of course I’m all right. What the hell is going on?”

  “I left an urgent message with you.”

  “I didn’t check my messages. What’s wrong?”

  McKenna’s eye caught the shotgun lying in the back seat. Now he pulled his own weapon and pointed it directly at Fiske. He studied Fiske’s injured face. “Is this man holding you against your will?” McKenna asked Sara.

  “Will you stop with the dramatic crap?” said Fiske. He lowered his hands and caught a sucker punch in the gut from McKenna. Fiske dropped to his knees, gasping. Sara raced to him, helping him lean back against the car tire.

  “Keep your hands up until the lady answers the question.” McKenna reached down and jerked Fiske’s hands up in the air. “Keep your damn hands up.”

  Sara screamed, “No, for God’s sake, he’s not holding me. Stop it. Leave him alone!” She pushed McKenna’s hand away.

  Perkins stepped forward. “Agent McKenna — ” he began, but McKenna cut him off with a cold stare.

  “He’s got a shotgun in the car,” McKenna said. “You want to take a chance with your men, fine. I don’t operate that way.”

  Another sedan pulled up and Chandler and two uniformed Virginia police offic
ers climbed out, guns drawn.

  “Everybody freeze!” Chandler boomed out.

  McKenna looked around. “Tell your men to put away their weapons, Chandler. I’ve got the situation under control.”

  Chandler walked right up to McKenna. “Tell your men to holster their weapons right now, McKenna. Right now or I’ll have these officers arrest you on the spot for assault and battery.” McKenna didn’t move. Chandler leaned directly in his face. “Right now, Special Agent Warren McKenna, or you’ll be calling the Bureau’s legal counsel from a Virginia lockup. You really want that in your record?”

  Finally, the man flinched. “Holster your weapons,” McKenna ordered his men.

  “Now move the hell away from him,” Chandler ordered.

  McKenna very slowly edged away from the fallen Fiske, his eyes