He turned his head and eyed the phone. He suddenly wondered if he should call and seek his brother’s advice. John was savvy in ways his younger brother was not. He might know how to handle the situation better. Michael hesitated for a moment longer, reluctant to admit that he needed any help, especially from that troubling, estranged source. But it also might be a way back into his brother’s life. The fault was not entirely on one side; Michael had matured enough to comprehend the elusiveness of blame.
He picked up the phone and dialed. He got the answering machine, a result that pleased a certain part of him. He left a message asking for his brother’s help but revealing nothing. He hung up, and returned to the window once more. It was probably better that John had not been there to take the call. His brother tended to see things only in rigid lines of black and white, a telling facet of the way he lived his life.
Toward the early hours of the morning, Michael drifted off to sleep, growing ever more confident that he could handle this potential nightmare, however it turned out.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
* * *
Three days after Michael Fiske had taken the file from the clerks’ mail room, Rufus Harms placed another call to Sam Rider’s office, but was told the attorney was out of town on business. As he was escorted back to his cell, Rufus passed a man in the corridor.
“Lot of phone calls lately, Harms. What, you have a mail-order business going or something?” The guards laughed loudly at the man’s words. Vic Tremaine was a little under six feet, had white-blond, close-cropped hair, weathered features and was molded like a gun turret. He was the second-in-command of Fort Jackson, and he had made it his personal mission to compress as much misery into Harms’s life as he could. Harms said nothing, but stood there patiently as Tremaine looked him up and down.
“What’d your lawyer want? He coming up with another defense for you slaughtering that little girl? Is that it?” Tremaine drew closer to the prisoner. “You still see her in your sleep? I hope you do. I listen to you crying in your cell, you know.” Tremaine’s tone was openly taunting, the muscles in his arms and shoulders tensing with each word, neck veins pulling taut, as though he were hoping Harms would crack, try something, and that would be the end of the prisoner’s life tenure here. “Crying like a damn baby. I bet that little girl’s momma and daddy cried too. I bet they wanted to wrap their fingers around your throat. Like you did to their baby. You ever think about that?”
Harms did not flinch. His lips remained in a straight line, his eyes looking past Tremaine. Harms had been through isolation, solitary, taunts, physical and mental abuse; everything one man could do to another out of cruelty, fear and hatred, he had endured. Tremaine’s words, no matter their content or how they were delivered, could not break through the wall that encased him, kept him alive.
Sensing this, Tremaine took a step back. “Get him out of my sight.” As the group headed off, Tremaine called after them, “Go back to reading your Bible, Harms. That’s as close as you’re ever getting to heaven.”
* * *
John Fiske hustled after the woman walking down the hallway of the court building.
“Hey, Janet, got a minute?”
Janet Ryan was a very experienced prosecutor currently doing her best to send one of Fiske’s clients away for a long time. She was also attractive and divorced. She smiled when she turned to him. “For you, two minutes.”
“About Rodney — ”
“Wait, refresh my memory. I’ve got lots of Rodneys.”
“Burglary, electronics store, north side.”
“Firearm involved, police chase, priors — now I remember.”
“Right. Anyway, neither one of us wants to take this sucker to trial.”
“Translation, John: Your case stinks and mine is overwhelming.”
Fiske shook his head. “You might have a chain-of-custody problem with some of the evidence.”
“Might is such a funny word, don’t you think?”
“And that confession has holes.”