He glanced over at the briefcase next to him on the front seat, drawing a long breath as he did so. He had learned a lot since reading Rufus Harms’s plea for help.
Harms had murdered a young girl, who was visiting the military base where Harms had been stationed at the end of the Vietnam War. He had been in the stockade at the time but had somehow broken out. There was no motive; it just seemed a random act of violence by a madman. Those facts were uncontroverted. As a Supreme Court clerk, Michael had many information resources to turn to, and he had used all of them in compiling the background facts. However, the military wouldn’t acknowledge that such a program as described in Harms’s petition even existed. Michael slapped the steering wheel. If only Harms or his attorney had included the letter from the Army in his filing.
Michael had finally decided that he needed to hear the account from its source: Rufus Harms. He had tried to do it through channels other than direct confrontation. He had tracked down Samuel Rider through the postal trail, but had received no reply to his calls. Was he the author of the typewritten paper? Michael believed it was a strong possibility. He had called the prison to try to talk with Harms on the phone, but his request had been denied. That had only increased his suspicions. If an innocent man was in prison, it was Michael’s job — his duty, he corrected himself — to see that that man became free.
And there was a final reason for this trip. Some of the names listed in the petition, the people allegedly involved in the little girl’s death, were names well known to Michael. If it turned out Rufus Harms was telling the truth . . . he shuddered as one nightmarish scenario after another rolled through his thoughts.
On the seat next to him was a road atlas and a sheet of written directions he had made up for himself showing precisely the way to the prison. Over the next hour or so, he traveled through miles of back roads and over corroded wooden bridges, blackened by weather and car exhaust, through towns that weren’t big enough to justify the title, and past battered house trailers tucked into narrow crevices of rock along the foothills of the Appalachians. He was passed by muddy pickup trucks with miniature Confederate flags flapping from radio antennae, and shotguns and deer rifles slung across racks in the rear window. As he drew closer to the prison, the tight, weathered faces of the few people he saw grew more and more taciturn, their eyes filled with a constant, irreversible suspicion.
As Michael rounded a curve, the prison facility loomed before him. The stone walls were thick, towering and vast, like a medieval castle transported to this miserably poor stretch of rocky soil. He wondered for a moment if the stone had been quarried by the prisoners into the assemblage of their own tombs.
He received his visitor’s card, passed through the main gate and was then directed to the prison’s visitors’parking. He explained his purpose to the guard at the entrance.
“You’re not on the visitors’ list,” the young guard said. He eyed Michael’s dark blue suit and intelligent features with contempt. A rich, smartass, pretty boy from the city, Michael could read in the man’s eyes.
“I called several times, but I never got through to anyone who could tell me the procedure for being put on the list.”
“Up to the prisoner. Generally speaking, if he wants you to visit, you do. If he don’t, you don’t. Only control these boys got.” The guard cracked a grin.
“If you tell him that an attorney is here to see him, I’m sure he’ll put me on his visitors’ list.”
“You’re his lawyer?” “I’m involved with an appeal of his right now,” Michael said evasively.
The guard looked down at his ledger. “Rufus Harms,” he said, evidently confused. “He’s been here since before I was even born. Exactly what sort of appeal could somebody like him have going after all this time?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss that,” Michael said. “My work is covered by attorney-client privilege and is absolutely confidential.”