“Only house my parents have ever owned.” Fiske looked around, shaking his head. “I don’t see his car.”
“Maybe it’s in the garage.”
“There’s no room. He was a mechanic for forty years, and accumulated a lot of junk. He parks in the driveway.” He looked at his watch. “Where the hell is he?” He got out of the car. Sara did as well.
He looked at her over the roof of the car. “You can stay here if you want.”
“I’ll come in with you,” she said quickly.
Fiske unlocked the front door and they went in. He turned on a light, and they moved through the small living room and into the adjacent dining room, where Sara stared at a collection of photos on the dining room table. There was one of Fiske in his football uniform; a little blood on the face, grass stains on the knees, sweaty. Very sexy. She caught herself and looked away, suddenly feeling guilty.
She looked at some of the other pictures. “You two played a lot of sports.”
“Mike was the natural athlete of the family. Every record I set, he broke. Easily.”
“Quite the jock family.”
“He was also valedictorian of his class, a GPA on the north side of four-point-oh, and a near-perfect score on the SATs and LSATs.”
“You sound like the proud big brother.”
“A lot of people were proud of him,” Fiske said.
“And you?”
He looked at her steadily. “I was proud of him for some things, and not proud of him for others. Okay?”
Sara picked up a photo. “Your parents?”
Fiske stood beside her. “Their thirtieth anniversary. Before Mom got sick.”
“They look happy.”
“They were happy,” he said quickly. He was growing very uncomfortable with her seeing these items from his past. “Wait here.” Fiske went to the back room, which had once been the brothers’ shared bedroom and now had been turned into a small den. He checked the answering machine. His father had not listened to his messages. He was about to leave the room when he saw the baseball glove on the shelf. He picked it up. It was his brother’s, the pocket ribbing torn, but the leather well oiled — by his father, obviously. Mike was a lefty, but the family had no money to buy a special glove for him, so Mike had learned to field the ball, pull off his glove and throw. He had gotten so good that he could do it all faster than a righty could. Fiske recalled that blur of efficiency, no obstacle his brother couldn’t overcome. He put the glove down and rejoined Sara.
“He hasn’t listened to my phone messages.”
“Any idea where he could’ve gone?”
Fiske thought a moment and then snapped his fingers. “Pop usually tells Ms. German.”
While he was gone, Sara looked around the room some more. She eyed a small framed letter, set on a wooden pedestal. Wrapped around it was a medal. She picked up the frame and read the letter. The medal was for valor, awarded to Patrolman John Fiske, and the letter commemorated the event. She looked at the date it had been given. Quickly calculating, she concluded that the award would have been given at about the time Fiske had left the force. She still didn’t know why he had, and Michael never would say. When she heard the back door open, she quickly put the letter and medal down.
Fiske entered the room. “He’s at the trailer.”
“What trailer?”
“Down by the river. He goes there to fish. Go boating.”
“Can you call the trailer?”
Fiske shook his head. “No phone.”
“Okay, so we drive. Where is it?”
“You’ve gone way beyond the call of duty already.”
“I don’t mind, John.”
“It’s about another hour and a half from here.”
“The night’s sort of shot anyway.”
“You mind if I drive? It’s off the beaten path.”
She tossed him the keys. “I thought you’d never ask.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
* * *
Let me get this right: On top of everything else that’s happened, you let him escape.”
“First of all, I didn’t let him do anything. I thought the guy had just had a friggin’ heart attack. He was chained to the damn bed. He had an armed guard outside his door, and nobody was supposed to know he was even there,” Rayfield snapped back into the telephone. “I still don’t know how his brother found out.”