The woman who had greeted Sara was also there. “I saw your lady friend, John. Real cute girl.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You leaving already?”
“Yep.”
“I’ll bet your daddy wishes you were staying longer.”
Fiske paid for the food and didn’t wait for a bag. “I’ll take that bet,” he told the puzzled woman, before heading back out to the car.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
* * *
Samuel Rider arrived at his office early after being away a few days for business. Sheila hadn’t come in yet. It was just as well, since Rider wanted to be alone. He picked up his phone and called Fort Jackson, identified himself as Harms’s attorney and asked to speak with him.
“He’s no longer here.”
“Excuse me? He’s serving a life sentence. Where exactly could he have gone?”
“I’m sorry, but I’m not allowed to give out that information over the phone. If you would like to come down in person or make an official inquiry in writing — ”
Rider slammed down the phone and collapsed in his chair. Was Rufus dead? Had they somehow discovered what he was up to? Once Rider had filed the appeal with the Supreme Court, Rufus should have had instant security.
Rider clamped his fingers around the edge of his desk. If it had reached the Court. He tore open his desk drawer and pulled out the white receipt with the tracking number on it. The green receipt should have come back to his office. Sheila! He jumped up and raced to Sheila’s work area. Normally, any return receipts would be included in the appropriate case file. However, there was no case file for Rufus Harms. What could she have done with the damn receipt?
As if in answer to his thoughts, the woman herself walked in the door. She was surprised to see him.
“Why, you’re in awful early, Mr. Rider.”
Rider assumed a casual tone. “Trying to catch up on a few things.” He edged away from her desk; however, she had picked up on his intentions.
“Are you looking for something?”
“Well, now that you mention it, I was, actually. I had sent a letter out and, you know, I had sent it return receipt requested, and then it occurred to me that I hadn’t told you anything about it. Stupid of me.”
Her next words brought an inward sigh of relief.
“So that’s what that was. At first I thought I had forgotten to open a case file. I was meaning to ask you about it when you got back.”
“So you got it back, then,” Rider said, trying to veil his eagerness.
Sheila opened a drawer of her desk and pulled out a green receipt. “The United States Supreme Court,” she said with awe, passing it over to him. “I remember thinking, are we going to be doing something with them or what?”
Rider put on his best lawyer’s face. “Naw, Sheila, just something to do with a bar function. We don’t need to look to Washington for our daily bread.”
“Oh, here are your phone messages that came in while you were out of town. I tried to prioritize them for you.”
He gave her hand a nice squeeze. “You’re the essence of efficiency,” he said gallantly.
She smiled and started to fuss at her desk.
Rider went back to his office, closed the door and looked down at the receipt. The filing had been delivered. The signature was right there. But then where was Rufus?
Rider planned to spend much of the morning in meetings discussing the possible development of a shopping mall on a vast tract of land that had been used since the forties as an auto wrecking yard. One of the men he was meeting with had flown a prop plane into Blacksburg, Virginia, from Washington early that morning and was driving over to Rider’s office. With everything on his mind it was all Rider could do to act normal when the man arrived at his office a while later. The man had brought with him a copy of the morning’s Washington Post. While the man accepted a cup of coffee from Sheila, Rider idly ran his eye over the Post’s headlines. One in particular caught his attention. The man noticed what Rider was doing.