“Maybe. He’s an ex-cop. He and one of the other clerks are snooping around. He’s helping the detective investigate the clerks’ murders.”
Rayfield started. “Murders? More than one?”
“Steven Wright.”
“What the hell’s going on?” Rayfield demanded.
“Wright saw someone come out of Michael Fiske’s office. He also heard something he shouldn’t have. We couldn’t trust him to be quiet, so I had to bluff him out of the building and kill him. We’re okay on that one.”
“Are you nuts? This thing is totally out of control,” Rayfield said angrily.
The man looked at Tremaine. “Hey, Vic, tell your superior to stay cool. I think Nam took away some of your nerve, Frank. You’ve never been the same since.”
“Four murders, and you say stay cool? And Harms and his brother are still out there.”
“So we’ve got two more bodies to go. The two most important. You understand that, don’t you, Vic?”
“I do,” Tremaine answered.
The man looked over at Rayfield with a pair of very cold eyes.
Rayfield swallowed nervously. “I guess there’s no going back now.”
“You’re right there.”
“John Fiske and this clerk: What are you doing about them? If Fiske is on some mission to find his brother’s killer, he may be a problem.”
“He already is a problem. They’re on a real short leash. And they’ll stay there until we decide what to do with them.”
“Meaning?” Rayfield asked.
“Meaning we might have four more bodies to go instead of two.”
* * *
Sara sat in her new office. Chandler had declared the space she shared with Wright off limits, but he had allowed Court personnel to move Sara’s computer and work files to this overflow space. She had taken the list of state prison agencies Fiske had given her and started calling. At the end of a half an hour she hung up the phone, depressed. There was no one with the last name Harms in any prison in any of those states. She tried to remember any other helpful word or phrase from the documents she had seen, but she finally gave that up.
Suddenly she had a mental flash: the letter R sticking in her mind. Harms’s first name started with an R; she had seen that in the filing. It was maddening that she couldn’t remember anything else.
She stood, and that’s when it caught her eye. She had just grabbed a stack of files with her abrupt move and hadn’t noticed it until now. It was the Chance bench memo. The one she had told Wright he had to work on last night until he finished. A handwritten note was attached asking Sara to review it.
She sat down and her head sank to the desktop. What if there really was some psychopath targeting clerks? Was it just chance that Wright had been killed instead of her? For a minute she sat there, frozen. Come on, Sara, you can beat this. You have to beat this, she urged herself. Using every bit of resolve she could marshal, she stood and walked out the door.
A minute later, she entered the clerks’ office, and went over to a clerk who was manning one of the Court’s computer database terminals. The question she was about to ask was one she had asked earlier, but she wanted to be absolutely certain.
“Could you check and see if there’s any case at the Court with the name Harms as one of the parties?”
The clerk nodded and started tapping buttons. After about a minute he shook his head.
“I’m not finding anything. When was it filed?”
“Recently. Within the last couple of weeks or so.”
“I’ve gone back six months — there’s nothing coming up. Didn’t you ask me about this a while ago?”
Before Sara could answer, another voice spoke.
“Did you say Harms?”
Sara stared at the other clerk. “Yes. Harms was the last name.”
“That’s strange.”
Sara’s skin started to tingle. “What?”
“I got a call early this morning from a man asking about an appeal and he used that name. I told him we didn’t have any case filing with that name.”
“Harms? You’re sure?” The clerk nodded. “How about a first name?” Sara asked, trying to suppress her excitement.