Michael breathed a sigh of relief. “Could you do that?”
“Maybe. You’re a lawyer. What about a quid pro quo?”
“What do you mean?”
“I throw away the report and you throw away that appeal.” He paused as he stared at the young man. “It would save the government another lawyer bill. I mean, God bless anybody’s rights to seek their day in court, but this is getting a little old.”
Michael looked away. “I’ll have to think about that. It has some technical deficiencies anyway. Maybe you’re right.”
“I am right. I’m not looking to mess up your career. We’ll just forget this ever happened. And hopefully I won’t be reading about this case in the papers. If I do, then maybe your being down here has to come out too. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” Rayfield turned on his heel and walked off, leaving behind a visibly distressed Michael Fiske.
* * *
Rayfield went directly to his office. Rufus’s suspicions had been well founded; a listening device designed to blend in with the wood grain had been planted on the underside of the table in the visitors’room. Rayfield listened once more to the conversation between Michael and Rufus. Some of it had been disrupted by Michael tapping his pen. The radio had obliterated all of Rufus’s earlier conversation with Rider. Rufus was no idiot. But Rayfield had heard and read enough to know that potentially they had a big problem. And his conversation with Michael had not solved the dilemma, at least not permanently. He picked up the phone and placed a call. In concise sentences Rayfield recounted the events to the party at the other end.
“Holy shit, I can’t believe this.”
“I know.”
“All of this happened today?”
“Well, I told you about Rider coming in earlier, but yes, all of these events happened just now.”
“Why the hell did you let him in to see Harms?”
“If I didn’t, don’t you think he would’ve gotten more suspicious? After reading what Harms had written in his damn letter to the Court, what choice did I have?”
“You should have taken care of the sonofabitch before this. You’ve had twenty-five years to do it, Frank.”
“That was the plan twenty-five years ago, to kill him,” Rayfield fired back. “And look what happened. Tremaine and I have spent half our lives watching over his ass.”
“You two aren’t exactly doing it for free. What’s your little nest egg up to so far? A million? Retirement’s going to be awfully nice. But it won’t be, for any of us, if this gets out.”
“It’s not like I haven’t tried to kill the guy. Hell, Tremaine tried to do him today in the infirmary, but damn, it’s like the guy’s got a sixth sense. Rufus Harms is as mean as a snake when his back’s against the wall. The guards will only go so far and we’ve got people looking over our shoulder, surprise inspections, the damn ACLU. The bastard just won’t die. Why don’t you come down here and try?”
“All right, all right, there’s no use us arguing about it. You’re sure we were all named in the letter? How is that possible? He didn’t even know who I was.”
Rayfield didn’t hesitate. The person he was speaking with had not been named in Rufus’s letter, but Rayfield wasn’t going to tell him that. Everybody was on the hook for this one. “How should I know? He’s had twenty-five years to think about it.”
“So how did he get the letter out?”
“That blows my mind. The guard saw the damn thing. It was his last will and testament, that was it.”
“But he got it out somehow.”
“Sam Rider is involved. That’s for sure. He brought a radio with him and the noise messed up the bug we installed, so I couldn’t hear what they said to each other. That should’ve told me something was up.”
“I never trusted that guy. Except for Rider’s insanity BS, Harms would’ve been dead a long time ago, courtesy of the Army.”
“The second letter we found in Fiske’s briefcase had been done on a typewriter. There were no initials at the bottom, you know, like when it’s typed by a personal secretary, so Rider probably did it himself. They were both original documents, by the way.”