Fiske wiped his mouth. “So, do you come from a family of lawyers? We tend to run in packs.”
She smiled and shook her head. “I’m from a farm in North Carolina. Single-stoplight town. But my father had a connection to law.”
Fiske looked mildly interested. “What was that?”
“He was the justice of the peace for the area. Officially, his courtroom was a little space in the back of the jail. More often he’d hear cases while sitting on his John Deere tractor in the middle of the field.”
“Is that what got you interested in law?”
She nodded. “My dad looked more like a judge sitting on dusty farm equipment than some others I’ve seen in the fanciest courts.”
“Including the one you’re in now?”
Sara blinked and suddenly looked away. Fiske felt guilty for having made the comment. “I bet your dad was a good JP. Common sense, fair in his decisions. Man of the soil.”
She glanced at him to see if he was being sarcastic, but Fiske’s look was genuine. “That’s exactly what he was. He mostly dealt with poachers and traffic tickets, but I don’t think anyone walked away feeling they had been treated unfairly.”
“You see him often?”
“He died six years ago.”
“I’m sorry. Is your mom still around?”
“She died before Dad. Rural life can be rough.”
“Sisters or brothers?”
She shook her head and seemed relieved to see their food arrive.
“It just occurred to me that I haven’t eaten today,” Fiske said as he took a large bite of his tortilla.
“I do that a lot. I think I had an apple this morning.”
“Not good.” His gaze swept over her. “You don’t have a lot of excess on you.”
She looked him over. Despite his broad shoulders and full cheeks, he almost looked gaunt, his shirt collar loose against his neck, his waist a little too small for his size. “Neither do you.”
Twenty minutes later Fiske pushed away his empty plate and sat back. “I know you’re busy, so I won’t waste your time. My brother and I didn’t see a lot of each other. There’s an information void I need to fill if I’m going to find out who did this.”
“I thought that was Detective Chandler’s job.”
“Unofficially, it’s mine.”
“Your cop background?” Sara asked. Fiske arched his eyebrows. “Michael told me a lot about you.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes, that’s right. He was very proud of you. From cop to criminal defense attorney. Michael and I had some interesting discussions about that.”
“Look, it bothers me that someone I don’t know has been having discussions about my life.”
“There’s no reason to get upset. We just thought it was an interesting career change.”
Fiske shrugged. “When I was a cop I spent all my time getting criminals off the streets. Now I make my living defending them. To tell you the truth, I was starting to feel sorry for them.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard a cop admit that.”
“Really? How many cops have you dealt with?”
“I have a heavy foot. I get lots of traffic tickets.” She smiled teasingly. “Seriously, why did you make the switch?”
He absently played with his knife for a moment. “I busted a guy who was carrying a brick of coke. He was a mule for some drug runners, a real minor role; just transport the stuff from point A to point B. I had other probable cause to do a stop and search. I turn up the brick and then the guy, with the vocabulary of a first-grader, tells me he thought it was a hunk of cheese.” Fiske looked directly as her. “Can you believe that? He would’ve been better off claiming he didn’t know how it got in there. Then his attorney could’ve at least had a shot at raising reasonable doubt on the possession charge. Trying to sell a jury on the fact that somebody who looks, acts and talks like a slimeball really thought ten thousand bucks worth of misery for their kids was a chuck of Swiss, well, you got problems.” He shook his head. “You put ten of these guys in jail, there’s a hundred more just waiting to take their place. They’ve got nowhere else to go. If they had, they would. The thing is, you don’t give people hope, they don’t care what they do to themselves or each other.”