Convicted of a murder that took place twenty-five years ago, an innocent Rufus Harms secretly files an appeal with the Supreme Court, but the real killers embark a deadly campaign to ensure that the case will remain closed, eliminating all who could reveal the truth. Simultaneous.
The Simple Truth
By David BaldacciTime Warner AudioBooks
Copyright © 1998 David Baldacci
All right reserved.ISBN: 9781570426209Chapter One
At this prison the doors are inches thick, steel; once factorysmooth, they now carry multiple dents. Imprints of human faces,knees, elbows, teeth, residue of blood are harvested large on theirgray surface. Prison hieroglyphics: pain, fear, death, allpermanently recorded here, at least until a new slab of metalarrives. The doors have a square opening at eye level. The guardsstare through it, use the small space to throw bright lights at thehuman cattle on their watch. Without warning, batons smack againstthe metal with the pop of gun reports. The oldies bear it well,looking down at the floor, studying nothing-meaning their lives-in asubtle act of defiance, not that anyone notices or cares. Therookies still tense when the pop or light comes; some dribble peedown their cotton pants, watch it flow over their black low-quartershoes. They soon get over it, smack the damn door back, fight downthe push of schoolboy tears and belly bile. If they want to survive.
At night, the prison cells hold the darkness of a cave but for oddshapes here and there. On this night a thunderstorm grips the area.When a lightning bolt dips from the sky, it splashes illuminationinto the cells through the small Plexiglas windows. The honeycombpattern of the chicken wire stretched tight across the glass isreproduced on the opposite wall with each burst.
During the passage of such light, the man's face emerges from thedark, as though having suddenly parted the surface of water. Unlikethose in the other cells, he sits alone, thinks alone, sees no onein here. The other prisoners fear him; the guards too, even armed asthey are, for he is a man of intimidating proportions. When hepasses by the other cons, hardened, violent men in their own right,they quickly look away.
His name is Rufus Harms and his reputation at Fort Jackson MilitaryPrison is that of a destroyer: He will crush you if you come at him.He never takes the first step, but he will the last. Twenty-fiveyears of incarceration have taken a considerable toll on the man.Like the age rings of a tree, the ruts of scars on Harms's skin, thepoorly healed fractures of bone on his skeleton are a chronicle ofhis time here. However, far worse damage lies within the soft tissueof his brain, within the centers of his humanity: memory, thought,love, hate, fear, all tainted, all turned against him. But mostlymemory, a humbling tumor of iron against the tip of his spine.
There is substantial strength left in the massive frame, though; itis evident in the long, knotty arms, the density of Harms'sshoulders. Even the wide girth of his middle carries the promise ofexceptional power. But Harms is still a listing oak, topped out ongrowth, some limbs dead or dying, beyond the cure of pruning, theroots ripped out on one side. He is a living oxymoron: a gentle man,respectful of others, faithful to his God, irreversibly cast in theimage of a heartless killer. Because of this the guards and theother prisoners leave him be. And he is content with that. Untilthis day. What his brother has brought him. A package of gold, asurge of hope. A way out of this place.
Another burst of light shows his eyes brimming with deep red, asthough bloodied, until one sees the tears that stain his dark, heavyface. As the light recedes, he smooths out the piece of paper,taking care not to make any sound, an invitation to the guards tocome sniffing. Lights have been extinguished for several hours now,and he is unable to reverse that. As it has been for a quartercentury, his darkness will end only with the dawn. The absence oflight matters little, though. Harms has already read the letter,absorbed every word. Each syllable cuts him like the quick bite of ashiv. The insignia of the United States Army appears bold at the topof the paper. He knows the symbol well. The Army has been hisemployer, his warden for almost thirty years.
The Army was requesting information from Rufus Harms, a failed andforgotten private from the era of Vietnam. Detailed information.Information Harms had no way of giving. His finger navigating trueeven without light, Harms touched the place in the letter that hadfirst aroused fragments of memory drifting within him all theseyears. These particles had generated the incapacitation of endlessnightmare, but the nucleus had seemed forever beyond him. Upon firstreading the letter, Harms had dipped his head low to the paper, asthough trying to reveal to himself the hidden meanings in thetypewritten squiggles, to solve the greatest mystery of his mortallife. Tonight, those twisted fragments had suddenly coalesced intofirm recollection, into the truth. Finally.
Until he read the letter from the Army, Harms had only two distinctmemories of that night twenty-five years ago: the little girl; andthe rain. It had been a punishing storm, much like tonight. Thegirl's features were delicate; the nose only a bud of cartilage; theface as yet unlined by sun, age or worry; her staring eyes blue andinnocent, the ambitions of a long life ahead still forming withintheir simple depths. Her skin was the white of sugar, andunblemished except for the red marks crushed upon a neck as fragileas a flower stem. The marks had been caused by the hands of PrivateRufus Harms, the same hands that now clutched the letter as his mindcareened dangerously close to that image once more.
Whenever he thought of the dead girl he wept, had to, couldn't helpit, but he did so silently, with good reason. The guards and conswere buzzards, sharks, they sniffed blood, weakness, an opening,from a million miles away; they saw it in the twitch of your eyes,the widened pores of your skin, even in the stink of your sweat.Here, every sense was heightened. Here, strong, fast, tough, nimbleequaled life. Or not.
He was kneeling beside her when the MPs found them. Her thin dressclung to her diminutive frame, which had receded into the saturatedearth, as though she had been dropped from a great height to formthe shallowest of graves. Harms had looked up at the MPs once, buthis mind had registered nothing more than a confusion of darkenedsilhouettes. He had never felt such fury in his life, even as thenausea seized him, his eyes losing their focus, his pulse rate,respiration, blood pressure all bottoming out. He had gripped hishead as if to prevent his bursting brain from cleaving through thebone of his skull, through tissue and hair, and exploding into thesoaked air.
When he had looked down once more at the dead girl, and then at thepair of twitching hands that had ended her life, the anger haddrained from him, as though someone had jerked free a plug embeddedwithin. The functions of his body oddly abandoning him, Harms couldonly remain kneeling, wet and shivering, his knees sunk deeply intothe mud. A black high chieftain in green fatigues presiding over asmall pale-skinned sacrifice, was how one stunned witness wouldlater describe it.
The next day he would come to learn the little girl's name: Ruth AnnMosley, ten years old, from Columbia, South Carolina. She and herfamily had been visiting her brother, who was stationed at the base.On that night Harms had only known Ruth Ann Mosley as a corpse,small-tiny, in fact-compared to the stunning breadth of hissix-foot-five-inch, three-hundred-pound body. The blurred image ofthe rifle butt that one of the MPs smashed against his skullrepresented the last mental sliver Harms carried from that night.The blow had dropped him to the ground right next to her. The girl'slifeless face pointed upward, collecting droplets of rain in everystill crevice. His face sunken into the mud, Rufus Harms saw nothingmore. Remembered nothing more.
Until tonight. He swelled his lungs with rain-drenched air andstared out the half-open window. He was suddenly that still rarebeast: an innocent man in prison.
He had convinced himself over the years that such evil had beenlurking, cancerlike, within him. He had even thought of suicide, tomake penance for stealing the life of another, more pitiably achild's. But he was deeply religious, and not a fleeting jailhouseconvert to the Lord. He thus could not commit the sin of prematurelyforcing his last breath. He also knew the girl's killing hadcondemned him to an afterlife a thousand times worse than the one hewas now enduring. He was unwilling to rush to its embrace. Betterthis place, this man-made prison, for now.
Now he understood that his decision to live had been right. God hadknown, had kept him alive for this moment. With stunning clarity herecalled the men who had come for him that night at the stockade.His mind once more clearly held every contorted face, the stripes onthe uniforms some of them wore-his comrades in arms. He recalled theway they circled him, wolves to prey, emboldened only by theirnumbers; the telling hatred of their words. What they had done thatnight had caused Ruth Ann Mosley to die. And in a very real sense,Harms had died as well.
To these men Harms was an able-bodied soldier who had never foughtin defense of his country. Whatever he got, he deserved, they nodoubt believed. Now he was a middle-aged man slowly dying in a cageas punishment for a crime of long-ago origin. He had no power to seethat any semblance of justice was done on his behalf. And yet withall that, Rufus Harms stared into the familiar darkness of hiscrypt, a single passion empowering him: After twenty-five years ofterrible, wrenching guilt that had relentlessly taunted him until hewas just barely in possession of a ruined life, he knew that it wasnow their turn to suffer. He gripped the worn Bible his mother hadgiven him, and he promised this to the God who had chosen never toabandon him.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Simple Truthby David Baldacci Copyright © 1998 by David Baldacci. Excerpted by permission.
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