Fan-Fiction

Pieces of a Whole

written by Betsy J. Bennett

CHAPTER 3

“Richard,” Jean jumped him as he entered the front door, wrapping her arms around his neck, reaching out to kiss him.

“Not here. Not now.” He shut the door firmly, well aware the photograph of the kiss would be on the front cover of all national papers by tomorrow morning. Kimble finds new love. Is she the next to die? He could see the headline as clearly as if it had already been written.

“Jean, upstairs.” His nephews, boys at this point who were seven and eight, were in the living room, building with Lincoln logs. There must have been two dozen sets, for it looked like they were building a fort. Probably the Alamo. Yeah, that was another adventure that didn’t go as planned. Death penalties didn’t always need an electric chair.

In addition to the Lincoln Logs, they had hard plastic horses, about twelve inches high, too big for the fort. Quarter horses, thoroughbreds, an appaloosa.  He wondered idly if Donna and Leonard had them in riding lessons. No, probably not for the past four years.  Although it was perfect weather for August, on a normal day, they probably would have been outside, playing kickball or dodge-ball or baseball with friends. These were active boys who collected lightening beetles in jars the one weekend he had been in Stafford, although they hadn’t seen him. He’d been able to watch them through the curtains while he spoke with his sister, made plans with his father before he had to escape into the night, running for his life.

Going up the stairs, Jean stuck to his side like a tic. Richard supposed the analogy was unfavorable, even if at the moment he felt it accurate. He only wanted to breathe, which was impossible since the cemetery and doubly so since finding the two dozen or more reporters camped out on the front lawn, hoping for a statement. When hell freezes over.

He hadn’t been intimate with her. Didn’t take much of a genius to figure out that the days he knew her before the exoneration things had been too confused. Then the arrest, even though Lieutenant Gerard had promised it was only a formality had kept them separated. And since he got his name back, his emotions had been roller-coastering. Highs, lows, and through it, an abiding depression that made him want to find a cold dark hole and hide until he could put his life back on an even keel.

“You want to go shopping? There’s probably a bunch of things you need.”

“I don’t want to go shopping.”

“How about a bar? I know it’s fairly early yet, but we could sit someplace quiet and talk.”

“Jean, we have to talk but we’re not going to a bar.” Not now. Not ever.

She wore a bright summer dress, sleeveless, green and yellow, with a wide white belt and white piping on the neckline. She bounced on the bed, clearly talking was the furthest thing from her brain. She leaned back, her weight on her palms, her arms straight, her legs apart. When he didn’t go to her, she returned to his side, tried to kiss him.

Over the past four years he had used women. It was something he wasn’t proud of, and for the most part, something he had not done deliberately. More than men, women believed his avowal of his innocence, and because of that, were willing to hide him, give him car keys or whatever he needed. In retrospect, he loved none of them. Some he cared for, yes, but not enough to endanger further by letting them carry on with a man wanted for murder and interstate flight.

“You were gone so long, I was beginning to worry.”

“I had things I had to do.”

“Things? With Donna?”

He would not tell her about the graves, about the headstones. That was too personal, and too much blood had been spilt over it. No, whatever he owed Jean, he didn’t have to bare his soul to her. “Donna took me to the dentist.”

“The dentist? Your first day as a free man, and you go to the dentist?” in innocence she laughed.

“I’ve had killer tooth aches off and on for about two years now. I haven’t been able to get to a dentist. I couldn’t afford one, and I couldn’t take the time. “

“No one likes to go to the dentist,” she said, still not picking up on the implications.

“I broke a tooth in a fight,” he said, remembering a one sided fight involving a guard with a night-stick. “And I had one infected. The dentist pulled both of them today. I’ve another appointment for later this week. I have three other cavities, and could use a serious cleaning.”

“Didn’t you brush your teeth?”

He could strangle her with his bare hands. “Yes. Whenever I could. It wasn’t always possible.” The left side of his mouth was still numb, and he wondered if that was why he was having trouble getting through to her. Still, he would try to be gentle. “I think it’s time you went back to California.”

“California?”

“I want to thank you for helping me when I needed help, for being here when things were so confused and I needed something to hold on to.” Something, he thought, and cursed himself silently. He should have said someone, but stuck by his statement. It had been something he needed.

“I want to stay here with you.”

He pulled a cigarette from the pack, struck a match, watching it burn before he lit the end. He pulled a deep draft of smoke into his lungs then spoke after he exhaled. “You can’t.”

“Richard, I love you. I want to be with you.”

“You don’t love me.” At the moment, there was nothing that he was more sure of than that.

“I do. Now that you’re not running, we can have a future. I want to go out dancing with you, and to the movies. I want to be by your side as you write your autobiography.”

“I’m not going to write an autobiography.”

“You have to. I told the reporters you would.”

“When?”

“Today.”

“You have no right to speak for me.”

“Richard, I get it that it’s all been a little much, the extradition, Fred Johnson’s death, the exoneration, but we can be together. If your mouth is hurting you we can go out tomorrow. There’s so much you haven’t seen, haven’t done. I want to do them with you. We can go to the beach.”

“What beach?” Indiana wasn’t particularly well known for beaches. “No, don’t answer that. It doesn’t matter. I’m not going dancing or to a beach, any beach. I need to take time, understand who I am, what I need. And Jean, I hate to say it, but right now, I don’t need you.”

“You do. You love me.”

He couldn’t remember if he ever told her that. Probably not. But if he had, it would have been a line, the kind of thing a fugitive tells a beautiful woman when he needs someone to hide him, to help him through whatever lonely desperation he was going through.

“You’re a beautiful woman, intelligent, educated. You have your whole life ahead of you. You don’t want to be here, stuck with me.”

“Stuck?”

“I’m not who you think I am, and I cannot change to be who you want.”

“Richard, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You have fallen in love with an illusion that you’ve picked up from television and movies. You like the bad-boy image of bucking society, of living by our own rules.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she repeated.

“You do. Do you like Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet?” He didn’t wait for her to nod, but he knew she would. “Star crossed lovers that do everything to prove their love is so strong against adversity that they do the most idiotic thing possible: they each kill themselves. That’s not love: that’s insanity. How about Bonnie and Clyde? They made their own rules. They bucked the system because all they needed was each other. How did that work out for them?”

“It will work for us.”

“It won’t because I refuse to enter into a relationship based on a lie. I was not a fugitive running from justice, I was a man doing everything I could think of to live. And if I had to lie to you to make it easier, I would. And Jean, I did.”

“No. What we had was real.”

“What we had was illusion. That’s not me. Whatever you think I am, I’m not. Maybe I was gentle once, but not any longer. Go to California. Get your life back. If you stay here any longer, I’ll find a way to hurt you.”

“You’re hurting me now.”

“It could be worse. Stay longer and you’ll only find how deeply I can hurt you. Trust me.”

“When you were on the run, you were kind.”

“Think back. Was I kind, or was I doing whatever I could to survive? If I had hurt you when we first met, you would have turned me into the police.”

“I wouldn’t have.”

“You might have. I couldn’t have taken the chance. Go. Find someone nice to fall in love with. Find someone without nightmares to take you dancing, and show you off when you go to the movies. Jean, I hope when you think back on me in a few years, your thoughts will be kind.”

She stood, wrapped indignation around her in the form of pride. “I’ll go. I respect the fact that you’re hurting, and perhaps all those years on the road you lost something human and now you’re out of your mind.”

It didn’t take Jean long to pack, and smoking in his room he heard Leonard on the phone, trying to make connections for flights heading to Los Angeles. A few minutes later, the front door opened and closed, and Jean disappeared, his brother-in-law driving her to the airport.

“Did you have to be that cruel?”

“Donna. If I hadn’t she wouldn’t have gone.”

“She was an innocent child.”

“Yes. And sending her back she can stay that way. She wouldn’t be happy with me.”

“I agree. I’m glad she’s gone. But I still think you could have been nicer.”

 

He’d never been one for alcohol, not as a doctor where he enjoyed an occasional drink, or while on the run when he felt he needed his wits about him. Helen liked to drink at the country club, while she socialized, he followed her lead, for to drink soft-drinks would label him as unable to hold his liquor, and appearances to the country club set were everything.

As an undergraduate, then while in med school, alcohol held no appeal. It dulled the senses, and he needed all his senses, for medicine was too important to him to ruin the career he wanted by fool acts.

But since Jean left, the only comfort he found came from a bottle.

He understood the term alcoholic, and while he didn’t think he was turning into one, he also understood the concepts of self-delusion and denial. When he drank, his mind dulled. When he slept it off, the nightmares were livable, flashing colors, dizziness, but nothing of guilt, of being hunted, of facing death in a nameless, unidentifiable hole.

While he drank, he could forget.

The house was quiet, and except for the living room, dark. He didn’t need a lot of light when drinking himself into oblivion. He was starting to like being drunk, and when he wasn’t fooling himself, he admitted he was getting to the part where he needed it, not only to sleep but to face himself in the mirror when he was awake.

When the doorbell rang, he startled. It was not a reaction he could have controlled. Kimble looked around, instinctively started planning his escape. He knew all the ways out of the house, including which windows on the top floor opened to the roof, the door in the basement that was never used except for bringing in lawn furniture in the late fall, and setting them out again in the spring. It was more than a gut feeling. It had saved his life countless times over the years.

Richard tried to control his flight reflex. There was no reason to run. He was safe. And he wasn’t going to open the door. The Tafts were gone for the night, some Boy Scout thing involving awards, he’d assumed, and brownies, which Donna brought on a plate covered in foil. They’d been fighting, he and his sister, but she left him two brownies in the kitchen, a sign he took to indicate he’d been forgiven. Brownies did not go well with whiskey so he left them alone.

The doorbell rang again. He went to the picture window, pulled back the curtains. Habit. He could no more have prevented the action than he could have flown. Lieutenant Gerard stood there. Although the lawman didn’t turn his head, Richard knew he had seen the curtain move, knew he was there. Although the car keys were in his pockets and the car in the driveway, there was no way he could get past Gerard to escape.

Gerard was patient. After six years, Richard Kimble understood Gerard’s character. With a search or arrest warrant he would break down the door. Without that necessary paperwork, he would wait on the front stoop forever.

His heart thumping loud enough that he heard the roaring palpitations, he felt he was having a heart attack, Richard opened the front door. He shook his head, and his features sagged. He looked old, defeated, far more than he had at a sentencing hearing when he heard, “You will be taken to the Death House at Michigan City, where you will be executed in the electric chair until you are dead. May God have mercy on your soul.”

Slowly, fatalistically, Richard Kimble put his hands out, wrists together. There would be no running, for he no longer had hope. And, he realized, he had nothing to live for. Whatever this was about, whatever crime he was to be convicted of, real or imaginary, he didn’t have the strength to face it.

Gerard stepped back, surprised, then instinctively he held his hands out, to show he was unarmed. “Dr. Kimble, don’t be afraid.”

Fear controlled his every waking minute. Exoneration was a poison, a trick used to ease him into complacency. Gerard knew. Of course he knew. Kimble didn’t see handcuffs, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t be spending the night behind bars with the thieves, the drug addicts, those who used weapons to take what was not theirs. He had been terrified his first few nights in jail, after his arrest, before his trial. Terrified, because he didn’t understand what it was he needed to be terrified of. Now after four years on the run, he had a much better conception of the darkness of men’s souls. And yes, he had seen kindness, and so much goodness, but maybe not for him. Not any longer.

“I’m not running. I don’t think I could if I wanted to.”

Gerard lowered his brows. Clearly Kimble’s reaction was not what he expected. “And I’m not here to arrest you. I only want to talk.”

His hands dropped to his sides, and the words slurred, not so much from the alcohol but from despair. “Do I need a lawyer?”

“No. Why would you say that? The exoneration was complete.”

His pulse remained high, his breathing ragged. He hated lawyers almost as much as he hated handcuffs, jail cells, that trapped feeling of being surrounded and having nowhere to run. “If that’s true, why are you here?”

“There are some things we need to talk about. Only talk.”

Kimble tried to digest that, understand any underlying syntax. Gerard had offered compassion, but not nearly as many times as he tried to shoot him in the back. “I’ve said all I care to say to you. In an interrogation room, when my every move was being watched.”

“This is no interrogation.”

He leaned against the door jam, hoping it would stop his world from undulating. “Then it’s a social call. Come on in. We’ll have a drink. Talk about old times. We can be friends.” Bitterness rolled through his statement.

“Your sister asked me to stop by. She’s worried about you.”

“That makes it ok.”

“If this is a bad time, I can come back later.”

“Or meet me downtown at the police station. At least that would be familiar.”

“Dr. Kimble, all the years I’ve known you, all the times we met while you were on the run, never once were you rude.”

“Is that what this is? Then forgive me. I can’t imagine why I should be rude to you. Come in. I know you’re familiar with the place.” Even before the twenty-four hour grace period before Fred Johnson was killed, Gerard had been here. He always suspected Donna Taft nee Kimble of being in constant touch with her brother. Richard was not the only sibling who had learned to lie straight-faced over the past years.

Kimble stood aside, let the policeman enter. Gerard took a seat on the couch, beside the coffee table where an open bottle of whiskey stood, and a glass, almost a tumbler, held the potent amber liquid.

“Yours?” Gerard asked, hiking an eyebrow.

“Yes. You want a drink? This bottle is almost empty, but I know there’s another one around here somewhere.”

“Got a big enough glass?”

“Donna found it. Said if I’m going to ruin my life, I might as well do it the way other adults do, through alcoholism.”

“She doesn’t know you.”

“She knows me well enough. She was trying to make a point.”

“Are you listening?”

“Listening and following through are two completely different things. So, what are the charges?”

“Charges?”

“Regardless of what you said, I really doubt this is a social call. I suspect there are any number of states who wouldn’t mind seeing me locked behind bars. A lot of money was spent setting up road blocks, hiring temporary deputies and conducting house-to-house searches. There should be assault charges at least. I know I hit any number of duly sworn-in lawmen over the years.”

“There are no charges.”

Kimble ignored him as if he hadn’t spoken. “Someone’s head should roll. I’ve been expecting this.”

“I’ve been keeping an eye out. No one anywhere is after you.”

“Well, except you. You know what’s funny? I was innocent of the murder I was charged with, but to stay alive long enough to prove it, I had to steal cars, break any number of laws.”

“That’s all in the past.”

He reached for the tumbler, drank deeply and set it down with both hands cupped around the glass, to control the tremors. “Your past or mine? Doesn’t seem like I’ve forgotten anything, and the fact that you’re here at seven o’clock at night indicates you’re still keeping the files open.”

“I am keeping the files open, and I figured we need to talk.”

“Sure. Best buds. You and me.” He reached for the glass again, this time stopped himself before he grasped that illusionary lifeline.

“You don’t have to run anymore.”

“I don’t?”

“No. Richard, no. The verdict was unequivocal. You’re safe.”

“Why don’t I feel safe? Why don’t I feel like I’ll ever be safe?” It was far more than he ever intended to say to the police officer. Rather than let the statement hang, Richard continued, “Can I offer you anything?”

“You got a beer?”

“You must not be working.”

“Oh, I’m working hard enough these days, but not at the moment.”

Richard was back within the minute with two beers, hoped he didn’t stagger.

Gerard took a sip of his, then set it on the end table. He reached into his jacket pocket, noticed Kimble’s reaction, ready to bolt or fight for his life against a police service weapon. “Relax. No gun. Not today. Not for you. I’ve been meaning to find the time to give this to you. It’s from Phil.”

Phil. Gerard’s son. Kimble had met Phil years ago, had accidentally kidnapped him, and kept him overnight while Phillip Gerard Sr. oversaw the manhunt. It had not been one of his proudest moments. Is that what this was about, repercussions from that night? The boy could be having nightmares, living in terror. Kidnap victims did not always do well when returned home, no matter how benign he had tried to make the experience.

Gerard handed Kimble the envelope.

It was sealed. Beware of police lieutenants bearing gifts. He held the legal sized envelope, turned it over, felt his mouth going dry. He wondered, idly, if he’d rather be shot than open it. “You know what this says?”

“I’ve got an idea. Phil and I don’t argue about much, but we never quite saw eye-to-eye over you.”

“Maybe I’ll open it later.”

“Don’t be afraid, Dr. Kimble. There’s nothing there to hurt you.”

Let me be the judge of that. Understanding the term ‘inevitability’ and with a knowledge that the fates can change without warning, Kimble took a deep breath and tore open the envelope. There was just one line written with the precise handwriting of a middle-schooler and a signature. “I always believed in your innocence. Phillip Gerard Jr.”

He had expected, what? Monsters? Blood stains? This simple statement meant as much to him as his complete exoneration. “Thank you. This…means a lot.” More perhaps than he could say.

Gerard leaned back in the couch almost as if now that that was over he was the one who could relax. “After…after Phil met you, we’d have long talks into the night, about the differences between a guilty conviction and guilt.”

Carefully, as if he were working with fragile crystal, Kimble fitted the letter back into the mangled envelope. “Anything you care to enlighten me on?”

“No.”

His stomach felt queasy, rolling. He wondered if it were alcohol poisoning, and if he should vomit. But he held onto this talisman of a letter and breathed through his nose, hoping to calm raging fears that there was a good chance had no basis in reality.

“So, do you still talk long into the night about Richard Kimble? Do you still expect calls from forgotten towns that I’d been sighted? Do you have an arrest warrant ready, just in case?”

“No to all of the above. Fred Johnson killed your wife. That’s no longer up for discussion. The kid is quite a debater. I want you to know I cherished those times, when we could discuss the finer nuisances of the law. I missed a lot of his ballgames and his practices, and for years I was rarely home.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I think, I know, arguing over you brought us closer. I wanted him to be a policeman, and for a while I thought he would. I’d try to justify my own position on how important it is to uphold the law.”

“Upholding the law? Excuse me if I’m not impressed. So you never got him over to your point of view?”

Gerard’s smile was wry. “Now he wants to be a lawyer. Wants to free people unfairly convicted. Can you imagine a son of mine a lawyer?”

Kimble took a drink of his beer, let the cold, malty brew sit on his tongue for a moment before he swallowed. His stomach continued to twist. “Couldn’t do worse than the ones already out there.”

“He’s still young. We don’t have to start looking at colleges yet. There’s still time to convince him to join the force.”

Kimble patted the white envelope with fingers that surprisingly did not tremble. “Good luck with that.”

Silence between them grew, long seconds when neither the former hunter or the former hunted spoke. They both used the time to understand how their relationship had changed, although neither would have understood that.

“How have you been?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I’ll be honest with you. Donna asked me to stop by. As I said, I was looking for an excuse, and your sister provided one. She says you’re not sleeping, not eating, and that you spend all your time smoking and checking for police out the window.”

“Yeah, because sometimes one shows up.” His tone was sardonic. He thought of the brownies in the kitchen, knew she had not completely given up on him.

Gerard waited while Kimble lifted the bottle, drank again. He turned his head so he wouldn’t see the tremors in the former prisoner’s hands, the way the muscles in his neck tightened. “You need to give it time.”

“I was hunted like an animal. Do you think time is going to help?”

“Doctor—“

He slammed the bottle down, both of them surprised that it didn’t shatter in his hands. “I’m not a doctor anymore. Oh, I can get my license back, easily enough I presume, some remedial classes, and a competency test, but I can’t read. Can’t concentrate. Every time I try to prep, I hear a siren in the distance or a dog starts barking or someone recognizes me.”

“You’re safe here.”

“Am I? Donna yells at me. Seems I’ve gotten into the habit of wiping my fingerprints off everything I touch. I started packing this morning out of reflex before I realized I didn’t have to run, as if I’d forgotten. I don’t want them complicit in anything should something else go wrong.”

“Although I wanted to, there was never anything I could tie her to.”

“Then you weren’t looking hard enough. You could have tapped this phone.”

“I did, but after the first few months when nothing turned up, I couldn’t get the warrant renewed. After that, it hardly seemed worth it. It was not the Tafts I was after.”

“No.”

“Have you seen a therapist? Do you know what shell-shock is? It’s not just soldiers who get it.”

“I know what it is. Why should I see a therapist when the average person on the street hasn’t forgotten?”

“They will.”

“Not yet.” He picked up the beer again, but instead of drinking, rolled it back and forth between his palms. “I got my driver’s license today. I’ve been driving without one for four weeks now, well, I’d suppose four years and change, but let’s not go there. I went to the DMV. I figured one of these days I’d get arrested for driving without a license. I suppose you could say, all things considered, I didn’t think it through. Donna wanted me out of the house, doing something, anything beyond pacing back and forth like a caged tiger, and it seemed like a simple enough thing. When I get to the front of the line, I needed proof of my identity. I swear, that hadn’t occurred to me. I don’t have my social security card, and anything else, my license to practice medicine, things like that, were long ago taken away by the police. But I stood there, trying to ignore the whispering. They all knew who I was. All of them. And the clerk stood defiant. I know she didn’t want to help me. I could see it in her eyes, in the set of her jaw. Where there’s smoke there’s fire, right? You would have liked her.”

He stopped, realized that was no compliment, but Gerard seemed unfazed, so he continued. “She demanded identification. I didn’t have any, and I was about to see if I could find a train I could hop heading out of town. Reflex. Another thing Donna is right about. I didn’t want to start an argument in downtown Stafford, so I was about to turn on my heel when one of the people in line handed her a copy of my wanted poster. He was carrying it with him, I have no idea why. The clerk said, “Well, the hair is different, but I’ll grant that that’s you,” and I got my license. You think I can forget when that’s how people talk about me?”

“I’m sure it’s hard. And the person with the wanted poster. I’m sure he wanted an autograph,” Gerard tried to keep the statement light.

The leer Richard returned had Gerard laughing. “I guess he didn’t get it.”

“I’d leave Stafford, I plan on leaving Stafford, but I have nowhere else to go, and every time I think about it, it feels like running. What you maybe don’t understand, Lieutenant, is that I want to run. I think about it every minute of every day. I want to be somewhere else, someone else. The exoneration hasn’t changed that.”

“So you stay.”

“So I stay. And Donna yells at me for smoking and drinking and staring out the window into the night.”

Time passed, and Richard got up, brought them both another bottle of beer. “Have you considered a hobby?”

Richard lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, remembered on the train when Gerard had given him a cigarette, when they had been handcuffed together. There had been a kindness to the action he was sure neither man had recognized at the time. Gerard hadn’t wanted him to suffer something as trivial as nicotine addiction. “A hobby? Like stamp collecting is going to help. I can’t keep my hands from shaking.”

“You could take those nephews of yours camping. I’m sure Phil would be interested in going.”

“I wouldn’t appreciate the irony. I meant what I said earlier, I still expect you to have me arrested on kidnapping charges.”

“No. Whatever you think of me, I wouldn’t do that. I knew you had no idea the boy was in the car when you took it and that while he was with you he suffered no harm.”

Kimble stood on legs that he wasn’t certain were going to hold him and went to the window, expecting a dozen police cars, snipers on the opposite roofs, maybe a dog handler, for he had been known to run, but the street was quiet, and he felt like a fool. He leaned against the wall, closed his eyes, went back in time a few years. “I kept him overnight against his will, and certainly against his father’s will.”

“Regardless of what you think, I never once worried that you would hurt him.”

“Right. Convicted murderer. Electric chair.” In all his nightmares he wears handcuffs and faces the man sitting benignly on the couch.

“You didn’t hurt him. Phil still talks about it as an adventure. It gave him bragging rights at school for years. Phil is the kid who faced the convicted murderer Richard Kimble and got away.”

He returned to the chair, sat down again, hoping the lack of movement will still his roiling stomach. “In case you didn’t know, he was very brave, braver, I’ll have to admit, than I was myself. He scared the bejezzus out of me.”

“I’d tell him that, but it would give him a swelled head. Phil only said you kept him safe. He’s still got the football cards. He made me take one in, fingerprint it. He wanted your fingerprints.”

“Like father, like son. And if you decide to ask your wife if your son can go camping with Richard Kimble, would you mind if I was nowhere in the country? I’ve heard my name disparaged in every way possible. I’d hate to see if there are some insults I’d missed.”

“Marie wouldn’t—“ but then he didn’t bother to finish. Of course she would. “Ok, if camping is out, how about golf?” Gerard was grasping at straws. Years before the doctors Kimble had played golf on Sundays.

“You want a laugh? I tried it. I went with Leonard. I couldn’t stand it. I found it too open. Nowhere to run. And it was so meaningless. Besides, why subject myself to more people, especially people who used to be my friends, whispering about me?”

“Little by little, you’ll get more comfortable.”

“Great. That’s just what I want, to be more comfortable with the nightmares, with the backbiting, with the feeling that the only life I ever knew is long gone. Sure, comfortable. I’ll get right on it. Oh, there never was an occasion before, but I meant to ask, how is Marie?”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s recovered from the concussion? No lasting headaches, no blackouts?”

“Concussion?”

“In Kansas, a few years back. She had what I suspect was temporary blindness. There was an evacuated town, and danger of the dam breaking.”

“Tipten. Marie was with you?”

“Yes. She called herself Mrs. Lindsey, or I would have caught on sooner. In case you’re wondering, she begged me to stay with her until her husband showed up.”

“And I’m sure you stayed longer than you wanted, because you couldn’t leave her alone before the ambulance arrived.”

Kimble shrugged, didn’t answer that statement, instead said, “You didn’t know?”

“That you met Marie? No. That answers a lot of questions I have about things she’s said over the years that didn’t quite make sense. And yes, she’s fine. We plan to take a long family vacation together.”

“Without fear of a call that Richard Kimble has been spotted someplace. Maybe I should stay here.”

“Thanks for the beer.” The policeman almost stood, but settled himself back on the couch, as if this were an afterthought, and not the main reason he’d come. “Oh, one thing before I go. I’m not sure what this means. I’ve given it a lot of thought and I haven’t come up with any conclusions.”

“What?” the tone was wary, and the fear was back in his eyes.

Gerard settled himself, would do anything, say anything not to shatter this man any more than he had, but that wasn’t to be. “As much as possible I don’t want to keep any secrets from you. I’ve still got questions, as I’m sure you have.”

“Maybe we should compare notes.” Kimble’s statement was bitter. “Questions. I suppose you’re taking me in? What is it now?” Theoretically there were a hundred crimes he could be arrested for, because while on the run from a murder charge he had done things he never would have contemplated otherwise: Assaulting a police officer. Stealing a car. Breaking and entering. Hell, even practicing medicine without a license.  Even running itself, called flight to avoid interstate prosecution was a felony.

“No. Nothing like that.” As if reading the former fugitive’s mind, Gerard continued, “I’ll repeat this again. There are no charges from any of the other states. None. And Richard, I want you to understand if any show up, I will do my best to get them dismissed. Whatever you did, or think you did back then, right now the slate is clean.”

He wanted, desperately wanted to go to the window and check again for an invasion of policemen, and he couldn’t prevent himself from standing, but rather than look the fool, he changed direction as if his only intent had been to reach a pack of cigarettes. Richard pulled out a cigarette while Gerard continued. “I went to Fred Johnson’s autopsy. I don’t know why, closure I guess. Later I got a report delivered to my desk: they discovered a match to his fingerprints.”

A cold knot formed in his trachea, making it difficult to breathe. “Where?”

Gerard waited until he met Richard’s gaze, held it. “On the lamp used to strike and murder Helen Kimble.”

Kimble, who had been standing, jerked, almost lost his balance. “Johnson’s prints were on the lamp?”

“Yes. Don’t yell at me. I didn’t know anyone but your prints were on that lamp. I have your police file memorized. You have to believe me on that.”

“Oh, I do.”

“There was no mention of anyone else’s prints, then out of the blue, I get the update that Johnson’s prints were on the lamp.”

“I would have—“ His voice cracked and he stopped speaking, he stumbled, almost fell into the chair he had been sitting on.

As a by-the-book policeman, Gerard was not known for his compassion, and co-workers seeing him now probably would not recognize the look, but Richard saw it and silently was grateful. “There would have been reasonable doubt. Even with the original conviction, that by itself is more than enough for a retrial or specifically a mistrial.”

What did a heart attack feel like? It was one thing to know the clinical definitions, the descriptions from patients, another to wonder if his heart were exploding in his own chest. “Someone withheld that information?”

“Richard, I don’t know. It wasn’t in the reports the police were given. The medical examiner’s file had the unidentified prints from the lamp that never made it to my desk.”

He considered the implications, what this information would have meant to him four years ago. Reasonable doubt. All he had needed was reasonable doubt. “Lieutenant, I appreciate you telling me,” his breathing was labored. “Someone deliberately covered that up?”

“I don’t know. It could have been a mistake.”

He dropped his head in his hands, elbows on his knees. “Mistake.”

“As I said, I don’t know what it means. I’m swamped at work so I won’t have much time to follow through with it, but I promise you, every free second I get, I’ll look into it.”

Gerard let himself out, and for hours Richard Kimble sat, smoking, occasionally looking out the window.

Link to Chapter 4