The Short Drop (10 page)

A surge of vertigo clouded Gibson’s vision, and a high-pitched feedback in his ears pushed the party away. He staved off the urge to put his head between his knees. Instead, he interlaced his fingers as if in angry prayer and held Calista’s gaze.

“Why didn’t you come forward?” he asked after a long moment.

“A fair question. Because, simply put, it was not in my interests.”

“It was your interests Lombard was stealing.”

“Yes, and my money was returned.”

“So that’s it?”

“Politics is an ugly picture with a pretty frame. Much as I enjoyed Duke Vaughn, I was not about to embroil my family in a feud with Benjamin Lombard to salvage your deceased father’s reputation. The cost to my own would have been irreparable.”

“You let Lombard win.”

“And I lived to fight another day. The lesser of two evils.”

“So is that why I’m here? To assuage your and George’s dirty conscience?”

“Oh, heavens no. That was all George. He’s such a good man. Noble even. It’s his great failing,” she said with an amused smile.

“So this arrangement wasn’t your idea.”

“Hire the man convicted of framing Benjamin Lombard to find Suzanne? It’s grotesque. Whatever choices you made were your own and have nothing whatsoever to do with me. But George, bless his heart, thinks it has symmetry. And so here we are.”

“So why
are
we here?”

“To balance George’s karmic scales, I suppose.”

“No. Why are
we
here?” he clarified.

“Ah. Why have I invited you to my home, you mean? Because, regardless of my feelings about Benjamin, Suzanne remains very dear to me. I am her godmother. I was at her christening. I helped raise her. She was an angelic baby. Truly. One of those who never cried. She was a treasure and a wonderful young lady. As you well know. She had the appetite for life that my family has frittered away. She was brilliant, or would have grown to be. What happened to her is a tragedy.”

She took a long drink from her wineglass. It was some time before she went on.

“I’m sorry. The subject is very raw to me. Even after all this time.”

“I understand,” he said.

“You’re too kind. Mr. Vaughn, if there is even a remote chance that this photograph is genuine—and, honestly, I think it is a hoax intended to inflict anguish, reopen old wounds, the work of a sadist—but if it is authentic and this person, in fact, knows something about what happened to my goddaughter, I will move heaven and earth to find him. The person responsible for all this . . .” She paused, choosing her words carefully. “He will suffer.”

The last word fell like a scythe. It reminded him of what George Abe had said about wanting to have a serious conversation with the man who took Suzanne.

“In any event, George thinks you could be of some benefit to the cause. I wanted to meet you and see for myself.”

“So this is an interview?”

“Hardly. No, I’m just a curious bystander. If George says you’re qualified, I’m certainly not qualified to dispute it.”

“So what, then?”

“Only this. Find this man, and I will be grateful. My family is not what it once was, not that our name has entirely lost its influence, but I believe it will be great again. Do you see the small cupola beyond the hedgerow?”

She gestured to a point beyond the lawn, and he saw the domed building at the edge of the property. The hedge had to be at least fifteen feet tall, so he didn’t know by what measure she thought it was small.

“It was built by my great-great-great-grandfather Alexandre Dauplaise when his wife passed away. He was buried alongside her twelve years later when he followed her. The entire family is interred there, apart from my uncle Daniel, who is buried under a white cross in Normandy. In time, I will join them, and on that date, my family’s connection to this city will span three centuries. But before I do join them, I intend to see my family begin to restore its traditions of greatness and service to this country.”

“No more condos in Florida?”

“Indeed. I say all this not to give you a history lesson but to assure you that my gratitude will not be inconsequential. You and your family will benefit. But should you have ideas,” she said, her tone darkening, “thoughts of exploiting the situation for your own ends, making this matter public in the media, as you tried to do in the past . . . Well, I will take it very personally indeed.”

“I understand.”

“Good. I’m sure this conversation was entirely unnecessary.”

“I’d wonder myself in your position.”

Calista nodded approvingly. “I appreciate that, Mr. Vaughn. I really do.”

“Aunt C! Aunt C!” a girl yelled, barreling up to the table at top speed. A pack of children followed behind but stopped at the top of the stairs as if a force field blocked their path. The girl stopped at her aunt’s side, out of breath, white dress dotted with grass. Her black hair was braided down the middle, and she had pretty blue eyes. She saw Gibson and immediately became shy, pressing herself close to her aunt and whispering in her ear. Calista laughed and hugged the girl.

“Yes, of course. But no more than twenty. Let Davis know so that he can make arrangements with their parents.”

The girl grinned and said thank you. She started to run back to the party, but Calista caught her by the sleeve.

“Can you say hello to our guest? This is Mr. Vaughn. This is Catherine, my niece.”

“Hello.” She waved.

“Hello,” Gibson said.

“Properly, young lady.”

She nodded at her mistake, gathered herself, and approached Gibson with her hand out. He shook it.

“So nice to meet you, Mr. Vaughn. I’m Catherine Dauplaise. Thank you for attending my birthday party.”

She looked at her aunt out of the corner of her eye to see if she’d gotten it right. Calista sighed and waved her away.

“Go on, go play. And remember, no more than twenty.”

“Yes, Aunt C!” Catherine yelled excitedly as she ran down the steps to the lawn.

“A work in progress,” Calista said. “I’m afraid motherhood is not in my makeup. As my lackadaisical son will attest. But I do my best.”

“If it’s any consolation, she’s better behaved than mine.”

He could tell from her face that it wasn’t.

“It was nice to see you again, Mr. Vaughn. Good luck in Pennsylvania.”

PART TWO

SOMERSET

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The expedition to Somerset left the next day. The parking garage beneath Abe Consulting was nearly empty, and Gibson’s footsteps echoed off the concrete walls. Hendricks, smoking a cigarette, leaned against a banged-up late-model Grand Cherokee, its wheel wells mottled with rust, the side panels badly dented. It looked like someone had resculpted the rear bumper using a concrete embankment as a chisel.

“Sweet ride. Range Rover in the shop?” Gibson said.

“Ninety-thousand-dollar SUVs don’t exactly blend in central Pennsylvania, Vaughn. We’re trying to keep a low profile.”

Gibson put up both hands. “Just a joke, man.”

“Just worry about the computers, all right?” Hendricks flicked ash toward two large black duffel bags. “That’s the equipment you spec’d out. Stow it in the back.”

Hendricks got into the Cherokee and started the engine. Gibson unzipped the bags and took an inventory before putting them in the trunk alongside a stack of identical black bags. Hendricks was hauling along an awful lot of equipment. What
was
all this stuff?

Jenn pulled up in a Taurus that was in even worse shape than the Cherokee. The car looked like it had been driven through an alleyway a quarter inch too narrow. However, whatever cosmetic damage the Taurus had sustained didn’t extend under the hood. Gibson could hear the throaty muscle of the engine as it came to a stop. Gibson shut the hatch on the Grand Cherokee and noted that it, like the Taurus, had Pennsylvania plates and a Penn State bumper sticker. He might not have a background in surveillance, but he appreciated people who paid attention to details.

The passenger door on the Taurus was locked. He rapped on the window and glanced in at Jenn. She shook her head and pointed one finger at the Cherokee. Hendricks honked.

“Are you kidding me?” Gibson mouthed.

Jenn’s window dropped an inch. “See you in Somerset.”

“Today,” Hendricks yelled.

“I will literally pay you to open this door.”

“I know what you make.”

Hendricks yelled for him to hurry up. Gibson gave Jenn one last imploring glance, but she just stared stonily into the middle distance, trying her damndest to suppress a smile.

Hendricks took them out of the city on the Clara Barton Parkway, which ran along the old C&O canal. Trees canopied the roadway, and they drove with the windows down. Gibson asked if he could put on the game. Hendricks pointed to the radio.

“Do you have a team?” Gibson asked.

“Dad liked the Dodgers. Don’t follow it myself.”

“Was he a cop too?”

“No.”

Gibson waited for Hendricks to go on, but that seemed the end of it. He reached for the radio.

“Studio engineer. Music. Did a lot of work for SST and Slash Records.”

“Cool. Any groups I’d know?”

“Not unless you’re into old punk bands. Black Flag?”

Gibson shook his head.

“Then you’re not going to know any of them.”

“So if your dad was into music, how did you end up a cop?”

“Applied to the academy. How do you think?” Hendricks flipped on the radio to mark the end of the conversation.

The Nationals were up 2–0 in the second. Duke would have loved having a ball club in DC again. When Gibson was growing up, the Orioles had been the next best thing to a home team, and Duke had taken him to ten or fifteen games a year. But if Gibson had to guess, he’d say his father preferred listening to the games on the radio. He remembered drives between Charlottesville and DC, listening to Mel Proctor and Jim Palmer call games. It was so boring. Listening to old guys on the radio describe something he couldn’t see. But like so much else, it had become a comfort as he grew older. Oftentimes, he didn’t even follow the game but enjoyed the soothing rhythm of it low in the background. Today was one of those times.

His conversation with Calista Dauplaise still had him reeling. If she was to be believed, then everything Gibson had thought the last ten years was based on a lie. All of his assumptions about his life had suddenly pivoted on one simple statement: Duke Vaughn wasn’t a criminal. It had been Benjamin Lombard from the start. Lombard, who had embezzled millions of dollars and framed his friend to cover his ass. Gibson still hadn’t recovered from the shock, couldn’t fully absorb the fact that he’d been right from the beginning. But he hadn’t
stayed
right. He’d bought Lombard’s story about his father and, to his shame, turned on his father like everyone else.

Another thought ate at him. All these years, he’d believed that his father had killed himself out of guilt for stealing from Lombard. There’d been no note, and it was the only motive that Gibson could imagine. But if Duke Vaughn wasn’t an embezzler, if he wasn’t a criminal, then what had driven him to suicide? It was the question that had haunted Gibson’s life long after he thought he’d answered it. The answer had left him angry and embittered, but at least it’d offered a thin, miserable sense of closure. Now he didn’t even have that.

Gibson remembered the old house perfectly. The sloping front lawn that he’d spent the better part of his childhood raking or mowing. The spiraling elm. Under which Duke had tried in vain to teach his son to throw a curveball. The road-weary Volvo in the driveway that meant his father was home. The creak of the porch steps and the Adirondack chairs that Gibson never found comfortable. The front door that was never locked.

It had been wide open that day.

Gibson had called out to his father but heard no answer. The Eagles were playing on the stereo, the opening lines of “New Kid in Town.” His father loved that stuff: James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Bob Marley & the Wailers, CSN&Y. His “college sunny afternoon, Frisbee music.” Gibson dropped his school backpack at the foot of the stairs and walked through the house, calling again for his father. He remembered having an uneasy feeling because his dad wasn’t due home until Friday, and he could count on one hand the number of times Duke Vaughn had ever been early to anything.

He checked every room twice. The backyard. Duke sometimes visited with the neighbors; he was probably just talking UVA baseball with Mr. Hooper, who worked for the university. That seemed reasonable. Still, Gibson didn’t like that the front door had been wide open. He made another lap around the house and noticed the basement door was open a crack. He hadn’t checked it because no one ever went down there. It was mostly storage, plus a makeshift bedroom for the rare times they had company.

He opened the door and saw the basement light was on. The acrid smell of shit hit him. He called for his father, but the basement didn’t answer. Down the steps he went. Slowly. Knowing something was wrong. Four steps from the bottom, he ducked his head and peered into the basement. He saw his father’s bare feet dangling in the air, pointing down at the cement floor as if he were flying away.

Another step.

It didn’t look like him. The rope had pulled his father’s features taut and turned them black. Gibson whispered his father’s name and sat heavily on the bottom step. He hadn’t cried until the police arrived and told him that he needed to come with them.

Why did you do it, Duke? You were innocent. What drove you down into the basement?

They pulled into Somerset in the late afternoon. An hour east of Pittsburgh, Somerset was a small blue-collar community of fewer than seven thousand residents. The town’s historical claim to fame, such as it was, was as a rebel hotbed during the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. More recently, it had become connected to 9/11 when Flight 93 crashed in nearby Shanksville. But it was Somerset’s proximity to the Breezewood gas station—a mere fifty miles east—that mattered now.

Hendricks circled the copper-domed courthouse in the center of town and pulled over to wait for Jenn, who was ten minutes behind them. Hendricks might not be the most pleasant of traveling companions, but he was one hell of a driver. They’d hit traffic at the Maryland Line, and Gibson had pulled up traffic on his phone to look for a way around.

“Put it away,” Hendricks had growled, steering them onto a wide-open Route 68 without so much as glancing at a map. The man was a human GPS.

End to end, it had been the smoothest ride Gibson could remember. Everyone believed himself to be a good driver, but Hendricks was the real deal. It was the effortless way the car flowed to a stop and accelerated so smoothly you hardly felt it. Somehow, Hendricks always had them in the lane that was moving, and it wasn’t luck; if a car tapped its brakes a quarter mile ahead, Hendricks anticipated how it would ripple back through traffic and adjusted his speed or changed lanes accordingly.

Jenn pulled up a few minutes later. Since Gibson couldn’t be certain how deep WR8TH had burrowed into Abe Consulting, he’d instituted a total electronic whiteout within ACG regarding their attempts to track their quarry—no e-mails, no texts, no Word documents. Michael Rilling was setting up a dedicated server for the operation that had no connection to ACG, but in the meantime everything went on legal pads and in handwritten memos, a weird adjustment for everyone except Hendricks, who seemed to prefer it.

It also meant no hotel reservations, but Hendricks knew the layout of the entire town of Somerset and rattled off the names of every motel in a three-mile radius.

“Have you ever been here before?” Gibson asked.

“Do I look like I’ve been here before?”

“So do you go home at night and study atlases?”

“If I’m going somewhere. Google’s no substitute for knowing things. Write that down.”

When Jenn pulled up, they caravanned up and picked a dumpy single-story motel that was somewhat shielded from the highway noise. Still feeling restless, Gibson opted for a run before thinking about dinner. He left his room and nodded to Hendricks, who had brought a wooden chair out of his room and was smoking lazily.

“I’ll be back in an hour.”

Hendricks grunted, and Gibson began an easy run out toward the street. Summer had arrived; it was still a muggy ninety degrees after six p.m. He ran south back into town, taking the lay of the land, passing the Summit Diner, a classic stainless-steel prefab diner with a red-and-green neon sign by the curb. It had been renovated, but he’d be damned if it hadn’t originally been an honest-to-God Swingle Family Diner. Probably dated back to the sixties. Duke would have known for sure, but it was a collector’s item in any event. Gibson knew where he would be eating his meals for the duration of their stay.

At the courthouse, he hung a right and headed west into the sun. He slowed when he saw the library and walked the rest of the way, wanting a firsthand look at it. The library had a single-page website that was little more than an electronic hours-of-operation sign. He’d found a few pictures but none that gave him a complete picture of the layout. Mostly, he was curious to get a look at what might be the base of operations of one of the FBI’s most wanted.

As villainous lairs went, it was a bit of a letdown. The Carolyn Anthony Library was a pretty brick building with white-painted trim around the windows and main entrance. It was set back from the street by a neatly manicured lawn and a border of flower beds and small bushes. A bright-red fire hydrant stood on one side of the main entrance, a water fountain on the other. It was a little slice of Mayberry Americanus and, like the courthouse, felt out of place in its drab clapboard surroundings.

The drinking fountain gave little more than a trickle. Gibson managed to coax a sip out of it then circled the library. To the side and rear, a public park sloped away with park benches, picnic tables, grassy lawns, and a stone fountain at the center that threw water up in a hazy, erratic spray.

It reminded him of the photo with Suzanne and the frog. Which in turn brought to mind something that had bothered him before . . . The hat—something about that Philadelphia Phillies baseball cap.
What’s the big deal?
he asked himself. She’d needed a cap to hide her face and bought a Phillies one. Settle down, Sherlock.

Still it nagged at him.

Keep your mind on the task at hand,
he told himself: the layout of the library. It appeared to have three ways in and out: the main entrance, a loading dock on one side, and a side door that opened onto the park. It stood apart from its neighboring buildings, offering little excuse to loiter. That plus the size of the town meant anyone who didn’t belong would quickly stand out. WR8TH would make them long before they made him.

Gibson used his cell phone to check what he already knew—the library Wi-Fi was not password protected. He walked half a block away before he completely lost the signal. Tomorrow, he’d come back with a range-tester and map out the perimeter of the Wi-Fi’s signal. Already, though, it was painfully clear that WR8TH could log in to the library Wi-Fi without stepping foot in the building—practically without coming within eyeshot of it. Their job had just gotten trickier. Not impossible but much more complicated.

Well, there wasn’t anything he could do about it now. He put his earbuds back in and began the run back to the motel to call Ellie before dinner.