The Short Drop (15 page)

The first was a squat, powerfully built white male in his late thirties. His computer’s registry identified him as Kirby Tate. His nondescript face was completely out of proportion with his enormous shoulders and chest, and he looked like someone had Photoshopped a kid’s face onto a man’s body. The result wasn’t pretty, but the man seemed to like the effect, since he was wearing tight khaki shorts and a tank top several sizes too small. Gibson knew the type—had served with the type—guys who would wear a tank top in a blizzard.

Tate sat at a picnic table near the fountain and divided his time between staring intently at his computer screen and staring intently at the girls on their blankets. The man’s sunglasses couldn’t mask the admiring way his head followed the young girls’ movements.

The second was a Hispanic male in his forties, Daniel Espinosa. Balding, gray at the temple, and the right age, but pedophiles tended to hunt within their ethnic group. It didn’t eliminate him, but it didn’t move him to the top of the list either. He had a friendly, open face and was chatting with a couple sharing his park table.

The third man was Lawrence Kenney. He was in his early fifties and looked like he’d purchased his crisp khakis, sweater vest, and unapologetic, sweeping comb-over from the same anal-retentive superstore. The man looked like the proverbial mild-mannered accountant pecking away at his laptop, but he made Gibson uneasy. He couldn’t put his finger on why. Perhaps it was the way the accountant sat among people but felt palpably apart from them. A woman pushing a baby carriage brushed past the accountant, who stiffened. His eyes trailed after her, fixing a simmering glare on her back that made the hair on Gibson’s arms stand up. Did goose bumps qualify as probable cause in Pennsylvania?

Hopefully, Rilling could match names with faces and run background checks on all of them. Until then, they would have to rely on old-fashioned police work and intuition.

Jenn and Hendricks set to debating and dissecting their pool of subjects. Listening to them, two things were clear to Gibson. One, they knew what they were talking about. Two, he didn’t, and the conversation quickly eclipsed his ability to follow. His knowledge of serial offenders stemmed largely from
The Silence of the Lambs
and Patricia Cornwell novels. What he did know was computers and the people who used them. He wondered if the same techniques that were used to profile killers and rapists could be applied to hackers. If he extrapolated backward from the signature of the ACG hack—to whom did it lead?

He supposed his money was on the accountant. The coding on the virus was clean, precise, and required attention to detail. At least going by wardrobe, the accountant was the best match. It was thin, though. He knew plenty of programmers who were slobs. He figured he was out of his league, discarded the theory, and went back to work sorting through the batch of driver’s license photographs that Mike Rilling had sent him from DC. Over the next hour, he mapped out their locations as best he could.

By a quarter to five, Gibson wasn’t asleep, but he wasn’t entirely alert either. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, he was resting his chin on his knuckles and staring at the monitor displaying ACG’s server data. He felt like a guy waiting for a plane that was perpetually delayed. So he was slow to react when his phone vibrated on the floor between his knees. On the third buzz, he looked down at his phone, saw the text message, and immediately snapped back up to the monitor. Adrenaline slammed through him. A red bar had popped up with an alert message. The virus on ACG’s servers was receiving new instructions.

“Did either of you just get a text message?” Hendricks asked.

“Yeah, I got it. Gibson, what’s happening?” There was an edge to Jenn’s voice—excitement fused with a predator’s hunger.

“The virus is active. WR8TH is talking to it.”

“From the library?” Jenn asked.

“Hold one,” he said, scanning the list of outbound library Internet traffic.
Come on, baby. Come on.
He ran his finger down the screen. And there it was. Big, beautiful, and guilty. Someone on the library Wi-Fi was communicating with the corrupt ad server that was the virus’s anonymous relay station. It was an impossible coincidence and could mean only one thing.

“Son of a bitch is here,” he said. Mostly to himself, but he’d left comms open and the response came back with urgency.

“Where?” Jenn demanded.

“He’s outside. He’s in the park,” Gibson said.

He looked at the video feed from the park. Their guy was down there. Suzanne Lombard’s kidnapper, and likely murderer, was sitting in plain sight, catching some rays.

“Which one?” Jenn demanded.

He matched the IP address to a machine and read through his notes until he found the driver’s license photo. He looked from the name back to the monitor until he spotted their man.

“Got you,” Gibson said with a smile.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Tinsley sat on the wooden crate he was using as a makeshift stool. He’d been there since before dawn and had watched the sun come up over the library. He was waiting for it to happen . . . or not. He was indifferent.

Earlier in the week, he had scoped out a small, unoccupied office to hole up in. From the second-story window where he sat, Tinsley had an unobstructed view of the library and adjacent park. At that hour, the library and park were deserted, but Tinsley wanted time for the emptiness to saturate his retinas and burn the landscape into his mind’s eye. Later, as it filled with bodies, each object would stand out clearly to his brain like a blemish on a pristine original.

The leasing agent who showed him the property had complained that Tinsley was the first nibble in more than a month. Tinsley took that as a good omen and broke in later that night. He’d been using it as a base of operations, but there was no trace or sign that anyone had been there. He wanted to leave this town without causing so much as a ripple in its surface. Tinsley had no intention at this time of killing the leasing agent, but he’d taken the man’s card in case things took a turn.

Tinsley blinked and the noonday sun greeted him.

Tinsley blinked and the sun dipped toward the far horizon.

His expensive watch told him he had been sitting at the window for twelve hours. His eyes continued to track the hazy movements of the shapes in the park. Nothing of importance had changed. The woman was still on the park bench. The thin, irritable man was still in his car. The third was nowhere to be seen, but Tinsley was confident that Vaughn was back at the motel. Probably typing away on one of his little computers. Type, type, type.

It was ironic in its way—the hunters unaware that they themselves were hunted. And that if they found their quarry it would mean their deaths. It did not impress him, but he did pause to wonder: Would he know if he was being hunted? Was he not arrogant to assume he alone had the edge? The thought made him grin. That would be an intricate play indeed. Set a killer on a killer; tie up all the loose ends. Doubtful but not beyond the realm of possibility. He would recalibrate his senses to be alert to such a betrayal.

In a way he longed for it. This job was proving mundane, and the prospect of killing them didn’t spark anything in him. Hendricks would be nothing. Jenn Charles would need careful attention, but that was all. Tinsley had a history with Gibson Vaughn, but even that did not rouse his spirits overly.

Not that it seemed a likely prospect at this point. Friday was supposedly a pivotal day for them, and so far they appeared to be coming up empty. He should urinate and eat something. He didn’t feel a need to do either, but he trusted the watch to tell him when it was time.

Tinsley’s cell vibrated. He read the text message with cold curiosity. It was happening. He looked back down into the park. The woman was gone from the park bench. His mind found her shape moving up toward the fountain. She circled around the main cluster of people at the tables near the library and stopped to fill her water bottle at a water fountain. The bitter man’s shape was still in the car, but Tinsley could see him talking animatedly into a cell.

He was curious to see the face of the other person he had been sent to kill—the one who had eluded him all those years ago. That was, after all, his primary target. The old unfinished business that had brought him back here. Either he had killed the wrong man ten years ago, or else there had been an accomplice who had been overlooked. Time, as it always did, had given this man the false confidence to show himself again. Tinsley would balance that ledger soon.

These others would just be collateral.

They were just fucking with him now. The vice president could feel it. Lombard looked at his watch with a sharp snap of his wrist. Six forty-seven p.m. He’d been twiddling his goddamn thumbs in his ceremonial office off the Senate floor for nearly seven hours.

All for a toothless immigration bill that had been languishing in the Senate since early spring. And now, miraculously, days before the crucial California primary, the Senate had gotten its act together for an up-or-down vote. The majority whip, anticipating a tie, had informed Lombard that, as vice president, he’d be needed in Washington to break the deadlock.

The majority leader had assured him that the vote would happen first thing, so Lombard had flown in first thing and arrived at the Capitol at eleven thirty for a noon vote. With the time change, he would have been back in Dallas by midafternoon for several campaign appearances. Instead, he’d endured an unexpected filibuster, a nongermane amendment, and a failed cloture vote. Each one timed exactly when the roll-call vote on the final bill appeared imminent. His worry now was that they would stretch the vote until tomorrow, which would put him back in Dallas on Saturday afternoon at the earliest.

This was no coincidence or accident. That much was obvious. Lombard knew from experience how the game was played here in the Senate, and he could imagine the minority leader laughing at him from his office.
Well, enjoy it while you can,
Lombard thought. The unofficial agenda of his first term had been amended in the last few hours to include unseating that prick.

He checked his watch again. Although he wouldn’t admit it to anyone, the campaign was in good hands and could take care of itself for a day without him. Fleming was on the ropes and, if his polling data were worth what he’d paid for it, then the nomination would be his next week.

No, it was this developing situation in Pennsylvania that was giving him heartburn. A cryptic message from Eskridge an hour ago indicated Gibson Vaughn might actually have found the man who took his daughter. It was unfathomable, and ordinarily Lombard could compartmentalize, but he’d been unable to focus on anything else. He wanted to know what was happening, and he wanted to know now.

Instead he was trapped here, surrounded by ears he didn’t entirely trust, and with no way to call securely for an update. For the first time in eight years, being vice president of the United States was damn inconvenient—all the power in the world but powerless to influence the search for his own daughter. He checked his watch and wound it for good measure.

“Mr. Vice President?” A young aide stood in the doorway of the vice president’s office.

“Yes? Are they ready finally?”

The aide looked unhappily at the floor.

“What now?” Lombard demanded.

“Another amendment, sir.”

He felt his blood pressure rising. “How long?”

“Ninety minutes . . . maybe two hours?”

Lombard looked at his watch. There went getting back to Dallas for the speech. He needed to talk to Reed and start making arrangements for Saturday.

“Close the door.”

The aide stepped gratefully back out into the hall. Lombard sat at his desk and picked up the phone, then put it back in the cradle. He sat staring at it grimly for a long while.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Gibson pulled the Taurus over to the side of the road. Traffic whipped by close enough to shake the car. He sat there, hands on the wheel, and listened to the engine idle. He was thirty miles out of Somerset. That ought to be enough. Would they have followed him? He glanced in the rearview mirror again. Nothing. It wasn’t all that comforting. He wouldn’t see Hendricks unless Hendricks wanted to be seen.

It had been an eventful thirty-six hours. WR8TH had turned out to be Kirby Tate, the wannabe bodybuilder. Gibson’s program had done its job perfectly and drawn a straight line between the corrupted ad server and Tate’s computer. While Rilling had run Tate’s name through state and federal databases, Hendricks and Jenn had tailed Tate to his residence. By the next morning, they were 90 percent sure they had the right guy, and by Saturday afternoon, when Rilling forwarded Tate’s file to Jenn and Hendricks, they were convinced. George had calls in to his contacts at the FBI to present their case against Kirby Tate.

“Our guy’s got a sheet,” Hendricks had said. “Did five and a half years at Frackville for false imprisonment. Must have been where he got jacked, because in his mug shot he’s a skinny little bitch.”

“What did he do?” Gibson asked.

“Got caught with eleven-year-old Trish Casper in his car is what he did.”

“He’s a registered sex offender,” Jenn added.

“Oh, yeah. The girl’s kid brother ID’d the car leaving a supermarket, and the mom called the cops. When the cops pulled Tate over, the girl was trussed up in his trunk. Half-naked.”

“He got out a year and a half before Suzanne disappeared.”

“Sad part is this monster should have gone down for felony kidnapping of a minor,” Jenn said.

“A first-degree felony,” Hendricks chimed in.

“So should have been twenty years.”

“But local PD got overzealous during the arrest and beat the guy while he was cuffed,” Hendricks said.

“Broke his arm and dislocated his shoulder. His lawyer cut a deal and got it knocked down to false imprisonment.”

“A second-degree felony,” Hendricks said.

“Which got him out of prison in time to take Suzanne,” Gibson said, seeing the tragic way it all fit together.

“We got him,” said Jenn.

Saturday night, while Hendricks sat on Tate’s home, Jenn and Gibson walked over to the Summit Diner. A couple of conquering heroes. Jenn had unbuttoned the top button on her personality, and they’d laughed together like old friends and told stories about the last week like it had happened half a lifetime ago. He felt like part of the team for the first time, and they toasted over milkshakes. Jenn was warm and appreciative, and said they couldn’t have done it without him. George Abe even called to thank him personally. It had felt good, really good to be part of something that mattered.

After she’d paid the check, Jenn had dropped the boom on Gibson: Abe wanted him back in Washington.

“You need to understand that your presence will jeopardize our credibility. The FBI is already going to be irritated that we didn’t turn this over to them straightaway. We need to be airtight with them, and having someone like you here is only going to muddy the waters that much more.”

“Someone like me.”

“Someone with your history. The FBI won’t understand how important Suzanne is to you. All they’ll see is your history with Lombard.”

Gibson wasn’t buying it. He promised to stay out of the way. He would have promised anything. They were so close; he couldn’t go home now.

“You hit a home run here,” said Jenn. “We’re in your debt, but you need to let us handle it from here. You want us to catch this guy, right?”

They’d stood in the parking lot of the diner and argued it around and around, voices and tempers rising until the manager came out and told them to knock it off. They picked up again back in Jenn’s room, iterations of the same stale arguments flying back and forth. Eventually, they lapsed into an exhausted silence.

“For God’s sake, let this go,” Jenn told him at last. “You did good. For once in your life, recognize when you’re ahead and keep it that way.”

It was good advice even if it stung. Even if he had no intention of following it. Not where Bear was concerned. He would see this through to the end even if he had to do it alone. They could have their money back.

About halfway through, he’d realized that no argument would sway Jenn to his cause. He’d kept on arguing but only for show. At the appropriate point, he’d stormed out and gone back to his motel room to pack. In the morning, Jenn had tried to make peace, but he’d shrugged her off angrily. She wouldn’t have bought it otherwise, and he’d needed her to believe he was going home.

He glanced in the rearview mirror again. Had he fooled them? If he had, then it was on them for believing a few kind words would get him to quit. Gibson cranked the steering wheel around, pulled a U-turn, and swung the car back toward Somerset.

Toward Bear.

Hendricks was right. Hope was a cancer.

Gibson watched Hendricks finish loading all the gear into the back of the Cherokee. The ex-cop slammed shut the hatch and lit a cigarette. After a minute, Jenn emerged from the motel manager’s office, gestured at Hendricks to get a move on, and got in the passenger side. Hendricks crushed out his half-finished cigarette and got behind the wheel.

The Cherokee pulled out into traffic, and Gibson slouched low behind the wheel as it passed him on the way out of town. He’d parked a couple blocks away and watched them through a pair of binoculars that he’d found in the glove compartment. He still felt exposed. It was a car they knew, and Hendricks didn’t miss much. He half expected them to pull over and drag him out. But Hendricks and Jenn cruised by without so much as a glance in his direction. He wanted to follow them, but he knew nothing about how to tail a car. Hendricks would make him in a half mile.

Gibson sat up, feeling foolish. But was he? Being foolish, that is? Something felt wrong to him. Supposedly, Jenn and Hendricks were to sit tight until Abe flew in so they could coordinate with the feds. So where were they going in such a hurry?

But that wasn’t even it. It was more the way Hendricks was going about it. Not hurrying exactly, but moving with a purpose. It was the way he strode, economically, back and forth between the room and the vehicle. Not on a clock, but with no time to waste either. It reminded Gibson of marines packing for an imminent deployment—checking and double-checking the gear, taking a mental inventory. It was the latent intensity that settled on people before they stepped off into something heavy.

So where were they going? He’d been gone for what, an hour and a half, tops? And in that time Jenn and Hendricks had pulled up stakes. Their plans hadn’t changed since he’d left; no, this had been the plan all along. Of that, he had no doubt.

He saw now what last night had been about. The camaraderie at the diner. Jenn had been putting on her own show. She’d tried to hack him, appealing to his insecurity and his vanity. She’d taken him out for dinner, held his hand, and whispered sweet nothings in his ear. All to get him to go back to DC peacefully.

What was the first rule to getting someone to fall in line? Figure out what they need and give them a taste. Not enough to sate them, but enough to whet their appetite. Enough that they wanted more. Needed more. Well, what did he need? Respect? Appreciation? Accomplishment? Wasn’t that what Jenn had fed him last night at the diner? Buffed his ego until it shone. Played on his loyalty to Suzanne and counted on it to control him. Gibson looked in the passenger seat at the manila envelope. Inside was ten thousand dollars. In cash. A bonus from ACG for his “outstanding” work. That had certainly been meant to help the medicine go down, hadn’t it?

If this had been the plan from the beginning, to send him home after they found WR8TH, the next question was why. What was it George Abe said to him the day they’d met about wanting to have a serious conversation with the man who took Suzanne? Something about giving the FBI the leftovers. Well, wouldn’t it make sense to have him safely out of the way for that? Did they even care about finding Suzanne? And if not, what was it they were after?

The real question was what he was going to do about it. First things first. He drove to a UPS store, folded a thousand dollars into his hip pocket, and boxed the rest of the money. He mailed it to Nicole with a note. If this went badly, at least she would have the money. He walked out into the sunshine and jangled the car keys in his hand.

Let the games begin.

He might not be able to tail Hendricks, but he didn’t really need to. When Hendricks had forgotten his phone outside his room, Gibson had taken it as an invitation to make a few personal upgrades. Hendricks’s personal data was all encrypted, of course, so it wasn’t easily accessible. But since Gibson didn’t want or need access to the data, it had been simple enough to move it off the phone temporarily, jailbreak the phone, install a program of his own, and reload Hendricks’s encrypted data back onto the device.

Gibson activated that app now using his own cell phone and waited for it to access the GPS feature on Hendricks’s phone. When it finished loading, a red dot appeared on his phone’s map. It moved steadily north away from the green dot that represented Gibson’s location. He watched it until it stopped moving. Expanding the map with his fingers, he found an address and ran a search on it.

It was the address of a self-storage facility.

A twenty-minute drive out of Somerset, Grafton Storage sat on a dismal two-lane highway banked on both sides by a state park. It came up on his right and was the first structure he had seen in miles. Gibson slowed for a better look.

The property took up the better part of two acres and was a pretty simple operation—a tall razor wire–topped cinder-block wall that circled the property, an automated gate with a small office, and rows and rows of identical one-story warehouses with identical blue rollaway doors. What would possess someone to build a storage facility out here in the middle of nowhere was beyond him. But that probably explained why Grafton Storage was out of business and, from the look of it, had been for some time.

He drove on until he found a dirt road to pull onto and stashed his car. Walking the quarter mile back to Grafton Storage, he didn’t see a single car pass by. The defunct storage business looked even more run-down up close: a battered “For Sale” sign hung slantways from the gate, and thick tufts of grass grew between the cracked asphalt. The thick chain and heavy corroded padlock that barred the gate didn’t look like they’d been disturbed in a hundred years.

Was his program glitching? He closed and reloaded the app that was tracking Hendricks’s location. Nope, it still showed Hendricks as inside Grafton Storage. Gibson looked at the padlock more closely. Were those flecks of steel showing through the rust where someone had worked a key into the stiff lock? When exactly did he become an expert on rusted padlocks?

He looked around. If Jenn and Hendricks really were inside, who had locked the gate behind them? It made no sense unless there was another way in. Or Hendricks had thrown his phone inside the wall to throw him off. But that would mean Hendricks knew he was being followed.

Or, or, or . . .

Gibson rubbed his forehead. There were too many options; time to whittle some of them away.

He called Hendricks’s phone. It rang five or six times before Hendricks answered. Sounded mightily put out too.

Good.

“Hey,” Gibson said as dumbly as he could manage.

“Hey what? Aren’t I done with you? I remember you leaving. Didn’t that happen? I remember that happening.”

“I know. Sorry. Is Jenn there? Got a quick question.”

“She has her own phone, you know? I’m not her secretary.”

He started to apologize again, but Jenn came on the line, sounding only slightly less tense than her partner.

“Yeah?”

“Sorry to bug you guys, but would it be cool if I went straight home and dropped the car off at ACG in the morning?”

He could practically hear Jenn’s eyes rolling, so he started into a story about wanting to catch Ellie’s soccer game this afternoon. She cut him off and said it was fine.

“Is George there yet?” he asked.

“Not yet.”

“Really think he’s going to sleep in that shit-box motel?”

Jenn forced a laugh. It sounded hollow and joyless. She agreed that it would be funny.

“Well, take pictures for me. That I have to see.”

She hung up without another word.

He stared at his phone quizzically. So Jenn and Hendricks had locked themselves inside an abandoned self-storage facility along Route Godforsaken. Putting aside the basic weirdness of that statement for a moment, how did they get in there and lock the gate behind them? He was just about to walk the perimeter and look for a second entrance when he noticed that a section of razor wire had been cut away some fifty feet from the main gate—easy enough to miss from the roadway.

He walked alongside the wall, dragging his hand along the smooth surface. In theory, the gap was wide enough for one person to cross through, but the top of the wall was ten feet high and even an experienced climber needed handholds. You would need . . . a ladder.