Simply Lies

Chapter 22

Earl Beckett looked like a us marshal, thought Gibson. Tall, lean, ramrod straight. Weathered good looks, wavy salt-and-pepper hair. A grim smile coupled with flinty eyes and a crushing handshake. Gibson thought that in another era, the man could have walked on to an old movie set and been an instant star, especially if he’d had on a ten-gallon hat and was sporting twin pearl-handled Colt .45s.

After Sullivan had introduced her, Beckett led them to his office in the federal building in Norfolk and sat down across from them. He had a manila folder in front of him.

“Had to get this sucker overnighted. It was in the record morgue, in yonder parts.” He smiled. “ ‘Yonder parts’ are what folks expect to hear from a US marshal, or maybe I’m just getting old.”

“Works for me,” said Sullivan.

Beckett opened the folder and got down to business. “Harry E. Langhorne. A name right out of the past.”

“Yeah, and he’s in our morgue,” said Sullivan.

“So you told me over the phone.”

“Then he was in WITSEC?” asked Sullivan.

Beckett slid a finger over his top lip. “You confirmed the dead guy is Langhorne?”

“Yes. We checked and rechecked. And the FBI sent us a notification as well.”

“Right. All WITSECs are on their database. And if any law enforcement agency sends a print ID request that ends up being a WITSEC, the Bureau gets pinged. They usually let us know, too. They may have, but I’m not necessarily in the loop on that.”

Gibson inwardly cringed. Thank God my cop friend Kate didn’t have to access a Fed database but got Langhorne’s print off a local one.

Beckett said, “Okay, yeah, he was under our protection starting around the time of the mob trials.”

“With his family?” asked Gibson.

“That’s right. His wife, Geraldine, and the two kids.” Beckett took a few moments to read over the file. “They were initially relocated to Eugene, Oregon, about as far away as you can get from New Jersey. Then to Butte, Montana, and finally to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where they spent a number of years.”

“Why so many moves?” asked Gibson.

“Not unusual at all. Might have been they suspected someone had found out where they were. Or there was a problem of some kind with the current location. We always err on the side of caution.”

“What’s the process for a WITSEC family?” asked Gibson.

“We determine how many members will be entering the program, adults, children. Then they’re all given a psych evaluation.”

“Why a psych eval?” asked Gibson.

“The transition is not an easy one,” noted Beckett. “So we need to know what mental state they’re all in. You don’t enter WITSEC because your life is a bed of roses, quite the opposite. The program will support them for six months financially. After that, they need to get a job. Now, we do cater to certain requests if feasible.”

“Like what?” she asked.

“Well, I can tell you that we’ve paid for breast implants, facelifts, and boxing lessons, but that’s atypical.”

“O-kay,” said Gibson slowly.

“The jobs these folks get are usually not going to be high paying. They have no work or credit history. Early on the Marshals Service reached out to the business community and got commitments from over a thousand national businesses to provide jobs to WITSEC members. In the past, we’ve also placed protectees in certain government jobs.”

“Doesn’t that jeopardize their safety?” asked Sullivan.

“We have protocols to prevent that, but I can’t get into them with you. Langhorne was working at a local car dealership in Albuquerque until about twenty years ago.”

“As a salesman?” asked Sullivan.

“No, as a vehicle detailer. Guy liked the details, apparently.”

“A long fall from mob accountant to cleaning cars,” remarked Gibson.

“What happened?” asked Sullivan.

“Langhorne vanished.”

Gibson and Sullivan exchanged glances. She said, “Vanished? Alone, or with his family?”

“Alone. After all those years, maybe he didn’t appreciate the lifestyle or the working-class life that came with it. Or the family he had.”

“Damn,” said Gibson.

“I always thought the guy was odd.”

“Wait, you knew him?” exclaimed Gibson.

Beckett nodded. “That’s why I agreed to meet. See, I was in Albuquerque at the tail end of Langhorne’s time there. Did several years with him and his family and some other families out there in WITSEC. Don’t tell anybody, but we sometimes clump them together in the same neighborhoods to conserve manpower. None of the families knew the others were in WITSEC, of course.” He eyed Gibson. “Will told me you were a cop for a while and now work for ProEye. Said I could trust you.”

“You can. What names did they go by back then?”

“They’re no longer in WITSEC, so I guess it won’t hurt to tell you.” He glanced at the file again. “Harry and Geraldine Parker. The kids went by Fran and Doug.”

“But those are their actual first names,” Gibson pointed out.

“Way we do it at WITSEC. Theory is people will not be able to get the memory of their true given name out of their brain. Someone calls out Harry and Harry turns. But if the first names are the same, so what? Last names are different, of course.”

“Do you change their appearances?” asked Gibson. “Especially if their faces had been in the media?”

“On a case-by-case basis, we do what we need to do to keep them safe,” said Beckett. “And that’s really all I can say.”

“So he just left his family?” said Sullivan. “You’re sure nothing happened to him?”

“We’re sure. I think he’d been prepping it for quite a while. This was in hindsight, of course. And he might have had a stash of money to help him on his way.”

“What makes you say that?” asked Sullivan.

“Rumors. Scuttlebutt.”

“Maybe in addition to ratting out the mob he might’ve raided their piggybank, too,” said Gibson.

Beckett shrugged. “The man had helped take down a bunch of really bad guys. You’re not gonna jump the dude’s bones over money at that point. And if they made him out to be dishonest that way, maybe it would have hurt the prosecution. You give a good defense attorney an opening, well, look out.”

“Right,” said Gibson. “Well, the man he became, Daniel Pottinger, paid five million dollars in cash for an old estate near Smithfield.”

“Damn” was all Beckett said to that.

“You said he vanished. How so?” asked Sullivan.

“Went to his job one day and never came home. We checked everything, talked to everybody. He went out for lunch, the folks at the dealership said, and then called in that he was feeling ill, so they didn’t expect him back. That was the last they saw or heard of him. We checked the buses, trains, airports, car rentals. Nothing.”

“So maybe he had help?” noted Gibson.

“I have no doubt of that. But he worked it so he had a good head start. His wife didn’t contact us until the following morning.”

“Why so long?” asked Gibson.

“She said that Langhorne had phoned and told her he was working late and not to wait up for him. He said he’d probably sleep on the couch downstairs, so as not to wake her. She went downstairs around eight the next morning and there was no sign of him. But she thought he’d just gone to work early. She didn’t call us until the dealership phoned her asking where the hell he was. All told, he had a long runway to make his getaway. And, look, it’s not like what he did was illegal. Being in WITSEC is a choice. We looked for him mainly because we were worried someone had snatched him. But as more information came out, it seemed clear that he planned it.”

“And his family? What happened to them? You said they were no longer in WITSEC.”

“Geraldine walked out of her house about a month after her husband vanished. No one’s seen her since.”

Gibson said, “And the kids?”

“Doug was nearly eighteen by then, a senior in high school. Francine was about a year younger. Not little kids anymore. It was a helluva mess. Technically, they couldn’t opt out of WITSEC until they were eighteen. And we, of course, couldn’t inform their extended family about the situation so they could help or make decisions for them. And traditional foster care was out, so we just kept watch over them. Doug hung around until Francine hit her eighteenth birthday, and then they both opted out and moved on. Haven’t seen or heard from them since.”

“What a miserable existence for them,” said Gibson.

“We did the best we could,” Beckett said defensively.

“Not saying you didn’t. I’m just talking generally. They had nothing approaching a normal childhood. Then their father abandons them, and then their mother does, too.”

“Right, yeah,” said Beckett. “I did feel sorry for them. But even if they leave, we ask them to stay in touch. We try to help them regardless of their official status. But they never did contact us.” He looked between them. “What else do you need to know?”

“A lot more than we do right now,” said Gibson glumly.