Simply Lies

Chapter 23

Darby was in the stroller and Tommy was walking next to his mother. It was a brisk morning and the sun was ascending into a cloudless sky. Tommy would occasionally hold his mom’s hand or walk right next to the stroller and talk to Darby, who talked right back to him in childish staccato.

Gibson was half watching them and half watching everything else around them. She had plenty of reasons to be paranoid.

Clarisse on the phone, the list of global criminals, and a dead mob numbers guy with maybe more mobsters involved had put her very near the edge. She was a few mental beats from chucking it all, selling her house, and taking the kids as far away as possible.

But could I ever get far away enough? And what about Mom and Dad?

She felt trapped because she was. She had called Zeb Brown a few times to see how long her “vacation” was to last. And whether she would have employment when she came back from said vacation. He had not returned her calls. But her latest paycheck had cleared the bank and there was a nice bonus added on for her work on the Larkin matter.

Yeah, I singlehandedly find two hundred million bucks and they tack on five grand for my bonus. I wonder how much Zeb got? But I’ll take it.

Every car that passed by and that she did not recognize received extra scrutiny. She had slipped her baseball bat into the mesh bottom under the stroller.

She had the burner phone with her; part of her was hoping it would ring and another part was hoping it would remain forever silent.

Tommy chased a squirrel while Darby begged to get out of the stroller and do the same. Gibson obliged, and she watched her kids pointing and doing inch-high jumps off the ground as the squirrel peered curiously down at them from ten feet up a tree.

Tommy looked at Gibson and said, “Mommy, skirl!”

“Yep. But it’s squirrel. Squa-earl. Fast, huh?”

“Vewie fast,” agreed her son.

“Me take home, Mommy?” pleaded Darby. “Pease, pease, pease.”

“It’s not a pet, sweetie. It needs to be free.”

“Pet, pet, pet,” chanted Darby, and Gibson silently berated herself for walking so freely into that one.

Five minutes of intense drama later, they were heading back home, Darby in tears and Tommy saying “Skirl” over and over.

She handed the kids off to Silva, who had just arrived when they got back.

Gibson ran to her office and fired up her computer.

Nathan Trask.

She hit the send key on her search, and a data dump ran down her screen. The man was wrapped up in numerous lawsuits, all civil litigation, at least currently. His business deals were immense, and his background was shady as hell. His Wikipedia page begged for more information on the man; the fourteen current pages on him apparently didn’t cut it.

The photos she saw were of a man who looked carefree, intelligent, and maybe even kind.

But they had said that about Ted Bundy, too.

She dug deeper. He had homes all over the world, but his principal residence, at present, was in Virginia Beach. A thirty-thousand-square-foot behemoth he’d built right on the ocean with its own helipad. His superyacht was kept at a nearby deepwater marina. His Dassault Falcon tri-engine jet was hangared at a corporate jet park.

He presumably had security out the wazoo. She had about as much chance of getting in to see the man as she did the president.

And even if I managed it, what would I say? “Excuse me, Mr. Gazillionaire, did you kill Daniel Pottinger by any chance, or pay to have someone do it?” Yeah, if I want to be dumped in a grave no one will ever find.

She slumped in front of her computer, a weapon she had used in her time at ProEye to slay mighty beasts. But this situation was different, far different.

What the hell does Clarisse expect me to do with this list, anyway?

She looked up the other men. They all were rich and looked arrogant and cruel and were probably criminal in myriad ways. But from the sources she could find that seemed legit, none of them were anywhere near here when Pottinger had bought it. Sure, they could have hired someone to do it, but she didn’t think so. Pottinger had died from poisoning. That was not what hitmen did. They shot you, usually. Anyone could poison someone and watch while they croaked. It took something altogether different to pull the trigger on someone and see their head explode right in front of you.

But why would a guy like Trask go to Stormfield and inject Pottinger with this botulism stuff? Did he stiff the man on poached elephant tusks or stolen biomedical crap?

Not that I really believed any of that from Clarisse. She’s a liar, plain and simple. But there were elements of truth in what she said.

Normally, one could tell if someone was lying by the number of words they used in response to questioning. People telling the truth used far more words, because they were unafraid of being trapped in a lie. Those lying used far fewer words. They consolidated them as a cautionary measure because they were wary of being jammed into an inconsistency. They were making it all up, and that always allowed for a mistake to creep in if they hadn’t practiced enough. Truth tellers could be inconsistent as well because no one could remember everything. But a pro could tell the difference.

I can tell the difference.

She tried to find some more information on Langhorne’s family, but there just wasn’t anything there. That actually made sense after what Marshal Beckett had told them. Doug and Francine Langhorne had vanished when they were old enough to voluntarily leave WITSEC. They had no doubt changed their names once more. That was a dead end.

She joined some dark web chat rooms using an untraceable online ID that she employed for her ProEye work. She had to be subtle about this because the last thing she wanted to do was warn anyone that someone was digging into their pasts. She dropped innocuous-sounding queries in some comment threads and then exited. She had an auto-ping that would alert her if anything interesting came out of these searches.

So now she had Clarisse on one end, Nathan Trask on the other, and a dead ex-WITSEC mob bean counter in the middle.

She grabbed her keys, snuck past the kids, who were enthusiastically telling Silva all about skirls as potential pets, and drove away in her minivan. She had plugged the address into her navigation. It took her about an hour to get to Virginia Beach.

Holy shit.

Trask’s compound made Stormfield look small. But it was as unlike that place as it was possible to be. It was all glass and metal and concrete. It looked more like some funky-ass factory of the future than a home.

There was a big gate that looked like the one at the White House. There were men in suits by the gate. As she watched, one of them climbed into a golf cart trimmed in what looked to be some sort of gold leaf and raced off toward the house. A few moments later a chopper came into view, tracking over the ocean below. As she continued to look up it came to a hover over the rear of the mansion and slowly lowered like a descending elevator car, until it passed from her sight line.

The king had apparently arrived back at his castle.

She drove off, and later stopped for a cup of coffee. As she was sitting in her van, snuggled in her coat and drinking her Starbucks, a gentle, chilly rain began to fall. The next moment the phone rang. She looked down at it, not really wanting to answer it, but still.

Damn.