Simply Lies

Chapter 30

Clarisse had managed to trace the van that had been used to abduct her mother. It had been rented. The identity used to lease it had been stolen. She found that out on her own. The rental company could do nothing to help her. They apparently spent every dollar of their budget on ads demonstrating how amazing their customer service was, and none on their actual customer service. All she got were recorded voices sending her from one voice mail to another until the system just spit her out.

Clarisse looked at her computer screen.

The vehicle had been picked up in Asheville, North Carolina, driven to Greenville, South Carolina, used for a felony abduction of one Agnes Leland, and then abandoned somewhere in between. No leads, no clues, no nothing. The interesting thing now? How would communication to her occur?

True to her habit, she had started a new notebook. On its cover she had written RECOVERY OF MOMMY.

Short and to the point but with a lot of work ahead and not much to go on.

She hacked into what she needed to hack into and watched Hoodie rent the van in Asheville, which was only about an hour or so across the state line from Greenville. The world was all connected now. What that actually meant was that there was no more privacy, ever. She zoomed in on the figure, but the person’s face was never pointed toward the camera.

Using an app, she calculated the height of the person at over six feet, but that included shoes. The clothes were bulky, so an educated guess on the weight and build was likely to be well off. The ID used to rent the car was in the name of Daryl Oxblood of The Plains, Virginia. The DMV records in Virginia showed there was a Daryl Oxblood of The Plains, Virginia. The credit card used was also in Oxblood’s name.

She sat back and thought about this.

Do I go to The Plains, Virginia, or do I wait for them to contact me? Or maybe they already have.

And there would be only one way to do it.

She used a burner phone to call the facility in Greenville.

The manager said in a cowed voice, “You’re not going to have me fired, are you? I really need this job.”

“How good are the firewalls on your computer network?”

“I don’t know anything about firewalls. But we have a guy. He’s a cousin of someone who works here and he gave us a good deal to—”

She hung up on the woman and checked the email she had given the facility in case of emergency. She had provided a phone number, too, which they had called when her mother went missing. But she felt sure the first contact would not be by phone. If ever.

And there it was.

Sitting in her email’s spam folder.

Hello and surprise. Took a while, but, like you, I don’t give up easy. The old bitch is well and full of shit, as always. We’ll need to talk about things. I’ll let you know when. Get cranked and buckle up because we’re taking this ride to a whole other level. It’s going to be a wild one, hon.

Take it to another level, will you? Well, that can cut both ways. But how did they find Mommy, and then me?

She let the possible scenarios flow through her mind.

The background cover was solid. Agnes was gaga so she wasn’t telling anybody anything. Greenville out of all places. So how?

The answer didn’t please her but it was inevitable.

They didn’t track Mommy to me, they tracked me to Mommy.

She went back over the last six months of her activity to see where the penetration might have come from. She consulted her notebooks and computer files and...

Frankfurt, Kentucky. A scam run on a horse breeder who thought himself a demigod of sorts. It was only a $250,000 operation, plus a racehorse that she’d later sold for a tidy sum. There had been no glitches.

The dickless senator with Angie. Again, nothing there. She hadn’t appeared on the scene until the very end.

Phillip Crandall. Now, that had been more involved. She had been invested in that one both digitally and in person. She flipped through her notebooks and then checked her schedule of appearances on the computer. She pulled up footage of the places where she had been seen on camera, but always in disguise. A disguise no one could see through, especially after all this time.

She flipped through screen after screen. The airport, the restaurants. The meeting places. Her conferring with her two conspirators, Bill and Joe. There was nothing that looked out of the ordinary. No one paying her the least bit of attention.

The building housing the fake Laser Focus.

It had nothing to do with Creative Engineering, the office space that she had used to dupe Phillip Crandall.

But Creative wasn’t the only business in the building. There was a wholesale jeweler, Stewart and Sons. She had previously read the news article but thought nothing of it at the time. They’d been robbed. Two million in uncut gems taken from a vault that was guaranteed as being pick-proof. It had been opened without any force whatsoever, which had led police to think it was an inside job. People had been questioned and arrested and then released for lack of evidence or alibis. Insurance paid the claim. The authorities were befuddled.

She was not. Not now.

The cleaning crew, of which I was a member for a short time. There was another woman my race, my age, and the right size.

She thought back. No, she never let me get a look at her, and she wore a COVID mask the whole time. But the crew had cleaned the jeweler’s shop. Clarisse had seen the impressive vault with its digital pad and laser trip wires and alarms all around. They had been strictly instructed not to go anywhere near it.

Two million in uncut gems, the easiest of all to fence. It would have netted her around half a million. Not bad for the time and effort.

How she had defeated the safe wasn’t all that complicated. Clarisse was surprised the local police were puzzled. She envisioned the vault in her mind. The laser trip wires were the first obstacle.

Needed: a number of mirrored surfaces built on a collapsible frame that when set up would redirect the lasers over their surfaces so the loop was unbroken, but leaving a gap in the middle to be exploited, like a running back going through a hole in the line created by his blockers. When done, it would collapse flat, go into a bucket of water, and become invisible.

Next, a ten-digit alarm pad was formidable with all the possible combinations. But knock it down to four numbers and it was quite doable by an app you could download on your phone. How do you knock it down to four?

She pantomimed shooting the digital pad with a substance that would luminesce under the right light. The person opening or locking the safe would hit only the requisite keys, leaving their luminous prints behind. That was how you eliminated six out of the ten possibilities. And that turned ten billion different possible combinations into ten thousand. That could be defeated in seconds.

Then, a place to secret the gems? The pole on the mop. It’s hollow. Open one end, slide them in, then drop in a long strip of precut Styrofoam so the gems would make no noise. She could have gone into that room and done it all in a couple of minutes.

And if she hadn’t been focused on separating Phillip Crandall from his money, she might have.

But somehow, against all the odds, she recognized me. She followed me. She found out what she needed. She knew I had traveled to Greenville. I flew commercial there twice. She was on the plane. She followed me to the assisted living facility. She bribed the people who worked there. Or, more likely — to avoid interacting with anyone there and leaving behind witnesses — she probably snuck in by pretending she was visiting someone else, and then sat down and gotten out of Agnes, in her lucid moments, all that she needed.

And Agnes wouldn’t tell me about it because she probably thought she was having one over on me. But then they took her and it’s obvious why.

So now I know how it could have happened. And I think I know who did it. But there my advantages stop. So they have Mommy and I have no idea where they have her. But I have one thing to do: close up this shop and open another. The trail on me goes cold now.

And Clarisse set about to do just that.

Mickey Gibson would have to wait a bit.