Simply Lies

Chapter 63

The next morning, after feeding her kids and then handing them over to Silva, Gibson rushed to her office and fired up her computer.

Her search this time focused on Wilson Sullivan.

He had joined the El Paso police force at age twenty-one. He moved up there before heading to a comparable position in Arkansas, where he achieved his detective status. After that were short stints in South Carolina, then North Carolina, and, finally, Virginia.

That was a lot of hopping around, she thought. She didn’t know if that was because he was just that type, or whether the police forces had asked him to leave. If so, she might be able to dig up something unless they had buried it, which, she knew, police departments often did.

And the thing was she could find nothing about him before he joined the police force in Texas. It was like a black hole. She went on sites that she used for ProEye to do more sophisticated searches and pulled a big fat zero on them.

Okay, put a pin in Sullivan and move on to something else.

She pulled up the photo she had of Francine Langhorne and compared it to her recollection of Clarisse from the previous night. Maybe a hint around the nose, the slightly off-kilter luminous eyes that gave them considerable depth, but she couldn’t be sure that the decades-old grainy photo of a little girl with big, sad eyes was the adult woman who had been in her house.

She next pondered the clue that Langhorne had left behind.

It’s the twenty-first century, act like it.

She knew better than most that there were many modern ways to hide money, assets, treasure. One didn’t need a safe-deposit box, or a bus locker ticket, or a trunk and a shovel with which to dig a hole.

And if she had learned anything while at ProEye, it was that assets were liquid and nonliquid, but one could be made into the other with blinding speed and done so behind a wall of secrecy. And those assets could be transformed and transferred in ways that would make it nearly impossible to trace their origins.

The one twenty-first-century possibility that leapt to her mind was cryptocurrency. Ironically, this esoteric system of creating value — which was tied to reams of numbers spewed out by oceans of computers — could usually be traced fairly easily. This was because of the system’s stringent registration requirements, which were the only things that made crypto valuable.

Even though it seemed that bitcoin had been around since the Roman Empire, it had only been created in 2008 by a still-unknown person using the alias Satoshi Nakamoto.

Once you registered an account online and took possession of your coins — which weren’t really coins, but digital assets — your account was placed on a blockchain. The blockchain was the electronic ledger that kept everyone honest and the bitcoin worth anything. With that Gibson could find what you had, even perhaps if you later placed it in a secure wallet. This wallet wasn’t made of leather; it was more likely in the form of a thumb drive — like device, but still tethered to the blockchain.

The FBI had long exploited the fact that persons using bitcoin for illicit purposes weren’t as careful as they should have been. They got impatient, or tried shortcuts. That had cost the creator of the billion-dollar Silk Road drug operation his freedom, and it put in prison another ambitious criminal with a $150 million Ponzi scheme. And it had cratered a young Frenchman’s multi-million-dollar embezzlement plan. All thieves using bitcoin. All caught and held accountable because they had messed up.

Gibson thought of the digital evidence left behind for the cops and people like her to find as Bitcoin Breadcrumbs.

But folks were getting more careful because if Gibson or the cops found you on the blockchain, it wasn’t just one illicit transaction that would be exposed. It would be everything you ever did with crypto. Since crypto was a fairly recent phenomenon, Gibson knew that Langhorne had to have put his stolen mob money elsewhere for many years.

Gibson’s fingers flew over the keys, and for the next hour she looked for the obvious places where Langhorne might have buried his ill-gotten fortune.

And she came up with exactly nothing.

Why would I think the asshole would make it easy?

She was about to try another search when her phone rang. Her real phone.

It was Zeb Brown.

“What’s up?” asked Gibson.

When Brown didn’t answer right away, she knew something was up. “Zeb?”

“Look, Mick, the company wanted me to email you, but I told them that you deserved better.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m afraid ProEye is letting you go.”

The blood drained from her face. “Letting me go? Why?”

“They didn’t give me a reason, just a directive.”

“I thought I was on leave. I thought that things had been explained. You told me so.”

“I thought so, too, until the phone call I got.”

“You’re telling me you have no inkling why this happened?”

“Look, I’m not supposed to say anything.”

“Say it anyway, Zeb, this is serious to me. I’m a single mom with two little kids.”

“Someone here got a call from somebody. And that got it rolling.”

“Who?” demanded Gibson.

“I don’t know, but it was apparently someone important. But on the bright side, they’re giving you two months’ severance. And you already got the Larkin bonus, of course.”

“There is no bright side to getting canned. And how about my family health insurance?” said a panicked Gibson.

“You can go on the marketplace.”

“The open enrollment period has passed for this year.”

“You can do COBRA.”

“Do you know how expensive that is? ProEye was picking up the premium. And with no job what exactly am I supposed to use to pay for it?”

“I’m really sorry, Mick. But you’ll get hired somewhere else. You’re really good. I’ll give you a reference. Again, I’m sorry.”

“Can’t you poke around and find out who got me canned?”

But he had already clicked off.

Gibson stared at her stunned reflection in the black of her dormant computer screen.

What in the hell had just happened?