Simply Lies, page 14
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.
GIBSON WATCHED HER CHILDREN EAT their dinners, or rather Tommy wolf his down and Darby pick at hers. It was annoying but she could understand it. Gibson had been the same way when she was a kid. Her brothers had eaten everything in sight while she had been indifferent to food and thin as a rail. She touched her hips and closed her eyes.
Those were the days.
Later, she put the kids to bed and went to her office. She stared at the Batphone for about ten minutes before hitting the send button.
“Now is not a good time,” Clarisse said.
“Then why answer?”
“I thought it might be important. Is it?”
“I went by Nathan Trask’s place.”
“You told me that already.”
“But we didn’t finish our discussion. How in the hell do you expect me to ever get a face-to-face with the man? Stealth, as you suggested, isn’t going to cut it, unless I can become invisible.”
“I didn’t think it was my job to do your job.”
“I don’t remember being hired by you to do a job!” Gibson snapped. “Or did my paycheck go astray?”
“You are in this knee-deep, no, make that ass-deep. If Trask is involved in Langhorne’s death he knows all about you already.”
“You sound flustered.”
“Maybe I am. And maybe I don’t need to be your self-starter, Mickey. I thought you could motivate yourself. You’re a smart girl—act like it.”
“Maybe we should meet. On a Zoom.”
“Why?”
“I like to know who I’m dealing with.”
“You already know who you’re dealing with. Me.”
“You’re just a voice on the other end of the ether.”
“A voice who has spent quite a bit of time holding your hand and leading you down the path you need to go down. I suggest, from now on, you take it from here.”
The line went dead and Gibson slowly put the phone down.
She picked up the yearbook and went back over the pages. Her focus was now on some of the people in the audience. She went through them one by one. But that didn’t make sense to her. Why would Francine Langhorne be in the audience in Philly watching a college performance starring Mickey Rogers?
But then her focus changed—to the stage wings.
The backstage crew. They were typically all students at Temple and also some folks who worked at the university. She had helped a number of the students, becoming a mentor and shoulder to cry on when auditions or their tests went badly.
She took pictures of all the images with her phone and then sent them to her email. She fired up her computer and brought the images up on the large screen and then zoomed in on the faces in the wings. There were a lot of them. Stage productions needed a great deal of manpower whether in college or on Broadway. She went through the pictures one by one. Nothing clicked.
But why would it? You have photos of Francine Langhorne as a child.
Wait, could our paths have crossed when I was a cop? She knew I had been on the force in Jersey City. Did I arrest her at some point? I met a lot of people back then. And she obviously knew I worked at ProEye. But I really haven’t met anyone in person at ProEye. It’s basically all done on the computer.
She sighed and sat back. This was getting her nowhere fast.
Okay, set this aside for now and work to your strengths.
And that meant trying to find Pottinger’s assets by way of her cyber-sleuthing.
She obtained some of Pottinger’s personal information from his purchase of Stormfield. She used this to start building a baseline of the man’s financial activities.
And then, surprisingly, the Batphone rang. She answered it.
Clarisse said, “I apologize for being so abrupt before. I did have something else on my mind, but it was no excuse for rudeness.”
“Okay,” said Gibson grudgingly, taken aback by this abrupt turnaround.
“As for Trask, here is some advice. He has an army of aides and bodyguards and all the entourage of the king he thinks he is.”
“Which was my point. So how can I—” began Gibson.
“Why do you think he built a place in Virginia Beach when he could live anywhere in the world?”
“Okay, why?”
“His father, Sam Trask, lives in Virginia Beach, too,” said Clarisse.
“What! And you didn’t tell me this before because why?”
“I like to see people find out things for themselves.”
“Trask Senior obviously knows what his son really is,” noted Gibson.
“He does. Apparently during his career at the Bureau, they built a formidable case against his son. His father, of course, would have been no part of it because of conflict rules, but I heard that he was actually the leading force behind the scenes. But the case fell apart when a group of women, who could have sent Trask to prison for sex trafficking, were burned up in a hotel fire in San Antonio.”
“Trask’s work?” asked Gibson.
“Obviously, but nothing could be proven. Sam Trask retired from the Bureau at age fifty-seven, which is mandatory for special agents. After that he worked at Kroll International for over a decade. You know them?”
Gibson said, “Of course, one of the biggest and best known private security and investigation firms in the world. They’re a competitor of ProEye.”
“He did specialized work for them, using his breadth of knowledge and Rolodex acquired at the Bureau. His cases took him all over the world, and there was overlap with the sort of crimes his son was engaged in.”
“So you mean the father was still trying to take down his son?”
“It’s almost biblical, isn’t it?” remarked Clarisse. “Sam Trask is now eighty years old, retired, widowed, and has lived for five years at The Feathers, an assisted living center in Virginia Beach. He has some health issues, but word is the man still has his mental faculties.”
“And his son built that monstrosity after his father moved there?” said Gibson.
“Sort of like, ‘Look at me, I have this awesome place and you’re the one imprisoned at an assisted living facility.’ ”
“If I were Sam I’d up and move somewhere else. Make his son shell out the bucks to build another place.”
Clarisse said, “I’m not sure Sam Trask would give him the satisfaction of knowing that his son is still getting in his father’s head.”
“Does Nathan ever visit him?”
“His father obviously wants nothing to do with him, so he has refrained from trying. So maybe there’s your in.”
“What do you mean?” asked Gibson.
“Sam Trask knows more about his son than maybe anyone alive.”
“If that’s so, why hasn’t the son taken out the father?”
“He would be the prime suspect if that happened, and that would turn the FBI’s attention to him again. His father can’t really hurt him now, so why make that sort of trouble for himself?”
“So you want me to go and talk to the father?” asked Gibson.
“Do you have a better idea? Apparently not, because you called me initially complaining you had no shot at nailing Nathan Trask.”
“Whoa, nailing him?”
“Okay, getting information about him,” amended Clarisse.
“But the Langhorne murder was very recent. Sam Trask has been out of the game for years. What would he know about his son’s activities since then?”
“I said he retired. I didn’t say he was out of the game. And what will it hurt to go and ask the man?”
“But won’t Trask have him watched, especially if his father knows so much?” noted Gibson.
“Nothing that Sam Trask knows has been enough to touch the son. And if he is being watched, then you need to use ingenuity to get around that.”
“You make it sound so easy,” retorted Gibson.
“I didn’t involve you in this because it was easy. I brought you in because you’re good.”
“I’m a former cop. I can’t flit around conning people and doing illegal things.”
“Really? Then how did you find out that Daniel Pottinger was really Harry Langhorne? I would imagine you did some conning and flitting and illegal shit to score that info.”
Okay, I walked right into that one. “What do you think Sam Trask can tell me?”
“Isn’t that the whole point of asking? Okay, I’m done hand-holding. Oh, and one more thing.”
“Yeah?” said Gibson.
“A much younger Sam Trask was on the FBI task force that took down the mob bosses Harry Langhorne was working with. But I’m sure you already knew that, right?”
And with that Parthian shot, the line went dead again. And Gibson didn’t think Clarisse would be calling back a second time.
And maybe she’s right. I am half-assing this because I keep oscillating between whether I really want to be involved or not.
She went online and looked up The Feathers. It was quite an upscale place, about a dozen rungs above any place Gibson would be able to afford when her time came to retire.
The resident list wasn’t available, of course; she looked over the facility schematic. It had a memory wing for dementia patients, a library, a game room, a hair salon, an outdoor courtyard in the very center, fireplaces, a dining room, and other community spaces.
She was surprised when her Batphone dinged. Not a call but definitely a communication.
She opened the email and saw a picture of a distinguished-looking, elderly man. Written under it was: “Sam Trask. Good hunting.”
She studied the picture, and then thought how best to do this.
And when she had struck on a plan, Gibson had to admit that a bit of the excitement lost from her earlier professional life was starting to seep back into her. And it wasn’t just her time as a cop, but also her stint as a college thespian.
She checked on the kids, and woke Tommy from a devilish nightmare and held him until he fell back asleep. She had had night terrors as a child and understood quite clearly how bad they could be.
Gibson went to her room, set her alarm, and pulled the covers over herself, thinking of what she had once been and perhaps what she still could be.
WITH THE KIDS BATHED AND fed and Silva in charge, Gibson set out for The Feathers the following morning. She had on an outfit that she had last worn about two years ago. She had delivered Darby about three weeks before, and had still been carrying some of her pregnancy weight. She refused to borrow any more clothes from her mother.
She drove past The Feathers twice, each time looking for anyone surveilling the place. She didn’t believe that Nathan Trask was keeping his father under eyeballs 24/7, but the man had enough resources to justify Gibson’s going through the pains of checking.
Nothing looked amiss to her, so she drove into the parking lot, and went inside with a little gift bag and small bouquet of flowers she had purchased as part of her cover. There was a sign-in sheet, so she signed in, in an undecipherable scribble. She took her temperature with the device sitting next to the sign-in ledger, and saw that it was normal. A woman at the front desk, on the telephone, nodded at Gibson, who smiled back and held up the gift bag and flowers. The woman mouthed the words Very nice.
