Simply Lies, page 25
Gibson knows about Julia Frazier’s being in The Plains, Virginia. She knows about the comic book and the initials. She saw the phrase on the wall.
She opened a notebook labeled, simply, The Past.
She turned to one page and stared down at the initials she had written there.
BD and RE.
She had once been sentimental, sometimes even caring. She could no longer be that way. Part of her was okay with that, and part of her, a constantly diminishing part, wasn’t.
She rubbed her fingers across the letters B and D. He had been one of them. They had taken an oath, like the Mafia. You never turned on one of your own. Obviously, the years had dulled that solemn promise for some of them.
She looked at her Gibson burner phone. What was the woman doing right now? Tracking Julia Frazier’s rental from Dulles to The Plains and back? Had Barbara Cole been able to give enough of a description of Frazier? She wasn’t really worried about that. Clarisse knew exactly the outfit and wig and makeup she had worn at The Plains. She would never look anything like that again, having already excised the items from her inventory. And Gibson couldn’t know that Frazier and she were the same person.
The name, driver’s license, and credit card she had used at the rental car company were first-rate, with several walls of defense separating her and her alter ego. The problem was that Gibson was a trained investigator with ProEye-level resources.
And going forward those same resources might be used against me.
She went online and performed an extreme electronic scrub down to obliterate any pathway for Gibson to connect the dots on Julia Frazier.
Finished with that, she left her place and drove nearly three hours to an apartment she had been renting for several months. Inside the apartment she put on another wig, teased it into a dull, lifeless bowl shape, and wiped all the makeup off her face. She then put on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt and flat canvas shoes. She grabbed a small duffel bag and headed out. She drove the rental car to her destination and parked in the back lot of a building after swiping her ID, which hung on a lanyard, against the reader port at the gate. She got into the rear door of the building using the same ID card with the name April Nettles on it.
She had her bag opened and examined.
“You over COVID, Nettles?” said the uniformed guard at the security checkpoint. She was in her forties, and did not look happy to be where she was.
“Yeah, it was a bitch the third time around.”
“You’re lucky they kept your slot open.”
“You want me to come here and infect everybody? And who else would want to do this crap? You guys outsourced all this. No benefits, shitty hours, lousy soul-sucking work, and crummy pay. I wonder how long the line is to sign up? Ha!”
“Hey, it’s the American way. Screw the little people, and I include myself in that group.”
Clarisse crossed the hall to a locker room, where there was a fresh set of work scrubs that she put on. She joined a team of nine young women as they pushed their cleaning trolleys down a hall and onto a large freight elevator.
They rode it up to the next floor, where the doors opened. One woman, holding a clipboard, stood there and said, “Bowers and Nettles, this floor. Start right, go left.” She handed each of them a sheet with instructions and office layouts. “Just in case you forgot, which you probably have, Nettles.”
Clarisse hadn’t forgotten, and the forewoman knew it. Clarisse had paid her five hundred bucks to let her work this floor tonight. And because they didn’t pay the supervisors any better than they did the underlings, the woman had not hesitated to take the bribe.
The forewoman got on the elevator and rode it up with the other cleaning crews, while Clarisse joined with Bowers in pushing her trolley down the hall.
Clarisse said, “You’re new, right?”
“Second night,” said Bowers, a petite woman with short dark hair.
“Okay, I’ll go right, you go left. No reason to double up no matter what they say. We get done faster, maybe we can sneak a smoke break,” she added, seeing a pack of Marlboros sticking out of Bowers’s pocket.
“Sounds good to me.”
Bowers went on her way and Clarisse did the same.
She had a system in place and fast-cleaned her section in half the time allotted. She actually liked to clean. It was a process with an intended result. That was pretty much her life. Clarisse left her trolley in an office and slipped down the hall.
She knew where every surveillance camera was located and carefully threaded that needle.
Clarisse took the second key card from its hiding place behind her first one in the lanyard pocket. This was why she had come back tonight. After doing this crummy job she finally had the key to where she needed to go. Her time off had been necessary, though, since she had had other things to take care of. But one of them had been getting a clone of this key, and it was not an easy one to duplicate.
She darted into the office and went directly over to the desk. She had already secured the password for this computer. She sat down, entered the system, and began her search. She continually shot glances at the door as she worked away.
She accessed the files she wanted, inserted a thumb drive, which had been hidden in her Zippo lighter, and copied what she needed.
She put the thumb drive back into her lighter and secured the lid.
She left the office and met up with Bowers. They took their smoke break outside, propping open a door that was supposed to remain locked. Everyone took their smoke break here, and the ground was littered with butts. The powers that be, not wanting to scare off the few people willing to do this job, had turned the alarm off on this door for that very reason.
While Bowers wasn’t looking, Clarisse dropped her Zippo on the ground behind a bush. After her shift was done, she went through the security process, which, on the exit, included X-rays and rigorous searches of both persons and bags. She had not wanted to chance that they would find the thumb drive.
Clarisse left the building, circled back around to where they had taken their smoke break, and plucked her Zippo from behind the bush. She got into her rental car and drove back to her apartment.
She walked up to her place, unlocked the door, and went in.
The voice told her not to move.
So Clarisse didn’t.
THE PLACE WAS DARK AND it stayed dark.
Clarisse slowly took the Zippo containing the thumb drive from her pocket. She put it inside her jeans and then slipped it into her underwear, and finally secreted it inside herself. It hurt, but it might not hurt as much as what was about to come.
“Who are you? What are you doing in here?”
She observed movement to her right, a shadow only slightly darker than the dark.
“Up close and personal time,” said the voice. “And you know the who.” The shadow did not move. It didn’t have to. Clarisse indeed knew who it was.
“Mind telling me how you did it?”
The shadow moved closer. “Yes, I do mind. I don’t want you to reverse engineer. You were always damn good at that, better than me.”
“What do you want?” asked Clarisse.
“Obvious, right?”
“Not to me. I thought we had done the communication thing and knew where we stood.”
“Really? I’m disappointed. You were always quick on the uptake. You live by your wits. You falling down on the job now?”
“We had an arrangement, did we not?” said Clarisse.
“Maybe you thought we had one.”
“You going rogue?”
“I was born rogue. I thought we all were.”
Clarisse shook her head. “No, not born, made. You know that.”
“Maybe.”
“BD?” she asked.
“What about him?”
“Why?” asked Clarisse.
“Why not?”
“You broke the rule on that one,” said Clarisse.
“I make my own rules now. Have for years.”
“Still, you didn’t have to do it. You just needed his ID for the van to take my mother.”
“There are things you never knew. Things I protected you from.”
“He was sweet. He was kind. He didn’t deserve that. He loved comic books!”
“He loved lots of ‘things,’ not just comic books.”
“You’re lying,” snapped Clarisse.
“Just you saying it doesn’t make it so, babycakes.”
The person came into the feeble light filtering in from outside, but she still remained largely a shadow. Then she took one more step forward and could be seen fairly clearly.
The woman had changed. Greatly.
“You don’t look good,” said Clarisse.
“You, on the other hand, look amazing. Good enough to eat, babycakes, even with the dopey wig and plebian clothes. Plebian? Have I educated myself over the years or what?”
“ ‘Babycakes’ was your nickname, not mine,” retorted Clarisse.
“It would have been yours, but for me,” she said quietly, moving still closer.
Clarisse looked for a weapon on her person, even as her hand slipped inside her pocket. “Something I was always grateful for,” she said, her fingers closing around the cylinder of pepper spray in her pocket.
“Well, then start appreciating me again. We were all each other had for a long time. And from what I’ve seen that hasn’t changed. Tell me if I’m wrong. Are you married? Do you have kids? A significant other?” She smiled. “I know you’ve got nobody.”
“I had Mommy. But you have her now.”
“Mommy is just fine, never better. She’s costing me a mint in Ensure, though, but it’ll take more than that to keep her alive. She, like me, doesn’t look so good.”
“She’s had a rough life.”
“She just sat there and stared at that rough life consuming all of us. Same as my bitch of a mother.”
“I told you what I was going to do,” said Clarisse. “So I don’t know why you’re here. And I don’t know how you found me here.”
“You think you’re the only one checking out the Feds? I was on the day cleaning shift for a month and scoping out the night shift when the time came. What a treasure trove of shit that was. And then I found you.”
“I thought you’d picked up my trail on the cleaning crew at the Creative Engineering building in North Carolina.”
“I did, but I picked you up back there, too. Wasn’t hard.”
“What was it? What gave me away?”
“Okay, I’ll tell you. It was the swagger. Change the hair, face, clothes, body, but you can’t change the way you walk. At least not to me.”
“But, really, how could you be sure?”
“I’ll tell you,” she purred. “No one else on the cleaning crew went to pick up a Zippo from behind a bush off the smoking exit.”
“Great minds,” said Clarisse, her fingers gripping the pepper spray.
“So did you find what you were looking for?”
“Maybe. Does it matter to you?”
“It all matters to me, babycakes. Where’s the stash you found?”
“In a safe place.”
She grabbed Clarisse’s crotch. “Down there, right? Same old hiding place. You need a new location, babycakes.” She let go.
Clarisse drew a quick breath. Deflect and counterattack. “ ‘Do as I say’? Why use that?”
“It was his mantra. Did you forget?”
“I can’t forget any of that.”
“There you go, then. Seemed fitting, after all.”
“Where is Dougie?” asked Clarisse.
“No idea.”
“You’re lying. He was always loyal to you. Did anything you wanted.”
“If you don’t want to believe me, don’t. By the way, you gonna pull that thing you’re holding in your pocket and try and hurt me with it? Go on and try. It might be fun.”
“I was certainly thinking about it.”
“Well, think about this instead.”
Clarisse felt the tip of the knife bite into her neck. She felt the drop of blood freed from her body. It meandered down her long neck like a skier on fluffy snow. “Is that the knife you used to kill Bruce?”
“No, you’re special. This one is even sharper.”
“You kill me, no treasure.”
“Maybe I have enough money.”
“Nobody has enough money.”
She made one more small nick, her hand wielding the blade like a surgeon. “Tomorrow is promised to no one, but I’m promising it to you, babycakes.”
And then she was gone.
Clarisse locked the door, hurried to the bathroom, and checked her wounds. They were precise cuts, as close together as snake fangs.
Or a vampire’s mark.
And all done in the dark. Impressive.
She cleaned them, bandaged them.
And then threw up.
GIBSON WAS STARING AT HER computer screen the next day when the phone rang.
That phone.
“Hello?”
“Mickey?” said Clarisse.
“Are you all right? You sound . . . shaky.”
“So do you.”
Gibson hesitated and then just decided to tell her. “I had a visitor the other night.” She went on to tell Clarisse about her being kidnapped and interrogated.
Clarisse said nothing for a few moments. “Nathan Trask? You’re sure?”
“I don’t know if he was there personally, but it was definitely him behind it. And don’t tell me you’re sorry because I won’t believe it. He wants the money that Langhorne stole from him.”
“He’s more concerned with the loss of face than the money. I made a deal with him to recover it. I would get a piece of the action.”
“What!”
“Oh come on, don’t act all surprised. I’m not doing this for the fun of it.”
Gibson said, “Well, I made the same deal with him. I had no choice if I wanted to walk out of there alive.”
“Winner takes all.”
“You make it sound like some sort of competition.”
“Maybe it is.”
“And why do you sound off?” asked Gibson.
“I had a visitor, too.”
“Who, Trask’s goons, too?” said Gibson.
“No. Not Trask.”
“Who then? And what did they want?”
“They want the treasure, too, Mickey. And maybe more than that.”
“Meaning what exactly?”
“Something that has to remain between me and them.”
“If we’re open with each other, it might improve our chances of survival.”
“I’m actually regretting involving you,” conceded Clarisse.
“Why exactly did you involve me? You could probably find the treasure without my help.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Only if you make it so.”
“I make everything complicated. It’s how I’m wired.”
“I’ve never heard you be this candid. That visit must have really shaken you.”
“I don’t like it when people can find me. Do you?” Clarisse snapped.
“I’m not in hiding.”
“Well, I am.”
With this stunning admission Gibson sensed vulnerability in the woman, for perhaps the first time. And she wasn’t quite sure how to play it. She decided to attack. The kidnapping by Trask’s people had lent a sense of urgency that was undeniable.
“Julia Frazier?”
“Who?” Clarisse said offhandedly.
A few seconds before, Gibson had connected the phone to her computer’s dongle and fired up her voice analyzer. She now watched on the screen as the arrow stayed rock steady.
She wondered what her next questions would do to the woman.
“Why were you in The Plains that day? Are you RE? And did you care for Bruce Hall aka Bruce Dixon aka Daryl Oxblood? RE and BD? I read it in a comic book. Just asking. Was it shocking to find his body like that?”
Clarisse ended the call.
Gibson stared at her screen where the stress arrow had crashed right through the top bar like a bolt of lightning reversing to the heavens.
For some weird reason, it didn’t make her feel any better.
CLARISSE WAS ON A TRAIN, for the first time in a long time. She had decided against another plane ride. She wanted to be tethered to the earth right now. She could not jump out at 35,000 feet, but she could leave a train with relative ease.
She had packed everything from her rental into two bags and Ubered to the train station. Just to be safe, she had gone into the women’s room, changed her appearance in a stall, and exited the bathroom with one small duffel.
She boarded the train and headed north. She stared out the window into the deepening darkness. As the train picked up speed and the ride became gently swaying, she closed her eyes and tried to process what had happened.
There were two major events, neither one of them good for her.
She tracked me down. All my precautions, all my work, and she still managed to do it.
She touched the wound on her neck.
Would she have cut it all the way?
Look what she did to Bruce.
She pressed her fingers against the coolness of the window.
Next up were Gibson’s stunning revelations. She knows I was Julia Frazier in The Plains. And she’s figured out the connection to Bruce Dixon.
I’ve got two of them breathing down my neck, literally.
Then her spine firmed.
Come on. You’ve got this. They haven’t beaten you yet.
She took out her laptop and inserted the thumb drive in the dongle.
She brought up the files and quickly sorted through them.
The one she was looking at now was, in a nutshell, all the US Marshals Service had on the Langhorne family.
She knew most of it, but not all. She saw pictures of Harry Langhorne when he had been the mob accountant. Tall, somewhat nice-looking, but the arrogance in those eyes, the evil lurking inside what most would assume was a mild-mannered dollars-and-cents counter.
She went through the man’s history, from cradle to, now, the grave. The file had dutifully been updated to include the death (murder, technically) of Harry Langhorne, aka Daniel Pottinger. But that hadn’t ruined the marshal’s perfect record, since Langhorne had left WITSEC long before he was killed.
