Poisonfeather (The Gibson Vaughn Series Book 2)

by Matthew Fitzsimmons

  He’d meant what he’d said to Birk and Swonger—he doubted he could succeed where the Justice Department had failed, but he had to know for certain. So in the middle of the second night, he roused himself from bed and started a file on Charles Merrick. Gibson didn’t know a thing about him, but the man had a name and a past—the only two things Gibson needed. Unlike the anonymous cowards who had snatched the Spectrum Protection job away. Perhaps it was precisely because Gibson’s own problems seemed insurmountable that Charles Merrick quickly became a stand-in for all of Gibson’s fury.

  So he did what he always did when contemplating a hack—he crawled into Charles Merrick’s life. Merrick’s celebrity made it easier than it might otherwise have been. Libraries could be filled with all that had been written about Charles Merrick, and Gibson immersed himself in the minutiae of the man’s life: pulling key words and phrases, compiling lists of biographical details, sifting through the data for the patterns and habits that defined Charles Merrick. Two books told the story of Merrick’s financial downfall, and Gibson picked the better reviewed: A Shark in Shark’s Clothing: The Rise and Fall of Merrick Capital. He wasn’t sure what else it would tell him, because the man’s life had been completely documented online and in the press, but it paid to be thorough. Piece by piece, Gibson built a time line and picture of the man’s life. By the end of the week, he knew Charles Merrick’s life backward and forward.

  Perhaps what he ought to be doing was finding a job. That’s what the judge would have wanted Gibson to do. But it simply was not in him. Like a runner who’d finished a grueling marathon, only to discover the finish line had been moved farther down the road, he didn’t have the will to start the race again. He was exhausted, and besides, what was the point? Even if he landed another job, they would just snatch it from him like they had the Spectrum Protection job. Whoever they were.

  He rationalized his decision by telling himself that Merrick was a small job, if it was anything at all—a few weeks at the outside. That it was something he needed to do for the judge. But the truth was that once the familiar adrenaline burn took hold, his vision became increasingly narrow and myopic. The world beyond Charles Merrick lost its ability to command his attention. Even his daughter’s name, which could always galvanize him to action, had no effect. He was ashamed that it didn’t, but even the shame couldn’t deter him. Not now.

  Gibson looked up at Merrick’s magazine cover taped to the wall above his makeshift desk and smiled. In the last twenty-four hours, a detail from the Finance magazine interview had begun to bother him. Gibson nearly dismissed it as nothing until YouTube finally connected the dots.

  Prior to his arrest, Merrick had been in demand as a public speaker, and Gibson found an entire YouTube channel devoted to his speeches. The man was electric in front of an audience, charismatic and cocksure. He would have thrived in politics. And like a politician, Merrick tended to give variations on the same speech. Gibson watched several of them, hoping to get a read on his personality. Midway through the third, he reached for the magazine and flipped to the end of the interview. Rewinding the speech, he listened to Merrick reiterate his motto about pennies being the new million. Almost. There was one key difference. Gibson clicked through several different speeches—same difference in each one between his lectures and the Finance article. He reread the line in the interview. It was a small thing, possibly a typo. A small discrepancy that might be nothing or might mean that Charles Merrick’s money wasn’t in the proverbial Swiss vault. If Gibson’s hunch was right, Merrick had remained in close control of his fortune from prison. That required a network of some kind. And networks were always vulnerable.

  Only one person knew for sure—Charles Merrick. But Lydia Malkin, the reporter who had conducted the interview, would do in a pinch. Where are you, Lydia Malkin? Foot tapping excitedly, he Googled her, all thoughts of finding a job forgotten. It was only Merrick now.

  Merrick just didn’t know it yet.

  His attempt at bluster fell flat, cornball and hokey in his ear. He was trying to pump himself up to do something that he didn’t believe possible. More than that, something he knew better than to try. Was he really going to chase Lydia Malkin down about a single word in an interview? And if he was right? What then? Would he travel to Niobe Federal Prison despite the judge begging him to stay away? If those two knuckleheads, Birk and Swonger, had deciphered Merrick’s boast, then how many others had reached a similar conclusion? How far was he going to push it?

  He was afraid he already knew the answer to that.

  He remembered an old framed map of the world that had hung in his father’s office in Charlottesville. At its margins, far out to sea, the mapmaker had written, in ominous letters, “Here there be monsters.” He’d asked his father what it meant, and his father had said, Some lines you can’t uncross, Gib. It means be sure.

  In the end, Gibson traced Lydia Malkin to an address in Queens, New York, through her food. She belonged to that curious segment of the populace who obsessively photographed their meals in restaurants and posted it online. Gibson didn’t get it, but it definitely made her easy to find since she also hadn’t bothered to turn off the GPS metadata that her phone embedded in each photograph. It was just a matter of triangulating her location based on the places she frequented regularly. She ordered from New Good One Chinese Restaurant at least twice a week and really had a thing for their dumplings. It turned out to be only a block and a half from where she lived on Astoria Boulevard; the delivery guy was more than happy to reunite Gibson with his “sister” for forty bucks.

  He waited outside her building under an awning for two hours. Dumplings were starting to sound good. Across the street, Lydia Malkin finally came out. He watched her cross the street toward him; in person, she looked younger than he’d expected. Maybe it was the fact that she was barely five feet tall. She seemed taller on TV. Since the Merrick issue of Finance had hit the newsstands, she’d been a busy woman. Appearances on all the major cable news networks, interviews in which she’d acquitted herself ably. But while he’d been impressed by how assured she was on camera, she hadn’t answered the question he needed answered.

  He felt more than a little stalkerish tracking her down this way. He hadn’t liked resorting to it, but his efforts to contact her using more conventional methods had been met with silence. Understandably so. Her star was in the ascendancy, and who was he? But he needed answers and didn’t have any more time for social niceties. The clock was ticking on Merrick’s release, and Gibson felt late to the party. Hopefully the price of a round-trip ticket to New York City would leapfrog him to the front of the line.

  The seven a.m. Amtrak from Union Station had allowed him to continue his homework on Mr. Charles Merrick. And there was always more to learn. It was astounding how much press Merrick had received even before his arrest. Easy to see why, though. Merrick was an extremely quotable interviewee. Outspoken to the point of recklessness, the man had a knack for the controversial and seemed wholly unafraid of the media. There was a tactical flamboyance in the way Merrick spoke to reporters.

  That was a good word for it. Gibson had stopped reading and typed “flamboyant” into the file he was creating on Merrick. Research was the cornerstone of any successful hack. Knowing your targets better than they knew themselves: their habits, the name of their high-school English teacher, the street they grew up on, their children’s birthdays. Gibson compiled it all, because you never knew what would turn out to be the key to unlocking someone’s personal security. Personal experience was most people’s first point of personal security. Despite the howls of warning from security experts, people went on believing their memories were private. They weren’t. An entire generation was conveniently compiling its personal history on social media websites. Convenient to people like Gibson Vaughn.

  Charles Merrick’s background seemed typically privileged. He claimed to be self-made, but Gibson didn’t know how self-made you could be growing up in a wealthy enclave of C
onnecticut. According to his transcripts, Merrick had coasted through his elite education, attending high school at Groton, a boarding school in Massachusetts, followed by an undergraduate degree in history from Dartmouth and an MBA from Wharton. There he’d met his future ex-wife, Veronica Barrett-Hong, whose WASP and Chinese family lines had sired a tireless overachiever. Unlike Merrick, Veronica had graduated summa cum laude from Wharton to accompany her undergraduate degree in economics from Yale. They’d married the summer before starting jobs on Wall Street, Veronica again the more impressive of the two, so it came as some surprise when Charles Merrick announced the creation of Merrick Capital while Veronica segued into the role of socialite and mother. They were a formidable pair, and as Merrick Capital roared to success in the late nineties, they’d risen together—stars of the New York scene with a home overlooking Central Park, a summer house in Southampton, a spectacular apartment on the Île de la Cité in Paris, and, in London, a house in Kensington.

  After his arrest, Charles and Veronica Merrick had endured an ugly and public New York divorce. Veronica Merrick’s newly minted status as social pariah had not sat well with her. Her revenge consisted of scorching what little remained of her husband’s reputation and sprinkling the ashes across the New York tabloids. A steady stream of unsubstantiated gossip about drug use, infidelity, and physical abuse flowed from unattributed sources as the divorce dragged through the courts. It took several years for the Justice Department to sort out whether there were any assets for Veronica Merrick to contest. In the end, she’d walked away with almost nothing. Before the arrest, the Merricks’ net worth was estimated in the billions. Veronica Merrick had a little money left to her by her parents, but it was no understatement to say that her standard of living had taken an ungainly swan dive from the balcony of her old life.

  Currently, Veronica Merrick resided in Miami in a rented one-bedroom condo, as reported by several articles gleefully describing her pedestrian lifestyle. America did enjoy a good comeuppance. There was no love lost between the former husband and wife, and at this point, she was probably a dead end for cracking Charles Merrick. Merrick seemed the sort who would need to celebrate his triumphs and erase his failures. Veronica Merrick fell in the latter category.

  The Merricks had one daughter, Chelsea Merrick. Unlike her mother, Chelsea seemed a promising angle. The daughter had followed in her father’s footsteps to Groton and had been accepted to Brown. Her college-application essay, leaked to Gawker.com, was an adoring paean to her father. Father-daughter photographs painted Merrick as especially doting, and Gibson found numerous mentions of her in his interviews. She’d been a beautiful girl, mixing the best from both parents. Her mother’s delicate bone structure and her father’s eyes and spectacular blond hair, which cascaded down her back. His third hedge fund had even been named “Chelsea” in her honor.

  During the trial, his assets frozen, Merrick had quietly emptied his daughter’s trust fund to pay his legal bills. Chelsea Merrick had never enrolled at Brown, and instead gone west to find herself, abandoning New York before it abandoned her. She’d worked for a spell as a waitress at a ski resort in Colorado before moving to Oregon. Gibson found her transcripts from the University of Portland, an incoherent assortment of courses but no degree. After that, a spotty job history in and around Portland before she dropped out of sight. Gibson had decided to continue looking; the memory of an adoring daughter would be something Charles Merrick would cling to in prison.

  As soon as Gibson stepped out of the shade, he reached for his sunglasses. It was a brilliant, cloudless day, and Lydia Malkin moved quickly along Astoria Boulevard. She covered a lot of ground in a hurry for someone her height, and Gibson found himself trotting to keep up, afraid to lose sight of her on the busy street. He was skilled at finding people but not so good at following them. The Marines had taught him many skills, but tailing a woman through New York hadn’t been among them.

  Lydia Malkin stopped to look at something in a store window. Not knowing what else to do, Gibson did the same and found himself staring stupidly in the window of a take-out chicken joint. When he glanced up she had doubled back toward him. Not toward him—at him. When he met her eyes, he knew he was busted.

  “Who are you with?” she demanded.

  “What?”

  “I’m not giving interviews. That’s all got to go through the magazine. You have to talk to Peter Moynihan directly.”

  “I’m not a reporter.”

  “Then why are you following me? Please don’t be a stalker. That would be so boring,” she said, channeling her best Dorothy Parker.

  “I need your help.”

  “With?”

  “Charles Merrick.”

  She said, “Ha” in lieu of laughing. “Get in line.”

  He looked around. “Think I’m at the front of it right now.”

  She made a face suggesting it was a passably clever retort. “Why should I help you?”

  “Goodness of your heart?”

  “Aw . . . first day in New York, sweetie?”

  “All right, how about you help me and I don’t publicize the real reason you wanted to interview Merrick?”

  That stopped her. She gave him a second once-over. “Well, you’re a quick study. I’ll give you that.” She checked the time on a clunky sports watch on her wrist. “I’ve got thirty minutes.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “You can have fifteen of them . . . insert name here.”

  “Ben Rizolli,” Gibson said, naming a kid he’d known in elementary school.

  They ducked into a grim railroad bar. Inside, they ordered drinks from a massive bearded bartender who looked at them like they were lost.

  “Bombay Sapphire and tonic,” Lydia said. “Three limes.”

  “What?” the bartender asked.

  “To which part?”

  “The Bombay part.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “No, I’m not kidding you, princess.”

  “A gin and tonic.”

  “Well, then say that.”

  “Come for the smell, stay for the customer service.” Lydia rolled her eyes and left Gibson to pay and found a table toward the back. Gibson ordered the first beer he saw on the row of taps, tipped heavily, and went to join her. She sat back lazily in her chair, watching him and stirring her gin and tonic. He finished his beer in three long gulps.

  “Prick forgot my limes.”

  “They don’t have limes.”

  “Of course they don’t,” she said and changed the subject. “You know, you’re the first one to figure it out.”

  “How much did they lose?”

  “Everything. But only half to Merrick. The other half went to Madoff.”

  “No way.”

  She laughed. “Right? My parents, the two-time losers. Way to diversify your portfolio, folks.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “Mom’s surviving,” she said, turning serious. “She’s not having the retirement she earned, but she’s surviving.”

  “And your dad?”

  “My mom survives him too.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, well, what are you going to do?”

  “That why you went after Merrick?”

  She nodded. “Didn’t think I’d get half of what I did, but the man has issues with women. Couldn’t help himself. Almost felt bad, but I just handed him the shovel; he did his own digging. So what’s your story? Your parents ride the Merrick express too?”

  “This isn’t about my parents.”

  “Not a reporter. Not personal. So what then? You some kind of private detective?”

  “No, I think I established that with my crappy tailing.”

  “True.”

  “How did you spot me anyway?”

  “I’m five foot nothing and live in Queens. My entire life is built around spotting men taking an unhealthy interest in me. I caught you not looking at me when I came out of the apartment.”r />
  “Damn.”

  “You’re big; I’m smart. Only chance I’ve got.” She tried her drink and put it back down. “Wow, that is literally the worst. Is this left over from a prohibition bathtub?”

  “Get you something else?”

  “No, but you can tell me what it is you want from me. This is your blackmail thing after all.”

  “I’m sorry for that.”

  “What’re you gonna do?” she said again with a shrug. “Finance would not take kindly to those kinds of undisclosed conflicts of interest. I’m actually kind of surprised no one has called me on it yet. It’ll come out eventually. Always does. Not like I tried to hide it.”

  “What happens then?”

  “Depends on how the media reacts. The magazine will act to protect their reputation. Peter will have to suspend me. Maybe fire me.”

  “You’re not worried about it?”

  “I’ll take a hit, but in the long run it will probably be good for my career. The Merrick interview got my name out there. Spin it right, and I might even come out the hero. Daughter sticks it to man who ruined her parents. Has a nice populist ring to it, don’t you think?”

  “So why are you talking to me?”

  She shrugged. “Never been blackmailed before. Got to admit, you have me curious. Truth, I’ve always had a naughty blackmail fantasy, and you’re kind of cute in a Chris Pratt sort of way. Buff Chris Pratt, not Parks and Rec Chris Pratt. Not really my type, but I can work with it. If you ever get around to telling me what you want, I mean.”

  It was all bull, but she was having a good time pushing his buttons, using her natural brashness to unsettle him. Gibson played along, dropping his head as though embarrassed, letting her feel in control of the situation.

  “Are you blushing?” she asked. “No blushing. You are totally going to ruin this for me if you blush. You cannot be a blackmailer and be this easy to mess with.”

  “Sorry.”

  She stabbed at her drink in mock disappointment.

  “Well, the moment, as they say, is over, so you may as well ask whatever it is you came to ask.”