“Gibson . . .” Toby trailed off, but Gibson knew the rest. He’d berated himself with some version of it for the last couple of days—what are you thinking? So far he hadn’t found an answer that mattered to him more than doing right by Judge Birk.
“I know,” he said lamely, and when that wasn’t enough, “I know.”
Last year, during the hunt for Suzanne Lombard, he’d called Nicole in the middle of the night and sent her into hiding. It had been a precaution, but it had strained his already-fragile relationship with his ex-wife. When he came back, she’d waited for an explanation that he couldn’t give—there was no way to tell her some without telling her all of it, and there were parts that he had sworn not to share with anyone. Too much was at stake. Nicole understood how important Suzanne was to him and hadn’t pressed him on it. But she had made it absolutely clear that if he endangered Ellie again, there would be consequences.
Yet here he was.
Across the table, Toby spread his hands in a gesture that said, I cannot help you if you will not help yourself.
“I know,” he said again.
“Then why?”
“Because I owe.”
Nicole met him at the door when he dropped Ellie off at home. She ushered Ellie inside and told their daughter to go upstairs. That should have tipped him off to trouble, but he was too taken aback by the transformation in his wife. Ex-wife. Her fledgling catering business was starting to take off, and tonight had been an audition for a new client. It was the first time he’d seen her dressed for work. Gibson tried and failed not to stare. His ex-wife had always been effortlessly beautiful, never working too hard at her appearance. She was working at it now.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her in heels. She wore an understated, elegant pencil skirt that flirted with her knees, topped by a tailored white blouse. She’d always hated necklaces, but a silver pendant sparkled on her breastbone. Her makeup, although subtle, made her features pop in a way that was new, framing her eyes and accentuating her high cheekbones. Since he’d seen her last, she’d changed her hair, which for as long as he’d known her she’d always worn below her shoulders. Now it was at least twelve inches shorter and fell in a sleek, styled line along her jaw. She looked sensational, but he felt strangely melancholic at the change. He felt a stab of irrational possessiveness—her hair looked great, but what was wrong with how she’d worn it when they were married?
He mustered up a smile for his ex-wife. “Your hair looks great.”
She thanked him, her voice as despairingly barren as it always was when speaking to him. A studied indifference that she’d perfected in the time since his affair had ended their marriage.
“Any word about the job?”
He should have told her the truth. He could have brushed it off and said he was still waiting to hear. Lying to Nicole had always been a waste of breath—they’d known each other since high school and married while he was in the Corps. She was the one person he could never fool. Instead, he launched into a lie. A stupid, unsustainable lie. Spectrum loved him. The job was a go. How excited he was to get started. What a great opportunity it would be. Talked about how busy he was likely to be as he got up to speed, figuring it would give him cover while he was in West Virginia.
“Maggie called,” Nicole interrupted.
That stopped him dead in his tracks, and his mouth went silent as if she’d reached out and snatched language from him. Maggie was Nick Finelli’s wife. She and Nicole were friends from back when he and Nick were in the service together. Gibson could tell from her eyes that Maggie had told her everything. A fragile second passed. Caught in a lie, the smart thing to do was own it. Nicole was angry, but it was still salvageable once everyone cooled off. He could have pled humiliation and embarrassment at being thrown out of the polygraph. All of which was true. Instead, he went the other way, picking the fight that often grew out of the faulty logic of liars after they’d been caught out: Nicole had played along with his deception, encouraged him, so if you really thought about it, it was her fault. She’d made him lie to her, which seemed in this blind moment to be the more outrageous of the two deceptions.
“Oh, what the hell, Nicole?” he exploded at her. “You knew? And so what . . . you’re trapping me now? Is that what this is? That’s such bullshit.”
Nicole didn’t take the bait, her voice striking an even more neutral, dispassionate chord. The tone that always infuriated and then broke him. “So now it’s my fault that you’re a liar?”
“Fuck you.”
“Were you in Atlanta last summer?”
“What?” He tried to stop the question leaving his lips. There was no sloppier admission of guilt to a hard question than feigning momentary deafness. It was the question that he’d been steeling himself against ever since the Suzanne Lombard investigation. He just hadn’t been expecting it now, on top of everything else. Nicole should have been a boxer.
“What have you done?” she asked.
“What?” he heard himself say again.
“Goddamn it. Were you in Atlanta? Is that why I had to go into hiding?”
“Why are you asking me this?”
“Because a man came to my door tonight asking about Benjamin Lombard and Atlanta.”
No doubt the same man who had questioned Toby at the diner. But coming around where his daughter lived? Gibson thought he’d like to have a conversation with this man.
“Are you going to tell me?” she asked.
“I can’t. I’m sorry.”
Nicole stood in the doorway a long time, studying him.
“You can’t? Were you always this person?” she asked rhetorically. “God, I’m such a cliché.”
“Nicole . . .” His voice a pleading teardrop.
“No. I have wasted so much of my life on you. There’s something not right about you.”
For a moment, in the white-hot vacuum that followed, the only sound Gibson heard was the martial pounding of the blood in his ears. He felt a finger graze an unforgivable switch, and whatever crossed his face shook his ex-wife. Her hand went to the doorknob, a tremulous fear in her eyes. It broke him. Is this what you are now? He stumbled back from the door, down the walk to his car. He didn’t dare look back to the house.
When he’d driven several blocks away, he pulled to the curb and screamed. His hands, bloodless on the steering wheel, tried and failed to rip it free.
Gibson slipped into his apartment sometime after one a.m. He’d driven around until he felt under control of himself, steering clear of the Nighthawk and Toby’s disapproving glances. In a corner of the living room, Swonger snored quietly from the floor, a jean jacket draped over him for warmth. Gibson lifted a blanket from his bed and draped it over him. Then he took his laptop into the bedroom and shut the door—there was something he needed to check.
The drive had given him time to think about who had been nosing around asking questions, and something that Birk had said back at the farm nagged at him. Something about the “other stuff” that Gibson had done. Birk had winked at him when he’d said it. Gibson had been preoccupied at the time, but now it felt like he’d swallowed a red-hot cigarette lighter. He opened his laptop and did something that he hadn’t done in years—he typed his name into a search engine.
Pages of results unfurled. Most of which fell into the ancient-history category: stories about the Benjamin Lombard hack, his arrest, and the subsequent trial. A few articles dated after Lombard’s death mentioned Gibson in cursory fashion. He didn’t care about any of these. He scanned down the list looking for something else . . . something out of the ordinary.
He found it on the third page of results.
A website called AmericanJudas.com listed Gibson’s name in its citation. Gibson clicked on the link. The site, which was run by someone who called himself Tom Pain, trafficked in most of the stock modern-day conspiracy theories about 9/11, climate change, vaccines, autism, the origin of AIDS, and so on. The list went on and on, but o
nly one topic stuck out to Gibson:
The Assassination of Vice President Benjamin Lombard
Gibson sucked in a breath and clicked through to that tab. Inside, Gibson found a rambling treatise speculating that Lombard’s cause of death in Atlanta was anything but natural. Ironically, Gibson shared the same sentiment. However, the author’s theories were hilariously off-target. Or would have been hilarious, if they didn’t feature Gibson so prominently.
Exhibit A was a photograph of a page from a Secret Service logbook. As the website took pains to point out, the log bore the same date as Benjamin Lombard’s death. And there was Gibson’s signature halfway down the page, signed in to meet the vice president’s wife, Grace Lombard. Why, Tom Pain demanded, would the man tried for hacking Benjamin Lombard have a private meeting with Grace Lombard? Why were there reports from staffers that Benjamin Lombard had assaulted Gibson Vaughn outside a conference room hours before the vice president rejected his party’s nomination, hours before he died mysteriously alone in his hotel suite?
The site asked all the right questions, even if it had none of the right answers. Yet. He thought about reaching out to Grace Lombard; she should be warned. No. He’d promised to stay away, and she had people watching out for her. Most likely, they already knew more about American Judas than Gibson did. He shut his laptop and pushed it away.
His father had been right—there were some lines that you couldn’t uncross.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
You knew that the Toproll had crossed the tipping point from controlled chaos to plain old anarchy when there were more dirty glasses than clean ones. Nothing threatened a bar’s delicate equilibrium like running out of clean pint glasses. It wasn’t her shift, but Lea jumped up multiple times to collect empties and run the old Lamber glasswasher when Margo and her staff got too far into the weeds. It looked to be a long night.
Any regular celebrating a birthday was treated to round after round. The first by Margo, then the responsibility fell to an ever-widening circle of revelers. It was common courtesy. A birthday was a birthday, and that meant it got celebrated on the day of birth. None of this waiting for the weekend nonsense. That was weak-kneed hippie talk. Everyone has a job to get to, now take your damn shot. Lea had seen more than one fight over someone trying to duck out before closing time.
Lea threw her hip into the Lamber to shut the door, and the glasswasher rumbled to life. Someone passed her a shot over the bar. She tapped it on the bar before belting it back and got busy before someone handed her another. She had to get out of here before getting sucked into this mess. Where the hell was Parker? Niobe Prison was only a mile up the road. There better have been a damn riot to keep him.
“Remind me to start putting birthdays on the calendar,” Margo huffed as she hurried past up the bar. She’d been saying that for as long as Lea had worked there, but it would never happen. That kind of planning was antithetical to the roiling mayhem that was the Toproll.
Lea finished restocking the glasses and turned around to find Parker standing at the bar. He was still in uniform; she’d never seen him out of it. Like most guards at the prison, he had a thing about wearing it around. The prison was one of the few steady employers left in the area, so the uniform carried some cachet. He gave her a nod and headed for the back room, where the pool tables were. He didn’t play, but it was nominally quieter. He passed a table of four more guards, also in uniform. A lot of prison guards did their drinking at Toproll, gossiping and trading war stories. It was the main reason that Lea had taken the job.
Parker was sitting at a table, picking the pretzels out of a bowl of bar mix, when she joined him.
“Parker,” she said by way of a greeting.
Parker didn’t reply; he wasn’t the chattiest of guys, which she thought ironic for an informant.
Parker was fifty-one and divorced, and lived alone. An ex-wife and teenage son lived in South Carolina; he hadn’t seen either in years. He considered himself something of a movie buff and watched four-plus hours of television a night, more on weekends. One of those guys who could rattle off the movies on which Quentin Tarantino had done uncredited rewrites. His only ambition was working less and watching more. Exactly the reason that she’d chosen him. He would take the easy money and be happy. Double-crossing her would cut into his La-Z-Boy time. Plus, men his age tended not to take women her age seriously, and she found it useful to be underestimated.
“How was work?”
Parker shrugged as if the topic of his own day bored him. So much for a riot. She slid him his beer and laid a stack of napkins on the table between them. He took the napkin with the money folded in it, making a point of always counting it in front of her. She could understand how working around convicts all day might diminish your faith in humanity. His lips moved as he did the math, and when satisfied, he slipped the money into his jacket pocket and pushed several folded sheets of paper across to her.
She read through Parker’s notes, which included a list of magazines and newspapers that Merrick received. She scanned it for anything anomalous, but it looked the same as every other week. Almost all were business related: the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Economist. The China Economic Review and Journal of Asian Economics headlined a long list of Chinese business periodicals. They puzzled her slightly. Merrick Capital had specialized in emerging markets but had never made an investment in China. Why the interest? Was China his destination after release?
Well, not if she had anything to say about it.
“How has he been this week?”
“Full of himself. Imagine James Cameron winning the Oscar for Titanic,” Parker said. “Then multiply it by cocaine.”
She shuddered to think what that might look like. “Any variation to his routine?”
Parker shook his head and took a sip of beer. “Same as always. Work detail. Little exercise. Reads in the library or out in the yard. Watches an hour of TV. Dinner. Plays cards with a couple of guys. Reads until lights out. You could set your watch by the guy.”
“Then why haven’t you ID’d his man in there?”
Merrick had a guard in his pocket. Lea was convinced of it. Someone acting as courier between Merrick and his contact on the outside. She needed the identity of the contact, now more than ever. It was the key to everything, but so far Parker hadn’t been able to flush him out.
“The man is careful, what can I tell you? I got it down to one of two. I’ll know next week.”
“I’m running out of weeks. He gets out in less than a month. And with this magazine interview . . . I need a name, Parker. Yesterday.”
“Next week.”
“You’re not stringing me along, by any chance?”
Parker’s expression darkened. “It’s either Slaski or Leonard. But I can only be in one place at a time. I’ll have it next week.”
“That’s good, because if I don’t get what I need, then there’s no payday at the end of this rainbow for you. Understand me?”
Parker nodded. “I’ll get it.”
“Good.”
“Why you hate him like you do?”
“My family.”
“One of those,” Parker said.
“One of those.”
Parker nodded and picked a few pretzels out of the bowl and munched on them thoughtfully. Building up the strength to actually use his words.
“Lawyer come to see him.”
“What lawyer? Henry Susman?”
“That’s the one.”
“Henry Susman was at the prison?” Lea sat back, dismayed. “When?”
“Couple days ago. Him and Merrick had themselves a sit-down. Your boy came out looking like he’d been shown pictures of his own mother in compromising positions.”
If Susman had seen her . . . She didn’t finish the thought. She saw now how complacency and overconfidence had crept into her thinking in the time since she’d landed in Niobe. She felt safe in Niobe, and that had made her lazy. Well, it stopped now. This was th
e homestretch, and with that damn interview in circulation, the situation had become dangerously fluid. It was time to tighten up her ship, and Merrick’s phone was the first step. She wondered what had been urgent enough to bring Susman down from his perch on the Upper East Side. What could the two possibly have to discuss now?
“Any idea what they talked about?”
“Those rooms are private. All I can say is the lawyer didn’t look none too pleased neither. I thought he was gonna wring Merrick’s neck.”
Wring his neck? Susman was a lot of things, but a neck-wringer wasn’t one of them.
“What did the lawyer look like?”
“Oh, big fellow. About six two, two twenty. Brother filled out that suit.”
“Susman was black?”
“There some other kind of brother?”
“And you’re sure his name was Susman?”
“What it said on his ID.”
Now she really was worried. Someone posing as Henry Susman had visited Charles Merrick in prison. A pretty brazen move, and confirmation that, as she’d feared, the interview was drawing flies. But then why hadn’t Merrick blown the whistle on the imposter instead of going along with it? Could it have been the partner that she’d long suspected Merrick had? It had never occurred to her that they would be reckless enough to meet at the prison. Maybe the partner recognized how foolish the interview had been even if Merrick couldn’t.
Nothing but conjecture, unfortunately. She didn’t know a damn thing now except that she really needed Merrick’s phone.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The visitation room at Niobe Prison reminded Guo Fa of the old Shanghai Railway Station of his childhood—yellow light falling to a stained floor that would never come clean again. The burnt smell of electricity. Fa sat at a narrow metal table and studied the inmates engrossed in quiet conversation with loved ones. He rarely thought of his wife, who lived back home, but he missed her now. A distance had sprung up between them after the miscarriage that had almost taken her life and had rendered her barren. When this was all over, he would call her more regularly. He was her husband and should do better, no matter how disappointed she might be with his career.
Poisonfeather (The Gibson Vaughn Series Book 2) Page 12