by Susan Wolfe
So Roy Gaddis had indeed been a fugitive from the law for thirty-five years. The $64,000—make that the $90,000—question was whether he was also the Grand High Doofus who was destroying Lumina Software. Hiding out for more than thirty years in plain sight, glaring at people in that superior way of his. Oh, delicious! Just unbelievable!
Which of course was the problem. It really was unbelievable. Mr. Lardy had spent less than five seconds looking at the photo before shaking his head and dismissing it as just another Elvis sighting. Nobody was going to take her seriously. By now, maybe nobody cared. The machine whirred to life as she started rewinding the tape. Almost 2 o’clock. Anything else to research while she was here?
She returned the tape to the desk and asked for the current phone book. That guy Lardy had said Roy Gaddis’s father was dead, but what about his mother? No listing for a Gaddis. What about the other guy, Jack Drummond? No listing for him, either, but she did find a listing for Jessica Drummond. She wrote the number down, then went outside and called on her cell phone to see if anyone was home. She hung up when a woman answered, and headed over to meet her in person. Jack’s wife? Maybe Jack would be there as well.
The Drummond house was overgrown with weeds and needed a new coat of its dark green paint. An old blue Chevy in the driveway was propped on cinder blocks with one of its wheels missing, and the once-white picket fence was listing dangerously. Georgia saw a chicken coop in the side yard, and several different kinds of chickens were ambling around in the yard, pecking at the dirt. A woman in jeans with long gray hair was throwing them grain.
“Ms. Drummond?” Georgia called as she approached the sagging fence near the chicken coop.
“Yes.” The woman looked up, set down her plastic bucket and walked toward Georgia. She was in her fifties, with deep creases in her sun-weathered skin. “Here for eggs?”
“Oh, no. Actually, I’m trying to find Mr. Jack Drummond.” The woman’s eyes hardened, and Georgia added quickly, “I was hoping he could help me find a mutual friend.”
She looked Georgia up and down before deciding to answer. “Not likely, unless you’ve got a ouija board. Jack’s been dead for twenty years now.”
“Oh! I’m so sorry. I’m obviously out of touch.” Ms. Drummond snorted. “You were related to him?”
She nodded, her mouth set in a grim line. “Sister.”
“Really. Then I wonder if . . .”
Jessica Drummond held her palm up and cut her off. “Look, if you knew Jack even a little bit, you know he was one scary loser. I never allowed him in my house, because he’d have stolen from me to support his drug habit, just like he did every fool who ever trusted him. I didn’t want to have to testify against him, though, so that made two good reasons to keep as far away from him as possible. So I have no idea who he did or didn’t hang around with. You here about that kid who disappeared?”
“Roy Gaddis,” Georgia confirmed ruefully. “I sort of need to find him. Personal connection through my mother.”
“After all this time? Well, good luck to you, but I can’t help.”
“Would you recognize his photo, do you think?” She pulled the photo out of her purse.
Ms. Drummond took the photo and glanced at it, then handed it back with a shrug. “Sorry. You have no idea how many times the police brought me photos, but I honestly don’t remember ever laying eyes on the guy. The way he disappeared like that, wouldn’t surprise me too much if Jack did away with him.”
Georgia reared back in surprise. “Good Lord! Did he and your brother have a falling out?”
“How would I know? Just seems surprising he never showed up, ’s all I’m saying.”
“I see your point. Can I ask how your brother died?”
“Boating accident, the police said. Some luxury yacht supposedly, owned by this big East Coast executive, only you tell me what business my brother would have with some legitimate businessman on a yacht.” She planted her fists on her hips in disgust. “Couldn’t even swim, the damn fool, required too much concentration.”
She poked the air with her forefinger. “I guarantee he was either stealing stuff or running drugs on that boat, so I asked as few questions as possible. They wanted to ship his body back here for burial, but I even said no to that. Who knows who he was mixed up with there at the end, that coulda come around here causing trouble? It’s a shame, but I kept away from him when he was alive, and I wasn’t about to get tangled up with him once he was dead.”
“Sounds like a very good decision, Ms. Drummond. Thank you so much for talking to me. I’ll let you get back to your chickens.”
Wow. So the teenage Roy Gaddis was involved with a real crook, she thought as she unlocked her car. That could be a whole separate motivation to disappear. Interesting, but sort of a dead end for her, really. Didn’t get her any closer to proving Roy Zisko was a fugitive.
Assuming he was Roy Gaddis, the fugitive. How confident was she of that? She sat with both hands on her steering wheel, staring up through her windshield at the lower branches of a pine tree. Beaky nose. Close-set little black eyes. He was a Roy who graduated in 1979, and Roy Zisko had been telling people for years that he graduated from this same public high school in 1979. And Sally surely had something on him that kept him firmly on her side. So was Georgia certain that Roy Zisko and Roy Gaddis were one and the same?
No. How could she be? And even if she had been certain, she had no proof. How could she prove that Roy Gaddis was Roy Zisko in seven—she glanced at her watch—soon to be six days?
Already 4 o’clock. Katie-Ann would have to get her own dinner. Better to call from the car, once she was zipping past the cows and horses on her way back to I-5. She pulled away from the curb and headed for Highway 90.
If Jessica Drummond was right about Gaddis being dead, then she was on the wild goose chase of the century. Don’t go there. No percentage in it.
Okay, how to get proof that Gaddis and Zisko were the same person?
Roy Zisko did get a degree from USF in 1987. If he and Roy Gaddis were one and the same, then he must have changed his name between 1980 (the year he disappeared) and 1987. How would he have done that? You could just start using a different name, probably, but then what did he use for transcripts when he applied to USF? No, he probably needed a court order, and would a 19-year-old fugitive show up in court to do that? Not likely. Had he stolen some actual Roy Zisko’s identity, and then used his transcripts? Maybe. Some dead guy, probably, so nobody would show up and complain. She made a mental note.
If you were a woman, you could just change your name when you got married. No questions asked, probably. Could a guy do that? What if Linda Zisko had always been Linda Zisko, and it was Roy who changed his name? Probably couldn’t figure that out in time, either, although her father’s lawyer would have access to marriage records. Worth shooting off a note to the lawyer to see if he could check marriage records in 24 hours. Another mental note.
She pulled onto Highway 90 and came to a dead halt behind a gigantic yellow tractor that was taking its own sweet time to turn around in all four lanes of the road, probably so that it could use both lanes in her direction for a good long while. Great. Her car and her investigation, both stuck, going nowhere fast. She pulled out her cell phone to call Katie-Ann.
Of course, the one person who did know whether Roy Zisko and Roy Gaddis were the same guy was Roy Zisko himself. Could she get the proof from him?
CHAPTER 29
Georgia’s knees ached, and her quads were burning. For forty long minutes now, she’d been crouched down on her haunches behind a big gray dumpster in the parking lot in back of the Overtime Fitness Gym. She wanted a clear and covert view of Roy as he rounded the corner of the pale gray stucco building and found the note clamped under the wiper blade of his red Ferrari, which read:
What ever happened to Roy Gaddis?
What was taking him so long? His personal training had ended half an hour ago, and if this was a guy who primped after a sho
wer, then he seriously needed a primping coach. The longer she stayed here the more likely it was that somebody would throw open the “Employees only” door in the otherwise blank stucco wall and send her scuttering into the stiff, scratchy shrubs along the chain link fence. She set her iPhone down on the blacktop, put a hand on each knee, and stretched her legs straight, lifting her butt in the air, breathing through her mouth to block the smell of rancid grease and tomato sauce wafting out of the dumpster. Shouldn’t fitness people be eating carrot sticks instead of this fast food crap?
She noticed a big, orange cat doing a stealth walk through the thick underbrush of the hedge behind her. Closing in on something? When she glanced back at the lot, Roy was hurrying toward his car, neck stuffed into his tight collar, wearing his charcoal gray suit and carrying his canvas gym bag. He tossed the bag from his right hand to his left as he walked, pulled out his key and pointed the remote door opener.
He had already opened the driver’s side door when he noticed the note. Tossing the bag across to the passenger seat, he snatched the note free and then hesitated mid-crumple, apparently realizing that it was a hand-lettered note addressed specifically to him. He glanced at the note and his whole body jerked. He darted a hooded, frantic look both right and left, then caught himself and reasserted careful composure. He stuffed the note into his inside coat pocket as he climbed into the driver’s seat and slammed the door. Then there was a full minute’s silence, during which Georgia expected him to jump back out of the car and drag her by her hair from behind the dumpster. God, her feet were so exposed between those dumpster wheels! Then the engine roared to life and the red Ferrari fishtailed out of the lot.
Well, shut the front door! (as Gramma Griffin used to say.) He really was Roy Gaddis. After a moment she stood stiffly and made herself walk calmly through the lot and across the street where she’d left her car.
Thank you thank you thank you, Mr. Gaddis, for your inadvertent candor. Because his reaction to the note could only mean one thing. Ye gods and little fishes! Hiding in plain sight for almost thirty years, using that glowery contempt to keep everybody at a distance. Fine scam, she had to admit. Remarkable scam. Her father would positively chortle with admiration.
As she sat with her hand on the key in the ignition, the big orange cat rounded the corner with a little rodent dangling limply from its mouth. Yes, Roy Gaddis had run a stunningly good, daredevil scam for thirty years. She let her smile widen into her slightly loony grin. And now he’d met his match.
Should she go to the police? Probably not. Even if they took her suspicions seriously, they’d never get anything done in the short amount of time before Andrea quit. And they probably wouldn’t take her suspicions seriously. After all, they ignored Ted Bundy’s wife, even though she’d shown up with the makings of his signature plaster cast from the back of his closet, practically proving he was the infamous serial killer. So why should they listen to her, when all she had—at most—was a lead on a thirty-year-old check fraud case in some other state?
The third reason not to go to the police was that if they did follow up and catch Roy, the whole thing would become notorious and tank the stock at a time when it seriously needed not to tank. And the fourth was that what self-respecting person with special talents would rely on the police for anything?
One thing that was clear from her misadventures with kiddie-porn-guzzling Glen Terkes was that she didn’t have the stature to shake the confidence of a Captain of Industry, no matter what she had on him. No matter how vulnerable he ought to feel. If she was going to shake Roy’s confidence, she needed to do it anonymously.
She would become the Wizard of Oz.
It took a couple of hours of computer time in an Internet cafe in Sunnyvale to settle on Chatzy for her anonymous chat room. (She didn’t really know how somebody could trace her, but why take the chance?) She chose Chatzy because they just assumed she wanted an alias, and efficiently asked her to choose and enter it right when she signed up. She named the chat room “Klamath History Lessons,” with a greeting of “Welcome to Roy Gaddis,” and then sent an email invitation from “Jack Drummond” to Roy’s work email. The invitation said simply,
Welcome to Klamath History Lessons.
To enter the room, please identify yourself below.
The Wizard assumed her position behind the curtain.
She bookmarked the Chatzy site so she could check back every few minutes to see whether he had responded. While she waited, she wrote a note to be delivered to her father’s lawyer the next morning, and then began a fruitless search for any subsequent criminal history for Jack Drummond.
Roy entered the chat room an hour and a half later:
Blackbox: You aren’t Jack Drummond.
Look at that. He wasn’t even bothering to pretend he didn’t know what this was about. She smiled triumphantly at the screen. And calling himself “Blackbox.” Already way better than the Terkes debacle, since Terkes had never admitted anything. Score one for the Wizard.
How did he know she wasn’t Jack Drummond? Probably knew about the boating accident. Either that, or he was bluffing. She replied:
Jack: Not the point. You are Roy Gaddis, and that’s what matters.
Blackbox: What do you want from me?
Jack: I want you to resign from Lumina Software.
If he was surprised, he betrayed it only by a slight delay in response. This one answer had greatly narrowed his field of suspects, of course. His mind was probably racing through every person who could want him out of Lumina. Satisfying, really, that she’d never be on that list.
He replied:
Blackbox: And then what?
Jack: Then Lumina Software rises to greatness, and you never hear from me again.
Blackbox: What about money?
Jack: I don’t want money.
Blackbox: Sally?
So Sally did know. Why hadn’t she ratted him out already? Was he paying her? In any case, she needed him to think he had bigger problems than Sally.
Jack: You aren’t thinking clearly. Why would Sally want you to resign?
Blackbox: Why do you want me to resign?
He was trying to narrow the candidates further. She drafted:
Jack: I know this is called a chat room, Mr. Gaddis, but I’m not here to chat. You have 48 hours to resign and live in peace as Mr. Zisko. On Thursday at 4 p.m. I contact the Klamath police.
Rereading, she deleted ‘Klamath police’ and entered ‘FBI.’ Neither agency probably gave a shit, but Roy couldn’t know that. Might as well make it scary. She hit send, and watched it appear in the chat room.
A full minute passed.
Blackbox: I will work with you, but I need to know who you are.
Jack: You don’t need to know who I am to resign.
Silence for three minutes, which was way too long. She’d lost him.
Blackbox: You don’t have proof.
Ha!
Jack: If you were dumb enough to believe that, Mr Gaddis, you wouldn’t have eluded the FBI for thirty years.
Blackbox: How do I know you won’t go to the FBI anyway?
Was he stalling? Trying to trace her?
Jack: You have until Thursday at four, Mr. Gaddis. Use your time wisely.
She made herself log out of the chat room before he could respond. If he had a good cyber-snoop tracing her, they would definitely identify this Internet cafe as the first dot on their map. But a cyber-snoop would see the contents of the chat room, wouldn’t he, and how could Roy take that risk? Maybe he could trace her himself, but that was bound to take longer, and it was real work. He probably preferred just to con her into revealing her identity. Get her to say something online that gave herself away. She’d definitely have to avoid sounding like Arkansas.
With any luck, he’d just twist in the wind for the rest of the day. Twisting in the wind was excellent preparation for what she hoped would happen next.
She needed to return to the office, which required recov
ering from her feigned stomach flu. There was a board meeting on Thursday morning, and she intended to be there.
On Wednesday morning she stood under an ice cold shower, left her hair wet, wore her black sweater to look as pale as possible, and drove to work with a Ziploc bag of ice inside the back of her pants against her lower back. By the time she entered Ken’s office at 10 a.m., she really did feel sick.
“Georgia, come on in. Good to have you back.” His yellow oxford shirt was rolled neatly to the elbows, and he brushed his bristle of red hair with one hand as he pushed back from his computer. His open, steady demeanor betrayed absolutely nothing of the disgust he’d expressed on the day Andrea was demoted. What if she’d blown the whole thing wildly out of proportion?
He joined her at the conference table, studied her face and winced. “Boy, you still don’t look so good, if you’ll pardon my saying so. You sure you should be here?”
She made her smile wan as she looked back into his green eyes. “I’m just a little weak. Maybe we can take care of things for the board meeting tomorrow, and then I’ll head home early. I’ll be fine by tomorrow.”
“We could use your help, no doubt about that. Nikki isn’t here this week, and her substitute doesn’t inspire much confidence. Tell you what. Why don’t we go over the board materials, then you can head home and finish them up from there.”
She tried to make her voice sound casual. “Any news on Andrea?”
“Not a thing, I’m afraid.” His voice was suddenly grim, and his face darkened. “You know, I come in every morning intending to talk to Roy about it, but I’m just afraid of how mad I’ll get when he doesn’t listen. She’s going to submit her resignation when the quarter ends next Tuesday, and then I fully expect all hell to break loose. But don’t you worry about that. We need to get you out of here today as fast as possible. Let’s start with the presentation slides.”