Swift nodded. “We can’t connect Robert Darring to this murder, show motive; we’ve already tried.”
“But as William Simpkins,” Mathis said, “We have a whole new case.”
“We get him as William Simpkins, we show the paper-trail to his alias Darring, and once we have him for motive and opportunity, we get his real computer from him, and Yom takes it apart and shows every spurious email and account transaction, plus we get all the FBI data on the Kapow servers, the hack, the chat threats, all of it.”
“What about the fingerprints on the headlamp?” asked Tuggey.
“That’s even better,” said Swift. “We can match those prints to William Simpkins, but he was a juvenile when he got into trouble. He became Darring when he was eighteen. So we need a judge in New York to unseal those records. Then we’ve got him a hundred percent.”
The atmosphere in the room became suddenly electric. Everyone seemed to recall at the same time that their number one suspect — a different version, but in the same body — was still in town, getting his car out of impound, taking his sweet time.
Billy Sweet Tea, Swift thought. William Simpkins.
“Let’s go,” said Tuggey. He strode out of the room already with his phone at his ear to give his troopers the order to pick up Robert Darring — William Simpkins.
Mathis looked at Swift, chastened. “Better late than never?”
“This is a Federal case now. You’re not going to get your big win.”
Mathis grimaced. “Well aren’t you something,” he said. He lowered his head and looked up at Swift from beneath knitted eyebrows. Swift saw that Mathis was grinning. Just a little.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
“You’re out, Simpkins.”
The door slid open and Mike Simpkins was free to go. It had been both the longest and the shortest time he’d ever spent in jail, just over eighteen hours. His only time.
He collected his things in a daze. The past couple of hours he had thought of very little apart from his conversation with his father. A public defender named Ashcroft had come to see him through his release, and had unleashed a volley of information, which failed to penetrate his thoughts about his talk with Jack. Mike had been curious, without a doubt, as to why he’d been released, and the lawyer, who admitted to only having part of the story, had tried to explain. It was possible McAfferty had been set-up by someone, meant to take the fall. A good thing Mike hadn’t pulled any triggers, the lawyer had said quietly and warily.
There was still the possession of an unregistered gun, they told him, and he had a court appearance for that coming up.
He left the jail after calling the single taxi service in the area to come and take him home. He supposed he could take responsibility for all of it, if he wanted to. For his mother, for Braxton, now for Callie and the girls, gone, apparently trapped by his maniac father back in Florida. As he drove through the evening with the sun setting on another day — five had now gone by since Braxton’s death — he knew what he had to do. He knew that nothing else mattered, not his anger, nor his sense of guilt, nothing from his past, not even his father.
All that mattered was his wife and daughters. If his father did have something to do with all of this, with the money, with what happened to Braxton, then they could still be in danger right now. Court appearance be damned, he needed to get to them.
Maybe Jack Simpkins had been right about at least that much. Family was hard. Maybe now Mike was beginning to understand what his father meant.
* * *
At home, he sat in the living room and looked out at the snow-covered front yard, at how the ridges of snow cast small shadows beneath the light of a full moon, the drifts settled in serpentine patterns. He went and built a fire in the woodstove. It was ten minutes to seven p.m.
The seconds slowly dripped into minutes. He was tired, too tired to sleep. He hadn’t slept at all last night. Driving to Florida was going to take everything he had. Along with every last cent. There was nothing left. Credit cards were maxed out. Checking account was empty. He had a little over three hundred in cash — just enough to buy gas for the twenty-four-hour drive. He’d packed the Honda with everything he needed. For a moment he considered cracking into the vodka again and drinking until he passed out. But that wouldn’t do. He’d even thought of getting on the road right now, sucking down energy drinks until his skin cracked, but that wouldn’t do either.
He couldn’t leave without Braxton.
He sat, and tried to calm his mind, think rationally through the things he needed to do. He needed to pick his son up from the funeral home the next day. He needed to start getting his life in order again. Maybe he could even place a few calls and emails in the morning to his contacts in Florida and get some fiber-tech work down there again.
This got him laughing. He laughed until he cried, and then he just sat. The long hand of the clock in the living room dragged around to half past the hour, and his eyes started to grow heavy, and his head lolled on his shoulders. Then a car appeared on the road. It slowed and turned into Mike’s driveway.
Mike stood up, fully alert again. He still had on his boots and jacket. He opened the front door and stepped outside.
He thought he recognized the vehicle.
Mike walked across and came up along the driver’s side. The window came down. John Swift looked up at Mike and smiled.
“You look tired.”
“I’m exhausted.”
“Little time in the hooskow will do that to you.” Swift turned his head and looked at the Honda parked in front of him. His headlights beamed into the back of the car where there was a puffy duffel bag standing on end.
“Going somewhere?”
“I can’t. I’ve got charges to stand for.”
Swift nodded, then he winked. “Can we talk before you go?”
Mike stood where he was for a moment, trying to read Swift’s features. The detective looked back, eyes hooded, crinkled with crow’s feet, his hair grey around the temples — to Mike he looked older than he had even just a few days before, but there was something spirited in his eyes.
Mike walked around the car and got in the passenger side.
It was warm, the heat pouring out of the vents. Swift twisted around to see behind him and started backing out of the driveway, on to route 9N.
At the road, he turned and drove up the half mile, passing the Hamiltons’ on the right, and the open field. He slowed the car at the site of Braxton’s death, his bumper slicing a groove into the snowbank on the shoulder.
Mike could feel the emotion rise as he looked out at the dark road. He imagined Braxton lying there as the snow fell down on him.
“You’re probably pretty unhappy with your old man.”
Mike cut a sideways glance at Swift. “He’s got my wife and two girls. For all I know, he’s the one who’s responsible for this whole thing.”
“Did you call the police in St. Augustine?”
Mike looked back out the window at the dark road. “No.”
Swift took a breath and nodded. “Good. Don’t think you need to.”
Mike gave him another sharp look. His fatigue had completely vanished. He felt alert, pellucid, ready. More so than he had in days. “Oh no?”
“You don’t think so either. You and your father may have problems, but you know he wouldn’t hurt them.” Swift turned to look at Mike directly. “We know who murdered Braxton.”
“Yeah? You do? Let me tell you, detective, I wonder two things: I wonder if I care what you know anymore, that’s one. And I wonder why I should believe you anyway. Why didn’t you go after McAfferty right when I told you about the emails? You knew about him, didn’t you?”
Swift was shaking his head. “No, we didn’t. Despite what you might think. Different departments, different troops.”
“Was Tricia Eggleston the one who told you where McAfferty was?”
“Yes. She proffered with the DA, who’s going to put her through some rehab and a li
ghter sentence.”
“You’re keeping Bull and Linda locked up?”
“They’re quite the characters. They’ve both got outstanding warrants in addition to the new charges. I know they’re your friends, but they’re probably going to be sent back down to New York to deal with some other business after they deal with shooting at cops on my property.”
“They were just here to help me.”
Swift raised his eyebrows. Mike could barely make out his face in the dashboard lights, just a bit of flesh tone, the shape of his head, the glittering points of light in his eyes. “I know.”
“What else do you know?”
“Robert Darring is behind all of it. The fake emails from McAfferty, the manipulation of the funds in the 529 account; he baited McAfferty to set explosives and is responsible for Alan Cohen’s severe injuries — and he tied up and dragged your son behind his car until he died, right there.”
The two men stared out at the spot in the road in silence.
“That’s a lot for one kid,” Mike said after a while.
“He wasn’t alone. He had the other two with him. And I believe there could be even more; compatriots from The Don. They have groups of players in a Crew. And I think they switched off and on and played one another’s characters. So other kids played Darring’s character in the game while he was in custody. Sent you emails, too. They even messed with my own personal life, managing to convince my bank to put a hold on my cards. All designed to distract, to throw me off. To throw us all off.”
“It worked.”
“I want to tell you who Robert Darring really is. But I think it’s best you just hear it for yourself. You up for one last ride, Muchacho?”
Mike breathed deeply through his nostrils. “Alright.”
Swift popped the car into Drive and they got moving.
“When did you know?” Mike asked. “About Darring?”
“I never knew. I went step by step. Made some mistakes.”
“That’s got to be tough on your career.”
“That’s the job. You never know anything. But I’m suspended, pending review. Which is a nice way for them to tell me I have to cool my heels while Internal Affairs mounts their case and has me totally canned. Which won’t happen; I’ll resign. It will all be cordial and quiet. I’ve cut a deal to revise my previous statements about the excessive force against Duso. He’ll likely get a settlement now. It all means bye-bye Attorney General’s office.”
Mike wasn’t sure he understood all that the detective was saying, but he offered, “I’m sorry.”
Swift got the car up to speed. “I’m not too worried about it. I got a date with Janine Poehler out of the whole thing. Taking her to dinner as soon as I’m done tonight. Hang on,” he said.
He surprised Mike by stamping on the accelerator and blowing the back end of the car around in a wide arc, tires spinning, snow and ice flying. He handled the wheel deftly, snapping the vehicle right back into the lane and rocketing back towards town.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
Robert Darring smiled at the federal agents as he walked into the room. He looked right at home, Swift thought. He wondered if Darring had been seeking attention all along. Although that might have been oversimplifying it somewhat. During all his years on the force, Swift had come across every kind of criminal. Many were driven by financial need. Others were compelled by unbridled passion. Emotion. Vengeance. Greed. And some, a few, left the investigators scratching their heads, long after the case was over.
Despite being picked up just moments before leaving town, Darring was his usual self, expressionless, smug. He sat at a long table surrounded by three Feds. Swift stood beside Mike, who had been permitted to stand in and watch the interview. Swift had had to move mountains in order to let that happen, but now here they were. It was something Mike needed, Swift had decided, before moving on with his life.
The federal agents had set up their cameras and brought their own recording devices. The place looked like a Best Buy showroom.
A federal agent leaned forward, speaking into a microphone resting on the big table. The Feds were extra starchy this morning, Swift observed, more machine than human. The agent proceeded to “let the record show” and bespoke the date, time, place, and purpose of the inquiry.
Unprompted, Darring suddenly began to deliver a speech. As he spoke his gaze seemed to track some interior place, as if seeing a world the rest of them could not. “A hundred years ago, Arthur Rimbaud said ‘We are having visions of numbers.’” Then Darring looked into the cameras, at the agents, and through the one-way glass, as if he knew Swift and Mike were there. “‘I am an oracle; everything I say is true.’”
He sat up straighter, projecting his voice. “It’s just like the game. It is a game, and nothing more. We all have our little bundle of resources. We watch the numbers go up and down on a screen. Press a few buttons. But I can change those numbers. I change those numbers, and I can influence behavior. I can make people do what I want them to. Just like the people who play The Don, we’re all just playing a larger version of that game every day. And it’s getting easier and easier to control. All digital, all ones and zeros. What’s easier than ones and zeros? A kindergartener can understand that.”
The agents looked at one another grimly, and broke in with their questions. For over two hours, Swift and Mike observed. The Feds were meticulous, and the inquiry painstaking, even to Swift, who knew the virtue of being thorough, even if he did like to cut to the chase. He was happy to see it in their hands now. Happy, honestly, to be free again.
Finally, the line of questioning turned to the question of Darring’s real identity. The Feds had with them files thicker than the King James Bible, and they produced document after document, and at last Darring was forced to confess who he really was.
“William Simpkins.” After nearly three hours of questioning, he was finally beginning to look beaten.
Swift watched Mike covertly during this revelation. He stared through the one-way glass, saying nothing. He uttered not one word throughout the whole procedure. When the federal agents took him aside after they were done with Darring, Swift wasn’t privy to their exchange.
Swift left the County Jail, walking out into the night, inhaling the crisp air, looking up as the stars snapped on one by one overhead. He needed to get home and feed his dog. He needed to get ready for his dinner with Janine. He needed to get moving with the rest of his life.
Maybe, he thought, walking to his car, feeling his coat flap around his legs, it was finally time to put some work into that sprawling property his grandfather had left to him so many years ago.
EPILOGUE
The wheels barked on the tarmac and the plane touched down in St. Augustine airport. Mike looked out the window. He knew he wouldn’t be able to see them — they’d be on the other side of the security checkpoint, but still he looked, and pictured them there, Callie and the two girls, Reno now standing to her shoulder, Hannah at her waist. For a moment, he almost thought he actually saw them.
The wait was agonizing. The canned music in the plane. The ill-concealed tension of the passengers as they all did their best to maintain decorum. Stay calm. Wait your turn. Be polite to the people around you. And get off this goddamn plane as soon as humanly possible.
He’d spent the flight trying to put the past behind him, but he recalled one final visitation as he stood in the cramped quarters with the plastic-smiling passengers, waiting to disembark. Just seven hours ago, minutes before he headed out to the airport in the old Honda (where he’d left it, for all he cared, for anyone who might want it) a black sedan with a, tall, silver, wobbling antennae had pulled into his driveway. Two men in dark suits had bade him goodbye, with a look in their eyes that told him not to drop off the face of the Earth, they just might need to contact him again.
After interviewing Robert Darring they’d taken him into another room, sat him down, and flicked on a tape recorder. They’d taken that thick file out again,
setting out the same photographs and documents they had displayed for Darring, like Blackjack dealers.
“William Simpkins,” The first Fed said, tapping a birth certificate with his finger. There was a picture attached by a paper clip, as if Mike hadn’t just seen the man in the flesh in the next room. “This is your half-brother?”
“I’ve never seen him before, never met him, had no knowledge of him until a few minutes ago.”
The agents looked at each other. “You have any idea why he would want to murder your son?”
“Step-son,” the second agent corrected.
“. . . Your step-son?”
“I think it was to hurt me.”
Those looks again. Then the agents pulled out pictures of two other kids unfamiliar to Mike. “These two were accomplices of Darring’s . . . of Simpkins’.”
“We’re talking with them now,” the second agent said in a manner suggestive of omnipresence. As if he was there with Mike, but simultaneously somewhere else entirely. “Darring blackmailed these two young men in ways similar to how he blackmailed Tricia Eggleston.”
The first agent sat back and folded his hands across his stomach. “Darring contacted Eggleston over a week ago. He told her the cops were looking into her boyfriend, McAfferty. That there was a task force that included a detective Remy LaCroix, and that there were witnesses getting ready to testify before a grand jury. Former addicts, people in trouble.”
“It was a bluff,” said the second agent. “LaCroix and his task force were nowhere near McAfferty. Darring learned about the task force, though, in the papers. He knew McAfferty was Braxton’s biological father through their online interactions; he gleaned this information over a couple of months playing The Don with your stepson. He sought out Eggleston, McAfferty’s girlfriend. So she’d do her Lady Macbeth part.”
“Naturally, McAfferty was skeptical. But, he was also paranoid. He bought an incendiary device.”
Another document. “We have the records of his online order for several parts here. Built the device and had it at the ready.”
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