Desperate

by Daniel Palmer

  “Tell me everything,” I said. “Start from the beginning.” I pointed the gun at her head.

  Anna held up her hands, shielding her face, nodding her submission.

  “I’ll tell you . . . I’ll tell you, Gage . . . please, don’t hurt me, I’ll tell you.”

  I gave Anna a moment. She took several readying breaths before she spoke.

  “Lily came to visit me in California a few years ago,” Anna began. She was speaking slowly, thoughtfully it seemed. “It was before I met you, before I agreed to be a part of this.”

  “What is this? What is Lily involved with?”

  “She works for Roy.”

  “Roy. That’s his real name?”

  “One of them,” Anna said.

  “What does Roy do?”

  “He calls himself an information retrieval specialist,” Anna said in a raspy voice. She kept rubbing her injured throat. “He gets corporate secrets for people who can afford his services. He’s paid millions of dollars for what he does, and he’s been doing it for years.”

  “He’s a con man,” I said. “That’s what he is.”

  “Yes and no. Roy specializes in retrieval without trails. At least that’s what he calls it.”

  “Computer hacking,” I said.

  Anna shook her head. “No. The opposite. He gets the jobs computer hackers can’t do on their own. He penetrates the most sophisticated computer security systems in the world and, yes, sometimes hacking is a part, but it’s never the whole part.

  “He won’t resort to kidnapping. That creates too much of a police response. He never tries bribes. Those always backfire, he says. People get greedy and then they start demanding more, or threaten to talk. He keeps it stealthy, under the radar, and never links his work back to his employer. He operates from the inside out by making people believe him. He creates their reality to manipulate it, taking time to build trust. Sometimes a job lasts a few months. Sometimes it’s a few years. He’s got multiple jobs going at once, all at different stages of development. It’s what he does, and he’s very good at it.”

  “Jack Hutchinson? The Moreno brothers?”

  “They work for Roy,” Anna said. “He employs different people for different jobs. His network is extensive and highly secretive. Most of his associates have other jobs and businesses, but they can become anything Roy needs them to be. They’re loyal and dependable.”

  “The stuff from the prison registry you printed out about Roy? Those documents your PI guy dug up?”

  “Fake,” Anna said. “That was all a forgery. I never hired any private investigator.”

  “And your job? Was that fake, too?”

  Anna looked up at me through a glaze of tears. “I managed an art gallery in San Clemente before,” she said. The tears were flowing freely. “I’m not a business consultant. I don’t know anything but the buzz words Roy taught me. I didn’t even paint those wall murals. It was someone else’s work, someone with a lot more talent than I have. Roy thought if we each did something for sick kids, it would help you to fall for me.”

  “Oh, it did,” I said, completely disgusted. “It sure did. So was it Lily who asked you to be a part of one of Roy’s cons?”

  Anna nodded. “She knew I was unhappy in my marriage to Edward. She knew I wanted to make a change, but I couldn’t afford my lifestyle, not after the prenup I signed. I was trapped in this horrible, loveless life with a man I couldn’t stand. I could have anything I wanted, so long as I lived with Edward. Those were his demands, and his divorce lawyers were prepared to leave me broke. To be honest, Gage, I was attached to the money,” she said, sounding both ashamed and authentic. “Lily told me I could make over ten million for a couple years’ work. That would be my cut. Ten million. That was the ticket to my new life.”

  “I was work to you? I was your job?” I couldn’t believe the words coming out of my mouth.

  “Gage, it’s not like that. That’s not what it became.”

  “And to do your job,” I said, “all you needed to do was get me to fall in love with you?” I paused, waiting for an answer. “Is that it, Anna? Smile at me enough. Show interest in me? Win my heart? And then what, pretend to want to start a family again? Pretend you understood what it felt like to lose a child? You lied about being a grieving mother? God, you’re so sick, so cruel, to do what you did to me.”

  I was the one shaking as my anger returned. I kept talking because I couldn’t stop.

  “It was all to get Lily into our lives,” I said. “We needed Lily to come live with us.”

  Anna nodded rather grimly.

  “So she could make me crazy,” I went on. “Everything: the present, the necklace, finding my Adderall, your missing folder, it was all staged. And you helped stage it.”

  “Yes.”

  “You kept turning the screws, knowing eventually I’d break. You lured me up to Lily’s apartment. You knew I’d go there to get the folder. You gave Lily one of my condoms. You sick, twisted bitch—you gave Lily a condom full of my semen.”

  “We needed to corner you. Roy did all sorts of psychological profiling beforehand. He studied your e-mails and ran them through these programs he wrote, looking for keywords and other things I don’t really understand. He knew with almost 100 percent certainty you’d offer up a payout to make them go away. You had to believe the stakes were high enough—that they’d tell me you and Lily slept together—only he wanted proof of an affair. You needed to think I’d believe whatever they told me. He recorded you offering him a bribe as the final piece to get your cooperation. It was all part of his design.”

  “But of course I wasn’t going to have enough money. Not for what Roy said he needed. But you knew that too, didn’t you?”

  “Roy knew everything. His psychological profile on you filled two massive binders. Gage, he knows you better than you know yourself.”

  I smiled, because Anna was wrong.

  “No,” I said. “He didn’t know I wouldn’t give him the real plans. He miscalculated there. I gave him useless information.”

  Anna responded only with a nod.

  “But I have to admit, holy crap. This is some elaborate shit you guys pulled off,” I said. “I go on a drug deal with Roy to make up the difference for what he needs, and in exchange they go away. Only the drug deal is staged to go horribly wrong and I end up shooting a man. What if I hadn’t pulled the trigger?”

  “There were all sorts of contingency plans in place,” Anna said. “One way or another, you were going to fire that gun, even if Roy had to use your hand to pull the trigger.”

  “So he rigged some special effects bullshit. He made me believe we needed a million dollars or you would die.”

  “That’s what he does, Gage. He makes you believe.”

  “What about the knife under your pillow?” I stopped because I got a sick feeling in my gut. “You put it there, didn’t you? You put that knife under your own pillow.”

  Anna looked away.

  “If you had given him the plans, nobody would ever have known. You would have kept it a secret from me because you killed a man, but eventually, and this was all part of the plan, I would have found out you had offered Lily a bribe to leave. Lily would have called me to clear her conscience, and then I would have left you. That’s how it was supposed to go down.”

  I bowed my head and kept my eyes glued to the ground, trying to brace myself against the onslaught of information, this new reality, my sham of a life.

  “Words fail me,” I eventually managed to say. “I can call you heartless, horrible, but that isn’t even close to describing you. Is Anna even your real name?”

  “Yes . . . yes, it is.” She tried to stand, but I pushed her back to the ground with my foot. Anna looked up at me with her big, sad eyes, resigned to staying where she sat. “We needed a real backstory in case you checked up on me,” she said. “I needed to once be married to Edward Daggett from California. That couldn’t be a lie.”

  “But I never did c
heck up on your past, because you told me not to.”

  “Roy’s profile on you was inconclusive there. We couldn’t be sure you’d respect those wishes.”

  “I loved you,” I said. “I loved you with every bit of my being. I was a shattered person, and you made me love you. Of course I was going to respect your wishes.”

  “At first I felt sick about what I was doing to you. I really did. But then I got to know you. It wasn’t all an act, Gage. I really did come to love you.”

  “You used my son to get to me!” I screamed inches from her face, eyes wide and wild. “My son!”

  Anna began to sob, her body wracked with spasms. As for me, I had to calm down and swallow past the brick-sized lump in my throat. My thoughts spun out of control while I tried to reconcile all the false bits and pieces of our life together.

  “You were tied up when I found you,” I said.

  “When I heard you coming up the stairs with Roy, we quickly put on the restraints,” Anna said, still sobbing. “We couldn’t let you know.”

  “A little bit of Roy’s contingency planning?”

  Her tears stopped like a faucet turned off.

  “Actually, that was my idea,” Anna said. The crinkle of a smile soiled what had once been a pure and beautiful face. I caught a twinkle in her eyes, not reflected by moonlight, and heard a note of pride in her voice as well. I understood why Anna did what she had done. She had to keep up the charade.

  “What else did you lie about?”

  She returned an indifferent look. “I guess a lot of things.”

  “The miscarriage?” I asked.

  Anna grimaced. “I never had one,” she admitted.

  “And the pregnancy test?”

  Anna took a few readying breaths. “We got it from a pregnant girl, someone we recruited online, the same girl who took the ultrasound for us. We paid her.”

  “Your files? Your paperwork for your business?”

  “Roy arranged all of that,” Anna said. “Same as he did my backstory.”

  “Backstory . . . what else about your backstory did he arrange?”

  The bite to my voice came because of a new suspicion I had, something that made me feel utterly sick. I couldn’t believe Anna would be capable of doing this. But still . . .

  “My business trips, mostly I went to see my family.”

  “Your family,” I repeated.

  “My mother, Gage.”

  Bile raced up my throat.

  “Who . . . who was the woman we visited in the nursing home?”

  “She’s someone Roy picked. He got a job at the facility working as a janitor, doing reconnaissance work before we got started. He found an Alzheimer’s patient, someone who didn’t have any local family. Her kids never came to see her. Never. So I told the nursing home staff I was a close family friend and you were my husband. At least we provided her with some comfort. Nobody ever came to see her, Gage. Nobody.”

  “We provided her with comfort?” I said. “We provided her with lies!” I raised the gun and pointed it at Anna’s head, my hand shaking. Anna cowered, shielding herself with her arms, while my whole body surged with a fresh rush of disgust. “That was why Bessie recognized Lily, isn’t it? Isn’t it! She’d seen her before with Roy.”

  Anna bit her lip and nodded.

  “We were worried after that incident, but nothing came of it. I needed to have some family, something so you wouldn’t be too suspicious of me. I couldn’t have just shown up in town with no connections. Bessie was there to help you trust me. That’s why we did it. It was all Roy’s creation. Even my cousin Gladys, that was really Lily who you spoke with on the phone. The lie had to be perfect and utterly believable.”

  “And it was,” I said. “It was perfect and utterly believable. What’s your last name? Your real last name?”

  “I changed it to Miller when we picked Bessie,” Anna said.

  “And before that?”

  “I was Anna Daggett.”

  Every part of me felt ravaged by disease. “I just wonder why Brad couldn’t see your aura,” I said.

  “Maybe because it wasn’t all a lie,” Anna whispered.

  “What about Will Gaines? Our tenant?”

  She shrugged—apparently he was just a bit player. “I paid him to leave. It didn’t take much.”

  “And the pictures of Kevin, if that’s really his name?”

  “That’s his name,” Anna said, nodding. “But he’s Edward’s nephew, obviously not my son.”

  “And if I had looked up your son’s death certificate?”

  “Things would have gotten complicated,” she said. “It was a bit of a risk, but I made sure you knew his life was private to me.”

  “That’s why you never wanted Brad to connect you to Kevin.”

  Anna nodded. “And why I supposedly painted pottery on his birthday. You weren’t going to suspect anything, and you didn’t. I gave you no reason to check up on my story. You believed what I told you because I was your wife.”

  Again my stomach somersaulted.

  “All those tears you cried?”

  Anna thought about this. Then she did something truly surprising. She kind of laughed, as if she was impressed by something. “I was really good, wasn’t I?”

  “What?”

  “I mean as it went along, I just got more and more into it. I really became this other person. Anna was quite something, a remarkable creation.” I couldn’t believe she spoke of herself in the third person, reverently, like a critic lavishing praise on a rising starlet. “Sometimes I would say things to you that I couldn’t believe were coming out of my mouth. I really felt like Anna Miller, your wife, this woman who loved you, and it got so hard to tell the difference between reality and what I was doing. Like those cops who go so deep undercover they forget who they really are. That’s what was happening to me. For the longest time I couldn’t figure out why everything was feeling so real, and then it came to me.”

  “What did?”

  “I must really love you, Gage. That was why. That’s why I could be so good, so honest. You see, it wasn’t all faked. I really did fall in love with you. I wasn’t going to leave you, even though I told Lily and Roy I would. We were going to have so much money. A rich uncle of mine who died, that’s where I was going to tell you it came from.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, more lies.”

  Anna began to cry into her hands—real tears or crocodile ones, who could tell?—while I went to my car and popped open the trunk. I took her bag out and dropped it at her feet.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked, watching me through sad, red eyes glossed with salty tears. “What are you going to do with me?” Her expression pleaded for mercy or a change of heart.

  “I’m going to leave you here, Anna,” I said. “I’m going to leave you in the middle of nowhere without a wallet, or money, or an ID, or a phone. You’ll have nothing because that’s what you are. Nothing. I don’t want to bother with police. What’s that going to do? You conned me into giving garbage product plans to our competitor. I gave you nothing. No money ever exchanged hands. You’d do a couple years in prison, if that. And what then? I’d have to live with this story being told over and over again. I’d be confronted with reminders of how you defiled the memory of my son and my wife, my real wife, in every media channel across the country. I don’t want to think of you. I don’t want to give you any more of my time or energy.”

  “What . . . what am I going to do?”

  “You’ll figure something out, Anna. You’re good at that.”

  I pushed her away from me, using my foot. I wanted to spit on her, I wanted to punch her, I wanted to put the gun in her mouth and pull the damn trigger, but instead I put the weapon back into the glove compartment and fired up the car’s engine. I drove away, leaving Anna sitting on the pavement of a deserted parking lot somewhere in Connecticut. I’d toss her purse and wallet into some trash can once I got a few miles away.

  In my rearview mirror
I watched Anna get back to her feet. She stood in the middle of the empty space with her arms dangling at her sides, looking lost and alone.

  Just like me.

  CHAPTER 64

  The man who called himself Roy Ripson—his name as flexible as his appearance—sat at an ornate, round metal table on the outside patio of a café in Sonoma, California, sipping from his cup of espresso. His fake tattoos had faded some in the month since everything went wrong, but they still served as a painful reminder of the only job he’d ever failed to complete.

  With him were two women. The younger of the pair, a woman named Lily, drank from a bottle of Evian water while she checked her appearance in a compact mirror. She was grateful to have stopped eating all the garbage food that had helped her to gain weight. It would take some time to get back to her peak physical condition, but hours in the gym, coupled with a regular regiment of yoga and Pilates, would do the trick eventually.

  Sitting beside Lily was a woman named Anna. Anna appeared removed, preoccupied, as though she had misplaced something of great value and was trying to recall where it might be. Her face was tired, and those who knew her best, but had not seen her for some time, would think she’d aged years in weeks.

  Roy, by contrast, was looking far more relaxed than he had of late, his demeanor bordering on jubilant. He was a hunter who was back on the hunt again. While Lily needed time to rebuild her body, Roy feared it would take far longer to reclaim his tarnished reputation. He was accustomed to having a waiting list of clients, but word had spread among his associates of a failed attempt to steal the product plans for a revolutionary type of lithium ion battery.

  In the aftermath of this debacle, Roy’s client list had dried up as quickly as a pool of rainwater in the summer’s heat. He knew those clients would return eventually—greed and power had always proved strong motivators—and those who knew and respected his ability would soon forget his only failure. But even Roy was surprised at how quickly this new opportunity had emerged. Maybe it was luck, maybe they didn’t know about Lithio Systems; whatever the reason, Roy was grateful for the opportunity and committed to giving it his all. He was studying his sheets of paper carefully, only now bringing Lily and Anna up to speed on his research.