The Short Drop (30 page)

PART THREE

GEORGIA

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Gibson woke in a twin bed feeling like death’s one-night stand. He went to roll on his side but simply could not. He surrendered and lay still. His body felt like it had been drawn and quartered between a pair of muscle cars. Hendricks appeared with a water bottle and helped him take a few sips. The effort exhausted him, and he slept again.

It took three days before he could swallow any of the baby food Jenn spoon-fed him, and five more before he was able to sit up on his own. When he spoke, his voice came out in a shuddering, painful rasp. Hendricks took to calling him Tom Waits and Gibson to writing things down rather than talking.

On the morning of the eighth day, being alive no longer seemed like the worst idea he’d ever had. He swung his legs off the side of the bed and gathered his strength for the Herculean task of taking a leak. He stood and pushed one leg in front of the other—an old-man shuffle. His reflection in the bathroom mirror stopped him. He
was
an old man with the damaged face of an unrepentant alcoholic. His ten-day beard couldn’t hide the livid, wrenching bruise that ran across his throat from ear to ear. He ran his finger along it and thought about how close he’d come to dying.

What were they going to do now?

Gibson ran a hot shower and stood under the water a long while. Bear opened her eyes. She was in bed. It was late, and she was watching the light under the door. Watching for shadows. Scarcely breathing.

Gibson tried to shake the image from his head. It drew Bear’s attention, and she looked to him now. Imploring. He wanted to ask her how Lombard had done it. Compelled her silence. But he knew—the awful emotional blackmail that her father must have used to isolate her. Control her.

But you failed, you son of a bitch. You failed.
All the time, Bear had been planning her escape with Billy Casper. And then it struck Gibson—there
was
no Tom B. Bear had invented him. Created a fictional father for her unborn child in case she didn’t get away. A plausible story to explain her pregnancy, to protect the child. Protect her mother. Maybe even to protect her father—so hard to beat loyalty out of children. Taking it all on herself. How could she be that strong?

He dressed gingerly, grunting through the pain of pulling on a T-shirt. His messenger bag was at the end of the bed, and he went through it to confirm that his laptop was gone, along with his father’s thumb drive. But Billy’s gun remained along with the Phillies cap and
The Fellowship of the Ring
. Inside he also found the picture of Bear pregnant on the couch. Pregnant with the baby of “Tom B.”

A crazy thought occurred to him. He began flipping back through the pages of the book, back to the beginning. It took a minute, but he found the passage he was looking for and read the familiar words aloud:

“Now, my little fellows, where be you a-going to, puffing like a bellows? What’s the matter here then? Do you know who I am? I’m Tom Bombadil. Tell me what’s your trouble! Tom’s in a hurry now.”

Tears washed down his face, but he was smiling too. A despairing elation. In the margin, in orange pen:

I knew you would.

Gibson laughed aloud and stifled himself with a hand over his mouth. What this brave girl had done. It defied belief. His tears hadn’t stopped, but he felt clearheaded for the first time in as long as he could remember. Clearheaded and angry. He wiped the tears away. He knew what came now.

He put the cap on and, holding the book tight like a catechism, shambled out to the living room. It was small and rustic and smelled like the inside of an old steamer trunk. Hendricks was asleep on a threadbare couch, but his eyes flickered open as Gibson shuffled past. A bulky old TV on a crooked stand was tuned to the news. It was a story about the imminent convention in Atlanta. Although Anne Fleming had not formally conceded, Lombard’s candidacy was assured. Reportedly, the two were scheduled to meet in Atlanta about the possibility of a joint ticket.

Jenn sat at a small table by the window, several handguns and ammunition laid out before her, fieldstripping a Steyr M-A1. He was fairly sure Jenn could do it in the dark, because she never took her eyes off the tiny gap between the curtains that gave her a view of the approach.

“Done lying around?” she asked without looking up.

“Good to see you too.”

She glanced his way and smiled. “You look taller.”

“I don’t feel it. Where are we?”

“North Carolina. Outside Greensboro.”

“Greensboro?”

Jenn and Hendricks caught him up. From the chaos of the lake house shootout to the tracker sewn into his messenger bag that had led them south to Charlottesville and the Cherokee parked outside his childhood home.

“How’d you find us?” she asked.

“Hacked Hendricks’s phone.”

She looked almost impressed; Hendricks not so much.

“Guess that makes us even,” she said.

“Guess it does.”

His assailant had gone out the exterior basement steps and fled through the backyard. A neighbor must have called 911, because they’d only just got out of there before police swarmed the area. Outside Roanoke, they’d dumped their vehicles in a grocery-store parking lot and paid cash for a 1995 Ford Probe.

“Drove it right off the guy’s lawn,” Hendricks said. He was awake and was sitting up on the couch, stretching and yawning.

From there, they’d driven south until they found a cheap rental cabin. They’d stashed Gibson in the trunk and passed themselves off as newlyweds celebrating their first anniversary. The cabin was rented for the month of August. It was isolated. Paid up front in cash, and the landlord lived in Raleigh so was unlikely to stop by unannounced. All in all, it was about as off the grid as one could hope on short notice while transporting an injured person.

“Cell phones?” Gibson asked.

“Duct-taped to the underside of two different eighteen-wheelers,” Hendricks said.

“We’re on burners.” Jenn held up a disposable flip phone. “So now you know our story. Mind telling us how you came to be hanging from a rope?”

“What do we have to eat? I’m starving,” Gibson asked.

“Strained peas? Creamy carrots?”

“Besides baby food.”

“They grow up so fast,” Hendricks said.

Hendricks turned out to be a fine cook. Either that or Gibson was hungrier than he’d ever been in his life. He polished off the eggs, bacon, and hash browns and went back for seconds. And thirds. Jenn came in from the living room and stood in the doorway.

“What was in Charlottesville?” she asked.

Gibson looked at each of them. Where to begin? Without the paternity test or Duke’s thumb drive, there was no proof. How could he ask them to take it on faith? Until the paternity test had been waved in his face, he’d feared that it was his father. How to convince them that Benjamin Lombard was the real enemy? Might as well start at the beginning, he decided, and opened
The Fellowship of the Ring
to show them Bear’s notes. At least it was something tangible.

“What should she have told you?” Jenn asked, looking up from the book. “What happened at the game?”

He told them about the trip to the baseball game and Bear’s meltdown in the stadium. “I went to Charlottesville for my dad’s diary. I thought maybe it would have the rest of the story.”

“Did it?”

He told them about his dad’s account. The decision to take Suzanne home early. Buying the two Phillies caps.

“Duke bought the cap?” Jenn asked.

Hendricks whistled. “That’s a mind-bender right there.”

He explained the origin of Tom Bombadil and why she’d invented the boyfriend. “It was Lombard,” Gibson said. “That was why she ran. It was Lombard’s baby.”

Jenn and Hendricks sat in silence, digesting his bombshell. Then Jenn glanced at her partner and they came to a silent conclusion.

“What?” Gibson asked.

“There’s something we need to show you,” Jenn said.

She went out and came back with her laptop and a manila folder. From the file, she handed him a crime-scene photograph of a man who had hanged himself in his garage.

Gibson studied it. “Who is it?”

“Terrance Musgrove.”

“The guy who owned the lake house?”

“The same. Now I have to show you another photograph. But . . .” She paused, hesitant to go on. “It’s your father.”

“Duke?” Gibson asked stupidly. “Is it what I think it is?”

“I wouldn’t ask, but you need to see it for yourself.”

He swallowed hard and nodded. She pulled up the photograph on the laptop and turned it around for Gibson to see. For the longest time, he stared away at the edges of the photograph, hoping it would soak into his mind through his peripheral vision. Dull the impact a little. Gibson realized he was breathing fast.

He looked.

What surprised him was how much he remembered wrong. In his mind, his father had been right next to the stairs when he’d discovered him that afternoon, looming over him, close enough to touch. But in the photograph, Duke was on the far side of the room. It was a chair, not a stool, that was kicked over under his feet. His father’s eyes were closed, not open.

“Why am I looking at this?” he asked, looking back and forth between the two photographs. They had everything in common that two dead men could. They were even in their socks. The shoes. Wait. He went back to the other photograph. The shoes were the same.

“The shoes?”

Jenn nodded.

He looked again. In both photographs, the shoes were placed carefully together and pointed away from the body at an angle. The same angle. A man, hanging, would naturally convulse; the rope would twist and spin. It would take time before the rope came to its final rest. The position of the shoes was an impossible coincidence.

“He killed them both.”

“And now he’s reappeared ten years later to kill you.”

“It’s insane,” Gibson said.

“Out of curiosity, was the guy’s nose broken?” Hendricks asked.

“Yeah. How did you know?”

“Fiftyish? White. Thin. Short brown hair, balding. Kind of nondescript?”

“Yeah, that’s the guy.”

Hendricks shook his head. “Same son of a bitch who shot Billy Casper. And I can’t prove it, but I’d throw Kirby Tate in there too.”

“It gets weirder,” Jenn said. “I saw that same guy shoot one of the tactical guys in the back.”

“Friendly fire?” Hendricks asked.

“Nothing friendly about it.”

Hendricks chewed that over. “So Lombard gets wind that we’ve been in contact with WR8TH and calls in his old hitter to tie up loose ends. He’s been on us from day one. Follows us to Pennsylvania, waiting to see if we find WR8TH before making his move.”

“But he jumps the gun and kills Kirby Tate in the storage locker instead,” Jenn said.

“Right.”

“And sends in that tac team to mop us up at the lake house,” Hendricks added.

“Yeah, because like a fucking idiot I gave Mike Rilling our twenty.”

“You think Rilling gave us up?” Hendricks asked.

Jenn shrugged. “How long after we talked did they show up?”

“Son of a goddamn bitch.”

“Who were they?” Gibson asked.

“Don’t know. Lombard has ties to an outfit called Cold Harbor. I wouldn’t bet against it being them.”

“Then why would he send in his hitter?” Hendricks asked.

“Get him out of the way too? No reason to leave him breathing, now that it’s all over.”

“Lombard isn’t screwing around,” Hendricks said.

“Would you?” Jenn asked. “With what’s at stake in Atlanta? Lombard is the chosen one at this point. If Gibson is right, and he was molesting his own daughter, got her pregnant . . . Good God, there are powerful interests with a lot riding on him winning in November. How far would you go to keep it a secret?”

“As far as Suzanne?” Gibson said.

“You think he killed his own daughter?”

“I don’t know. Billy said something like that, and I thought he was crazy. But is he? Where
is
Suzanne? Her baby? If she’s alive, and if Lombard’s guy got to Musgrove ten years ago, then that means he got to Suzanne as well. Tell me I’m wrong. Where is Suzanne?”

Jenn put her face in her hands. Hendricks looked like he’d unlearned the art of breathing. As Gibson saw it, they only had one play left to make, and it needed to be made soon. If they weren’t in Lombard’s crosshairs at this very moment, they soon would be. But even if they somehow survived until the convention was over, the nomination secured, Lombard would never call off his dogs. The three of them represented too great a threat. He would hunt them. He would find them. He would kill them. It was inevitable. They simply lacked the resources to stay hidden from a man destined for the White House.

“Well, this is a hell of a ghost story, but can we prove any of it?” Hendricks asked.

“We can prove she was pregnant.”

“But we can’t connect it to Lombard?”

Gibson shook his head.

“So what’s our move?” Jenn asked.

“We go to Atlanta.”

“To the convention?” Hendricks said. “How long did you lose oxygen to your brain?”

“It’s the only way,” Gibson said and explained his plan. It wasn’t without risk. It meant walking into the lion’s den. It meant turning to the one person who might, just possibly, be innocent in all this. It meant getting to Grace Lombard and proving the unprovable—that her husband had raped her daughter and was involved with her disappearance.

When he was done, no one spoke. There was nothing to be said. One by one, Jenn and then Hendricks left the kitchen. Like boxers retreating to their corners to regroup after getting their bells rung. Gibson went to the fridge to see what else there was to eat.

A hanging did wonders for a man’s appetite.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

When they pulled into Atlanta a week later, the city was humming and the convention in full swing. Atlanta was also, quite literally, sold out. Conventioneers were buoyant and optimistic about their man and his chances come the general election. They were feeling no pain; it was as close to Mardi Gras as politics got. The streets surrounding the convention center were a complex warren of security checkpoints and media encampments. The sidewalks, thick with pedestrians at all hours, were cumbersome to navigate. Atlanta accepted the intrusion with good old-fashioned southern hospitality. Certainly the bars and restaurants around the convention center weren’t complaining.

Gibson watched Grace Lombard’s personal assistant, Denise Greenspan, come around the corner toward him. History and political science double major at Hamilton College. Master’s in public policy from Georgetown. The sidewalk was overflowing with conventioneers, but there was no danger of losing sight of her. At five foot eleven, she had a distinctive, gorgeous Afro with just a hint of red to it. Today it was tied back with a yellow-and-green head scarf and swayed regally above the sea of heads as she walked. She’d run cross-country and track at Hamilton, and the previous fall had finished the Marine Corps Marathon in 3:28—an impressive pace for a first timer. Back in Washington, Denise ran with Grace most mornings, which insiders claimed was the core of their close working relationship. Denise had been with Grace for four years and by all accounts was fiercely protective of her boss.

She was also a creature of habit. Each of the last three evenings at six p.m., she had taken an hour for herself to have dinner at the same sushi restaurant some eight or nine blocks from the convention center. She favored the same table in the front window, surfing news and political blogs on her laptop while she ate.

Yesterday, Hendricks had taken the table beside her. It was a small restaurant, and the tables were narrow and packed tight together. It had made it easy to get the two fairly clear recordings of her entering her laptop password—once when she arrived, and once when she returned from the restroom. Later, Hendricks slowed the recording down and the three of them sat around a monitor going backward and forward over the tape, arguing over whether it was a
K
or an
L
. Because of the camera angle, her left hand partially obscured the right side of the keyboard. But they were reasonably certain her password was DG5kjc790GD. Or possibly DG5kjl790GD. Jenn favored DG5lhj790GD. Definitely one of those.

When Denise sat down today, it was Gibson waiting for her at the next table. He apologized and moved his bag off her seat. She smiled thanks and made herself comfortable. She set up her laptop but didn’t comment on the fact they had the same computer. It was a pretty popular model after all.

Gibson went back to his work on his new laptop, which he’d bought only yesterday. Denise placed her order and proceeded to read a succession of blogs about the newly announced Lombard-Fleming ticket.

Overhead, Gibson could see Jenn’s reflection in the large mirror by the door. She was at the small sushi bar with her back to him. When the waitress picked up Denise’s food to take to the table, Jenn rose and went down the back hallway to the unisex bathroom. The waitress presented Denise with her food and asked them each in turn if they wanted anything else. Denise asked for a tea. Gibson asked for his check.

The past three nights, Denise had waited until her food arrived to wash her hands. Gibson held his breath until she shut her laptop and slipped out between the two tables. In the mirror, he watched her disappear around the corner. He switched laptops without looking up. Better to do something fast and with confidence than draw attention by looking around like a thief.

In his earpiece: “She’s knocked. Ninety seconds.”

He opened Denise’s laptop and entered the first password. The log-in window shook, rejecting it. Gibson blew air up his face in frustration. Always the last one you try, he thought darkly. He tried the second . . . same thing. The third—the log-in window shook disapprovingly again.

“How are you doing out there?” Jenn asked.

“I need a minute,” he muttered into his mic.

“Define a minute.”

“Look it up. I’m busy.”

He stared at his list of three probable passwords. The
D
and
G
were obviously her initials backward and forward. So she wasn’t averse to using personal mnemonics.
D
—Denise.
G
—Greenspan.
5k
—like the race? So what were those two lowercase letters? He looked back at the three possibles they’d come up with. A lot of
j
’s,
l
’s,
h
’s and a
c
. What was she trying to spell with that alphabet soup?

He saw Jenn come out of the hallway and sit back down at the bar.
hc
—Hamilton College.
Could it be as simple as that?
he thought. He typed, “DG5khcG790GD.” The computer logged him in. People loved their alma maters. He plugged in the thumb drive and began to download the file from it to her laptop. Denise Greenspan kept an immaculate desktop, so she would see the folder the first time she went to open something.

It was still downloading when Denise came out of the bathroom. He saw her in the mirror but kept his head down. What was a believable reason for being on her laptop? Other than being a thief, of course.

“Stop her,” he whispered.

Jenn turned sharply and said something to Denise. Denise paused and then slowly turned her back on Gibson. The two women chatted amicably. He offered a prayer of thanks at the altar of Jenn Charles, unplugged the thumb drive, and traded the laptops back. He was packing up to pay his bill when Denise got back to her table.

“What did you say to her?” Gibson asked.

“I asked where she bought her head scarf. Said my girlfriend had similar hair, and I was looking for a gift.”

They leaned forward and clinked the necks of their beer bottles over the coffee table.

“Maybe a little premature on the celebration, huh?” Hendricks was sitting by the window, looking out the gap in the curtains. They’d found a single vacant room at a motel about forty-five minutes out of Atlanta and slept in shifts, with one of them always stationed at the window.

Gibson was doing a lousy job of not staring at the burner cell phone on the coffee table between them. Was a phone the electronic equivalent of a watched pot?

Come on, Grace. Just call, already.

Hendricks snatched up the keys, saying he was hungry. He was gone thirty minutes and surprised them by bringing back food for everyone. Pretty decent Chinese. Hendricks spread the plastic dishes out on the small Formica table, and they all tucked in to eat. Hendricks only ate egg rolls. He would cut the ends off them, empty the filling out onto the table, and mix it with orange sauce. Then, laboriously, he would repack the egg rolls with a fork and finally eat them.

The phone sat in the middle of the table like a centerpiece. They talked about nothing in particular. Keeping it light. Certainly not the call they were all waiting on. For his part, Gibson kept up the pretense that he felt confident about his plan.

The contents of the message to Grace Lombard had been relatively simple. First was the photograph of Suzanne and her backpack at the kitchen table that Billy had taken all those years ago. Gibson remembered how he’d reacted to it the first time he saw it back at ACG and knew it would knock the wind out of Grace. They also included photos of Suzanne’s book. The only thing they held back was the picture of Suzanne pregnant. It was his hole card, and Gibson planned to show it to Grace in person.

The final piece was a short video recording of Gibson sitting at the table with the baseball cap in front of him. Jenn had been against it. She’d wanted to send a simple letter, but he said it was the only way. She would need to see his face if they wanted any chance of a meeting.

In the video, he spoke directly to Grace.

“Hi, Mrs. Lombard, this is Gibson Vaughn. It’s been a long time, but I hope you’re well. You made the best sandwich I ever ate. I miss the old days at Pamsrest, and I hope the place is still standing,” he said, pausing as he shifted gears. “Mrs. L., I know this is a strange way to approach you, but I believe you’ll come to see that these are extraordinary circumstances. I’ve learned something about Suzanne, about Bear, that you need to hear. In person. I’ve included photographs that I believe prove the truth of what I have to say. I don’t want anything. Only the opportunity to speak to you, and you alone. To tell you the truth.

“I’m going to ask you to keep this confidential until we have a chance to speak. Should you choose to involve your husband, then I guarantee that you will never know why your daughter left home or what happened to her. That may sound like a threat, but it is simply the truth.”

Hendricks had called the plan insane and tried to tear it apart. He was still taking potshots at it tonight.

“Hey,” Jenn said, “it’s our best shot.”

They’d been having variations of this argument since Greensboro. Hendricks, to say the least, had been skeptical right down the line.

“Yeah, but for all we know, she’ll take the message straight to her husband. I don’t care how well you knew her as a kid, Gibson. You really think she’s going to keep something like this secret from him?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s Grace, and this is about Suzanne.”

Hendricks groaned. “Well, be sure and tell that to the SWAT team when they get here. I’m still in favor of just going public, huh? Go to the media. Post it all over the Internet. The book. The cap. Once it’s out there, then he’ll have no reason to go after us.”

They’d been over all this in Greensboro. But Hendricks wasn’t the only one who had doubts, and sometimes it just helped to go back over things.

“That won’t work,” Gibson said in unison with Jenn.

“Why not?”

“You were a cop, right?” Gibson asked.

Hendricks didn’t look inclined to admit to it just at the moment.

“Well, there’s what you know, and then there’s what you can prove. And what can we prove? The book doesn’t do anything but ask questions. The hat doesn’t prove Lombard is a pedophile. We go to the Internet, we’re just another paranoid theory among a constellation of wacked-out conspiracy theories. It does us no good.”

Hendricks grudgingly accepted the truth of what Gibson was telling him, but he wasn’t happy.

“Yeah, but this is insanity. You’re actually talking about walking into that hotel. It’s a fortress. And it is guarded by Lombard’s men. You go in there, you’re a dead man.”

“I think you’ve got it backward. That hotel is probably the safest place for me.”

“How you figure that?”

“Have you seen any stories about us on the news?”

“No.”

“Right, because Lombard is playing this one off the books. Secret Service isn’t looking for me. It’s these Cold Harbor guys, and they won’t be anywhere near the hotel.”

“It can’t be done,” Hendricks said.

“It has to be done,” Jenn said. “She’s the only one who will believe us. She’s the only one Lombard can’t silence.”

“If Grace thinks I can tell her something she doesn’t know about Suzanne, then she’ll listen,” Gibson said, hoping the statement didn’t sound as wishful as it felt.

“Well, what if she knew about it? What if she’s just as twisted as her husband?” Jenn had slid back to Hendricks’s side of the argument.

“No, I don’t believe that. I knew her. There is no way that Grace Lombard had a part in it.”

“But what if she’s made her peace with it and likes the prestige and power too much to give it up now? You’ll just be walking into a trap.”

“Maybe she has, but my father always said she was the most grounded person he’d ever met in politics.”

“Jesus,” Hendricks said. “Are you really going to hang your life on a twelve-year-old opinion? By a man who, no offense, kind of fatally misread his boss?”

“Look, you may be right,” Gibson said. “It’s probably a stupid idea. But if so, then we have nothing that’ll work. And that means running. And if we run now, we run for the rest of our lives. That’s what I call a stupid idea.”

That quieted them all. Yes, it was a terrible plan, and it was their only option.

Hendricks chuckled. “Goddamn, Vaughn. When did your balls drop? I like the new you.”

The phone rang. They stopped and stared at it. It was painful letting it ring, but that was the arrangement. After a while the phone buzzed to tell them that they had a voice mail.

Jenn took up the phone and listened to the message. When she was done, she shut it and looked up at them.

“We’re on.”