The Short Drop (20 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Gibson sat at a table in the shade of the Carolyn Anthony Library. It was comforting after the storage locker. He’d also hoped returning to the scene of the crime would help him think, offer some clarity, but the library was just a library and had nothing useful to tell him. The park was quieter than last Friday, when he’d allowed himself to be conned. Allowed himself to be spun expertly and aimed at Tate.

How easily he had fallen for it.

Gibson looked at the GPS coordinates his virus had pinged back to ACG as if they might speak to him. No doubt Jenn and Hendricks had followed those coordinates, wherever they led. Perhaps they would take WR8TH unawares, but Gibson doubted it. WR8TH was much too careful. If Gibson’s virus had activated, it was only because WR8TH had allowed it. But why reveal himself now? Didn’t it defeat the entire purpose of setting Tate up? Unless, of course, WR8TH couldn’t resist—was so arrogant that he couldn’t stand not sharing his brilliance. Gibson had certainly known hackers like that. He’d been that hacker. This was exactly the kind of move he would have made . . . when he was fifteen years old.

His laptop pinged, and a small text window opened in the corner of his screen. The hairs on Gibson’s arms stood up.

WR8TH: i hear ur looking for me

It was written in the shorthand Pidgin English favored in some quarters of the Internet. It sounded like teenage laziness, but Gibson made no assumptions. He knew programmers in their fifties with master’s degrees who used it regularly online. There were sites where good grammar could get you banned on general principle.

GVaughn: I don’t even know who this is.

WR8TH: true. but u know who im not, dont u???

GVaughn: You’re not Kirby Tate.

WR8TH: whoops

Gibson could feel WR8TH laughing at him.

GVaughn: You really did a number on him.

WR8TH: dont feel bad for that trash. he got wat he deserved

GVaughn: That’s pretty cold-blooded.

WR8TH: yeah not me who stuck him in a storage locker

GVaughn: You’re quite the puppeteer.

WR8TH: r u all butthurt that i found yer program?

GVaughn: It served its purpose.

WR8TH: only cuz i let it

GVaughn: Why did you?

WR8TH: why didnt u go back to dc like they told u?

GVaughn: Been spying on us?

WR8TH: little bit. answer the question, why r u still here?

GVaughn: Suzanne.

WR8TH: same

Gibson stared at the last line of text for a full minute.

GVaughn: WR8TH. I assume that’s who you’re supposed to be? The WR8TH?

WR8TH: *blush*

GVaughn: I don’t believe you. I think you’re some wannabe using his old alias.

WR8TH: ur not that stupid. u know its me

GVaughn: Do I?

WR8TH: who else would have that picture???

GVaughn: It’s probably a fake. Just like you.

WR8TH: stop playing games. ur wasting time

GVaughn: Maybe it’s my turn to waste time. All your games kinda put me in the mood.

A long pause followed.

WR8TH: r u done?

GVaughn: For now. So it was you? You took Suzanne?

WR8TH: sort of . . . more complicated than that

GVaughn: What do you mean “sort of”?

WR8TH: i’m not wat they think I am

GVaughn: What do they think you are?

WR8TH: a pedophile like tate. that i hurt her

GVaughn: And you didn’t?

WR8TH: no, i loved her

GVaughn: You understand how sick you are, right?

WR8TH: not wat u think

GVaughn: Okay, you loved her, all right. So where is she now, Romeo?

Another long pause. Gibson was afraid he had goaded WR8TH too far. He couldn’t help it. Listening to this son of a bitch talk about loving Bear was too much to take. But he needed to keep him talking.

GVaughn: Are you capable of feeling bad for what happened to her?

WR8TH: every day man. every lousy day

GVaughn: So where is she? Come on. You have us all in suspense. We’ve played your little game. You’ve proven how clever you are. The Tate thing was very clever. Golf clap. But enough with the foreplay, huh? It’s main attraction time. The big reveal. Isn’t that what the point of all this is? Some kind of creepy confession? Unburden your soul at last?

WR8TH: u dont get it

GVaughn: Or do you just miss the attention? Just hoping to inflict a little more pain on the people who loved her?

WR8TH: I LOVED HER!!!!

GVaughn: Then where is she?

WR8TH: i dont know

GVaughn: Fuck you, “WR8TH.”

WR8TH: swear to god. i thought they knew

GVaughn: They? Who is they?

WR8TH: abe consulting group. why u think i hacked them???

GVaughn: You think ACG knows where Suzanne is?

WR8TH: i did yeah

GVaughn: And now?

WR8TH: i dont know anymore

Gibson sat back and stared at the screen.

WR8TH: hey, dont look so surprised, gibson

That got under his skin; he was sick of being toyed with. He punched at the keys.

GVaughn: Oh, you know my name. Good for you. That must have been real hard to figure out from all the ACG files you took.

WR8TH: u kidding? i would know u anywhere. BrnChr0m. ur a legend. Suzanne talked about u all the time

That rocked Gibson. Bear talking about him to her captor. That he’d been on her mind even then. He felt a great sweeping sadness. Sadness mixed with a returning anger.

GVaughn: Oh, yeah? She talk about the good old days growing up on the shore while you were torturing her, or whatever sick shit you did?

WR8TH: KISS MY ASS!!! i LOVED her. she did actually and she talked about u a lot. how u called her Bear and read to her

GVaughn: I don’t want to hear it from you.

WR8TH: wat u did to her dad. how mad u made him

GVaughn: Screw him.

WR8TH: we agree on something at last haha

Gibson could not think of how to respond to that. WR8TH had something on his mind.

WR8TH: why are u here?

GVaughn: To find out what happened to Suzanne.

WR8TH: ur partners. are they here to kill me?

GVaughn: I don’t know.

WR8TH: want to know something funny?

GVaughn: What?

WR8TH: i trust u. pretty stupid, huh?

GVaughn: Yes.

They’d been typing back and forth faster and faster. Gibson was striking the keys hard, and it slipped off his fingers before he thought about it. He took his fingers off the keys and stared at the blinking cursor, waiting for a response, but none came. He cursed under his breath.

GVaughn: Still there?

Nothing. Damn, damn, damn. Come back, you sick bastard.

Wait, what?

Gibson scrolled up and reread what WR8TH had typed: “don’t look so surprised.”
Look
so surprised? Son of a bitch could
see
him. WR8TH was here. Watching him the way they had watched Tate. And now that he thought about it, WR8TH must be on the library network too. How else had he opened a chat client on his laptop?

Gibson glanced around to see who else was in the park. He locked eyes with a tall, gangly man sitting opposite him two tables over. No more than twenty-five.
Scruffy
was the word that best described him. Long, curly blond hair launched off his head in all directions in a way that made Gibson doubt a comb was one of his earthly possessions. A failed attempt to grow a beard had resulted in long, patchy sideburns and a mustache that curled down but not far enough to reach the thick tuft under his chin. He wore a black Slipknot T-shirt—a heavy-metal band Gibson had heard more than enough in the Corps. Trendy black glasses couldn’t disguise the man’s wide, friendly eyes.

Eyes that held Gibson’s gaze and didn’t blink or look away.

GVaughn: WR8TH?

He typed it slowly, thinking it couldn’t be him. The man sitting in front of him would have been a kid when Suzanne disappeared.

The man glanced down at his laptop, then looked up and nodded.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Hendricks slowed as he turned into Grafton Storage.

The gate was wide open.

Jenn saw it too. She opened the passenger door and stepped out as the Cherokee rolled toward the gate. Gun flat against her thigh, she trotted alongside the Cherokee, using the open passenger door as a shield. Someone had made short work of the padlock with bolt cutters.

“What do you think?” Jenn asked without taking her eyes off the road ahead. “Police?”

“The police wouldn’t advertise like this. The gate would be shut to lure us in. This is something else.”

“Agreed. We go in.”

Hendricks nodded grimly. Jenn shut her door so he could maneuver more easily and fell in behind the Cherokee.

When they were inside, Jenn shut the gate behind them. On the one hand, she was trapping them inside with their uninvited guests. On the other, she was trapping their guests in with them. Guess they’d find out which soon enough.

She tapped the back of the Cherokee, and Hendricks rolled forward slowly. Jenn took an angle so she could both stay in cover and keep line of sight as they came up on intersections between storage buildings. She didn’t hate that they had the late afternoon sun behind them either. It would help offset the tactical advantage of an enemy ambush.

They made their way to the storage locker housing Tate. It was slow going, but if it was a trap, it gave the best chance of spotting it. Jenn agreed with Hendricks, though. If it had been a trap, the gate would have been shut and they wouldn’t have known until it was too late. The gate was a message, and as they neared Tate’s cell, she saw that the rollaway door was up.

Hendricks drove past Tate’s cell, and Jenn slipped off the bumper and took the near corner. Hendricks stopped thirty feet away and came back on foot, taking the far corner. He held up three fingers, and Jenn nodded. He mouthed “Three, two, one,” and Jenn rolled around the corner in a crouch, gun up, scanning the room. Hendricks followed a half step behind, hard and fast, dividing the room in half.

They came to an abrupt halt, their guns falling limply to their sides. Tate’s cell door was open. Tate was gone.

Jenn took a step forward and stepped in something wet. She looked down. A wide blood trail led from Tate’s cell. Someone had bled out in the cell. Wherever Tate was now, he hadn’t walked there.

“Well, this isn’t ideal,” Hendricks said, holstering his gun.

She looked at him, thinking. “Leave the camera running?”

“Yeah,” Hendricks said.

“Roll it back and take a look. I’m going to call George.”

“Don’t you think, maybe, we should talk about what’s happening here?”

“Not now. Check the tape.”

“Then what?”

“We break camp and get the hell out of Dodge. Then we talk about what’s happening here.”

Jenn stepped out into the late afternoon sunshine and dialed George. It went to voice mail, and she hung up and dialed again. Voice mail again. She frowned. She hung up and called Abe Consulting’s main line. It also went to voice mail. She checked her watch. Reception went home at five thirty; it was nearly six. Usually there was someone in the office. She tried Rilling but got his voice mail. Where was everybody? She called George back and left a perky two-word message. “Call me!” It was code to send the cavalry. Cavalry would be nice.

She heard Hendricks yelling her name. She found him by the monitors.

“You’re not going to like this,” Hendricks said.

“I don’t like it now.”

Hendricks hit “Play.” It was a static shot of Tate in his cell. After a minute, the cell lit up and immediately dimmed again as the rollaway door opened and closed. Gibson Vaughn came into the frame.

“Oh, you have got to be kidding me . . .”

“I told you.”

“Vaughn did this? I don’t believe it.”

“Just watch,” Hendricks said.

Vaughn sat down by the cage. Tate eventually came and sat nearby, and the two men talked for a long while before Gibson left. She would pay good money to know what the two of them talked about, but the room was only wired for video. Hindsight was twenty-twenty.

Hendricks sped up the recording. The time stamp zipped ahead ninety minutes. In the recording, she watched the cell light up as the rollaway door opened yet again. Hendricks slowed the tape to its normal speed, and Jenn leaned forward. Tate stood up and came to the front of the cage. He seemed to be expecting someone, and his face registered first surprise and then fear. Whoever it was stayed back behind the camera. Tate began gesturing frantically, hands up in a gesture of surrender and compliance.

The first bullet caught Tate in the shoulder and exploded through his collarbone, twisting him around. Tate staggered backward, trying to right himself, but before he could regain his balance he was hit twice more and sent sprawling. Once Tate was down, the gunman kept firing. Jenn watched in horror as Tate’s body was riddled with bullets. She counted at least a dozen impacts. There was a pause as the gunman reloaded and emptied a second magazine into Tate’s unmoving body.

“Jesus.”

A minute passed. A piece of black tape was placed over the camera. Hendricks sped up the recording again; twenty minutes passed before the tape came off. And, like a magic trick, Tate’s cell was open and his body gone.

Hendricks hit “Pause,” and the two of them stared at the frozen image.

“Ain’t that some shit?” he said. “Think it was Vaughn? He could have broken into the McKeoghs’, set off his virus to lure us out, and looped back to take care of Tate.”

“No way.”

“Suzanne Lombard was personal for the guy,” Hendricks said. “If he thought Tate took her, you don’t think he has it in him?”

“Maybe. But do I think Vaughn let himself be recorded and then came back ninety minutes later, blacked out the camera, and killed Tate? No, I do not.”

Hendricks thought it over and grunted agreement. “We’re going to wish this was Vaughn.”

“I know.”

“So who killed Tate? The real WR8TH?”

Jenn didn’t have a response.

“What did George say?” Hendricks asked.

“He didn’t pick up.”

“Perfect. What now?”

“Break everything down. Bleach the cell and torch it. Erase all the surveillance footage.”

“What if we need the footage later?”

“Risk we have to take.”