Hendricks was a remarkably accomplished audio technician. He’d conjured an entire cockpit crew running through a preflight checklist. She and Hendricks had staged a prisoner transfer, manhandling Tate and barking instructions at him. Tate struggled and moaned under his hood but couldn’t speak through the gag. Hendricks had rapped him across the head and told him to be a good boy.
Right before “takeoff,” they’d gassed him. Nothing too potent. Just enough to knock him out for five minutes, and when he’d woken the plane was in the “air.” It was an impressive effect, the cockpit humming like a plane in flight. Hendricks had defeated the plane’s squat switch (a weight-sensitive trigger in the landing gear that told the plane it was on the ground) and pressurized the interior; Jenn had actually felt her ears pop. A “pilot” came over the speakers and gave the cabin a status update: airspeed, altitude, flight time. Hendricks had placed a large subwoofer beneath the plane, which produced a constant low-frequency tone to simulate the engines. They’d kept up a constant chatter: Jenn playing the part of the veteran, Hendricks the rookie. During the “flight,” Hendricks had peppered her with questions about their destination, and Jenn painted a grim picture for Tate’s benefit.
They’d let Tate soak up the performance for thirty minutes and then gassed him again. A little more this time. So that when he’d woken, groggy and disoriented, he was easily convinced that he was back on terra firma and being loaded into a car. The same car, as it happened, but with the sounds of foreign voices chattering in the background, there’d been no way for him to know that. Tate had whimpered under his hood.
By the time they had arrived at Grafton Storage, Tate believed. Jenn had heard it in his voice. Somewhere along the line, he’d wet himself too.
While Gibson had been occupied writing his program at the motel back in Somerset, Hendricks had converted one of the abandoned storage units into a rudimentary command center. They had cots, a hot plate, food, and water. A portable generator ran the monitors they used to watch their captive.
Kirby Tate’s cell was a neighboring ten-by-thirty-foot storage unit, which Hendricks had adapted into a holding cell and interrogation room. He’d installed chain-link fencing and a padlocked door across one half of the room. A coil of barbed wire ran along the base. A straw pallet in the event Tate earned the right to sleep. A bucket for waste.
It was primitive and intended that way.
They’d hustled him out of the car and into his cell. Strung him up while he’d made hysterical clucking sounds through his gag. Went on making them while they’d changed into black jumpsuits and pulled on ski masks. By concealing their identities, they gave Tate a glimmer of hope that if he confessed, they would let him go. Even Tate was smart enough to know that if he saw their faces, he was a dead man.
Jenn had yanked off Tate’s hood, and Tate’s eyes bulged as he frantically looked in all directions. Hendricks did all the talking. She felt Tate would respond better to a male authority figure. Who knew what kind of humiliating relationship Tate had with adult women.
She’d been a little worried about Hendricks. He had decades of experience with traditional interrogations and possessed tremendous instincts. But this was something else entirely. She’d been coaching him for a couple weeks now, and while he got it in the abstract, it was very different in reality. She needn’t have worried; Hendricks was a natural.
“You’ve done it now, boy,” Hendricks had begun.
Tate tried to speak through the gag, but it came out as futile, clownish gurgles.
“You really thought you could get away with it? That we wouldn’t find you? Bad news there, son. This is the end of the line for you. Should have gotten off this train a long time ago, and now you’re a long way from home.”
Jenn had yanked the gag out of his mouth.
“I want a lawyer,” Tate had demanded.
Hendricks had laughed. “There are no lawyers in hell, son.”
“This is illegal. I want my lawyer!”
“I am your lawyer. What do you need?”
“You can’t do this,” Tate had cried. “I know my rights.”
“There are no rights out here, boy. Where do you think you are?”
Tate’s eyes had been wide, filled with an animal panic. His mouth had worked silently like he still had the gag in it.
“Listen to me good. We know who you are. We know what you did. We all know it. We just want to hear you say it. You messed with the wrong man’s child, and there’s no coming back from that. You have any idea how powerful he is? How far he can reach? I suppose not, or you would have messed with some other kid, am I right? Well you’re in it now, boy. What’s done is done. There’s only here and now left to think about. How it’s going to go for you from here on out. Is it going to go long or is it going to go short? That’s what you need to decide. How do I make it go short? Because, believe you me, you don’t want this to go long.”
“I swear to Christ, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
Hendricks had slapped him. Not hard, but the effect had been powerful. Tate had shut his mouth and stared up with sullen fear.
“That kind of talk right there,” Hendricks had said. “That kind of talk is what makes a short thing go long.”
“I swear,” Tate had whined, eyes darting back and forth between them. There were no good cops here.
Hendricks had put a finger to his lips. “We’re going to leave you to think about it. Long or short. It will be up to you. Tell the truth, this will be short and painless. Lie to us and you will hurt for a long, long time. Understand?”
Tate had said nothing.
“Understand?” Hendricks had bellowed.
Tate had nodded, his head lolling weakly to the side.
“Good,” Hendricks had said. “So, we’re going to leave you to think about it. In the meantime, my partner and I are going to go have dinner. Rest up for you. When we come back, you’re going to tell us all about Suzanne Lombard. Or I’m going to make a mess of you.” Hendricks had said it flatly. Matter-of-factly, like he was choosing between two light beers.
Hendricks had nodded to Jenn, and they’d left Tate dangling in his cell. Tate had yelled after them and kept yelling long after they had slammed shut the locker’s rollaway door.
“Who?” he’d cried repeatedly. “I don’t know no Suzanne! I don’t. Who the fuck is Suzanne Lombard, man? I don’t know her.”
And on and on.
Jenn actually preferred the speed metal to the sound of Tate’s voice. He was so compelling. So sincere and blameless. It would have made her heart ache if she hadn’t seen this act many times before. An interrogation room was the greatest acting school ever devised. They clung to the lie like a life jacket. So convincing that she wondered sometimes if they actually convinced themselves of their own innocence. In the long run, it never made any difference. The only variable was how long it would take him to realize the same thing. She checked her watch and hit a button on her console. Tate’s cell was engulfed in searing white light. His body recoiled, and his mouth stretched into a scream as if the light itself burned.
The music played on.
Jenn and Hendricks stepped out of Tate’s cell and into the sunshine. Jenn pulled the rollaway door down. They stripped out of their jumpsuits and ski masks. It was foul in there, and they were both bathed in sweat. She watched Hendricks walk away in his boxers and Doc Martens to light a cigarette. In her shorts and sports bra, she was in no position to complain. They were way past social niceties.
She went back to their command post and fished four bottles of water out of a cooler. She found a spot in the shade, put her back against a wall, and slid down to the ground. When Hendricks came back, she handed him a bottle.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“Fuck the time, what day is it?”
He fished his phone out of his gear and held it up to her face.
“When did it get to be Thursday?” she asked.
They’d been working on Tate for four days now. It had been slow going, and they weren’t in complete agreement about how much progress they were making. Hendricks thought it was going well. Jenn was a little surprised at how long it was taking. She’d expected Tate to cave before now. The pathetic child molester had more backbone than she’d expected. What was certain was that Tate had accepted the fact that his situation was hopeless. He had come to see Jenn and Hendricks as the gods of his life. At this point, his game was admitting to just enough to make them happy without incriminating himself—a standard intermediary step. He talked in circles, but the circle was getting smaller every day.
For the first two days, he had clung to the fairy tale that he’d never even heard of Suzanne Lombard or her abduction. It was a stupid lie, and Hendricks had leaned on Tate hard enough to get him to give it up on Tuesday. They’d made Tate tell them the whole story. Tate was, if anything, an aficionado of the Suzanne Lombard case and knew it backward and forward. But so far Tate hadn’t told them anything that wasn’t in the public record and swore up and down that he didn’t know anything about hacking ACG.
“How much more do you want to push him today?” Hendricks asked. “He needs to eat. Sleep. Boy’s borderline incoherent at this point.”
Jenn nodded. Hendricks was right. They were in danger of breaking Tate, but not in a productive way. She would need to update George. He wasn’t going to like it. Calista was on his back to produce results, and every day they were here increased their chances of detection. That would not be good, to put it mildly. It didn’t matter one bit what Tate had done. If she and Hendricks got caught with Tate, they were all going away for a long, long time.
Hendricks’s phone buzzed in his hand. He looked at it, puzzled at first, but then confused and worried.
“What is it?” she asked.
“It’s Vaughn’s virus.”
“What about it?”
“It just went off.”
Gibson lay flat on his stomach and watched Jenn and Hendricks peel off matching jumpsuits. He was on the roof of a storage unit at the far end of Grafton Storage that offered an unobstructed view of Jenn and Hendricks’s little operation. He didn’t know precisely what was happening to Tate, but he had a pretty good idea. The fact that it required ski masks made him a little sick. Tate was vile. No question. But that didn’t justify whatever was happening down in that storage locker.
So why hadn’t he called the police? The timer on his moral high ground had long since counted down. He might not be down in the trenches with Jenn and Hendricks, but at this point he was every bit as guilty. How far was he willing to let this go if it meant finding out what Tate knew? Where was the line?
He felt his phone buzz and put down his binoculars. He was expecting a call from ACG at some point. He’d called on Monday to ask if he could keep the car for an extra week, maintaining his ruse that he was back in the DC area. George’s assistant had said he’d get back to Gibson, but there’d been no word since. Apparently ACG had other things on its mind.
He looked at his phone; he was half-right. It was a text, and it was from ACG, but it had nothing to do with the car. The beacon virus that he’d embedded in ACG’s files had gone off.
The text was a long spool of data and ended with GPS coordinates. His original virus’s instructions had been to install itself onto the hacker’s machine, cover its tracks, and use the host machine’s GPS to phone home. But that hadn’t happened. Instead it had been downloaded and remained dormant ever since. That’s why they’d resorted to staking out the library.
The original virus had been a long shot anyway, and Gibson hadn’t been surprised when it hadn’t gotten a hit. It would have required the subject to open ACG’s files on a machine with an Internet connection. But the hacker had done what Gibson would have done, which was take the downloaded files somewhere safe and look at them on a stand-alone computer.
For it to go off while Tate was locked up confirmed Gibson’s suspicions. His virus couldn’t self-activate. For it to phone home now, someone would have to intentionally connect it to the Internet. It sure as hell wasn’t Kirby Tate. So who? Who had just rung the dinner bell?
Gibson focused his binoculars back on Jenn and Hendricks, who were locked in a heated discussion. Hendricks was pointing angrily at the unit where they had Tate. Jenn had both hands, fingers interlocked, on top of her head in a gesture of disbelief.
Not the text message you were expecting either, was it?
Gibson tried to put the pieces together. If the virus had gone off now, then it meant that another player was involved. Tate had a partner. Someone who knew computers and had activated Gibson’s virus either by mistake or on purpose. His money was on on purpose. But why?
If it was on purpose, then the partner knew Tate had been taken. Activating the virus might be a signal to lead them away from Tate. Unwilling or unable to risk a call to the police, the partner was doing the next best thing in trying to divert suspicion away from Tate and, in so doing, saving his life. Make them think they’d grabbed the wrong guy.
And give himself away? It just didn’t make sense. He and Tate would have to be awful close for the partner to stick his neck out like this when he could just give them Tate and slip away. Unless Tate wasn’t his partner at all but a pawn. In that case, what was WR8TH’s play?
Gibson gave up trying to calculate all the permutations and went back to the binoculars. Jenn and Hendricks had settled on a plan. They squared Tate away and shut him up in his storage unit like a box of old clothes. In half an hour, the two were back in street clothes. They made their usual exit from Grafton, with Jenn going over the wall and unlocking the gate for Hendricks in the SUV.
When they were gone, Gibson dropped off the roof and jogged to where they were holding Tate. They had locked him in but hadn’t locked the unit where they were staying. He found the keys on a hook just inside the rollaway door. He wondered what he would find in there. He didn’t know, but he hoped there was still enough of Tate left to answer his questions.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Hendricks took the Pennsylvania Turnpike toward Pittsburgh. Jenn paged through her notes, trying to make sense of what had happened and hoping she wouldn’t rue the decision to send Gibson back to DC. She could have really used his expertise right about now. She ran her tongue across her teeth while she thought. For once, Hendricks was quiet, the possibility that Tate was the wrong guy too horrible to contemplate.
“Tate is no angel,” Hendricks said.
She didn’t answer and flipped to another page in her notebook.
The GPS coordinates that Vaughn’s virus provided led them to North Huntingdon—an older, established suburban neighborhood outside Pittsburgh. Mature, stately trees shaded the streets, and the lawns were expanses of perfect green. Luxury vehicles were parked in every driveway.
“All this needs is a lemonade stand,” Hendricks said.
The GPS coordinates led them to 1754 Orange Lane, a broad two-story Tudor with white trim. A police car was parked in front, and Hendricks kept driving. At the end of the block he pulled over to the curb, adjusted his mirror, and sat back to watch.
“This is the house?” Hendricks asked.
“If Gibson’s virus is accurate.” She called Rilling and had him look up the tax records on the house.
Twenty minutes later, an officer emerged from the house with a man and woman following him. The couple appeared to be in their early thirties, and even from a distance it was clear they were unhappy. The man shook hands with the officer while his wife clung to her husband’s arm. They stood out on their porch until he drove away. The woman waved good-bye.
Jenn’s phone buzzed. It was a text from Rilling. The house was owned by William and Katherine McKe
ogh. She showed it to Hendricks.
“What do you think?”
Hendricks waited until the couple went back inside, turned the car around, and parked across the street from the house.
“Only one way to find out,” he said, getting out.
An elderly woman sitting on her porch put down her book and waved to Jenn. She waved back politely. Friendly neighborhood. Guards down. Welcoming. She followed Hendricks across the street and up the front steps of 1754 Orange Lane. Hendricks rang the doorbell and stepped back from the door. He shook out his neck like he was limbering up for a fight. As the woman opened the door, Hendricks put on a warm, friendly smile that Jenn had never seen.
“Can I help you?” Katherine McKeogh had a kind face and large brown eyes. Her hair was pulled back with an emerald bow.
Hendricks retrieved a business card from the breast pocket of his jacket and handed it to her.
“Sorry to bother you at home, ma’am. My name is Dan Hendricks. This is my partner, Jenn Charles. We were hoping to ask you and your husband a few questions.”
“Are you detectives?” she asked, looking at his card.
“No, ma’am. ACG is a private firm. We’ve been contracted to consult with the local police department and evaluate their procedures.”
“Oh,” she said, handing the card back. “But an officer was just here.”
“We’re not police, ma’am. We’re doing follow-ups. It’s part of a countywide initiative to improve services. We were in the area and thought we’d stop in and see if we could take a report while it was fresh in your minds.”
“He was very nice. I don’t want to get him in any trouble.”
Hendricks smiled sweetly. Jenn was starting to see why he’d had one of the highest case-closure rates in the LAPD. His transformation bordered on disturbing.
The Short Drop Page 18
