The Short Drop

by Matthew Fitzsimmons

  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.

  He
ndricks 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.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  George Abe pressed a button on his steering wheel and hung up the call. After a moment, a bootleg recording of the Rolling Stones live at the LA Forum’75 filled the car. Jagger was growling about a gin-soaked barroom queen. It was the Stones’s first tour without Mick Taylor, and Ronnie Wood, while an able replacement, was still his own man and was putting his own mark on another man’s chords. It was one of George’s favorites, but he needed to think. He turned off the stereo and drove in silence.

  The call with Calista had not been pleasant. She was impatient, anxious, and increasingly frustrated that things weren’t proceeding more quickly in Somerset. That was part of it, but the death of her older sister had shaken her profoundly, and to say the least, Calista was not at her best.

  Calista had been close to her sister, and in many ways Evelyn Furst was the last member of the family of which that could be said. Evelyn had shared Calista’s passion for the family’s legacy and standing in the world. Her career as a surgeon and as the long-serving dean of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh was something Calista celebrated. Evelyn had been a pioneer for women, had led the way, and to Calista that was what it meant to be a Dauplaise.

  To say no one had seen it coming was an understatement. He had known Evelyn for years, and she’d seemed fine when he’d spoken to her at Catherine’s birthday party. Perhaps a touch preoccupied but certainly not suicidal. Of course, it was impossible to predict how the loss of a spouse might affect a person. Evelyn’s suicide note had been profound and sad.

  Calista had rather dramatically taken to talking about being “alone in the world.” It was hard to be alone in the world when you had thirty houseguests, as Calista did for the funeral, but Calista had always drawn a distinction between those who upheld her notions of Dauplaise values and those who absconded to Florida. Evelyn was, in Calista’s mind, one of the last who’d carried the torch. A true Dauplaise. She was only interested in results and had no understanding of the time such matters required. And things in Pennsylvania had definitely become more complex.

  She was also incensed that he had brought Gibson Vaughn home. She hadn’t wanted him there in the first place, but now she was acting as if his absence explained why things were taking so long. She continued to voice doubts about Jenn and Dan’s competence, and was pushing hard for George to take over personally in Somerset.

  George understood, in principle. She was grasping at straws, trying to impose order over a situation that was still fluid. This was not her world, and looking for Suzanne this way exposed her to considerable risk. As it exposed them all. It weighed heavily on him. He had sanctioned these tactics when Kirby Tate had been an abstract. But now Tate was a person, and George had to question the morality of asking his people to go down this path. Jenn and Dan were loyal. When this was all over, George knew there would be a reckoning.

  His phone buzzed—a voice mail from Jenn. She’d called twice while he’d been talking to Calista. She and Dan would have had time to digest the Musgrove file by now. George had decided against mentioning Musgrove to Calista until he knew better how it fit into the investigation. She was liable to overreact to such an unexpected curveball.

  A black SUV passed him at speed and pulled in front of his car aggressively. George tapped the brakes as the SUV slowed and red-and-blue strobes erupted from its running lights. A second black SUV pulled in tight behind him, boxing him in. The lead vehicle squelched a short burst of siren and signaled for George to pull over. George followed their directions and hit a button on his steering wheel. The car asked what number to call.

  “Jenn Charles,” he said, pronouncing it crisply.

  The phone rang as their little convoy came to a stop on the shoulder. It went to voice mail, and he spoke a single word: “Meiji.”

  He hung up as a tall agent in a dark suit rapped on his window. A second agent was at the passenger door. The doors of the SUV behind him were open, but neither agent had moved. George rolled down his window an inch.

  “FBI. Are you George Abe?”

  “Yes.”

  “I need you to come with us, sir.”

  “What’s this about?”

  “Pennsylvania, sir. Step out of the car, please.” The agent tried the door, but it was locked. “Unlock the door, sir.”

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “We’d prefer to avoid that if we can.”

  George weighed his options.

  “Step out of the car, sir.”

  “Give me a minute,” George said.

  “Step out of the car, sir,” the agent repeated, an undercurrent of menace in his voice now.

  The agents were out of the other SUV now. George could feel things escalating quickly out of his control. He unlocked the door, and the agent opened it. George stepped out and allowed the agent to pat him down.

  “He’s clean,” the agent said to his partner on the other side of the car.

  The agent ushered him in the direction of the lead SUV. His partner crossed toward them, slipping between the bumpers of the two vehicles. George glanced down at the sizeable dent in the SUV’s rear fender. The Bureau was slipping. There had been a time that a Bureau vehicle with a dent would have been off the road and in the shop in twenty-four hours. Then George caught the license plate, and his smile disappeared. It didn’t have government plates, and it wasn’t from DC or Virginia either. Tennessee plates… he’d been too busy calling Jenn to pick up on it when he’d been pulled over. The agent hadn’t shown him credentials either. Whoever they were, they weren’t Bureau. He’d have given a small fortune for the gun in his glove compartment, but it was a long way away now.

  George slowed and patted his sports-jacket pockets as if he’d forgotten something.

  “I left my phone in the car,” he said and began to turn back.

  “Just get in the car, sir.” The man took him by the arm to turn him back.

  The man expected a little resistance. George offered none and used the tug to spin back toward him. His fist caught the man under the chin. It was a hammer blow, and if it had caught the man in the throat as George intended, then it would have crushed the larynx. But George’s feet had slipped slightly in the gravel, and it didn’t land cleanly.

  As it was, the man’s head snapped back, and he let out a snarl of pain. George couldn’t run, and while he might take both of these men in close quarters, the two men in the rear SUV would put him down. George went for the man’s gun instead. His only chance was to draw it before the partner reached him. George found the gun’s grip and pulled it clear, twisting sideways as he did to put some space between himself and the partner who was closing in on him. George tried to bring the gun up, but it snagged on the lining of the man’s jacket. H
e wrenched it free, but the partner was on him by then.

  Taser voltage exploded through George’s central nervous system.

  Jenn sat in the passenger seat of the Cherokee. On the dashboard lay the crime-scene photo of Terrance Musgrove’s suicide. In the shock of discovering Tate’s murder, she’d forgotten all about it. Wondering what Gibson Vaughn was doing back in Pennsylvania had brought it back to her.

  She opened her laptop and scrolled to the background dossier on Gibson that she’d compiled before George had approached him for the job. She clicked on the folder labeled “Duke Vaughn” and flipped through it until she found the photograph. Her eyes went back and forth between the two.

  “How is this possible?” she said out loud.

  It was a small thing—a meaningless detail in the bottom corner of each photograph. Unremarkable unless you looked at them side by side. She’d figured that it was her memory playing tricks on her, or at best it was just a coincidental similarity. But this, this was something else. This was the same. Exactly the same. How was that possible?

  She showed it to Hendricks.

  “How is that possible?” he echoed.

  She didn’t know, but it tied Duke Vaughn to what was happening in Somerset. To Suzanne Lombard’s abduction.

  Hendricks looked at her seriously. “This stays between us until we know what it means.”

  “Even Vaughn?”

  “Especially Vaughn.”

  They went back to work, because it was paralyzing to think about it too long, and they couldn’t afford to be here a second longer than was necessary. That worked for a while, until the sound of Hendricks cursing rousted her. She thought she was well versed in all of Hendricks’s tones, but there was an unfamiliar edge to his voice. He sounded panicked. She found him standing over their weapons bag.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “One of them’s gone.”

  “One of what’s gone? One of the guns?”

  “One of the Glocks.” His voice had dropped to a near whisper. “That and two mags.”

  “Anything else?”