Cynthia was shaking her head, unable to believe it all. “Did the police catch them?”
“Didn’t have to,” Abagnall said. “Anthony Fleming’s people took care of them. Massacred a houseful of them-those who were responsible, and a few who were not but happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time-in retaliation. They figure Vince Fleming was in charge of that operation, but he was never convicted, never even charged.”
Abagnall reached for another cookie. “I really shouldn’t,” he said. “I know my wife will be making me something nice for dinner.”
I spoke up. “But what does all this have to do with Cynthia, and her family?”
“Nothing, exactly,” the detective said. “But I’m learning about the kind of person Vince turned out to be, and I’m wondering about the kind of person he might have been, that night when your wife’s family disappeared.”
“You think he had something to do with it,” Cynthia said.
“I simply don’t know. But he would have had reason to be angry. Your father had dragged you away from a date with him. That must have been humiliating, not just for you, but for him as well. And if he did have anything to do with your parents’ disappearance, and that of your brother, if he…” His voice softened. “If he murdered them, then he had a father with the means, and the experience, to help him cover his tracks.”
“But surely the police must have looked into this at the time,” I said. “You can’t be the first person this has occurred to.”
“You’re right. The police looked into it. But they never came up with anything concrete. There were only some suspicions. And Vince and his family were each other’s alibis. He said he went home after Clayton Bigge took his daughter home.”
“It would explain one thing,” Cynthia said.
“What’s that?” I asked.
Abagnall was smiling. He must have known what Cynthia was going to say, which was, “It would explain why I’m alive.”
Abagnall nodded.
“Because he liked me.”
“But your brother,” I said. “He had nothing against your brother.” I turned to Abagnall. “How do you explain that?”
“Todd may simply have been a witness. Someone who was there, who had to be eliminated.”
We were all quiet for a moment. Then Cynthia said, “He had a knife.”
“Who?” Abagnall asked. “Vince?”
“In the car that night. He was showing it off to me. It was a-what do you call it-one of those knives that springs open.”
“A switchblade,” Abagnall said.
“That’s it,” Cynthia said. “I remember…I can remember holding it…” Her voice trailed off, and her eyes were starting to roll up under her eyelids. “I feel faint.”
I quickly slipped my arm around her. “What can I get you?”
“I just, I just need to go…freshen up…for a minute,” she said, attempting to stand. I waited a moment to see that she was steady on her feet, then watched worriedly as she made her way up the stairs.
Abagnall was watching, too, and when he heard the bathroom door close, he leaned closer to me and said quietly, “What do you make of that?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think she’s exhausted.”
Abagnall nodded, didn’t speak for a moment. Then, “This Vince Fleming, his father made a very good living from his illegal activities. If he felt some sense of responsibility for what his son did, it would have been financially possible for him to leave sums of cash for your wife’s aunt to assist her in sending her niece to school.”
“You saw the letter,” I said. “Tess showed it to you.”
“Yes. She gave it to me, in fact, in addition to the envelopes. I take it you still haven’t told your wife about that.”
“Not yet. I think Tess is ready to, though. Cynthia’s decision to hire you, I think Tess sees that as a sign that she’s ready to know everything.”
Abagnall nodded thoughtfully. “It’s best to get everything out into the open now, since we’re trying to get some answers.”
“We’re planning to see Tess tomorrow night. Actually, it might be worth seeing her tonight.” I was, to be honest, thinking about Abagnall’s daily rate.
“That’s a good-” Inside his jacket, Abagnall’s phone rang. “A dinner report, no doubt,” he said, taking out the phone. But he looked puzzled when he saw the number, tossed the phone back into his jacket, and said, “They can leave a message.”
Cynthia was making her way back down the stairs.
“Mrs. Archer, are you feeling all right?” Abagnall asked. She nodded and sat back down. He cleared his throat. “Are you sure? Because I’d like to bring up another matter.”
Cynthia said, “Yes. Please go ahead.”
“Now, there may be a very simple explanation for this. It might just be some sort of clerical error, you never know. The state bureaucracy has been known to make its share of mistakes.”
“Yes?”
“Well, when you were unable to produce a photograph of your father, I went in search of one, and that led me to check with the Department of Motor Vehicles. I thought they would be able to assist me in this regard, but as it turns out, they weren’t much help to me.”
“They didn’t have his picture? Was that before they put pictures on driver’s licenses?” she asked.
“That’s really something of a moot point,” Abagnall said. “The thing is, they have no record of your father ever having a license at all.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s no record of him, Mrs. Archer. As far as the DMV is concerned, he never existed.”
19
“But that could just be what you said,” Cynthia said. “People go missing from computer files all the time.”
Denton Abagnall nodded agreeably. “That’s very true. The fact that Clayton Bigge didn’t show up in the DMV files is not, in itself, particularly conclusive of anything. But then I checked past records for his Social Security number.”
“Yes?” Cynthia said.
“And nothing came up there, either. It’s hard to find any record of your father anywhere, Mrs. Archer. We have no picture of him. I looked through your shoeboxes and I couldn’t find so much as a pay stub from a place of employment. Do you happen to know the name of the actual company he worked for, that sent him out on the road all the time?”
Cynthia thought. “No,” she said.
“There’s no record of him with the IRS. Far as I can tell, he never paid any taxes. Not under the name of Clayton Bigge, at any rate.”
“What are you saying?” she asked. “Are you saying he was a spy or something? Some kind of secret agent?”
Abagnall grinned. “Well, not necessarily. Nothing quite so exotic.”
“Because he was away a lot,” she said. She looked at me. “What do you think? Could he have been a government agent, being sent away on missions?”
“It seems kind of out there,” I said hesitantly. “I mean, next we’ll start wondering whether he was an alien from another planet. Maybe he was sent here to study us and then went back to his home world, took your mother and brother with him.”
Cynthia just looked at me. She was still looking a bit woozy after her near fainting spell.
“It was supposed to be a joke,” I said apologetically.
Abagnall brought us-me in particular-back to reality. “That’s not one of my working theories.”
“Then what are your theories?” I asked.
He took a sip of coffee. “I could probably come up with half a dozen, based on what little I know at the moment,” he said. “Was your father living under a name that was not his own? Was he escaping some strange past? A criminal one, perhaps? Did Vince Fleming bring harm to your family that evening? Was his father’s criminal network somehow linked to something in your father’s past that he’d been successfully covering up until that time?”
“We don’t really know anything, do we?” Cynthia asked.
Abagnall leaned back tiredly into the couch cushions. “What I know is that in a couple of days, the unanswered questions in this case seem to be expanding exponentially. And I have to ask you whether you want me to continue. You’ve already spent several hundred dollars on my efforts, and it could run into the thousands. If you’d like me to stop now, that’s fine. I can walk away from this, give you a report on what I’ve learned so far. Or I can keep digging. It’s entirely up to you.”