“Alone. After all those years, maybe he didn’t appreciate the lifestyle or the working-class life that came with it. Or the family he had.”
“Damn,” said Gibson.
“I always thought the guy was odd.”
“Wait, you knew him?” exclaimed Gibson.
Beckett nodded. “That’s why I agreed to meet. See, I was in Albuquerque at the tail end of Langhorne’s time there. Did several years with him and his family and some other families out there in WITSEC. Don’t tell anybody, but we sometimes clump them together in the same neighborhoods to conserve manpower. None of the families knew the others were in WITSEC, of course.” He eyed Gibson. “Will told me you were a cop for a while and now work for ProEye. Said I could trust you.”
“You can. What names did they go by back then?”
“They’re no longer in WITSEC, so I guess it won’t hurt to tell you.” He glanced at the file again. “Harry and Geraldine Parker. The kids went by Fran and Doug.”
“But those are their actual first names,” Gibson pointed out.
“Way we do it at WITSEC. Theory is people will not be able to get the memory of their true given name out of their brain. Someone calls out Harry and Harry turns. But if the first names are the same, so what? Last names are different, of course.”
“Do you change their appearances?” asked Gibson. “Especially if their faces had been in the media?”
“On a case-by-case basis, we do what we need to do to keep them safe,” said Beckett. “And that’s really all I can say.”
“So he just left his family?” said Sullivan. “You’re sure nothing happened to him?”
“We’re sure. I think he’d been prepping it for quite a while. This was in hindsight, of course. And he might have had a stash of money to help him on his way.”
“What makes you say that?” asked Sullivan.
“Rumors. Scuttlebutt.”
“Maybe in addition to ratting out the mob he might’ve raided their piggybank, too,” said Gibson.
Beckett shrugged. “The man had helped take down a bunch of really bad guys. You’re not gonna jump the dude’s bones over money at that point. And if they made him out to be dishonest that way, maybe it would have hurt the prosecution. You give a good defense attorney an opening, well, look out.”
“Right,” said Gibson. “Well, the man he became, Daniel Pottinger, paid five million dollars in cash for an old estate near Smithfield.”
“Damn” was all Beckett said to that.
“You said he vanished. How so?” asked Sullivan.
“Went to his job one day and never came home. We checked everything, talked to everybody. He went out for lunch, the folks at the dealership said, and then called in that he was feeling ill, so they didn’t expect him back. That was the last they saw or heard of him. We checked the buses, trains, airports, car rentals. Nothing.”
“So maybe he had help?” noted Gibson.
“I have no doubt of that. But he worked it so he had a good head start. His wife didn’t contact us until the following morning.”
“Why so long?” asked Gibson.
“She said that Langhorne had phoned and told her he was working late and not to wait up for him. He said he’d probably sleep on the couch downstairs, so as not to wake her. She went downstairs around eight the next morning and there was no sign of him. But she thought he’d just gone to work early. She didn’t call us until the dealership phoned her asking where the hell he was. All told, he had a long runway to make his getaway. And, look, it’s not like what he did was illegal. Being in WITSEC is a choice. We looked for him mainly because we were worried someone had snatched him. But as more information came out, it seemed clear that he planned it.”
“And his family? What happened to them? You said they were no longer in WITSEC.”
“Geraldine walked out of her house about a month after her husband vanished. No one’s seen her since.”
Gibson said, “And the kids?”
“Doug was nearly eighteen by then, a senior in high school. Francine was about a year younger. Not little kids anymore. It was a helluva mess. Technically, they couldn’t opt out of WITSEC until they were eighteen. And we, of course, couldn’t inform their extended family about the situation so they could help or make decisions for them. And traditional foster care was out, so we just kept watch over them. Doug hung around until Francine hit her eighteenth birthday, and then they both opted out and moved on. Haven’t seen or heard from them since.”
“What a miserable existence for them,” said Gibson.
“We did the best we could,” Beckett said defensively.
“Not saying you didn’t. I’m just talking generally. They had nothing approaching a normal childhood. Then their father abandons them, and then their mother does, too.”
“Right, yeah,” said Beckett. “I did feel sorry for them. But even if they leave, we ask them to stay in touch. We try to help them regardless of their official status. But they never did contact us.” He looked between them. “What else do you need to know?”
“A lot more than we do right now,” said Gibson glumly.
Chapter 23
Darby was in the stroller and Tommy was walking next to his mother. It was a brisk morning and the sun was ascending into a cloudless sky. Tommy would occasionally hold his mom’s hand or walk right next to the stroller and talk to Darby, who talked right back to him in childish staccato.
Gibson was half watching them and half watching everything else around them. She had plenty of reasons to be paranoid.
Clarisse on the phone, the list of global criminals, and a dead mob numbers guy with maybe more mobsters involved had put her very near the edge. She was a few mental beats from chucking it all, selling her house, and taking the kids as far away as possible.
But could I ever get far away enough? And what about Mom and Dad?
She felt trapped because she was. She had called Zeb Brown a few times to see how long her “vacation” was to last. And whether she would have employment when she came back from said vacation. He had not returned her calls. But her latest paycheck had cleared the bank and there was a nice bonus added on for her work on the Larkin matter.
Yeah, I singlehandedly find two hundred million bucks and they tack on five grand for my bonus. I wonder how much Zeb got? But I’ll take it.
Every car that passed by and that she did not recognize received extra scrutiny. She had slipped her baseball bat into the mesh bottom under the stroller.
She had the burner phone with her; part of her was hoping it would ring and another part was hoping it would remain forever silent.
Tommy chased a squirrel while Darby begged to get out of the stroller and do the same. Gibson obliged, and she watched her kids pointing and doing inch-high jumps off the ground as the squirrel peered curiously down at them from ten feet up a tree.
Tommy looked at Gibson and said, “Mommy, skirl!”
“Yep. But it’s squirrel. Squa-earl. Fast, huh?”
“Vewie fast,” agreed her son.
“Me take home, Mommy?” pleaded Darby. “Pease, pease, pease.”
“It’s not a pet, sweetie. It needs to be free.”
“Pet, pet, pet,” chanted Darby, and Gibson silently berated herself for walking so freely into that one.
Five minutes of intense drama later, they were heading back home, Darby in tears and Tommy saying “Skirl” over and over.
She handed the kids off to Silva, who had just arrived when they got back.
Gibson ran to her office and fired up her computer.
Nathan Trask.
She hit the send key on her search, and a data dump ran down her screen. The man was wrapped up in numerous lawsuits, all civil litigation, at least currently. His business deals were immense, and his background was shady as hell. His Wikipedia page begged for more information on the man; the fourteen current pages on him apparently didn’t cut it.