The photos she saw were of a man who looked carefree, intelligent, and maybe even kind.
But they had said that about Ted Bundy, too.
She dug deeper. He had homes all over the world, but his principal residence, at present, was in Virginia Beach. A thirty-thousand-square-foot behemoth he’d built right on the ocean with its own helipad. His superyacht was kept at a nearby deepwater marina. His Dassault Falcon tri-engine jet was hangared at a corporate jet park.
He presumably had security out the wazoo. She had about as much chance of getting in to see the man as she did the president.
And even if I managed it, what would I say? “Excuse me, Mr. Gazillionaire, did you kill Daniel Pottinger by any chance, or pay to have someone do it?” Yeah, if I want to be dumped in a grave no one will ever find.
She slumped in front of her computer, a weapon she had used in her time at ProEye to slay mighty beasts. But this situation was different, far different.
What the hell does Clarisse expect me to do with this list, anyway?
She looked up the other men. They all were rich and looked arrogant and cruel and were probably criminal in myriad ways. But from the sources she could find that seemed legit, none of them were anywhere near here when Pottinger had bought it. Sure, they could have hired someone to do it, but she didn’t think so. Pottinger had died from poisoning. That was not what hitmen did. They shot you, usually. Anyone could poison someone and watch while they croaked. It took something altogether different to pull the trigger on someone and see their head explode right in front of you.
But why would a guy like Trask go to Stormfield and inject Pottinger with this botulism stuff? Did he stiff the man on poached elephant tusks or stolen biomedical crap?
Not that I really believed any of that from Clarisse. She’s a liar, plain and simple. But there were elements of truth in what she said.
Normally, one could tell if someone was lying by the number of words they used in response to questioning. People telling the truth used far more words, because they were unafraid of being trapped in a lie. Those lying used far fewer words. They consolidated them as a cautionary measure because they were wary of being jammed into an inconsistency. They were making it all up, and that always allowed for a mistake to creep in if they hadn’t practiced enough. Truth tellers could be inconsistent as well because no one could remember everything. But a pro could tell the difference.
I can tell the difference.
She tried to find some more information on Langhorne’s family, but there just wasn’t anything there. That actually made sense after what Marshal Beckett had told them. Doug and Francine Langhorne had vanished when they were old enough to voluntarily leave WITSEC. They had no doubt changed their names once more. That was a dead end.
She joined some dark web chat rooms using an untraceable online ID that she employed for her ProEye work. She had to be subtle about this because the last thing she wanted to do was warn anyone that someone was digging into their pasts. She dropped innocuous-sounding queries in some comment threads and then exited. She had an auto-ping that would alert her if anything interesting came out of these searches.
So now she had Clarisse on one end, Nathan Trask on the other, and a dead ex-WITSEC mob bean counter in the middle.
She grabbed her keys, snuck past the kids, who were enthusiastically telling Silva all about skirls as potential pets, and drove away in her minivan. She had plugged the address into her navigation. It took her about an hour to get to Virginia Beach.
Holy shit.
Trask’s compound made Stormfield look small. But it was as unlike that place as it was possible to be. It was all glass and metal and concrete. It looked more like some funky-ass factory of the future than a home.
There was a big gate that looked like the one at the White House. There were men in suits by the gate. As she watched, one of them climbed into a golf cart trimmed in what looked to be some sort of gold leaf and raced off toward the house. A few moments later a chopper came into view, tracking over the ocean below. As she continued to look up it came to a hover over the rear of the mansion and slowly lowered like a descending elevator car, until it passed from her sight line.
The king had apparently arrived back at his castle.
She drove off, and later stopped for a cup of coffee. As she was sitting in her van, snuggled in her coat and drinking her Starbucks, a gentle, chilly rain began to fall. The next moment the phone rang. She looked down at it, not really wanting to answer it, but still.
Damn.
Chapter 24
The good folks in Greenville, South Carolina, had called late last night. Her mother had taken a turn for the worse. Clarisse wasn’t unduly concerned, since the woman took a turn for the worse at regular intervals.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” she had said. “Tell her to hang on until I arrive.” She clicked off the line.
That had stopped the woman on the other end of the call in her tracks, she felt sure. Clarisse could imagine the silent gasp, the brow wrinkled in outrage at a daughter’s callousness.
Oh honey, if you only knew. And it’s complicated. You can care about someone and still hate them at the same time. At least I can.
With that last thought she picked up her Mickey Gibson phone and made the call. Clarisse had just downloaded an app on her computer that would analyze a person’s speech pattern and spew out findings on a variety of emotional measures including anxiety and fear, which Clarisse knew all too well.
“Hello,” said Gibson.
Clarisse eyed the screen to see if this simple greeting had caused any alarms to go off.
Nothing yet.
“You got the list. Have you checked it twice?”
“If you’re trying to be funny.”
“I thought it would work well for a mom with two little kids.”
“Christmas is a long way off,” noted Gibson.
Not for me, not if things go according to plan. “So what have you learned?” Clarisse asked.
“Nothing that I’m sure you couldn’t have learned already. But I did go by Trask’s house. It’s a fortress. I’m not sure what you expect I can do about it.”
“I wasn’t suggesting a frontal assault, if that’s what you’re implying. You’re a stealth girl, remember?” added Clarisse.
“I’ve been online. There’s a ton of stuff on the guy, but so what?”
“Have you checked his assets?” said Clarisse.
“Why, is he a deadbeat and I need to find something to grab before he can hide it?”
“His net worth puts him at number eighty-nine on the Forbes list.”
“He’s not on the Forbes list. I did check that,” said Gibson.
“That’s only because they don’t put suspected criminals on there, since their wealth can’t be verified using traditional measures. That’s why you won’t see Putin on there, but for some odd reason, they do list a number of his oligarchs. I simply estimated his net worth and placed him within the Forbes list rankings.”
“Again, so what? That doesn’t help us find out if he had Pottinger killed. And Trask is only fifty. He’s really too young to have been much of a player in Langhorne’s mob days.”
“What did you learn about Trask’s past?” Clarisse asked.