“He was born in Chicago. He seemed to have a normal upbringing. Hell, his father was Sam Trask, an FBI special agent of some note. But then again maybe that’s a variation of the ‘preacher’s kids gone wild’ theme. Anyway, he got into some scrapes with the law, managed to dodge any jail time, and after that he headed to South America. Probably cartel business. Then he came back home flush with cash, and he built on that footprint to get where he is now. He owns a lot of businesses and properties.”
“Laundering fronts?” said Clarisse.
“Probably. He doesn’t tweet or post or say anything publicly. He just makes money and lives in a grand style. But there were a lot of gaps in the story. My thinking is those gaps represent the man’s true history, but people are afraid to post it, because they’ll get sued or, more likely, killed.”
“I’m impressed, Mickey. You’ve covered a lot of ground and your analysis is perfectly acceptable.”
She studied the screen and finally had a hit. The analysis of Gibson’s speech pattern showed stress and doubt and conflict.
Amazing that your words can show all that.
She wrote in her notebook: Speak far less.
“Okay, but I don’t see where it gets us.”
“Remember that I only threw out that list as possibly being connected to Langhorne’s death. You’re right that Trask is too young to have really been part of the mob back then. But there are other alternatives that need to be explored.”
“If he did kill or have Langhorne killed, it seems far more likely it was connected to whatever Langhorne did as Daniel Pottinger rather than stretching back to the mob days. Maybe he screwed Trask over some deal and the guy decided to punish him for it.”
Okay, let the big one drop and see what it does to little old Mickey Gibson. “How is that reconciled with the phrase ‘Do as I say, not as I do’?”
She listened to the woman’s breathing, and waited for the words to come and be analyzed.
“If you knew about that, why not tell me?”
She looked at the stress meter. Oh, yes, straight-up pissed-off angry at me on that one. “I assumed you knew if you were in the room. And obviously you did.”
“Yeah, but only recently.”
“You were in the room with the body,” she repeated.
“I didn’t search the whole thing. I found the body, got out of there, and called the cops. They wouldn’t let me back in there — it was a crime scene.”
Still angry but mellowing. “But now you do know, so someone told you, or showed you.”
“Does it matter?”
“I suppose only to you.”
“What does that mean?” exclaimed Gibson.
“I don’t know. What does it mean to you?”
“I’m not playing the patient to your shrink, okay?”
Clarisse said, “My take is that either Trask did it or paid someone to do it because Pottinger screwed him over fairly recently, as you suggested. The writing on the wall might be mumbo-jumbo, or it might have some meaning between Trask and Pottinger. Or Trask is not involved, and someone else killed Pottinger for recent dealings.”
“Or,” Gibson said, “this does date back to Langhorne’s screwing the mob over.”
Oh, Mickey, you missed an obvious one, babe, but that’s for me to know and you hopefully never to find out.
Gibson continued, “If the latter, then I can start digging into the mob from back then.” She paused. “Langhorne might have escaped with a shitload of mob money. The mob, at least the one today, may have discovered that, and wanted it back.”
Oh, how right you are, at least partially. “The question becomes, did they find it?”
“Is that what you want, too? The mob treasure?”
She analyzed the screen and saw that Gibson had been remarkably calm when uttering these lines. Clarisse automatically wrote some thoughts in her notebook. Her anxiety goes down when she believes she’s right about something.
“I could lie and say it never crossed my mind, but what would be the point? Besides, don’t girls multitask really well?”
“I’m glad you can see it that way,” muttered Gibson.
“Are you? It brings me no particular joy.”
Her other phone silently buzzed. She looked at the screen. It was Greenville. What now?
Frowning, she said, “I’ll have to get back to you.”
Only in her hurry, her finger didn’t hit the right button.
She answered the call. “Yes? I already said I would be there as soon as I could.”
The woman’s voice on the speakerphone was trembling. “Ms. Frazier, I’m afraid—”
“Afraid? Don’t tell me she died already.”
“No, ma’am. But it seems that... that...”
“Oh for God’s sake. It seems what?”
“It seems that she’s gone missing,” the woman said.
It was only then that the other line disengaged, as Gibson clicked off her phone.
Chapter 25
The hard bed, the hard chair, an empty bottle of Ensure on the nightstand, the cheerless room cluttered but now without its occupant. Her mother had come here with basically nothing and had now left with the same.
Clarisse sat in the chair and gazed around.
The management had groveled at her feet for an hour, begging for mercy, pleading for her not to sue their asses off. The police had been called and looked around and asked some questions. They came back to meet with Clarisse when she arrived. They told her that her mother might have simply wandered off. They had started a search. No foul play was suspected, they told her. Just an old woman wandering off. She would turn up soon. The weather was nice, not too hot, not too cold. She couldn’t have gone far. They’d find her soon enough. They left, their boredom barely concealed.
Clarisse slipped one glove off and then the other. She had gotten off the jet dressed to the nines. She wanted them to know who was in their presence. She wanted them to quake.
Though I’m really a nobody, I can act like SOMEBODY better than any other person on the planet.
The manager poked her head in the doorway. “If there’s anything you need, anything at all, Ms. Frazier?”
“My mother would be nice. See what you can do about that, why don’t you?”
The head disappeared like it had been jerked away, and the door closed.
Her mother had not gotten up and walked away, although it would have been easy to do so in this place. Except for the memory unit, the facility had not been built to prevent old people from fleeing. It had apparently never occurred to the dolts here that their charges ever could or would.
But her mother didn’t have the lungs to walk down the hall, much less out the door. She had told the police this but they clearly didn’t believe her. She hadn’t pushed it because the last thing she wanted was to start answering a bunch of questions about her and her mother’s past.
One cop had asked her, “Do you or your mother have any enemies, ma’am?” She knew the way he asked it, he was being tongue-in-cheek.
Oh, you have no clue, asshole. She truly hated men in uniform.
It was clear that someone had taken her mother. The puzzle was how they had found her in the first place.
She walked to the office, opened the door, and said, “Any CCTV? I saw what looked like cameras.”
A few minutes later, on the camera feed, she saw her mother come around the corner of the building, and the woman was not alone. She was in a wheelchair being pushed by someone in jeans and a bulky hoodie.