Vince told Frank a simplified version of what happened at John Wayne Airport. Frank reacted visibly; he actually went pale. “Fuck,” he said, one gloved hand rubbing his mouth. “You’ve got to be kidding. And the cops say they’ve got somebody in custody?”
Vince nodded. “Yeah. One of the detectives I’ve been working with is supposed to call me this afternoon with more info.”
“This changes everything, then.” Frank glanced in the mirrors, once again making Vince paranoid as well. “I’m gonna have to tell Mike about this.”
“Who’s Mike?”
“A friend of my father’s. He and I have been working on this for the past six months or so. He’s the one that did the extra surveillance on you and determined they hadn’t gotten to you yet. Obviously, they have. Shit!”
Frank’s mood had darkened considerably since this bit of news, and Vince sought to steer his mind back to the task at hand; he needed to know everything Frank knew. “Tell me about Mike.”
Frank continued looking out the windows and into his rear and side view mirrors. “He contacted me over a year ago. He’d been researching my father’s disappearance. You see, my mother originally left my father when I was about three years old. She just packed me up and moved to San Francisco and she took me with her. From what I’ve been able to gather, she wasn’t a member of the cult yet, but she was exposed to them in the Bay Area. My dad tracked us down and things get kind of fuzzy there.” He turned back to Vince. “He essentially disappeared for two years. He turned up later in El Paso. He was… all fucked up. Severe mental problems. My aunt Diane and Uncle Charlie tried to help him out, but he took off again a year or so later and nobody’s seen him since. Anyway, a few years ago, my dad’s best friend from when he was a kid, Mike Peterson, decides to do some of his own detective work. And he found out more than he cared to know. He was the one that initially found out the basic information on the cult. He tracked me down and asked if I wanted to help him. At first I didn’t, but by then I was having the dreams. So I agreed. It was through my memories that you and your mother came into the picture. I didn’t remember your names but therapy helped that, and even now I’m surprised I was still able to find you the way I did.”
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t remember you as Vince Walters,” Frank said. “I remember you as Andy and your mother as Margaret. Your name is… or was… Andrew Swanson.”
At the mention of the name Vince felt a weird sense of deja vu. Andrew Swanson. The name came to him so effortlessly, so easy. It was as if the long missing piece to a puzzle had been finally inserted in its place again. He felt whole and complete.
“Andy,” he let the name roll off his tongue.
“Trouble was, we couldn’t find you,” Frank said, turning back in his seat again and facing Vince. “We tried every method of skip tracing known to man. So do you know what we did?”
“What?”
“Several things.” He brought the old photograph of him and Vince out and held it up. “We scanned this into a computer and with the aid of a sketch artist I know, he aged your picture to make you appear as you might look now.” Frank grinned. “Scott was pretty damn accurate.”
Vince managed a small grin.
“Next, I remembered you were good in math and sports. I thought this would be a long shot, so I checked at the local universities and colleges first. Our plan was to search colleges and universities statewide, but I thought I would try California first, since it seemed the easiest thing to do. I had them compile a database of alumni from the years 1985 to 1992, years I figured you would be attending college if you enrolled, and I asked them to pay close attention to math majors, computer science majors, and accounting or business management majors. I also paid attention to those students that excelled in sports or maybe gained sports scholarships. The database spit out a list, and Mike and I narrowed it down to several hundred thousand candidates.” He laughed. “Quite a lot, I know, but it didn’t take us that long to go through it. We obtained school photos and began comparing, which helped whittle down the list. And we found a match right away. A University of California at Irvine alumni by the name of Vincent F. Walters, graduating class of 1988. From the small town of Lititz, Pennsylvania where he had previously lived with his mother, Maggie Walters.”
Vince sipped at his Coke, amazed that he’d not only been tracked down so deftly, but that the pieces were slowly coming in place. “The rest was simple,” Frank said, sipping his Dr. Pepper. “We found out where you lived, did some background work on you and your mom, and started doing some background work on your close friends and co-workers to make sure they hadn’t found you yet.”
“You did background checks on my friends?”
“We had to,” Frank said. “In order to make sure the group hadn’t found you. We found out about your wife’s death and checked it out as much as we could. There’s no physical evidence they had anything to do with it, but if you know their history you could see that they might have had a hand in it. They’re experts at making deaths seem like accidents. Defectors from the group always wind up dying from them. One such accident was very similar to Laura’s—his car just suddenly veered off a highway at fifty-five miles an hour and he died in the crash. By all accounts, the guy was a good driver, the car was in top shape, and he had no health problems. And there were no other cars involved—plenty of witnesses testified to that. They just…”
Vince finished for him. “It’s like they maybe used some kind of supernatural power to make the car lose control. Right?”
Frank nodded. “Yeah. Sounds crazy, huh?”
“And you think they got to Laura this way? Why?”
“It’s just a theory,” Frank explained quickly. “From what we were able to gather, they seemed to have no knowledge of your new identity. So it seems unlikely they had anything to do with Laura. What happened to Laura was tragic and unfortunate and probably not their doing. And… I know this is gonna fuck with your head, but it just seems so unlikely they had anything to do with this incident at the airport. That just isn’t their style, but then I could be wrong. If they were going to get to you, they would have done so through your friends. That’s why we had them checked out. Yeah, your wife’s death was probably an accident, but we couldn’t be sure of that, know what I mean?”
Vince shook his head. The whole thing sounded like an Ian Fleming novel. “You checked out my friends!”
“Brian Saunders and Tracy Harris seem okay,” Frank said. “At least on the surface, but then so does everybody else in your life. So does your shrink, Dr. Cartwright. Likewise, Laura’s parents in Kansas checked out okay too—”
“You did background checks on my in-laws?” Vince snapped. A hot flush crept up the back of his neck. Now he was getting irritated and more than a little angry.
Frank held up his gloved hands. “I’m sorry. We had to. You have no idea how good these people are at blending in with society, leading double lives that are all but unknown to those they’re close to when they parade around wearing their masks of normalcy. We had to make sure that—”
“This is starting to sound like a bunch of private eye bullshit!” Vince spat. “What the hell do you think you can accomplish by telling me this? Who the hell do you think you are to butt into my life, invade my privacy?”
Strong hands grabbed Vince’s shirt and pulled him toward Frank. The bigger man scowled as he held Vince firmly in his grip, rumpling his clothes. “You listen to me, goddamnit! I’ve got more than our lives at stake here on this. I’ve got my wife and kids to think about, too. If they were already onto you and I come poking around, they’d find out, find out who I am, then go after my wife and kids and kill them. So don’t you come to me with your whiney bullshit about your pathetic loss of your privacy!”