The Short Drop
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2015 Matthew FitzSimmons
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle.
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503950252 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 1503950255 (paperback)
ISBN-13: 9781503950344 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1503950344 (hardcover)
Cover design by Rex Bonomelli
For Uncle Dave
CONTENTS
START READING
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
PART TWO
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
PART THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
CHAPTER FIFTY
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.
—George Bernard Shaw
PART ONE
VIRGINIA
CHAPTER ONE
Gibson Vaughn sat alone at the bustling counter of the Nighthawk Diner. The breakfast rush was in full swing as customers milled about, waiting for a seat. Gibson barely registered the crescendo of knives and forks on plates or the waitress who set his food down. His eyes were fixed on the television mounted behind the counter. The news was playing the video again. It was ubiquitous, part of the American zeitgeist—dissected and analyzed over the years, referenced in film, television shows, and songs. Like most Americans, Gibson had seen it countless times, and like most Americans he couldn’t look away no matter how often it aired. How could he? It was all he had left of Suzanne.
The beginning of the video was grainy and washed out. The picture stuttered and frames dropped; distorted lines rolled up the screen like waves pounding an undiscovered shore. By-products of the store manager having recorded over the same videotape again and again and again.
Shot down at an angle from behind the cash register, the footage showed the interior of the infamous service station in Breezewood, Pennsylvania. The power of the video was that it could have been anywhere. Your hometown. Your daughter. Viewed in its entirety, the silent security camera footage was a melancholic homage to America’s most prominent missing girl—Suzanne Lombard. The time stamp read 10:47 p.m.
Beatrice Arnold, a college student working the night shift, was the last-known person to speak to the missing girl. At 10:47 p.m., Beatrice was perched on a stool behind the counter, reading a tattered copy of The Second Sex. She would be the first to recall seeing Suzanne Lombard and the first to contact the FBI once the disappearance hit the news.
At 10:48 p.m., a balding man with long, stringy blond hair entered the store. On the Internet, he’d come to be known as Riff-Raff, but the FBI identified him as Davy Oksenberg, a long-haul trucker out of Jacksonville with a history of domestic violence. Oksenberg bought beef jerky and Gatorade. He paid cash and asked for his receipt but idled at the counter, flirting with Beatrice Arnold, in no apparent hurry to get back on the road.
The first and best suspect in the case, Oksenberg had been questioned repeatedly by the FBI in the weeks and months after the disappearance. His rig was searched and searched again, but no trace of the missing girl was found. Grudgingly, the FBI cleared him, but not before Oksenberg lost his job and received dozens of death threats.
After his departure, the store fell still. An eternity ticked by… and then you saw her for the first time—the fourteen-year-old girl in an oversized hoodie and Phillies baseball cap, a Hello Kitty backpack slung over one shoulder. She’d been in the store the whole time, standing in the camera’s blind spot. To add a layer of intrigue, no one could say for certain how Suzanne came to be in the store in the first place. Beatrice Arnold didn’t remember seeing her enter, and the security tape offered no answers.
The hoodie hung off her in great, draping folds. She was a pale, fragile stalk of a girl. The media liked to contrast the black-and-white footage with colorful family photographs—the smiling blonde girl in the blue bridesmaid’s dress, the smiling girl at the beach with her mother, the smiling girl reading a book and gazing out the window. They stood in bold relief to the grim-faced kid in the baseball cap, hands thrust deep in pockets, hunched low like an animal watching warily from its burrow.
Suzanne wandered up and down the aisles, but her head was cocked toward the front window. One hundred and seventy-nine seconds passed. Something out the window caught her eye, and her posture changed. A vehicle perhaps. She snatched three items off the shelves: Ring Dings, a Dr Pepper, and a box of Red Vines licorice. A combination now known eerily as the Lost Girl’s Picnic. Suzanne also paid in cash, dumping crumpled dollar bills, quarters, and pennies on the counter before shoving her purchases into her backpack.
The security camera caught her eye, and for a long moment Suzanne gazed up at it—an expression frozen in time and, like Mona Lisa’s smile, interpreted a thousand different ways.
Gibson stared back, as he always did, locking eyes with Suzanne, waiting for her to smile shyly at him the way she had when she wanted to tell him a secret. Waiting for her to tell him what had happened. Why she’d run away. In all the intervening years, he’d never stopped hoping for an answer. But the little girl on the security video wasn’t talking.
To him or anyone else.
In a final gesture, Suzanne drew her baseball cap low over her eyes and looked away for good. At 10:56 p.m., she stepped out the door and into the night. Beatrice Arnold would tell the FBI that the girl seemed anxious and that her eyes were red as if she’d been crying. Ne
ither Beatrice nor the couple pumping gas noticed whether she got into a vehicle. One more frustrating dead end in a case of dead ends.
The FBI failed to turn up a single substantial lead. No one ever came forward to claim the ten-million-dollar reward offered by the family and their supporters. Despite the frenzied media coverage, despite her famous father, Suzanne Lombard walked out of the gas station and vanished. Her disappearance remained an enduring American mystery alongside Jimmy Hoffa, D. B. Cooper, and Virginia Dare.
The news went to commercials, and Gibson exhaled, unaware that he’d been holding his breath. The tape always left him spent. How much longer were they going to keep showing it? There hadn’t been a development in Suzanne’s case for years. Today’s big breaking story was that Riff-Raff had cut his hair short and earned a college degree while in prison for a felony drug bust. The Internet, in its infinite snark, rechristened him Professor Riff-Raff or Raff 2.0. Other than that it was all a maudlin rehash of what everyone already knew, which was nothing.
But the tenth anniversary of her disappearance loomed, which meant the networks would keep running their retrospectives. Keep exploiting Suzanne’s memory. Keep trotting out anyone with even a passing relationship to the family or to the case. Staging their tasteless reenactments at the service station in Breezewood and using computer models to project what she might look like today.
Gibson found the mock-ups especially hard to look at. Suzanne would be twenty-four now, a college graduate. The images tempted him into imagining what her life might have been. Where she might live. Her career path—something to do with books, no doubt. He smiled at that but caught himself. It wasn’t healthy. Wasn’t it time to give her some peace? Give them all some peace?
“Heck of a thing,” the man beside him said, staring up at the television.
“Sure is,” Gibson agreed.
“I remember where I was when I heard she was missing—hotel room in Indianapolis on a business trip. Like it was yesterday. I have three daughters.” The man rapped his knuckles on the wooden counter for luck. “I sat on the edge of the bed for a couple hours watching. Just terrible. Can you imagine not knowing for ten years whether your little girl is alive or dead? Hell of a thing for a family to endure. Lombard’s a good man.”
The last thing Gibson wanted was to get drawn into a conversation about Benjamin Lombard. He nodded to be agreeable, hoping to put a tourniquet on the subject, but the man would not be deterred that easily.
“I mean, if some sick bastard, excuse my French, can grab the daughter of the vice president—and get away with it—what hope do the rest of us have?”
“Well, he wasn’t vice president then.”
“Yeah, sure, but he was still a senator. That’s no joke either. You don’t think Lombard had juice with the feds back then?”
In fact, Gibson knew firsthand just how much influence Lombard wielded and precisely how much the man enjoyed wielding it. Vice President Benjamin Lombard was another subject he tried not to think about.
“I think he’ll make a good president,” the man continued. “To come back from something like this? Get the VP nod when most people would curl up in a ball. And now a run for president? That takes a strength you can’t imagine.”
As a two-term incumbent VP of a popular president, Lombard had been expected to nail down the nomination early—the convention in August a mere formality, a coronation more than anything else. But Anne Fleming, the governor of California, had come out of nowhere and seemed intent on playing spoiler. The two were currently polling virtually neck and neck. Lombard led in the delegate count and was still the favorite, but Fleming was making him work for it.
That the tenth anniversary of Suzanne’s disappearance fell during an election year had, in a perverse way, been a boost to Benjamin Lombard’s campaign. That was nothing new, though: championing Suzanne’s Law through the Senate had propelled him onto the national stage in the first place. Of course, Lombard gracefully refused to discuss his daughter. The cynic would argue that there was no need, since the media couldn’t help but do it for him. And, of course, there was his wife. Grace Lombard’s tireless efforts on behalf of the Center for Missing and Exploited Children had been a staple of cable news outlets throughout the primaries. She was, if possible, even more popular than her powerful husband.
“If he gets the nomination, he’s got my vote in November,” the man said. “Doesn’t even matter who the other side runs. I’m voting for him.”
“I’m sure he’ll appreciate that,” Gibson said and reached for the ketchup. He poured a generous dollop onto one end of his plate, mixed it with a little mayo, and scrambled it into his hash browns the way his father had taught him when he was a boy. In the immortal words of Duke Vaughn, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, take a big bite and chew slow.”
Words to live by.
CHAPTER TWO
Jenn Charles was parked across the street from the Nighthawk in the back of a white unmarked van. She felt pretty damned conspicuous out here—put her on a forward operating base near the Pakistani border and she was right at home, but white-panel vans in Northern Virginia weren’t really her style.
She checked her watch and noted the time in the log. Say what you would about Gibson Vaughn, the man gave predictable a bad name. On the upside, it made surveillance on him simple; on the downside, it got tedious quickly. The daily logs were virtually interchangeable. Vaughn’s morning began at five thirty with a five-mile run. Two hundred push-ups, two hundred sit-ups, followed by a shower. Afterward, he ate the same breakfast at the same diner at the same counter stool. Every damn morning, like it was his church.
Jenn brushed a renegade strand of coal-black hair behind her ear. She needed a shower and a good night’s sleep in her own bed. She could also use some sun. A pale lethargy was creeping over her after ten days in the back of a van, which was beginning to feel unpleasantly like home. It was crammed with surveillance gear that made it a tight squeeze for one. A small cot at the front allowed a team to work in shifts, but, apart from that, the van offered little in the way of amenities.
Living the dream, Charles. Living the dream.
If Vaughn stayed true to form, in twenty minutes, when the rush died down, he would move to the back of the diner to work. He was friendly with the owners, who let him use one of the back booths as a makeshift office during his job search. It had been three weeks since Vaughn had lost his job at a small, failing biotech firm, where he’d been the information technology director. He wasn’t having much luck finding work, and, given his history, Jenn didn’t expect that to change.
Dan Hendricks, her partner, was a top-notch surveillance man. He’d broken into Gibson’s apartment a week ago and wired it in ninety minutes flat. Motion-activated infrared cameras, bugs, the works. It gave them uninterrupted video coverage of the entire apartment, and the starkness of Gibson’s living conditions was informative.
After his divorce, he’d moved into a low-rent high-rise. His living room consisted of a used IKEA table and a wooden chair. No TV, no upholstered furniture, nothing. His bedroom was equally Spartan. Spartan but spotless—eight years in the Marines didn’t rub off. A box spring and mattress sat on the floor beside a reading lamp on a squat end table. An unvarnished chest of drawers with a broken leg that he’d repaired. No other furniture. Interior design courtesy of Franz Kafka.
It was hard to believe that at sixteen this guy had been the most wanted hacker in America. The infamous BrnChr0m—a forerunner to the modern, politically motivated hacktivist movement. The teenager responsible for nearly taking down the then senator Benjamin Lombard. Who stole a decade’s worth of the senator’s e-mails and financial records and turned it all over to the Washington Post. Anonymously, or so BrnChr0m had thought—the FBI arrested Gibson Vaughn at his high school and led him from chemistry class in handcuffs. Jenn had taped his mug shot to one of the monitors, and she paus
ed to study his frightened yet defiant face. Twenty-eight now, he’d led an eventful life.
The FBI’s swift apprehension of a sixteen-year-old hacker made for a pretty good story. The documents that Vaughn had leaked, on the other hand, made a great one. They detailed a cynical and criminal diversion of campaign funds to banks in the Cayman Islands. They also pointed the finger squarely at Benjamin Lombard. For a time, the revelations looked to signal the end of the senator’s political career, and the media went crazy for the idea that a teenager had toppled a US senator. Everyone loved a good David versus Goliath story, even if David had broken a score of federal and state laws in the process.
Jenn had been in college at the time of his arrest and remembered infuriating debates about whether the ends justified the means. Abstracted, high-minded crap that chafed her practical nature. Offended by how many of her classmates saw Vaughn as a digital Robin Hood, she’d felt more than a little vindicated when it broke that BrnChr0m had gotten it absolutely wrong.
In the end, many of the most damning documents were either doctored or outright forgeries. A crime had indeed been committed, but the FBI concluded that the culprit was not Benjamin Lombard but his former chief of staff, Duke Vaughn, who had recently taken his own life. Duke Vaughn had not only embezzled millions of dollars but covered his tracks by implicating Benjamin Lombard. It was a Shakespearean act of betrayal, and when the anonymous hacker turned out to be none other than Duke Vaughn’s son… well, the story became a sensation and BrnChr0m became a legend.
But Gibson Vaughn hadn’t gone by that alias in a long time and was a long way from legendary now.
Since Vaughn was spending his days at the diner, Hendricks had proposed wiring the diner too. Jenn vetoed the idea, but it left a sizeable gap in their eyes-on surveillance that they had to live with. At six p.m., Vaughn would go straight to the gym for an hour and a half. Home by eight, frozen dinner at the computer, lights out by eleven. Rinse and repeat. Day after day. Christ. She appreciated the importance of self-discipline and structure, but she’d take a merciful two in the head before she let this be her life.