The Big Exit (30 page)

“H
OW’D SHE FIND ME
?” M
C
G
REGOR ASKS
.

“Why don’t you tell me where we’re going first.”

“Make a left at the next light.”

“Where are we going?”

“I don’t know. Just make a left.”

Mark looks like he’s put on twenty-five pounds since Richie last saw him. Maybe more. He asks whether Ashley gave him the
scratch on his face—or was it Dupuy? It looks oddly like a tattoo he’d once seen in prison, only longer.

“The girl,” he answers.

“You hurt her?”

“She deserved what she got.” She’d suckered him out. Rang the doorbell and said there was a package, then pretended to go
away.

“Clever little tart,” he says. “She would’ve made a good hire. So how’d she find me? What made her want to look for Anderson?”

Richie keeps scanning the road for police cars, but he doesn’t see any. He heard sirens earlier. The cops must have been a
minute or two behind them. Now everybody and his brother are headed toward the Anderson house. They probably think they’re
still inside. God, he hopes so.
Please
, he thinks.
Please, get them out
.

“Got lucky,” he says, glancing over at the gun, which McGregor has propped up on his thigh and is pointing at his midsection.
He’s worried he’ll hit a bump and McGregor will accidentally put a slug in him.

He tells McGregor about the guy at Macy’s, the former coworker who gave her the tip on the address. McGregor doesn’t react
strongly.

“Figures,” is all he says. Then: “Make a right here.”

They ride in silence for a moment, Richie concentrating on making the turn. McGregor’s right. It actually isn’t as hard as
he thought to drive in handcuffs, though he can’t see himself pulling off a quick, evasive maneuver with any success. He still
feels a little woozy from the head blow and his stomach’s churning badly. He’s also thirsty as hell.

“You kill him?” Richie asks. “Or you have someone do it for you?”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking. What’d you do you with Hsieh?”

McGregor laughs. “A fucking prop,” he says. “The guy spoke almost no English. He didn’t have a clue what was going on.”

Anderson did most of the talking, he says. Did it well, too. Said exactly what he was supposed to say and even spiced it up
with a few added flourishes. As instructed, he played hard to get, said he would never sell, and Cahill, their Aussie investor,
took the bait.

“So this was all about money?” Richie says. “Ten million bucks. That’s what this was all about?” He’d argued so assuredly
to Madden that money was the motive for the murder, yet now he can’t quite fathom it.

“After all the monies came out of the wash, it came to more than that,” McGregor says. “But to answer your question, no, it
was a confluence of factors. You like that? A
confluence
,” he says, enunciating the word, himself enamored of it.

“I don’t understand,” Richie says, shaking his head.

“What’s not to understand?”

“How you could come up with something so crazy. This is fucking crazy, man. You planned this all out, didn’t you?”

He smiles. “For almost two years. Ever since I met Anderson in the hospital.”

Talk about serendipity, he says. There Mark was, all bent out of shape and not feeling too good about life, and he ended up
in a room with another sad sack. Only Anderson was ahead of him. He’d actually tried to kill himself.

Before he ended up in the hospital, he’d been having some dark, self-destructive thoughts, Mark says. He’d taken a big hit
in the 2008
crash and then things started to go south with Beth. And despite staying out of prison, he’d never been freed of the accident.
It dogged him. There were people who doubted his story and a few others who came right out and said they didn’t believe him.
He was no longer invited to the TED Conference and other prestigious events. And one guy came up to him after he’d spoken
on a panel and called him a killer. To his face.

“I killed a young woman,” Mark says flatly. “A promising young woman. You didn’t have to live with that. You were lucky.”

“Lucky?”

How can Mark even
think
that? It’s one of the dumbest things anybody has ever said to him.

“Shit,” McGregor says, “we’re going the wrong way. Make a left at the next light.”

This, from a guy who said he didn’t know where they were going.

He and Anderson resembled each other, Mark says. Same height, complexion, and eye color, and just a year apart. Anderson had
a few pounds on him, but hey, that was easy enough to fix. He just had to up his calorie intake for a few months, let himself
go a bit. Actors did it all the time.

“‘Now there’s an idea for a movie,’ I thought to myself, lying there all depressed and self-loathing in that hospital room.
Guy doesn’t want to live anymore so he sells his life to someone else. Instead of selling an organ like those poor schmucks
in South America, he’d sell his whole life.”

“What was he going to do with the money once he was dead?” Richie asks.

“I don’t know, maybe he had a relative or someone he wanted to hook up. Shit, if he’s going to kill himself, he might as well
get something for his trouble.”

“And you were just the guy who was willing to provide it.”

“Well, that was for the movie. In real life, you can’t tell him that eventually you’re going to have to kill him. That doesn’t
go over so well. And sadly, once people come into half a million dollars, they have a habit of wanting to live a little longer.
Sometimes a lot longer.”

McGregor smiles again. But this time when Richie glances over, he sees that McGregor is not only smiling, but he’s staring
back at him.

“Ah, man, I missed you, Richie,” he says, giving him a little slap on his shoulder with his left hand—the one that isn’t holding
the gun. “We had a fucking good time, didn’t we? Back in the day.”

“Ancient history, Mark. Ancient fucking history.”

“The glory days. Before women brought us down.”

“Women brought us down? You’re blaming women, plural? What the fuck are you talking about? You sound wasted.”

“That’s because I am.” Then, not missing a beat: “Bear right. And follow the signs to 280.”

Madden calls Carlyle back to ask for an update on the Hertz car-tracking situation. Apparently, he hasn’t gotten very far.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Hank. We’re getting a little bit of a runaround. I’ve got Pastorini making calls. They’ve
transferred him twice, put him on hold.”

“Is he on the phone to corporate? Who’s he calling? You need someone high-level to authorize this. Tell him to step it up.”

Lowenstein comes over. He’s been talking to Ashley, making sure she’s all right, but he must have seen Madden talking on the
phone, looking frustrated.

“Where are we at?” Lowenstein asks.

“We’re working on it,” Madden replies. If it were anyone else, he would leave it at that and rebuff any more intrusions. But
it’s Lowenstein, and Lowenstein isn’t going to sit back and take his bullshit. So he adds, “But if you’ve got any strings
you can pull with Hertz corporate, I’d encourage you to pull them.”

Lowenstein nods, seeming to appreciate the gesture, then takes out his phone and makes a call.

“Hi, Elizabeth, this is Marty Lowenstein,” he says. “I’m a President’s Circle member and I’m about to put your exceptional
service to the ultimate test.”

“I haven’t driven a car in over eight years,” Richie says.

“Really? It’s not hard. You can pick it up a little.”

McGregor talks as they drive, explaining the evolution of his plans with increasingly slurred words and jerky hand gestures.
Project A, as he liked to call it, became an obsession. It invigorated him, he says.
Obviously, the key to the whole thing was pulling off the body switch. He knew he’d have to disfigure Anderson, but he didn’t
want to go so far as to burn him, making him totally unrecognizable. He was relying on Beth to identify the body and he wanted
it to look like a crime of passion, one a wife could have committed. Those were the two underlying principles he started with,
and he worked backwards from there.

While he needed her to make a positive ID, he knew that in any suspicious death, the coroner’s office wouldn’t simply take
her word. They’d start with fingerprints, move to dental, then finish with DNA. If he had the first two nailed—or three if
you counted Beth’s ID—he figured he’d have more wriggle room with the DNA. Over the months, he’d acquired a couple of Anderson’s
toothbrushes, a hairbrush, nail clippers, and a number of other personal effects he could exchange for his. While there was
no escaping the fact that he would leave some of his own DNA around no matter how careful he was, as long as there was enough
of Anderson’s around to pick from, he’d be in decent shape.

The fingerprints and dental records were an easier fix than he thought.

“Everything is digital now,” he says. “And everything digital is open game for manipulation.”

For all his issues, Anderson had never been arrested. That was a big plus. Other than giving his thumbprint when he got his
driver’s license, he’d never been fingerprinted.

McGregor says the “thumbprint part” wasn’t a huge challenge. His previous company had been awarded one of the contracts to
help modernize the state’s computer system and integrate a new online voter registration system. That gave him a back door
into the DMV, which he’d kept in his back pocket, so to speak.

He thought the dental records would prove much trickier, but it turned out that not only did his and Anderson’s dentists both
use digital X-ray machines, but also the same software.

“I’m not going to lie,” he says, “it was a little hairy, but it’s not like you’re hacking into the Pentagon. I just had to
pick the right time to switch the files.”

As Mark tells the story, Richie briefly forgets he has a gun pointed at him and stops caring where they’re headed. In a way,
it’s fascinating,
if not horrifying—the lengths to which McGregor has gone to extricate himself from his life, in the process completely infiltrating
Anderson’s.

How’d he get to Anderson? Drugs. Anderson dug painkillers and tranks: vikes, percs, oxies, benzos, z-drugs, “all that shit.”
But it was more than the promise of drugs that got him to the house that day. It was money, too, he says.

Anderson had been asking for another hundred grand. Usually, he met him at his shitty little apartment in Mountain View and
later at the house in San Carlos. Anderson was a lazy fuck. That’s why he didn’t make it. His idea of a good time was sitting
in his hot tub smoking a joint and then having some dude handcuff him to that bed downstairs and pound him in the ass and
tell him what a fucking loser he was.

Richie wonders who McGregor’s talking about, himself or Anderson? Sometimes it’s hard to tell. He lets it go, though. He wants
him to finish the story.

McGregor says that as a precaution, he always made sure that they both kept their cell phones off twenty minutes prior to
each meeting and twenty minutes after so they couldn’t be tracked. The same rule applied this time but he told Anderson to
meet him much closer to his home—on the El Camino in front of the Guild Theater in downtown Menlo Park. He said he had something
special for him.

When he got there, he opened the trunk of his car and showed him a briefcase with money in it, let him touch a stack to see
that it was real. He said there was twenty thousand inside, which was a lie; it was five. He said he didn’t have any more
cash but he could take the car. It was worth seventy, maybe more. Just give him a ride home and he could take it. He’d sign
over the title to him right now. And that would be that. They’d be done. For good this time.

Anderson seemed amenable to the deal. He’d always coveted that car, and was happy to take possession, though he was momentarily
flummoxed over what he was going to do with his own car.

Not my problem, McGregor said. Stick it in a garage. Did he want the car or not?

Like any junkie, Anderson was focused on getting a fix. Every exchange they had seemed to end with that.

“What you got pharmaceutical-wise?” he asked.

He told him he’d left a bottle of “oxy” in the glove compartment (which Anderson promptly fished out and opened), and had
another few bottles at home he could give him.

When they turned onto Robert S Drive, McGregor, in the passenger seat now, ducked down, pretending to look for something on
the floor between his legs, then pressed the remote for the driveway gate, and Anderson pulled the car inside.

He had everything set up, ready to go. Distracting Anderson, he told him to check under the front seat of his other car in
the garage for more pills. They should be in a little cardboard box, he said as he slipped on a pair of black golf gloves.

Anderson looked and said there was nothing there.

McGregor told him to keep looking. They were there. But they weren’t, and when Anderson stood up and turned around, he never
knew what hit him. McGregor struck him high across the neck and then several times in his chest and upper back. Wham, wham,
wham. Anderson went down and McGregor slammed the backside of the tomahawk into his face. Once, twice, and then a third whack
for good measure. It was over in less than thirty seconds.

“I was breathing hard, my heart pounding like a goddamn jackhammer. But I pulled it together. I stuck to the plan. I wrote
‘Hack’ in Anderson’s blood on the floor with my left index finger.”

Then he slipped the weapon into a garbage bag and wrapped it up tightly. Next, he removed Anderson’s wallet and everything
from his pockets, including his car and house keys and phone, and replaced them with his own, dropping his own moneyless wallet
on the ground near the body. Last was the watch, his prized Rolex. God, he hated giving that thing up. But he wanted to create
confusion. The fake robbery would look so blatantly botched it wouldn’t make sense.