The Short Drop (4 page)

CHAPTER SIX

They drove in silence to DC. Gibson sat in back beside George Abe, who disappeared into his phone, answering e-mails. When Abe entered his phone’s passcode, Gibson stole it out of the corner of his eye. It was force of habit. It had taken him months to perfect the skill, but he could steal a phone’s passcode from across a room simply by watching the thumb move. Gibson filed it away just in case.

Numbers had always come easy. Math, science, computers had always made sense to him. It had been a tremendous asset when he’d gone to the dark side. He’d trained himself to remember sequences of numbers. He could recall anything up to sixteen digits with one pass: phone numbers, credit cards, social-security numbers—it was remarkable how often people recited vital information in public. It ranked among his less socially acceptable talents.

Up front, Abe’s girl Friday sat in the passenger seat, scanning the road like she was riding point in Fallujah. He’d seen that look before in the eyes of combat veterans. The memories that wouldn’t stay memories. The sights and sounds that were forever tuning up like a discordant symphony. She carried it like that—tense and watchful—as if roadside ambushes were commonplace in Northern Virginia.

Back at the Nighthawk, Abe had introduced her as Jenn Charles. She’d given him a professional handshake, but her false, trapdoor smile was a warning not to cross her. Still, Jenn was a sweetheart compared to the dour little man driving: Hendricks—no first name given. Hendricks didn’t seem to like Gibson either, but, unlike with Jenn Charles, it didn’t feel personal. Hendricks didn’t seem to like much of anything or anyone.

Despite it being a Sunday, traffic into DC was as heavy as rush hour. It was early April and the cherry blossoms were blooming, so the roads into Georgetown were bumper to bumper with sightseers. Somehow Hendricks maneuvered them expertly through the congestion, dancing between lanes as one ground to a halt and the other accelerated. A very practical superpower, Gibson thought. On Key Bridge, Hendricks exited onto the elevated Whitehurst Freeway, which ran alongside the Potomac and emptied them onto K Street. The river sparkled all the way down to the Kennedy Center.

Gibson glanced at Abe. His words at the diner still stung—
Suzanne loved you better than anyone.
He looked out the window at the river.

Better than anyone.

Gibson had known Suzanne since they were kids, their lives linked by their fathers’ bond, which ran far deeper than senator and chief of staff. Lombard had been best man at Duke’s wedding, and after his mother’s death, when he was three, Gibson spent more of his holidays with the Lombards than with his own family. Senator Lombard and Duke would often work late into the night and through weekends, and as a result Gibson had his own bedroom down the hall from Suzanne. When Gibson was seven, Duke had to sit him down and explain that three-year-old Suzanne was not his actual sister. Gibson had not taken the news well.

Some of his fondest childhood memories were from the Lombards’ summer house at Pamsrest on the Virginia shore. Summer began each year with the annual Memorial Day party thrown for hundreds of the Lombards’ closest friends, political allies, and their families. There were always scores of kids to play with, and they were allowed to run wild while the grown-ups socialized and networked on the lawn and wide wraparound porch. Gibson would spend the day playing epic games of capture the flag that ranged all over the back of the property. An ice-cream truck made an annual appearance to the delight of the children, who had already pigged out on hamburgers, hot dogs, and potato salad. It was a kid’s paradise, and he’d always looked forward to such events eagerly.

Suzanne spent the parties inside, reading in the large bay windows that dominated the back of the house. From the raised, cushioned banquettes piled high with pillows, she could look out over the property as far as the tree line. It was a waste of a beautiful day, in his opinion. At that age, he much preferred climbing trees to contemplating them. But it was Suzanne’s favorite spot in the house and the first place anyone looked for her. From there she could watch the party and read her ever-present books. If she could sweet-talk her mother into delivering her lunch, she would happily pass the day reading and napping in the sunshine.

While he counted her as a sister, Gibson didn’t “get” Suzanne for the longest time and treated her the way older brothers often treat little sisters—like foreign creatures. She didn’t play football or baseball; she didn’t like playing soldier out back in the woods; she didn’t like any of the games that he liked. So he did the only sensible thing under the circumstances—he ignored her. Not out of spite but simple expedience. They had no shared language.

But Suzanne treated him the way little sisters tend to treat older brothers—with patient love and constant amazement. She met his dismissiveness with adoration, his disinterest with beamy smiles. She was never hurt or put off that he didn’t return her affection, and she was always willing to give him another chance. In the end, she simply outloved him with a child’s generosity—the kind that burns away as one enters adulthood, but which Suzanne had in abundance. Gibson never stood a chance, and, eventually, with persistence, she wore him down, and he learned to love her back. And somewhere along the line she stopped being Suzanne and became his sister.

His Bear.

Not content to simply be loved, Bear pestered him, for what seemed like years, to read to her. He’d read to her once when she was very little; he couldn’t remember what book, only that he’d quickly lost interest. Since then she’d begged him to read to her again, usually from her reading nook as he pelted out the back door to play in the woods. He wasn’t a reader in those days, so he’d always put her off.

“Gib-Son. Gib-Son!” she would call. “Come read to me!”

“Later, Bear. Okay?” was always his answer.

“Okay, Son. Bye!” she would call after him. “Later!” As though later had become an official date.

Bear always said his name as if it were two words or sometimes shortened it to “Son” if she was excited. Duke thought she sounded like an old southern gentleman: “What are you doing, Son?” It made all the adults laugh, which only encouraged her. She didn’t get why it was funny, only cared that it meant everyone was paying attention to her.

Bear finally broke him down one Christmas. The senator and Duke were in crisis mode over some piece of legislation, so Gibson spent most of that holiday at the Lombards’ house in Great Falls. She was seven. He was eleven. In a moment of weakness, he said yes, and she’d gone scampering off before he could start another movie. She came back with
The Fellowship of the Ring
by someone named J. R. R. Tolkien. The movies based on the series hadn’t existed back then, so he didn’t know anything about the book except that it was thick and hardbound.

“Bear. No chance,” he said, weighing it in his hands. “It’s too big.”

“It’s the first book of three!” She was bouncing with excitement.

“Come on . . .”

“No, it’ll be good. I promise. It’s an adventure,” she said. “I’ve been saving it for you.”

Grace Lombard had watched with an amused, pitying smile that told him what he already suspected—no escape for you now, young man. Gibson sighed. How bad could it be? He flipped to chapter one. What the hell was a hobbit? Whatever. He’d read for twenty minutes, Bear would get bored or fall asleep, and that would be the end of it.

“All right. Where do you want to read it?”

“Yes!” she said triumphantly and then had to think, not having planned on getting this far. “By the fireplace?”

She led him to an armchair in the living room. The fire was dying, and Bear built it up until Grace warned her not to burn down the house. Then he’d waited another ten minutes while Bear arranged everything just so. That meant piles of pillows and a throw, hot chocolate for her, a glass of Cran-Apple juice for him. She ran around the room, adjusting the lights so it wasn’t too bright but not too dark either. Gibson stood in the middle of the room, wondering what he’d gotten himself into.

“Sit, sit, sit,” Bear said.

He sat. “Is this okay?”

“Perfect!” Bear snuggled contentedly across his lap and put her head on his shoulder.

He gave her ten minutes before she’d be asleep.

“Are you ready?” he said, trying to sound grumpy but failing.

“Ready. Oh, wait,” she said but thought better of it. “No, never mind.”

“What?”

“Never mind,” she said, shaking her head. “Next time.”

There wasn’t going to be a next time. He opened the book and got comfortable. Halfway into the first sentence, Bear stopped him.

“Son?”

He stopped. “What?”

“Thank you.”

“You know there’s no way I’m reading this whole thing.”

“That’s okay. Just as much as you feel like.”

He read the first thirty pages without a pause. Bear didn’t fall asleep, and it wasn’t even a bad story. There was a wizard and magic, so that was pretty cool. They were still reading when the senator and Duke took a break from their strategizing. Mrs. Lombard led them to the doorway of the living room. Stealthily, like it was a safari, and they might startle the wildlife. Gibson didn’t notice them until the camera flashed.

A framed copy of the picture had hung in the hall between their bedrooms, and Duke had kept one in his office at home.

After the surprise photo, Gibson had tried to quit reading, but Bear, sensing trouble, clamped her hands around his arm.

“What happens next?”

Gibson found he was curious too.

They finished
The Return of the King
two years later, and in the process, Gibson became a reader. Something else he owed Bear. Books helped him keep his sanity first in jail and then in the Marine Corps. He read whatever he could get his hands on: obscure Philip K. Dick stories, pulp Jim Thompson mysteries, Albert Camus’s
The Stranger
, which he’d found revelatory at nineteen. An ancient copy of Don DeLillo’s
Great Jones Street
had been a constant companion since boot camp, and he could recite the opening monologue from memory.

If he was honest, he had never allowed himself to connect the Suzanne Lombard in the security-camera footage with his Bear. In his mind, Bear was a college graduate, living in London or Vienna the way she had always daydreamed. Bear was dating some smart, shy boy who adored her and read to her on Sunday mornings. Bear had nothing at all to do with the long-missing Suzanne Lombard. It was easier to believe that fiction.

Would she like his daughter? He sometimes caught himself comparing them—the two little girls who figured so large in his life. Not one bit alike—Ellie wasn’t the quiet, introspective type. She was like her dad in that regard, much preferring to climb trees than read under one. But Ellie and Bear were exactly the same when it came to loving people. They both hugged in the same fierce, uncompromising way. Yeah, Bear would have loved Ellie, and Ellie would have loved her right back.

Where did you go, Bear?

Gibson looked at George Abe and the team he’d assembled.

Would she answer at last?

CHAPTER SEVEN

As they passed McPherson Square, Jenn shifted in her seat and let George know they were back. The Range Rover pulled into the building’s underground garage.

When they parked and got out, Jenn drifted to the back so she could keep an eye on Vaughn. He glanced back at her but said nothing. He was taller than she expected, but his eyes were no less intense. He’d made her in the diner, which was embarrassing enough, but the way he met her eyes when they shook hands outside the diner made her feel like a microwavable dinner. She didn’t like it.

Upstairs, the offices of Abe Consulting Group were dark and quiet. The lights hummed to life automatically. It wasn’t a huge space, but the atrium was immaculate and modern with high ceilings and stylish black leather furniture. Vaughn seemed impressed.

Hendricks ushered them down a corridor toward the sound of thudding, angry music. He pushed open a pair of glass doors to a conference room, and the noise spiked painfully. It was like standing on a runway as a 747 landed over your head. Jenn recognized it but didn’t know the name of the band. She never did. She didn’t care enough about music to waste time committing it to memory.

A bald head popped up from behind a laptop like a weary Whac-A-Mole.

“The music, Mike! Jesus!” Hendricks yelled.

The conference room went silent, and the bald head stood up. It belonged to Mike Rilling, Abe Consulting’s IT director. In his early thirties, he had the jittery, bloodshot eyes and sallow skin of a man living on a potent cocktail of caffeine and junk food. The stale smell of stress clung to the room.

“Sorry, Mr. Abe. I didn’t think you’d be here until this afternoon.”

“It
is
this afternoon,” Jenn said.

“Oh,” Mike said. “I’m sorry, Mr. Abe.”

“That’s fine. How is it coming?” Abe asked.

Mike’s mouth opened but closed without answering the question in what Jenn recognized as the international sign for
It’s not coming at all, and I wish people would stop asking about it.
She’d been there and had some sympathy for him. Mike worked as hard as anyone on the team, but this was not his area of expertise. Not his fault, though overselling his ability had been. That was why Vaughn was here. If it wasn’t already too late.

Ordinarily, this was their main conference room, but it had been converted into a makeshift war room. Photographs, diagrams, maps, and notes were pinned neatly to a series of wheeled bulletin boards arranged along one wall. A photograph of Suzanne Lombard sat at the top of the center bulletin board, her immediate family arrayed below her like an inverted family tree. Vaughn’s eyes went straight to it, and an expression she couldn’t interpret passed over his face.

Arrayed beneath the family, staff members from Lombard’s Senate days, including Duke Vaughn, formed a row of their own. George’s photo was up there too. Completing the gallery, two blank placeholders hung side by side. One was labeled “WR8TH”—the anonymous chat-room handle of the person or persons with whom Suzanne had communicated online prior to her disappearance. The second read “Tom B.” A line connected the pair and a question mark hung between.

Abe took a seat at the head of the table. Hendricks and Vaughn followed suit while Rilling scurried around like a frantic mother hen.

“Michael. Please. Housekeeping can wait,” Abe said.

“Yes, Mr. Abe. Sorry.”

Abe forced himself to chuckle. “And stop apologizing for working hard.”

Jenn appreciated her boss’s effort, but no amount of praise was going to unwind Mike Rilling. She wasn’t convinced a bottle of Xanax and a straitjacket would do the trick. Rilling was overworked, tightly wound, and committed to the belief that he was deeply, tragically underappreciated.

“Michael, this is Gibson Vaughn,” George said. “He’s going to consult on the Lombard case. Gibson, this is Michael Rilling, our IT director.”

Rilling shook Vaughn’s hand limply and shot him a canine territorial look. Gibson either missed it or played it off.

“I’m going to have Jenn bring you up to speed,” Abe told Vaughn. “Fill in some of the blanks. Sometimes it’s helpful to retrace familiar terrain. You’ll find all of it covered in the file.”

Jenn pushed a thick binder across the conference table to Vaughn. “Suzanne Lombard” was typed neatly along the binding and on its cover; inside, it contained an overview of Suzanne Lombard’s disappearance and the subsequent investigation. A lot of it consisted of internal FBI documents, photographs, and memorandum, all impressively thorough. Abe might have fallen out with Benjamin Lombard, but he carried some serious weight of his own.

Vaughn regarded it warily and rubbed hard at a spot behind his ear. Every mention of Suzanne Lombard seemed to cause him to recoil and withdraw a little further inside himself. What was it? Guilt? Remorse? Fear? Was it fear? He caught her looking at him and smiled like someone trying to be friendly to a dentist prepping him for a root canal.

An overhead projector flared to life, and a screen descended from a wall-mounted casing. A photograph of Suzanne filled the screen. There had been no shortage of photos to choose from. The Lombards were a remarkably handsome family, photographs with the inner circle de rigueur at every get-together. The one up on the screen was cropped from one of the annual Christmas parties—Suzanne sitting on the floor at the grown-ups’ feet, smiling happily at the camera. Gibson Vaughn’s disembodied arm hung in the air beside Suzanne. Jenn had found a few without Vaughn—there weren’t many—but she’d chosen this one to gauge his reaction.

She regretted it now. The man looked seasick.

“Jenn, you have the floor,” Abe said.

She started to stand, thought better of it, and ran her tongue across her teeth. “How much do you know about Suzanne Lombard’s disappearance?”

“Apart from what they’ve been showing on the news for ten years?” Vaughn said. “Not a lot.”

“Were you ever questioned?” Hendricks interrupted. “After the abduction. We couldn’t find a record of it.”

“No,” Vaughn replied. “I was in jail at the time.”

“Dan makes a good point,” Jenn said. “If anything we know about Suzanne sounds wrong to you, inaccurate, speak up. You had a special relationship with her.”

Vaughn frowned. “Sure, but remember, I hadn’t seen her since my father died.”

“Understood,” Abe said. “But you never know.”

Jenn cleared her throat. “If no one objects, I thought we’d start at the beginning.” She paused to see if anyone did. “Okay, so as you all know, this July is the tenth anniversary of the disappearance. It was on the morning of Tuesday, July 22, that Suzanne Lombard, the daughter of Senator Benjamin Lombard of Virginia, ran away from home. Ran away from what, according to all observers, was a perfect and happy family. Does that jibe with your recollection?”

“And then some.”

“In the early stages of the investigation, the police and FBI worked from the theory that Suzanne had been snatched off the road around the family beach house outside the hamlet of Pamsrest, Virginia. Grace Lombard and her daughter often spent the entire summer there while the senator commuted back and forth between Pamsrest and DC.”

Pamsrest was a small community of the “everybody knows everybody” variety. Mom-and-pop stores, two ice cream parlors, a boardwalk, and an award-winning no-frills barbeque pit. A throwback to a simpler age that people got misty about but could never quite pinpoint in time—the kind of place where families felt safe enough to let their guards down.

“Definitely,” Vaughn said. “The last summer I spent down there, Bear was maybe twelve? And she already had free rein to come and go as she pleased.”

“Bear?” Hendricks asked.

“Sorry. I mean Suzanne. Bear was just what I called her.”

Hendricks made a note.

“Suzanne biked everywhere,” Jenn continued. “That summer she had a job at the local pool and usually left in the morning and was gone all day. This was before every kid had a cell phone. It wasn’t uncommon for Grace Lombard not to speak to her daughter during the day. So she didn’t get really worried until almost six in the evening. It took two calls to establish that Suzanne hadn’t shown up for work. Her third was to her husband in DC; Senator Lombard called the FBI. That got the ball really rolling. By morning, the town was inundated with law enforcement—local, state, and federal. By noon, the story broke nationally and Suzanne Lombard became the latest obsession of cable news.”

“Pays to be white,” Hendricks said.

Jenn nodded. That was inarguable. Social scientists referred to it as MWWS, or Missing White Woman Syndrome. Suzanne followed in the footsteps of Elizabeth Smart and Natalee Holloway—if you were going to go missing in America, it certainly helped to be white, female, and pretty. Throw in daughter of a US senator for good measure, and you had a recipe for America’s next obsession. The press descended on Pamsrest like a plague on Egypt. TV trucks formed a gleaming shantytown in a field on the edge of town. Any resident who cared to stand still for more than a few seconds was guaranteed to wind up on TV. The story ran round the clock for months on every media outlet in the country.

“On the afternoon of the second day, Suzanne’s bicycle was found two towns over in a covert of waist-high grass behind a general store. The area was canvassed multiple times, but no one remembered seeing Suzanne Lombard. Local law enforcement went to work on registered sex offenders in the region while the FBI explored the possibility that it was a politically motivated kidnapping. Of course, no ransom call ever came.”

Both Abe and Hendricks shifted in their seats. She went on before they could interrupt. She wanted to get through the old before broaching the new.

“The first break in the case came on day six. A college student named Beatrice Arnold called the FBI hotline to report she’d sold Suzanne Lombard snacks at the gas station where she worked in Breezewood, Pennsylvania.

“The Breezewood tape caused a seismic shift in the investigation and completely scrambled the assumptions of law enforcement. Suzanne Lombard hadn’t been snatched; she had run away. She had somehow traveled three hundred fifty miles from the Virginia shore to the Pennsylvania line without drawing attention to herself. From the surveillance tape, three unassailable facts emerged: First, Suzanne was actively trying to conceal her identity. Second, she was waiting for someone. And third, in Suzanne’s mind at least, that someone was a friend.

“When it was presumed to be a kidnapping, no one had paid too much attention to Suzanne Lombard herself. She had just been an innocent girl in the wrong place at the wrong time. But when the Breezewood tape surfaced, the FBI took a bright light to the private corners of Suzanne Lombard’s life. Her environment, her belongings, her social circle were all inventoried and dissected.” Jenn paused. “I assume you’re with me so far, yes?”

Vaughn nodded.

“Okay, this is where we get into the part of the narrative that wasn’t shared with the media. So stop me if you have questions.”

Vaughn nodded again.

“So who was this ‘friend’ she met in Breezewood, and how did she know this individual? Initial interviews with Suzanne’s friends at the pool pointed to a boyfriend—a ‘Tom B.’ ” Jenn indicated the blank photo on the board.

“She had a boyfriend?”

“Does that surprise you?”

“A little, I guess. What do we know about him?”

“Not a lot. Her friends admitted covering for her at various points so she could leave work early to meet him. Suzanne’s parents were adamant there was no boyfriend, but a search of Suzanne’s room turned up a stash of love letters from him hidden in a bookcase.”

“And?”

“And nada. Law enforcement canvassed but failed to turn up a single Tom B. within a fifty-mile radius. They expanded the search to include variations on the name: Tom A., Tom C., Tom D., etc., but it was a dead end.”

“And he never came forward?”

Jenn shook her head. “But a new lead emerged when Suzanne’s laptop was searched. The hard drive had been wiped using Heavy Scrub, a program designed to erase data permanently.”

“Gibson, can you explain how it works?” George asked.

Jenn looked at her boss questioningly. George knew exactly how Heavy Scrub worked. He was the one who’d explained it to her. No doubt he had a reason for asking. Dealing with George was like playing chess with a grandmaster. He made her paranoid about her paranoia.

“Ah, sure,” Vaughn said. “Well, contrary to popular misconceptions, emptying a computer’s ‘trash’ only de-allocates it. It still exists on the hard drive, but the computer now has permission to overwrite the file should space be needed. However, an ‘erased’ file might exist for years depending on the user’s habits. Retrieving so-called erased data from a hard drive is simple. It’s been the downfall of many a would-be master criminal. Hence the need for programs like Heavy Scrub, which systematically overwrites a hard drive multiple times until any existing data becomes unrecoverable. Not the sort of thing your average fourteen-year-old would know to do.”

“And certainly not a teenager described as ‘technologically inept’ by her parents,” Jenn said.

“Which she quite clearly was,” Hendricks interjected. “Because while she installed and ran the program to cover her tracks, she shut the laptop’s cover before it was finished—”

Vaughn’s head turned sharply to Hendricks. “Which caused the computer to hibernate and stop Heavy Scrub midwipe,” he completed Hendricks’s sentence. “Bear botched it?”

“Correct,” Jenn said. “The laptop was taken to Fort Meade, which reconstructed as much of the data as it could—which turned out to be not much. The majority was garden-variety teenager: fragments of homework, essays, e-mails, etc. But an Internet relay chat client was found on her machine that her parents didn’t know anything about. And that none of her friends used.”

“I remember the FBI hunting high and low for WR8TH. Is that how the FBI knew about it?” Vaughn was sitting forward in his seat now.

“Yes. Someone using the username WR8TH befriended Suzanne in a chat room. WR8TH presented himself to her as a sixteen-year-old boy and became her confidant. What emerged was that he encouraged her to run away and helped her cover her tracks.”