Before Gibson could respond a hand pressed something against her face, and once more it was lights out.
Chapter 54
She awoke with a jolt and saw the first shimmers of daylight coming in the window of the front room.
Gibson scrambled to her feet, raced up the stairs, and threw open the door to her kids’ bedroom. They were there and still sleeping peacefully. Her chest heaving and her heart racing, Gibson felt like she might throw up. She closed the door and sat on the floor in the hall, trying to calm her nerves and her stomach.
She was not doing well with either.
She put her face in her hands and quietly wept, finally leaning back against the wall to steady herself. A minute later she took one long, calming breath and sat up straight, wiping the tears off her face. She rose, trekked to the bathroom, and took a quick shower. When she looked at herself in the mirror afterward, she saw a woman who’d had the wits scared clean out of her.
She looked at her watch. It was after six a.m. Her day was just about to start and all she wanted to do was crawl into bed.
Do I go to the cops? What good will that do? I have proof of nothing. Do I tell my dad? No, God no. He’d go off half cocked and get himself killed.
She made a pot of coffee and then she heard the kids stirring.
Gibson hurried upstairs and hugged them tightly. She got them dressed and downstairs for breakfast, hovering over them as they ate to such an extent that Tommy started giving her worried looks. He was quick to pick up on her moods, Gibson had found.
She attempted a smile as she slid another pancake onto his plate and let him pour the syrup, using both hands on the bottle.
“Good, Mommy?” said Tommy.
She didn’t know if he was talking about his syrup pouring skills or her emotional state.
“Good, sweetie,” she replied, tousling his thick sandy hair. “Really good.”
She spent the morning with them, then let Silva take over.
Gibson rushed to her office and picked up the phone. She hit redial and it rang and rang.
Where are you, Clarisse? Where the hell are you?
She put the phone down and sat in her chair, staring at her twin dark screens.
She had emailed Zeb Brown about her job status. He’d assured her that she still had a position there. ProEye was very pleased with her work, and the assets she’d found on the Larkin matter were so colossal that her taking time off was not a big deal. Take as much time as you need, Brown had told her.
Gibson didn’t know if that was true or bullshit, but at least she now had an email trail if it came to a lawsuit. Virginia was a right-to-work state, but still, she wasn’t going down without a fight.
She fired up one of her computers and started going over what she had found on Harry Langhorne the previous night. She even used Google Maps to look at his boyhood home in Yarden, New York.
One ninety-nine Button Road was the address. It seemed that someone was living there now. An old car was in the driveway. There were early spring flowers in the beds around the house. The front porch had a rocking chair.
She noted the few other modest homes on the street. They all looked like people lived in them, too.
Gibson now turned once more to the disturbing article she had found on Langhorne. Then she looked more closely at the date. She saw that the story had come out after Langhorne and his family had disappeared into the world of WITSEC.
Some girls in Langhorne’s neighborhood in Trenton had come forward and accused him of molestation, of enticing them to take their clothes off while he took their pictures, of sexually abusing them, of even having sex with them.
However, each time Langhorne had convinced the girls not to tell anyone. He had used gifts and glibness and then threats to keep them quiet, the girls had reported. Apparently, their willingness to come forward now had been enhanced by the disappearance of the Langhorne family.
Old Harry couldn’t threaten or bribe them anymore.
What the hell had the US marshals done with those revelations? Nothing, apparently. The government had made a deal with the devil, it appeared. But couldn’t they have prosecuted the man, regardless of his WITSEC status? She supposed it was a legal gray area, though morally, it shouldn’t have been. Gibson also knew that many folks in WITSEC were criminals themselves. If the government started prosecuting them for previous crimes after they had been accepted into the program, it would effectively kill any incentive these folks would have to risk life and limb to come forward and rat out their fellow criminals higher up the food chain.
The next moment she heard a noise outside. She rushed over to the window overlooking the front of the house.
A sedan with federal plates had just pulled into her driveway.
And the man who got out of it screamed Federal law enforcement all the way down to his slightly scuffed black wingtips. He buttoned his jacket, which enhanced the hump where his gun lay in its shoulder holster. He seemed so tightly wound that she thought she could see some wires sticking out of him.
He looked around, clearly unimpressed with Gibson’s humble domicile, and then the man headed to the front door. Gibson stepped back from the window.
Oh hell.
Chapter 55
“FBI Special Agent Cary Pinker,” said the man after Gibson answered his knock. He took out his cred pack and held it in front of her for a couple of beats too long, at least to her mind.
Intimidation conflagration, she said to herself. She had experienced this as a cop and detective and it washed right off her back. But this guy was a Fed, and she was now a private citizen, so she clearly didn’t have the luxury of underestimating him.
“Please come in.”
She ushered Pinker into the front room and motioned to the couch, to the one area that wasn’t stained from her kids’ antics. Tommy and Darby were in the backyard with Silva, which was good. She didn’t think she wanted them to be around for any of what Pinker would be saying, even if they couldn’t understand it.
They sat down across from each other.
Pinker looked around. “I hear you’re a single mom?”
“That’s right. I work from home. The kids are in the backyard with their babysitter.”
“And you used to be a cop, first forensic tech, then uniform, then detective, all in New Jersey.”
“Yes, Jersey City.”
“And your father was a beat cop?”
“That’s right.”
“And now you’re currently employed by ProEye as an asset finder.”
“That’s pretty much my whole story.” She smiled disarmingly.
He appeared to ignore this gesture. “And you find yourself in the middle of this mess with Harry Langhorne and another former WITSEC murder in The Plains, Virginia?”
“That’s correct.”
“I’m surprised that the Virginia State Police are allowing you to work with them on the investigation, but maybe they do things differently down here.”
“It’s informal. Detective Sullivan knew I had some skills that might help, but it’s not like I’ve been given any special confidences. In fact, he told me he was going to meet with you, but that I was not allowed in the meeting. I’m surprised you came to see me. You haven’t even met with him yet, have you?”
“Not yet. But let me explain that.”
“All right,” Gibson said pleasantly.
“I’m here to find out what you haven’t told Detective Sullivan. What are the things you’ve done that have crossed the line? And I want to know what your motivation is to do all those things.” He looked around. “Could it be money?”