Dark Web (31 page)
Robert Darring smiled at the federal agents as he walked into the room. He looked right at home, Swift thought. He wondered if Darring had been seeking attention all along. Although that might have been oversimplifying it somewhat. During all his years on the force, Swift had come across every kind of criminal. Many were driven by financial need. Others were compelled by unbridled passion. Emotion. Vengeance. Greed. And some, a few, left the investigators scratching their heads, long after the case was over.
Despite being picked up just moments before leaving town, Darring was his usual self, expressionless, smug. He sat at a long table surrounded by three Feds. Swift stood beside Mike, who had been permitted to stand in and watch the interview. Swift had had to move mountains in order to let that happen, but now here they were. It was something Mike needed, Swift had decided, before moving on with his life.
The federal agents had set up their cameras and brought their own recording devices. The place looked like a Best Buy showroom.
A federal agent leaned forward, speaking into a microphone resting on the big table. The Feds were extra starchy this morning, Swift observed, more machine than human. The agent proceeded to “let the record show” and bespoke the date, time, place, and purpose of the inquiry.
Unprompted, Darring suddenly began to deliver a speech. As he spoke his gaze seemed to track some interior place, as if seeing a world the rest of them could not. “A hundred years ago, Arthur Rimbaud said ‘We are having visions of numbers.’” Then Darring looked into the cameras, at the agents, and through the one-way glass, as if he knew Swift and Mike were there. “‘I am an oracle; everything I say is true.’”
He sat up straighter, projecting his voice. “It’s just like the game. It
is
a game, and nothing more. We all have our little bundle of resources. We watch the numbers go up and down on a screen. Press a few buttons. But I can change those numbers. I change those numbers, and I can influence behavior. I can make people do what I want them to. Just like the people who play
The Don
, we’re all just playing a larger version of that game every day. And it’s getting easier and easier to control. All digital, all ones and zeros. What’s easier than ones and zeros? A kindergartener can understand that.”
The agents looked at one another grimly, and broke in with their questions. For over two hours, Swift and Mike observed. The Feds were meticulous, and the inquiry painstaking, even to Swift, who knew the virtue of being thorough, even if he did like to cut to the chase. He was happy to see it in their hands now. Happy, honestly, to be free again.
Finally, the line of questioning turned to the question of Darring’s real identity. The Feds had with them files thicker than the King James Bible, and they produced document after document, and at last Darring was forced to confess who he really was.
“William Simpkins.” After nearly three hours of questioning, he was finally beginning to look beaten.
Swift watched Mike covertly during this revelation. He stared through the one-way glass, saying nothing. He uttered not one word throughout the whole procedure. When the federal agents took him aside after they were done with Darring, Swift wasn’t privy to their exchange.
Swift left the County Jail, walking out into the night, inhaling the crisp air, looking up as the stars snapped on one by one overhead. He needed to get home and feed his dog. He needed to get ready for his dinner with Janine. He needed to get moving with the rest of his life.
Maybe, he thought, walking to his car, feeling his coat flap around his legs, it was finally time to put some work into that sprawling property his grandfather had left to him so many years ago.
The wheels barked on the tarmac and the plane touched down in St. Augustine airport. Mike looked out the window. He knew he wouldn’t be able to see them — they’d be on the other side of the security checkpoint, but still he looked, and pictured them there, Callie and the two girls, Reno now standing to her shoulder, Hannah at her waist. For a moment, he almost thought he actually saw them.
The wait was agonizing. The canned music in the plane. The ill-concealed tension of the passengers as they all did their best to maintain decorum. Stay calm. Wait your turn. Be polite to the people around you. And get off this goddamn plane as soon as humanly possible.
He’d spent the flight trying to put the past behind him, but he recalled one final visitation as he stood in the cramped quarters with the plastic-smiling passengers, waiting to disembark. Just seven hours ago, minutes before he headed out to the airport in the old Honda (where he’d left it, for all he cared, for anyone who might want it) a black sedan with a, tall, silver, wobbling antennae had pulled into his driveway. Two men in dark suits had bade him goodbye, with a look in their eyes that told him not to drop off the face of the Earth, they just might need to contact him again.
After interviewing Robert Darring they’d taken him into another room, sat him down, and flicked on a tape recorder. They’d taken that thick file out again, setting out the same photographs and documents they had displayed for Darring, like Blackjack dealers.
“William Simpkins,” The first Fed said, tapping a birth certificate with his finger. There was a picture attached by a paper clip, as if Mike hadn’t just seen the man in the flesh in the next room. “This is your half-brother?”
“I’ve never seen him before, never met him, had no knowledge of him until a few minutes ago.”
The agents looked at each other. “You have any idea why he would want to murder your son?”
“Step-son,” the second agent corrected.
“. . . Your step-son?”
“I think it was to hurt me.”
Those looks again. Then the agents pulled out pictures of two other kids unfamiliar to Mike. “These two were accomplices of Darring’s . . . of Simpkins’.”
“We’re talking with them now,” the second agent said in a manner suggestive of omnipresence. As if he was there with Mike, but simultaneously somewhere else entirely. “Darring blackmailed these two young men in ways similar to how he blackmailed Tricia Eggleston.”
The first agent sat back and folded his hands across his stomach. “Darring contacted Eggleston over a week ago. He told her the cops were looking into her boyfriend, McAfferty. That there was a task force that included a detective Remy LaCroix, and that there were witnesses getting ready to testify before a grand jury. Former addicts, people in trouble.”
“It was a bluff,” said the second agent. “LaCroix and his task force were nowhere near McAfferty. Darring learned about the task force, though, in the papers. He knew McAfferty was Braxton’s biological father through their online interactions; he gleaned this information over a couple of months playing
The Don
with your stepson. He sought out Eggleston, McAfferty’s girlfriend. So she’d do her Lady Macbeth part.”
“Naturally, McAfferty was skeptical. But, he was also paranoid. He bought an incendiary device.”
Another document. “We have the records of his online order for several parts here. Built the device and had it at the ready.”
“Just two days prior to the explosion, Darring contacted Tricia Eggleston. He never really corresponded with Tori directly, but through the girl. He convinced her that the cops were closing in. And then he gave her the location of a safe house for her and Tori to run to. She was supposed to join him, but she never did. Wanted out, I guess, no matter which way.”
“So you’ve never heard of William Simpkins?”
“No.”
More photos were pulled out. One showed Mike’s father standing beside a dark woman with gypsy hair and eyes, in a group photo. It was hard to be sure because of the other people crowding the picture, but it looked like Mike’s father had his hand around her waist. Mike stared at the woman, her eyes, the Mona Lisa smile on her face in the grainy photo. The first agent placed his finger on the face.
“This is Pamela Falcone. Know her?”
Mike swallowed. It took him a moment to find his voice — when he tried to talk all he produced at first was a scratchy grunt. “Yeah, I remember her,” he said. Then he looked out through the windows and into the snow where the tree shadows morphed into memories rising up from his past. “I went down to the bar once where my father spent just about every night. I remember seeing her standing near him, the way she looked at him. I was only fifteen or sixteen. And that’s when I understood. That’s when I knew. But, then, my mom got sick.” Mike looked down at the floor, at the pictures, at one showing Mike with his father and mother in Battery Park. He didn’t even know where it came from — maybe a passerby had snapped it. Mike was Hannah’s age, just a tot. He looked at his mother, her thin face, her small mouth, her large, baleful eyes. “I think I was even relieved she got sick,” he said, his voice dangerously close to cracking. “Because then he stayed. He let the other woman go and he stayed with my mom, but I always knew it. And I never forgave him for it.”
Mike pulled in a deep breath and looked away from the photos, anywhere but at those faces. He put his head in his hands for a moment, ran shaking fingers through his hair, and finally looked up at the agents, both of whom watched him intently. The second one asked, “Maybe just like Robert Darring — William Simpkins — never forgave you for being the son your father raised? Watching you all of these years, resentment eating away at him, hatred? Forming his plan? How he could hurt you the most?”
Mike let out a breath. He hadn’t even realized he’d been waiting to exhale. The two sets of eyes were watching him extremely closely. Now they blinked, all four of them, in eerie unison. Mike could smell Dial soap on the first agent.
“I raised a gun to my father when I was a kid. That’s probably in your file, too. When I found out about his affair. And he stayed. After that, he stayed with my mother. I don’t know if it was because he was afraid, I don’t know if he just . . .”
They were looking at him with detachment.
“You realize this is a formality,” the first agent said.
“We have to be thorough,” said the second.
Mike nodded, swallowed, and said, “I understand.”
He thought of Swift.
I understand.
The two agents stood up, collected their files, and proceeded to the door.
Mike had remained seated, not sure his legs would support his weight if he should try to stand.
The first agent had opened the door and the second agent looked back over his shoulder. “Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Simpkins. We’ll be in touch. Good luck in Florida.”
And they had left.
When his turn came he filed down the aisle with his single carry-on duffel. He had checked no baggage onto the airplane. He only had the duffel and a box, about the size of a bowling ball case, handsome bound-leather, black, with silver edges and rivets.
He nodded at the captain and stewardess, bid them farewell and stepped off the plane, leaving its chilly recycled air and into the balmy blast of a Florida spring. The humid air blanketed him with wet, fuzzy nostalgia; all the years that had passed down here in the sunshine state. And here he was again. For a moment, his stomach turned viscous as he remembered what he had lost, what his family had lost. But Braxton was home now.
As he had expected, they were waiting for him on the other side of security. Callie was wearing a pair of short-shorts that showed her long, smooth legs. Those legs had never quite lost their tan. Her bra strap was showing under a soft tank top, her dirty blonde hair piled up and pinned behind her head, her eyes wet, her mouth quivering with a smile. The girls were in their cutest outfits, Hannah in a little one-piece jumper thingy — Mike didn’t know, didn’t matter — Reno in jean shorts and a t-shirt that read
Aloha!,
a salutation from the wrong state that filled him with love and longing. And standing behind them, almost lost in the crush of passengers exiting and preparing to board, was Jack Simpkins.
As he walked towards them, Mike shot a glance at his father. Jack nodded back, and Mike felt something loosen in his chest. He dropped the duffel bag, almost running, like a guy in some frigging movie. He didn’t care. There would be nothing hidden in his life ever again, no withholding. He grasped the box, saw Callie’s eyes rest on it, saw her quivering lips part, as a heavy sigh escaped her, and she put the back of her hand to her mouth and looked at Mike.
He reached them, and set the box down. Braxton’s ashes, there, in the middle of his family, Braxton who had bound them all together, who had been at the heart of these four people’s lives, who now stood arm-in-arm, laughing and crying a little.
Mike pulled them all in tight. The crowd bustled around them; he caught one brief frown and one bright smile among the faces.
People were the same wherever you went.
THE END
TJB
Etown
February 12, 2014 — January 22, 2015
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