Poisonfeather (Gibson Vaughn #2)(27)
No, he couldn’t live with it.
He’d meant what he’d said to Birk and Swonger—he doubted he could succeed where the Justice Department had failed, but he had to know for certain. So in the middle of the second night, he roused himself from bed and started a file on Charles Merrick. Gibson didn’t know a thing about him, but the man had a name and a past—the only two things Gibson needed. Unlike the anonymous cowards who had snatched the Spectrum Protection job away. Perhaps it was precisely because Gibson’s own problems seemed insurmountable that Charles Merrick quickly became a stand-in for all of Gibson’s fury.
So he did what he always did when contemplating a hack—he crawled into Charles Merrick’s life. Merrick’s celebrity made it easier than it might otherwise have been. Libraries could be filled with all that had been written about Charles Merrick, and Gibson immersed himself in the minutiae of the man’s life: pulling key words and phrases, compiling lists of biographical details, sifting through the data for the patterns and habits that defined Charles Merrick. Two books told the story of Merrick’s financial downfall, and Gibson picked the better reviewed: A Shark in Shark’s Clothing: The Rise and Fall of Merrick Capital. He wasn’t sure what else it would tell him, because the man’s life had been completely documented online and in the press, but it paid to be thorough. Piece by piece, Gibson built a time line and picture of the man’s life. By the end of the week, he knew Charles Merrick’s life backward and forward.
Perhaps what he ought to be doing was finding a job. That’s what the judge would have wanted Gibson to do. But it simply was not in him. Like a runner who’d finished a grueling marathon, only to discover the finish line had been moved farther down the road, he didn’t have the will to start the race again. He was exhausted, and besides, what was the point? Even if he landed another job, they would just snatch it from him like they had the Spectrum Protection job. Whoever they were.
He rationalized his decision by telling himself that Merrick was a small job, if it was anything at all—a few weeks at the outside. That it was something he needed to do for the judge. But the truth was that once the familiar adrenaline burn took hold, his vision became increasingly narrow and myopic. The world beyond Charles Merrick lost its ability to command his attention. Even his daughter’s name, which could always galvanize him to action, had no effect. He was ashamed that it didn’t, but even the shame couldn’t deter him. Not now.
Gibson looked up at Merrick’s magazine cover taped to the wall above his makeshift desk and smiled. In the last twenty-four hours, a detail from the Finance magazine interview had begun to bother him. Gibson nearly dismissed it as nothing until YouTube finally connected the dots.
Prior to his arrest, Merrick had been in demand as a public speaker, and Gibson found an entire YouTube channel devoted to his speeches. The man was electric in front of an audience, charismatic and cocksure. He would have thrived in politics. And like a politician, Merrick tended to give variations on the same speech. Gibson watched several of them, hoping to get a read on his personality. Midway through the third, he reached for the magazine and flipped to the end of the interview. Rewinding the speech, he listened to Merrick reiterate his motto about pennies being the new million. Almost. There was one key difference. Gibson clicked through several different speeches—same difference in each one between his lectures and the Finance article. He reread the line in the interview. It was a small thing, possibly a typo. A small discrepancy that might be nothing or might mean that Charles Merrick’s money wasn’t in the proverbial Swiss vault. If Gibson’s hunch was right, Merrick had remained in close control of his fortune from prison. That required a network of some kind. And networks were always vulnerable.
Only one person knew for sure—Charles Merrick. But Lydia Malkin, the reporter who had conducted the interview, would do in a pinch. Where are you, Lydia Malkin? Foot tapping excitedly, he Googled her, all thoughts of finding a job forgotten. It was only Merrick now.
Merrick just didn’t know it yet.
His attempt at bluster fell flat, cornball and hokey in his ear. He was trying to pump himself up to do something that he didn’t believe possible. More than that, something he knew better than to try. Was he really going to chase Lydia Malkin down about a single word in an interview? And if he was right? What then? Would he travel to Niobe Federal Prison despite the judge begging him to stay away? If those two knuckleheads, Birk and Swonger, had deciphered Merrick’s boast, then how many others had reached a similar conclusion? How far was he going to push it?
He was afraid he already knew the answer to that.
He remembered an old framed map of the world that had hung in his father’s office in Charlottesville. At its margins, far out to sea, the mapmaker had written, in ominous letters, “Here there be monsters.” He’d asked his father what it meant, and his father had said, Some lines you can’t uncross, Gib. It means be sure.
In the end, Gibson traced Lydia Malkin to an address in Queens, New York, through her food. She belonged to that curious segment of the populace who obsessively photographed their meals in restaurants and posted it online. Gibson didn’t get it, but it definitely made her easy to find since she also hadn’t bothered to turn off the GPS metadata that her phone embedded in each photograph. It was just a matter of triangulating her location based on the places she frequented regularly. She ordered from New Good One Chinese Restaurant at least twice a week and really had a thing for their dumplings. It turned out to be only a block and a half from where she lived on Astoria Boulevard; the delivery guy was more than happy to reunite Gibson with his “sister” for forty bucks.