Poisonfeather (Gibson Vaughn #2)(44)

Jimmy whistled. “That real gold? Looks expensive.”

You have no idea, Lea thought. “Doesn’t belong to any of our regulars. Anyone check in recently?”

“Oh, yes, several, actually.”

“Several?”

He smiled. “Must be my winning personality. They’ve been trickling in the last couple of days. And I’ve had calls for reservations for the next few weeks.”

“They know this is Niobe, right?” she joked.

He laughed. “I didn’t mention it.”

“Seriously, that’s great news. How many you got here now?”

“Well, let’s see, four men checked in yesterday.”

“Together?”

“Uh-huh, they did. Young fellows. Businessmen, I think. They were wearing jackets is why I say that. They weren’t too chatty, so that’s just me speculating.”

“Anyone else?”

“Yep, two more this morning, and an Asian gentleman has been here for a couple of days, nice fellow. Fisherman. From Ohio, I think. Couldn’t quite place his accent.” Jimmy pointed at the watch. “But I doubt that’s his. He was up at the crack of dawn. Headed over to the Elk River today, fishing trout. Doubt he’s spending time at the Toproll.”

“Well, ask around. It’ll be behind the bar if they can tell me the inscription.”

Although if anyone could tell her the inscription, that would frighten her to death.




Gibson and Swonger drove into Niobe along Tarte Street, which ran parallel to the Ohio River. Niobe was one of those towns whose reason for existing had long since passed into history, and its century-long contraction had left a swath of shuttered, abandoned buildings to mark high tide. According to their map, this was the center of Niobe’s historic district, but to Gibson most of the town looked like history at this point. Tarte Street was a stretch of brick buildings, some open, most closed permanently—windows bricked over like bandaged eyes. One bank, one hardware store, one drugstore. Three antique shops all in a row, possessed of a liberal definition of “antique” judging by the junk piled up in the windows. Four churches. A police station with one lonely cruiser parked in front. A dollar store and a Food Lion. A defiant liquor store called Niobe Spirits. Away to the right, the remnants of a bridge that once spanned the Ohio River rose into view, a grand old relic, beautiful in the way that American ruins could be.

A group of teenagers stood outside a service station that had been converted into a sandwich shop, not doing much of anything but waiting for someone to suggest somewhere else to stand. The lonely migration of small-town kids with nowhere to go and nothing to do when they got there. Swonger maneuvered around a beat-up mail truck double-parked outside what might be America’s last surviving video store. The mail truck caused something to click in Gibson’s head. The question wasn’t where Merrick had invested his money; it was how. If Merrick was managing investments from prison, he would need a computer. Gibson didn’t know if inmates had Internet access, but even if they did, Merrick couldn’t risk the prison network, which would certainly be monitored. So either he had a computer . . . no, that was stupid. Where was he going to hide a laptop in a prison? Even a tablet would be next to impossible. Gibson thought back to his time in jail, awaiting trial—how many times did the guards conduct random searches? There were only so many places to hide things in a cell, and the guards knew all of them.

What about a cell phone? No pun intended. Maybe. It was smaller but still a huge risk to take, and Merrick had a lot on the line. In his mind, Gibson drew a question mark next to it, but until he had a very good reason to believe otherwise, he was discounting the possibility that Charles Merrick had hidden a cell phone and charger for eight years without getting caught.

That meant Merrick had help. If Merrick couldn’t manage his accounts from the prison, then someone on the outside was executing transactions on his behalf. So how was Merrick communicating with them?

When you thought about it, it was bin Laden but in reverse.

In fact, Charles Merrick and Osama bin Laden had a lot in common. Both were prisoners. The only difference was bin Laden had built his own prison. Like Merrick, bin Laden couldn’t travel and couldn’t risk using modern communications technologies. Instead, bin Laden had relied on a sophisticated, low-tech courier network to communicate with the outside world. The United States knew what was being communicated and with whom; it just didn’t know how. It had taken years, but they had tracked bin Laden to Pakistan through those couriers.

In this instance, Gibson knew the location of his subject. Merrick was fixed and unmoving behind bars. That was the known. The unknowns were what was being communicated, with whom, and how. So who were Merrick’s couriers? How was he getting information in and out? As with bin Laden, it was probably a low-tech human network. If Gibson could find it and break into it, he could trace it back to the money. He smiled to himself. In this case, the money was the “bin Laden.” To find it, all he had to do was locate Merrick’s confederate on the outside.

Swonger pulled into the parking lot behind the Wolstenholme Hotel and threw the car into park.

“What are you grinning about?” Swonger asked. “Oh, you having one of them epiphanies. Whatcha got for me?”

Gibson waved him off. “I got nothing for you,” he said. “You’re here strictly in an observational capacity. Understand?”