Going Dark(54)

“Let me ask you something, Marta. You ever wanted to just vanish, start over as somebody else?”

“Are you kidding? Who doesn’t?”

“How would you do it?”

“Save up till I had forty thousand, enough to last six months, get new ID, new Social, a bus ticket to California, find a job cutting hair.”

“You’ve thought this out.”

“Haven’t you?”

“Not in such detail.”

“So is that helpful?”

“Would you consider staging your own death?”

She grimaced.

“Does that mean you wouldn’t?”

“Well, it would be kinder. So your loved ones didn’t have all those unanswered questions. Your spouse wasn’t out driving around all day and night looking for you. My way would be easier to pull off, less likely to fail, but staging a death, it’s actually the more considerate thing.”

“Yeah,” he said. “More considerate.”

“That’s all?”

Frank’s eyes strayed to his window, afternoon clouds building over the Everglades. Ivan had moved away into the Gulf. Juanita was heading their way. They were in the cone of probability. “I need that background stuff on Leslie Levine. In particular, any relatives, loved ones, friends she had. The kind of person she might be trying to spare some emotional pain.”

Marta left. Frank read the files. She was right, nothing much on Wally Chee, except some medical issues. A birth defect with his legs, which some pediatrician in New Mexico blamed on contaminated drinking water on the Navajo res where his people had lived for generations.

He and his brother had been raised by a single mom. As Marta had said, Pauly’s military history was too light to be real. Heavily blue-penciled. Something worth checking.

Claude Sellers, now that shithead was intriguing.

Sellers had been with the power company all his working life. Started as a lineman, worked his way up to district supervisor of field maintenance, then jumped over to security, an odd zigzag that seemed to have no basis in new training.

Divorced four times. No children. Second marriage only lasted three months with a messy finale. A restraining order from the ex. No abuse charges filed, but there had to be some kind of harassment to get the restraining order. Claude, the bully, probably didn’t take rejection well. Wife three and four survived a year with Claude before they bailed. Cycling through women. Fucking up, then fucking up again.

Sellers had a concealed-weapons permit, a mail-order college degree from some no-name place in Arizona. Never been arrested, rented a starter condo out in Kendall, where the young marrieds and recently divorced lived.

The thing that must’ve caught Marta’s eye was his credit history. His score was so low, Claude couldn’t have bought a toaster on layaway. The guy filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy seven years ago, then filed under Chapter 13 last year. Wiping his debt slate clean twice. Frank double-checked and saw from the court records there was alimony in all four divorces.

Money problems. His salary from the power company was damn good, within a few thousand of what Frank made, the prick. But all that alimony was eating him alive.

Frank got out his legal pad, started jotting down the things that jumped out. Claude’s money issues, the empty military record of Pauly Chee, the gel on the ladder, an informant dead, the video of an unlikely croc attack, Prince Key.

Marta buzzed and told him Angie Stevens was waiting to see him, their top cybersleuth. Nice young woman, blond with a perky smile. Not a single tattoo showing anywhere, zero piercings, normal shoulder-length haircut. Nothing like the movies. More debutante than hacker.

Frank sketched out the situation, gave her the cyber-attack analysis sheet that Sheen had faxed over, and asked Angie if she could find some time this weekend to drive down to Turkey Point and check over the current security status of its computer network.

“If you don’t have some kind of scheduling conflict,” he said.

“You mean other than the big one-day sale at Macy’s?” It sat there for a few seconds, then she beamed at him, a jokester. “Happy to do it, boss.”

He was about to tell her to call him Frank, but Angie Stevens had already turned and walked out of his office without a good-bye. Frank thinking, There it was, the computer-nerd thing, the klutzy lack of social skills.

He buzzed Marta, told her to call their FBI liaison at the Pentagon, see if there was any more on Pauly Chee they could shake loose.

“Bottom of my list or top?”

“Tippy top,” Frank said. “Try hard, stamp your feet if you have to.”

He worked through the afternoon, running his own computer searches on the principals, hours slumped at the screen but finding nothing.