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SpaceMonkey 1343
Mac waited until the bartender had left to serve the next customer before he spoke. He kept his voice low. “According to the transcript of the interview, Wilson arrived an hour after Theo and I were picked up.”
Gus nodded. “It’s a two-and-a-half-hour flight between New York and Lawrence.”
“Which means he was retained to represent Theo well before she was picked up.”
Gus tapped the table as he thought. “He did say he was in Lawrence. Could he have been retained there and sent straight out?”
“It’s possible, I suppose…but what was he doing there? I doubt he vacations in Lawrence.”
“Another client?”
“Who was important enough for a partner to fly out to Lawrence but whom he abandoned to represent Theo at police questioning?” Mac shook his head. “I think it was more likely that he was there for Theo.”
“Which means?”
“I’m not sure.” Mac typed a message into his phone. “I’ll get Bernie to find out what she can about Wilson Freeman and its clients.”
Gus stared at his drink. “You know, this all started with that bloke Murdoch. Maybe the key to this is finding out more about him.”
“Unfortunately, it seems he’s always been a bit ‘private’ in terms of public profile.” Mac opened his laptop and pulled up the information they’d managed to gather on Dan Murdoch over the years. Date and place of birth, education, habits, friends. “You know, all the stuff until his second book was published seems very neat, contrived. If he wasn’t an internationally acclaimed bestselling author, I’d say he was in witness protection. He’s been a fairly big deal bookwise for six or seven years, give or take, and yet there is not one clear photograph of him.”
“Theo said they were hiding his image on purpose because of some over-earnest fans.” Gus stared at the artistic, shadowy publicity shots on the screen. He squinted. “I’m not even sure these are of the same bloke.” He cursed. “Why the hell didn’t I go over to eyeball the joker when Theo—”
“Because she was twenty-two, not fourteen,” Mac replied. “Anyway, wasn’t she trying to set up a meet-the-family type dinner when he died?”
Gus winced as he remembered. He’d been worried that Murdoch was so much older than Theo. It seemed a trivial thing in light of what had ensued. “What makes you think he was not in witness protection?”
“If you’re in the program, trying to become famous is usually prohibited. It kind of defeats the purpose of disappearing.”
“Fair enough,” Gus said quietly. “Unless, of course, you became famous as someone else.” He met Mac’s eyes, his own fixed on a flickering light at the end of the tunnel. “Could this be what we’re looking at, Mac? Theo disappears and then her story comes out under another name…one that cannot be connected to hers.”
“Theo didn’t turn state’s evidence, Gus.”
“She confessed. Maybe that’s what they wanted from her.”
“Come on, man, you’re an attorney. You know that’s not how it works.”
“What if whoever really killed Murdoch, and the others, also sent Wilson, and helped Theo disappear and create a new identity in exchange for her confessing?”
“Perhaps if the President was a suspect…but there were no other suspects aside from you and me.”
Gus groaned. Mac was right. They were probably the only people who gained anything from the fact that Theo confessed.
“Forget the confession for a moment,” Mac suggested. “We know that Altamirano’s book is the story Theo plotted on your kitchen table. And though we can’t be certain, the writing itself does sound like Theo.”
Gus nodded. All this was true.
“We have no evidence, aside from the fact that you haven’t heard from her, that she’s dead, and she had not actually started writing this story when she left.”
“Then, she could have written Afterlife…” Gus caught himself wanting to believe it, desperately. Did Mac wish it too? Were they both just wishing? “Are we finding Theo in this book because we want to, Mac?”
Mac’s lips twitched upwards. “I don’t know about you, Gus, but this isn’t the first book I’ve read in the last four years. And I’ve never recognized anything before.” He shrugged. “I assume if it was wishful thinking, it would have happened years ago when we…you missed her most.”
Gus swirled the whisky in his glass. He didn’t drink so much anymore. There was a time when he was drinking to numb all kinds of pain and fury, when he was still using a walking stick, and his house and career were ashes.
Mac had taken him out to the Ponderosa for a while. Nancy Etheridge would not allow alcohol in the house, and Mac was convinced that being forced to survive his family without the help of the occasional stiff drink was better than any twelve-step program. To be honest, Nancy had been kind, and the Etheridges’ insane convictions about imminent Armageddons and right-wing conspiracies had been distracting. They taught him to preserve food and filter water from puddles. It was a bit like living with the Boy Scouts. And he had begun to get his head together. “So we try to find P. S. Altamirano?”
