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“I didn’t send anything to your daughter. I don’t even know your daughter.” He leaned in. “Think about it. There’s no reasonfor me to sneak around and threaten your kid. I came straight to you, just as I’ve gone to others, trying to warn you before it was too late.”
“Other what?” Every word he said dragged her in deeper, but she had to know the endgame here. That was the only way to stop him.
“We shouldn’t discuss this out in the open.”
As if she’d never taken a self-protection class and would just invite some disgraced guy to join her in private. “This is your only choice. Say what you have to say to me here, or I’m leaving.”
“You don’t understand what—”
“You have exactly one shot to convince me what everyone is saying about you is wrong. Choose your conversation topic with care.” That was a lie, which she’d apparently gotten very good at over the years. She needed fodder, evidence to discredit him and protect Kennedy. She needed him to talk and keep talking.
“So that we’re clear, I’ve never faked a story or made up a source. Every piece I’ve written was fact-checked for accuracy. I don’t follow or support wild conspiracy theories.” His whisper grew raspier, more insistent, as he talked. “What’s happening to me now, to my reputation, it’s part of a disinformation campaign about me and my beliefs.”
She wondered if this was what she sounded like when she rambled. “You’re blowing your one shot.”
He grabbed a notebook and held it in front of him. “Several very well-connected, influential people in the metro area, so far only men, have died under questionable circumstances. In allthose cases, negative information leaked either before or right after the deaths. Anyone who questioned the manner of death had some part of their lives blow up.”
“That sounds like you’re guessing.” Rambling, actually, but she didn’t want to upset him. Not when she sat this close and didn’t know what he would do.
“If it only happened once, maybe,” he said. “Look at the most recent case. Alex Carlisle. Do you really think he shot himself in the dick then bled out?”
That case seemed to have a new twist every day. But he was connecting dots that didn’t exist. Using generalities and possibilities to invent a case for nothing. “I agree his death sounds—”
“Ridiculous and planned to look that way. Like he was being made to answer in the most obvious way for messing with women he’d paid to have sex with him. Hell, he should have been punished, but by a jury. Not a vigilante group.”
She thought about Alex Carlisle and the very strange way he’d died. His wife insisted he didn’t own a gun, and now this morning’s news talked about her being brought in for questioning, the implication being that the wife had believed the allegations against him and killed him. Almost as if she’d balked at the official story and now she was in trouble.
Damn, now Rob had her connecting phantom dots.
He sat back in his chair. “Look, I get that this sounds impossible. But it’s real, and following this, unraveling the puzzle, is personal.”
“How?” She wanted to write him off. Get up, walk away . . . but so little of her life made sense right now. Someone had sentthat letter to Kennedy. The longer Gabby sat here, the less convinced she was that Rob had done it. Then who?
“I didn’t figure this conspiracy out on my own. Like you, I had to be convinced, and I fought it. Thought it sounded too twisted, too fantastical, to be real,” he said.
“Okay. Let me talk to this other person who convinced you.”
“She’s dead.”
Gabby knew she should have seen that coming. So many dead bodies. Gabby felt like she was swimming in a sea of them. She hated to ask—tried not to, but... “How did she die?”
“They killed her.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Gabby
Gabby balanced her elbows on the table. No way was she walking away now, not after that line. “Okay, let’s start again.”
“Tami Zimmer.” Rob tapped a few buttons on his phone then turned the screen around for her to read the headline.
Award-Winning Reporter Killed on Capitol Hill
The photo showed a smiling brunette, young, probably in her thirties, more ponytail-wearing than DC chic. Someone you’d want to sit down with and chat over coffee.
He flipped through a few more photos. These were personal. They showed him with Tami. Her smiling. Hiking. Out to dinner. Laughing on a couch with a cat stretched out on her lap. Images so intimate and personal that Gabby felt like she was intruding on private moments between lovers.
He took the phone back, not bothering to shut it off as he cradled it in his hands. “More than six months ago. I lost her in a supposed purse grab gone wrong.”
