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CHAPTER31
G?IBSON WATCHED HER CHILDREN EATtheir dinners, or rather Tommy wolf his down and Darby pick at hers. It was annoying but she could understand it. Gibson had been the same way when she was a kid. Her brothers had eaten everything in sight while she had been indifferent to food and thin as a rail. She touched her hips and closed her eyes.
Those were the days.
Later, she put the kids to bed and went to her office. She stared at the Batphone for about ten minutes before hitting the send button.
“Now is not a good time,” Clarisse said.
“Then why answer?”
“I thought it might be important. Is it?”
“I went by Nathan Trask’s place.”
“You told me that already.”
“But we didn’t finish our discussion. How in the hell do you expect me to ever get a face-to-face with the man? Stealth, as you suggested, isn’t going to cut it, unless I can become invisible.”
“I didn’t think it wasmyjob to doyourjob.”
“I don’t remember being hired by you to do a job!” Gibson snapped. “Or did my paycheck go astray?”
“You are in this knee-deep, no, make that ass-deep. If Traskisinvolved in Langhorne’s death he knows all about you already.”
“You sound flustered.”
“Maybe I am. And maybe I don’t need to be your self-starter, Mickey. I thought you could motivate yourself. You’re a smart girl—act like it.”
“Maybeweshould meet. On a Zoom.”
“Why?”
“I like to know who I’m dealing with.”
“You already know who you’re dealing with. Me.”
“You’re just a voice on the other end of the ether.”
“A voice who has spent quite a bit of time holding your hand and leading you down the path you need to go down. I suggest, from now on, you take it from here.”
The line went dead and Gibson slowly put the phone down.
She picked up the yearbook and went back over the pages. Her focus was now on some of the people in the audience. She went through them one by one. But that didn’t make sense to her. Why would Francine Langhorne be in the audience in Philly watching a college performance starring Mickey Rogers?
But then her focus changed—to the stage wings.
The backstage crew. They were typically all students at Temple and also some folks who worked at the university. She had helped a number of the students, becoming a mentor and shoulder to cry on when auditions or their tests went badly.
She took pictures of all the images with her phone and then sent them to her email. She fired up her computer and brought the images up on the large screen and then zoomed in on the faces in the wings. There were a lot of them. Stage productions needed a great deal of manpower whether in college or on Broadway. She went through the pictures one by one. Nothing clicked.
But why would it? You have photos of Francine Langhorne as a child.
Wait, could our paths have crossed when I was a cop? She knew I had been on the force in Jersey City. Did I arrest her at some point? I met a lot of people back then. And she obviously knew I worked at ProEye. But I really haven’t met anyone in person at ProEye. It’s basically all done on the computer.
She sighed and sat back. This was getting her nowhere fast.
Okay, set this aside for now and work to your strengths.
