to know. If she really trusted me.” He keyed in several different combinations, and on the fourth try, he heard the lock unlatch.
“Your birthday?” Abbey said with a smile.
“She knows that wouldn’t mean anything to me. She used the date we met. In reverse order, just to be difficult.”
He put both hands on the lid of the security box.
“It wouldn’t be booby-trapped, would it?” Abbey asked. He could tell that she was only half joking.
“If it is, we’ll never know.”
“Optimist,” she said.
He opened the safe. Seeing the meager contents, he was disappointed. He wasn’t sure what he expected, but he was hoping that something inside would remind him of Nova. She could have left behind hidden fragments of who she was. Passports. Driver’s licenses. Anything to let him see her again. But there was nothing like that. In fact, there was no useful material inside for an intelligence agent at all, no identifications, no cash, no gun. The only thing in the box was a thick manila folder.
“I don’t get it,” he said.
“What?”
“I was expecting a getaway box. You keep things in it you’d need if you have to run.”
“Do you have something like that?” Abbey asked.
“Ten of them,” Bourne said. “They’re in different cities, different countries. You never know when you’ll need them. But this is something else.”
“What’s in the folder?”
He removed the folder from the box and opened it so they could both study the contents. The first thing he saw was a surveillance photo of a man getting into a beat-up Cutlass. He didn’t recognize the location, but it was in the desert, somewhere remote, with craggy hills in the background. The man himself was tall and slightly stooped, in his fifties, with an unruly mop of gray hair. He wore loose jeans and a shirt and string tie.
“That’s Charles Hackman,” Abbey said.
Jason dug further into the folder. Everything he found was related to Hackman. Phone records, credit card statements, printouts from his social media pages. Nova had compiled a complete dossier on the Lucky Nickel shooter.
“This makes no sense,” Abbey said. “Are you sure it was Nova who left this? Could it have been someone else?”
He shook his head. “This is her work.”
“But she died in the shooting,” Abbey pointed out. “How could she have gathered information about Hackman? Until November 3, he was a complete nobody. He came out of nowhere and didn’t leave any clues behind.”
Jason pointed at the computer date on the bottom of the printouts. October 28.
“Nova was doing research on Hackman before the massacre,” Bourne said. “Somehow, she already knew who this guy was before anyone else did. She knew he was being groomed for something.”
TWENTY-NINE
ABBEY knocked on the door of Sylvia Hackman’s apartment in the seamy heart of North Las Vegas. There were bars on her windows, and the neighborhood around her was ground zero for gang activity in the valley. This wasn’t a place anyone chose to live unless they couldn’t afford to live anywhere else. When Abbey had first met Charles Hackman’s wife, the woman had owned an upscale house in Summerlin, but money had obviously grown tight after her husband became a notorious killer.
The woman answered the door from behind a chain. Her eyes were suspicious. “What do you want?”
“Mrs. Hackman, my name is Abbey Laurent. I visited you once before when I was working on an article last year.”
“I remember. I told you back then that I don’t talk to reporters.”
“Yes, I understand that, but I have some new information to share with you. Maybe if we put our heads together, we can get some answers.”
“I don’t care about answers,” Sylvia snapped.
“Don’t you want to know what really happened to your husband?”
“I already know. I was married to a monster. He killed all those people. He ruined my life. End of story.”
Sylvia began to close the door.
“I can pay,” Abbey went on quickly. “Five hundred dollars. Just to talk. It looks to me like you could use the money.”
The woman hesitated. “Off the record? You leave me out of it?”
“Sure.”
“Let me see the cash.”
Abbey dug in her pocket for a wad of folded bills and pushed it through the crack in the door. Sylvia Hackman took it, undid the chain, and opened the door. “I’ll give you fifteen minutes.”
The woman led Abbey into the small apartment, which was neat as a pin but sparsely furnished. The television was on, and she switched it off using a remote. She took a seat on a worn sofa near