I resisted the urge to clench my fists and made a non-committal noise. Nicolette kept acting like she was working.
“Anyway, about a year ago, the kid’s case gets reopened. New evidence or some shit. So he sends me out to look for her again. I come up with nothing, and he’s pissed. This guy’s so twisted he wants his own kid dead.”
Stay calm, Gibson. Stay calm. “Shit. He wanted you to take her out?”
“Yep. Wouldn’t be my first hit, but I don’t like it. She’s not a kid anymore, but still. What kind of guy does that?”
“Good question. But why would he want her dead?”
He shrugged, hiccupping. “Don’t know. My guess is, she knew something and they don’t want her around to tell.”
“You were right, it’s a damn good story. Did you ever find her?”
“No, and here’s the real rub. I made everything a hell of a lot easier for him and he still sends me out to this crappy town. She’s officially dead, we have the forensics report to prove it. Fake report, but no one’s going to question it. Even if she did turn up, who would believe her? Some chick already burned that bridge when she claimed to be her.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Don’t you follow the news out here?” he asked. “I guess if it doesn’t involve someone driving a tractor into a fence or a chicken taking a shit in someone’s roses, you people don’t pay attention.”
God, this fucking guy. “Guess not. What happened?”
He proceeded to tell me all about Abbie Gilbert. How she’d turned up at a hospital, claiming to be his boss’s missing daughter—he still hadn’t said anyone’s name—and how his boss had gone out to see who she was. Brought her home and told the media his daughter had been found.
“Did he know it wasn’t her?” I asked. “I mean, a guy would have to know his own daughter.”
“Oh, he knew. I think it was his wife’s idea to use her. They figured this would close the case for them. They were getting sick of these damn investigators poking their noses everywhere.”
“Smart move,” I said. “So what’d they do? Pay her off to keep up the lie?”
“That’s exactly what they did.” Swaying on his stool, he poked my shoulder. “Paid her a solid chunk of change and set her up out in Philly. I took her out there, myself. Dumb girl thought she’d won the lottery.”
“What happened to her?”
“This is good, too,” he said, practically laughing. “So someone outs her, right? Gets their hands on a DNA sample—don’t ask me how, because I don’t know—and makes her come clean. So she loses her fancy apartment and the allowance they were giving her. Guess she wasn’t happy because she came back and tried to blackmail them. Said she’d go to the media and tell the truth about their agreement. I’m sure you can guess how that ended.”
“Tell me.”
He made a slicing motion across his throat.
“Damn,” I said. “You have to do it?”
“I hired a guy,” he said. “It cost me a little extra, but I don’t like killing girls if I don’t have to.”
I stopped myself from saying that hiring someone to kill a girl wasn’t any different than doing it yourself. But we were so close. I just had to hold it together a little longer.
“I don’t know, man. This all sounds like a bunch of made up bullshit to me.”
“All true,” he said, putting a hand on his chest and hiccupping again. “Swear it on my mother’s grave. So anyway, my boss keeps getting more and more paranoid, right? I really think he might be going off the deep end. Then he finds out some former social worker’s been trying to dig up stuff on his daughter. Guess who got saddled with that problem?”
“You?” Holy shit, he was going to tell me about Shelby’s kidnapping.
“Damn straight it was me. But, hey, the boss man pays me good money to take care of shit like this for him.”
“What’d you do?”
“It was almost too easy. I found out who she was and did some research. She had some guy stalking her a while back. He was perfect. Legitimately crazy. So I tracked him down and gave him some rather specific information about her whereabouts. It was like throwing a dog a stick. He couldn’t help himself.”
“Did it work?”
He hiccupped again. “Well enough. She backed off. But then it got worse again. Some local guy got hauled in for questioning about the