Page 21 of The Lie Maker

“Write down this address.”

I’d scrambled to find a pen and something to write on. Lana dug a pencil out of a drawer and handed me a takeout menu. I scribbled in the text-free borders. “Pandora what?” I asked.

She told me. When I asked another question—“Ten o’clock, you said?”—and got no reply, I realized she had already ended the call.

“So you’re Gwen,” I said, now that we were meeting face-to-face.

“I am,” she said. “Apologies for taking a couple of days to get in touch after you’d been given the phone. I had a few other things on my plate.”

“You have a last name, Gwen?” I asked.

“I do,” she said. “Gwen Kaminsky.”

“So, what do you folks import?”

“Not a goddamn thing.”

She reached into her jacket and brought out a black billfold. She flipped it open, revealing a badge. “Gwen Kaminsky, with the U.S. Marshals Service.” She gave me about two seconds to inspect the badge before she snapped the billfold shut and tucked it back into her pocket.

“You’re a U.S. marshal?” I asked.

“I think that’s what the badge suggests.”

“What the hell do you want with me?” I took a second, then smiled. I had it all figured out immediately. “You want to write your memoir. True tales of a U.S. marshal. You need a ghostwriter. My girlfriend was right. I’m flattered, but unless you’ve already got a publisher behind you with a decent advance on the table, I don’t think this is something I’d be interested in.”

“If you know everything I’m going to say, then I guess we can wrap this up now. Thanks for coming.”

She made like she was going to get up, but I stopped her by saying, “Wait. Sorry. Maybe I jumped the gun a bit there.”

“You want to hear what this is about or don’t you?”

I nodded. “Sure, go ahead.”

Gwen Kaminsky took a breath, shot a quick, withering glance at the man with the bobbing knee at the nearby workstation, and said, “You’re a writer.”

“I am.”

“I had some research done on you. Two novels. Good reviews. Haven’t read them myself—had never heard of them—but the people I had read them for me said they weren’t bad. They did summations for me.”

“Great,” I said evenly. I was going to get a swelled head with all this praise.

“You know what they liked about them?” she asked.

Rather than try to guess, I waited for her to tell me.

“The characters, how fully developed they were. How you invented these rich past lives for them, these detailed backstories. I’m told the characters were very authentic, very three dimensional.”

“I see.”

“So that made you one of our candidates.”

“Candidates,” I said.

“Do you know what we do here?”

“You mean, like, the U.S. Marshals generally, or in this office specifically?”

“You’ve heard of the Witness Security Program? A lot of people refer to it as witness protection, or witness relocation.”