Page 75 of The Lie Maker

“I have recordings,” he said.

Tarrington said, “What?”

“Not for when he told me he wanted Gartner dead. But with Klay, yeah, I had one of those mini recorders in my pocket. Thought I might need it for backup one day.”

“Where the hell are these recordings?”

“Hidden. But I can tell you where to find them.” He paused. “But the thing is, even if somehow you got my charge dismissed, Frohm will get me. He knows people. And so do the folks he made all those crooked deals with. They’ll be going down, too. They’ll all come looking for me.”

“We offer them the recordings,” Tarrington said, “in exchange for witness protection. When they hear you’ve got Frohm on tape, they’ll give you anything. You might have to do some jail time. A token few months, but after that, they can give you a new identity, relocate you. Rose and your son, too.”

Michael said he would have to think about it, discuss it with his wife.

Who, it turned out, wanted no part of it. Not for her, and not for their son.

And that tore Michael apart. He loved Rose, to be sure, but their marriage had been headed for a cliff for a long time. If he had to leave Rose to start a new life on her own, he could reconcile that.

But Jack. God, that was another thing altogether.

He loved his son so much. Did he love him enough to leave him behind?

So Michael had a decision to make. (1) Testify and not accept witness relocation and run the risk of getting not only himself killed, but his family, too. Or (2) don’t testify, and spend much of the rest of his life in jail, without his family. Or (3) accept the offer of a new identity and go into hiding without his wife and son, provided there were assurances that they’d be safe, that Frohm and his people would know going after them would come with grave consequences.

I’ll take what’s behind Door Number Three, Monty.

Tough choice, but it was the only one that made sense. Did he regret betraying Galen Frohm? Definitely. But he could also see how Frohm had used him, groomed him from an early age to become a killer. Michael wasn’t dismissing his own responsibility here. He wasn’t whining that Frohm had made him do it. But the time had come to be pragmatic about these things.

He had to save his own ass.

The next time Alicia came to visit, Michael said, “Tell them it’s a deal. And here’s where you can find the key to a safe-deposit box where the tapes are.”

But to make the deal happen he would have to confess to his other crimes, including the Chicago murder. It took a while to nail down the details, but there was so much multiagency interest in nailing Frohm that Michael was granted immunity for his various misdeeds.

And instead of Michael going to jail for the rest of his life, it was Frohm.

Who, as it turned out, did not die in prison, but in the hospital, having been transferred there during the early days of a raging pandemic, before scientists had a clear idea how it spread, and frontline workers were taking every precaution to make sure the uninfected stayed that way.

And so it was that Galen Frohm died alone. Didn’t even live long enough to hear his loved ones, over the cell phone that a doctor held to his ear, tell him how much they loved him.

Thirty-Nine

Jack

I went to Lana’s that evening.

We hadn’t seen or communicated with each other for a couple of days, and she seemed distant. Something was wrong, but I didn’t know what.

“Everything okay with you?” I asked her.

“Yeah, sure,” she said, her back to me. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

I waited for her to ask whether everything was okay with me. When she didn’t, I volunteered some information.

“Harry killed himself,” I said.

Whatever it was that had been troubling Lana, whatever it was I might have done, she put it aside for the moment and said, “Oh, my God. What happened?”

I told her about the call with my editor, Ann.