Page 90 of The Lie Maker

“What the fuck are you doing?”

Gwen was glancing repeatedly in her rearview mirror. “I want to be sure.”

“Sure of what? That we’re not being followed? Who the hell would follow a U.S. marshal?”

She grinned. “You’d be surprised.” She eased up on the gas. “Okay, I think we’re okay for now.”

Gwen wheeled into a supermarket lot, drove around to the back, where the loading docks were, and parked half behind a huge dumpster. She killed the engine, got out her phone, and entered a number. She waited a few seconds, said, “We’re good,” to somebody, then put her phone down and, taking a few deep breaths, turned to look at me.

“You okay?” she asked.

“No!” I said. “I am not even close to fucking okay.”

She raised a palm. “All right, let me try to bring you up to speed. About Bill...”

“He’s really dead?”

Gwen nodded. “At the cabin. We had someone check in on him this morning. He wasn’t answering calls or responding to texts. Wouldn’t come to the door when we got there. We had to break in. Found him in the bathroom, in the tub.”

I had a brief mental image of Bill—or Garth Walton, as I now knew him to be—in bloody water, having slashed his wrists.

“Killed himself?”

Gwen shook her head. “I wish.”

“You wish?”

“Sorry, bad choice of words. But yeah, I do wish. Because then it would mean we hadn’t fucked up. It would mean those sick bastards he testified against hadn’t found him. It would mean that there’s not a leak in our department, or that someone had hacked into our files. It would mean it wasn’t our goddamn fault. Someone made him sit in that tub and then blew his head off.”

I felt my heart in my mouth. “Fuck no.” I wondered whether I was going to be sick.

“So when you called asking about him... have you talked to anyone about going to see him?”

“Of course not,” I said.

Which wasn’t true.

I’d told Lana. But there was no way—no way—that she could have let anyone know, not even inadvertently, about my going to see Bill. And besides, even if I had, and someone had been listening in, I didn’t know where Bill was. I’d been blindfolded on the way there and back.

“This is a fucking nuclear bomb,” she said. She took a moment to collect her thoughts, then finally turned and said to me, “So you know he was an actor.”

“Garth Walton,” I said.

“Yeah. He’d gotten a few acting jobs. But they were few and far between, so he turned to other ways to make money. Like drugs and stolen property, and that brought him into contact with some badass Russians. Hard to get an acting job when you’re busy transporting fentanyl to Florida. You remember how much he talked about TV when we had lunch with him?”

I remembered. “Sure, yeah.”

“What? Did you think there was something fishy going on because you saw him on a TV show?”

“I... I guess I did. But you’re right. Everybody has to have done something. And he used to act. Do you think it was the Russians that got to him?”

“Most likely,” Gwen said.

“Why’d you rush me out of the house? Am I being watched?”

She let out a long breath. “I hope not. I don’t, as of this moment, see any way for someone to connect you to Bill, but it’s better right now to play it safe. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst kind of thing. And I don’t want to freak you out even further, but we need to consider that someone is very possibly looking for your father. They might be watching you, thinking maybe he’ll contact you. In person. Which would actually save us all a lot of trouble, but might expose you to risk at the same time.”

“Consider me freaked. Had Walton already testified, or were you keeping an eye on him until such time as he did?”