The Short Drop by Matthew FitzSimmons Read Free Book Online Page B

a bottle of Xanax and a straitjacket would do the trick. Rilling was overworked, tightly wound, and committed to the belief that he was deeply, tragically underappreciated.
    “Michael, this is Gibson Vaughn,” George said. “He’s going to consult on the Lombard case. Gibson, this is Michael Rilling, our IT director.”
    Rilling shook Vaughn’s hand limply and shot him a canine territorial look. Gibson either missed it or played it off.
    “I’m going to have Jenn bring you up to speed,” Abe told Vaughn. “Fill in some of the blanks. Sometimes it’s helpful to retrace familiar terrain. You’ll find all of it covered in the file.”
    Jenn pushed a thick binder across the conference table to Vaughn. “Suzanne Lombard” was typed neatly along the binding and on its cover; inside, it contained an overview of Suzanne Lombard’s disappearance and the subsequent investigation. A lot of it consisted of internal FBI documents, photographs, and memorandum, all impressively thorough. Abe might have fallen out with Benjamin Lombard, but he carried some serious weight of his own.
    Vaughn regarded it warily and rubbed hard at a spot behind his ear. Every mention of Suzanne Lombard seemed to cause him to recoil and withdraw a little further inside himself. What was it? Guilt? Remorse? Fear? Was it fear? He caught her looking at him and smiled like someone trying to be friendly to a dentist prepping him for a root canal.
    An overhead projector flared to life, and a screen descended from a wall-mounted casing. A photograph of Suzanne filled the screen. There had been no shortage of photos to choose from. The Lombards were a remarkably handsome family, photographs with the inner circle de rigueur at every get-together. The one up on the screen was cropped from one of the annual Christmas parties—Suzanne sitting on the floor at the grown-ups’ feet, smiling happily at the camera. Gibson Vaughn’s disembodied arm hung in the air beside Suzanne. Jenn had found a few without Vaughn—there weren’t many—but she’d chosen this one to gauge his reaction.
    She regretted it now. The man looked seasick.
    “Jenn, you have the floor,” Abe said.
    She started to stand, thought better of it, and ran her tongue across her teeth. “How much do you know about Suzanne Lombard’s disappearance?”
    “Apart from what they’ve been showing on the news for ten years?” Vaughn said. “Not a lot.”
    “Were you ever questioned?” Hendricks interrupted. “After the abduction. We couldn’t find a record of it.”
    “No,” Vaughn replied. “I was in jail at the time.”
    “Dan makes a good point,” Jenn said. “If anything we know about Suzanne sounds wrong to you, inaccurate, speak up. You had a special relationship with her.”
    Vaughn frowned. “Sure, but remember, I hadn’t seen her since my father died.”
    “Understood,” Abe said. “But you never know.”
    Jenn cleared her throat. “If no one objects, I thought we’d start at the beginning.” She paused to see if anyone did. “Okay, so as you all know, this July is the tenth anniversary of the disappearance. It was on the morning of Tuesday, July 22, that Suzanne Lombard, the daughter of Senator Benjamin Lombard of Virginia, ran away from home. Ran away from what, according to all observers, was a perfect and happy family. Does that jibe with your recollection?”
    “And then some.”
    “In the early stages of the investigation, the police and FBI worked from the theory that Suzanne had been snatched off the road around the family beach house outside the hamlet of Pamsrest, Virginia. Grace Lombard and her daughter often spent the entire summer there while the senator commuted back and forth between Pamsrest and DC.”
    Pamsrest was a small community of the “everybody knows everybody” variety. Mom-and-pop stores, two ice cream parlors, a boardwalk, and an award-winning no-frills barbeque pit. A throwback to a simpler age that people got misty about but could