Thomas took a sip of single-malt. “Why would I shoot you when I’ve admitted to needing you?”
“About that.” Trapper crossed his arms and his ankles. “That’s why I’m here. Time to renegotiate, Tom. The power has shifted.”
“How can that be, when you were robbed of that flash drive?”
“I was robbed of a flash drive. The one taken out of the wall had porn on it.”
Well, that explained why Jenks hadn’t mentioned finding the buried treasure. The deputy had been made a fool of. More galling, Thomas had fallen for Trapper’s bluff as well. “Your inflection indicates that there’s another flash drive.”
“Sure is,” Trapper said. “And its contents are even juicier than the nasty movies.”
“What’s on it?”
“For starters, a video of Berkley Johnson, telling all. The time burn-in is dated two days before he was killed.”
“If I’m not mistaken, the authorities dismissed his allegations as sour grapes.”
“But his soul-searing video, plus this audio recording…” Trapper gave Kerra a silent signal. She took a cell phone from her handbag and went through the appropriate steps to engage it. Thomas’s voice came through the speaker.
Thomas listened to half a minute of the recording and then quietly asked Kerra to turn it off. “You would never use that,” he said. “It would violate your integrity as a journalist. You had agreed that we were off the record.”
“I don’t intend to publish or broadcast it,” she said coolly. “Besides, it was a unique circumstance. I was in fear of my life.”
“Are you recording this conversation?”
“No.”
“I’m to believe that?”
“Same as we’re to believe that you didn’t have Jenks put a tracking device on Kerra’s car,” Trapper said.
Wilcox turned back to him. “I didn’t.”
“See? Some things we just gotta take each other’s word for. Now answer Kerra’s question.”
“About knowing if she was the girl in the picture?” He looked her straight in the eye. “Of course I knew. Within a few weeks of the bombing, I knew your name and that you’d been shuttled off to Virginia by an aunt and uncle.”
Her lips parted.
“How can you be surprised?” he asked. “I had to know everything about every single survivor, where they were inside the building when the bombs were detonated, who or what they might have seen.”
“Even a child of five years old?”
“I don’t take chances. Since your identity had been so scrupulously protected, it took some ingenuity and money, but a wily individual on my payroll, the likes of Mr. Trapper here, identified and located you.
“I kept track. Years passed. You grew up, a normal little girl in every respect. Neither you nor your relatives ever referenced the bombing or drew the connection between it and yourself, not even as you pursued your profession when that level of notoriety would have been a boon to it. I believed I had nothing to fear from you. Until you moved to Dallas.”
“The wily likes of me would have sat up and taken notice,” Trapper said.
“Shortly after your arrival,” Thomas said, still speaking to Kerra, “you began requesting to do an interview with me.”
“Panicksville.”
Again Thomas ignored Trapper. “I agreed to the interview to test you, Kerra, to see if, while profiling me, you had somehow linked me to the Pegasus.”
Trapper said, “You told us you did the interview to make those who killed your daughter nervous.”
“That’s true, in part. Definitely. But I had to know if Kerra posed a threat.” Going back to her, he said, “You didn’t touch on anything remotely connected to the bombing or the complex I developed on the hotel’s former spot. Again, I relaxed.”