Page 64 of Being Lost

He shakes his head. “This shit that was found is over twenty years old?”

I nod.

“You really think this is Phil’s insurance I heard him talking about?”

Resting my elbows on the table, I stare at him. “Truthfully, I think everyone is clutching at straws. It all seems so farfetched. Can you remember anything that might shed light on this at all?”

But Dan doesn’t get the chance to answer. Before he can even open his mouth, two women come back into the kitchen. One, with reddened cheeks who makes me blush. I find I can’t quite look Eva in the eye, knowing exactly why her lips look swollen. The second goes straight to the oven, clearly to check if her meal is cooked. I wave my hand and Dan picks up my signal.

We move the conversation outside.

When we’re sat on a picnic bench shaded by a tree, Dan stares out at the magnificent view, before he says, “I’m wracking my brains trying to think of anything that would help. I can’t.”

“What were you able to tell the feds, Dan?”

“I knew where the drugs entered the country, how they got to Colorado.” He pauses, and his eyes close. “Certainly nothing about a tunnel. I told them about his modified trucks, and which crossing points they used, and the routes he would take across the country. Enough so he wasn’t able to smuggle them in that way anymore. The main thing was, I could finger him as the man behind it.”

“Where is Alder now?” I muse. “He’s gone underground, otherwise the feds would already have run him down.”

“Agent Caruso told me they’d confiscated his assets. He’s lost his house, and the damage I’ve done to his business, well, he’ll have to be building that back up from scratch.”

I do some thinking myself. “When I saw him at the funeral, he didn’t ask me anything.”

“Perhaps,” Dan muses, “he didn’t think he’d needed to at the time.”

“But Phil was already dead,” I remind him.

“At that point, the feds hadn’t made their move, though. Alder was making sure I was dead. That was the reason he turned up.”

Something isn’t right. Something that no one has mentioned before. I think we were just stunned to find out it was me Alder was searching for and not my son. “If he thinks you’re dead, how does he think the feds got the information to close him down?”

Dan looks like a light bulb’s just gone off in his head. “What if Phil’s insurance policy was something else? What if Alder thinks Phil left details of his operation with you, to be used at the time of his untimely death?”

I just stare at him, realising we’ve all been looking at this upside down. If Alder truly believes my son is dead, then who spoke to the feds? “But why me? I’m the last person who Phil would have shared anything with. Anything given to me, I’d just hand to the cops.”

“Exactly.” Dan grins widely. “Phil could have left a letter or something with his lawyer. Phil dies, the letter comes to you, you hand it over and the feds close in. Then you pack up and run.” His face falls. “If you hadn’t have moved with me, then maybe Alder wouldn’t have become suspicious.”

I cover his hand with mine. “Or it’s the best thing I could have done. If those are Alder’s suspicions, then if I’d stayed, he could have taken me at any time.” I wait for that to sink in. “Jesus, Dan. You’re right. It all makes sense. Alder wants revenge—”

“Or he wants to find out how much damage was done. If I were Alder, I’d want to know exactly what the feds were told. What if he’s got more routes that Phil knew about but not me? He’d have to know whether they were safe to use, or whether they were being staked out to catch him red-fuckin’-handed.”

I breathe in deeply. That’s the only thing that makes sense. I regard my son almost with fresh eyes. It’s been years, if ever, since I’ve sat and brainstormed ideas with him. Maybe he’s not so academic as Beth, but he’s far from stupid.

“Hey. I’ve been looking everywhere for you.” Lost comes over and joins us. When he sits on the bench alongside me, Dan raises an eyebrow and grins.

I ignore him, turning instead to Lost. “We’ve come up with an idea of why Alder is so desperate to find me.”

Dan takes over. “Phil told Alder he had insurance. What you found on the floppy discs may or may not have been part of it, but all Alder knows is that after Phil was killed, the feds swooped in and destroyed his drug running organisation.” Lost nods his head. “By then, I was already dead.” Dan proceeds to fill him in on the thoughts we’ve just been having.

When he’s finished, Lost’s eyes have gone wide as he looks at each of us in turn, digesting what we’ve told him. After a moment, he raises his chin. “Makes more sense than anything else we’ve come up with.” He taps on the picnic bench. Once, twice, then he seems to come to a decision. “I’ll take this back to Token. If you’re right, those floppies don’t hold anything that’s going to move this forward. Alder’s chasing fictional information that he thinks resides in your head.” He rests his hand against my cheek, his eyes full of compassion.

There’s no easy escape from Alder. If there’s no tunnel to find, Lost loses a bargaining chip. I hadn’t really hoped that anything would come from twenty-year-old information.

“We’ll sort it, Patsy. Somehow we’ll draw Alder out.”

“How?”

Instead of answering my question, a shuttered look comes over Lost’s face.

---