And then Briggs seemed to slowly deflate. He stared down at his salad. “My wife,” he began, and then grimaced, picked up his glass of iced tea, drank, put it back down. “Emma was sick,” he said. “Breast cancer. It got into her bones. Ate her up, along with all our savings. She was a nurse, but she had to quit when she got sick, and we had other bills . . .” He shifted in his seat, still looking down at his salad. “By the time . . . that night, when Fritz Davenport disappeared . . . she was at home in bed, down to about ninety pounds. I couldn’t stand to see her like that. We had talked about hospice, but I was stubborn at first about . . . letting strangers in to help. I didn’t want her in a hospital. She didn’t want to be in a hospital. I thought having her home would be better.” He looked up at me then, a world of anguish and shame in his eyes that made me sit back. “When I got the call to go out to Blackburne, I was glad to get out of the house. Emma’s sister was over, so she could watch her. I just—needed a break.” He laughed then, a hard, bleak sound. Stop, I wanted to say, but I sat there unable to speak, drawn along in Briggs’s story. He glanced out the window, his eyes restless. Then with a force of will, he turned his gaze on me and held it there. “Doing my job was something I could control, something I could direct. So I focused on Fritz and argued with Ricky Townsend and followed leads and just—turned my life over to it, almost. Because I was scared to sit at home and watch my wife die.”
He stopped. Dimly I could hear forks clink on plates in the diner, other customers enjoying their lunches and having their own conversations. Briggs paused for so long that I said, “How does that . . . I mean, I’m so sorry, but . . . what does that have to do with—”
Briggs took a deep breath. “Frank Davenport came to me after the FBI quit. Met me at the station. Said he wanted to thank me for everything I’d done to help find his son. I told him that wasn’t necessary and that we were still looking. He could tell I had my suspicions about him. But he just thanked me again and left.” Briggs took another breath. “The next morning, two nurses from a hospice agency were on my doorstep. They said they’d been hired to help take care of my wife. I told them there must be a mistake, but they said no, it was an anonymous gesture, everything was paid for privately, wouldn’t even be on my insurance. I almost said no, but they insisted. They had already been paid, they said, so it would be a waste. While I stood there trying to figure out what to do, Emma called out from the bedroom. She was frightened. I . . . The hospice folks came in with me, and I let them. Emma was—she was in a diaper at that point, couldn’t get to the bathroom, and she needed it changed. The hospice people started cleaning her and talking to her and Emma just—she just looked at them so gratefully, and then at me.
“Then the phone rang. It was the bank calling, saying they had approved the refinance on our mortgage. I’d called about that three months earlier and no dice, and now someone was calling and said no problem, it’s all taken care of. Meanwhile the hospice people are in my bedroom, cleaning up Emma and talking to her and . . . It was like a dream, like a lottery or a fairy godmother. I knew what it was, who it was who had done it all, but I stood there in my kitchen holding the phone and listening to the banker on the other end talk about papers to sign, and I just—I gave in. I let it happen and just . . . pretended it wasn’t happening.”
He stopped and closed his eyes, a man in need of benediction, and I stared at him for a long moment. “But,” I said, “did you ever—I mean, it was Davenport? You’re sure?”
Briggs opened his eyes, which looked dull, clouded over. “A week later, I called someone at NorthPoint, following up a lead about some new contracts they had, couple of people who got fired a few months earlier. Thought there might be a kidnapping angle.” Startled, I remembered what Wat had told me about the two NorthPoint employees selling secrets to the Chinese. Briggs continued, not noticing my reaction. “The assistant I’d spoken with had been very helpful up until then, but that day she said she’d have to check with Mr. Davenport before getting back to me. An hour later, the bank called me. There might be problems with the refinance after all, they said. I argued with them, and then hung up and went home for lunch to see Emma like I usually did, intending to head over to the bank right afterward. When I got home, the hospice worker who was there was all upset and wringing her hands because her boss had called and said that they might have to terminate services immediately due to lack of funding.” Briggs took another drink from his iced tea. “So I called Davenport’s assistant back and told her never mind. Next day, everything with hospice and the bank was fine again. Emma lived another couple of weeks, comfortably. Died with a smile on her face while I lay next to her in the bed, holding her.” Briggs set his glass down deliberately and gave me a wasted, haunted look.
“You lied to me,” I said, thinking it and uttering it aloud at the same moment.
“I told you to look at Fritz’s family.”
“You told me this wasn’t personal.”
Briggs considered this. “True. Score one for you. Now tell me what you learned about Davenport.”
I stared at him. “This is—what? Revenge?” He said nothing. A new thought struck me. “How does Sheriff Townsend know about this?”
Briggs actually smirked. “You think Davenport didn’t do the same with him?”
I sat in the booth, trying to take all this in. Davenport had paid off two officers, probably more besides, to keep them from investigating his son’s disappearance. Or was it to keep them from investigating NorthPoint? Everything kept coming back to that. It was like a locked door in my own house that I couldn’t open, couldn’t find the key to.
Briggs was saying something, pulling me out of my thoughts. “What?” I said.
“You ever read Moby-Dick?”
“What? Yes, I’ve read it. A long time ago, in college. Why?”
“Melville wrote that Ahab chose the white whale as his enemy and swore vengeance on it. Everything evil, everything wrong in the universe, Ahab puts on that whale, and he seeks it out to destroy it.” Briggs took another sip from his glass of tea. He seemed calmer now, focused, as if telling his story had strengthened him somehow.
“You’re telling me Davenport is your white whale?”
Briggs leaned forward. “Everything I understood about honor I compromised because of what he offered me. I know you can understand that—they teach you about honor up at that school. I’ve dealt with my own faults and lived with them for ten years, and I will take whatever punishment comes to me. But he did something wrong and needs to take responsibility for it. Not for bribing me—that’s my fault for accepting it. He kept people from finding his son. How can that be justified?”
I sat back in my seat, staring at him. “You know Ahab was insane, right? Melville wrote that, too.”
Briggs picked up his fork and speared a slice of hard-boiled egg. “Everybody searches for something, Matthias,” he said. “You telling me Fritz isn’t your white whale?”
He chewed his food, watching me as I sat across from him at a loss for words. “So,” he said, swallowing, “what did you find out about Davenport?”
WE SPENT ANOTHER TWO hours talking in the diner. It’s probably more accurate to say that Briggs interrogated me and I answered his questions. He wasn’t satisfied with what Wat Davenport had told me about the two NorthPoint employees selling secrets to Chinese clients. Frank Davenport might not have had the two investigated, he argued—he may have lied to his brother. Or he may have sat on whatever information he’d learned from private detectives. “You need to go back to Wat Davenport, see what else he knows,” Briggs said.
“I’m not doing anything until I solve my problems here,” I said, a bit heatedly. “We need to find out who tried to frame me at Blackburne.”
Briggs grunted and pulled a small worn notepad from his hip pocket. “So we make a list,” he said.
It was a short list. Ren Middleton was at the top, then Travis Simmons, followed by his son, Paul, and then the hypothetical “Paul’s friends/customers.”