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Searle Lecroix stood at the back of the room, hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans, staring at the TV from under the brim of his black Stetson. “That man’s just one more person who let her down. But at least he seems to know it.”
His smoky drawl sounded hoarse. His face was drained. Tasia’s baby boy, her Mister Blue Eyes with the silver tongue, looked like he’d had the stuffing pounded out of him.
Tang walked over. “I didn’t know you were still here.”
“I couldn’t leave while Tasia’s out there,” he said. “Leave her lying on the field with people picking her over—I couldn’t. She deserves to have somebody nearby who cares.” His timbre dropped. “What happened to her?”
“We don’t know yet,” Tang said. She motioned Jo over. “This is Dr. Beckett.”
Tang explained what Jo did, and asked Lecroix to let Jo interview him.
“You want to talk about Tasia from a psychological perspective? Now?”
Jo shook her head. “Tomorrow or the day after.”
He agreed, and gave her his cell phone number. “You going to find out who let this happen?”
“Maybe you can help us figure that out.”
He nodded. “They’re taking her to the morgue. I need to go.” He touched a finger to the brim of his hat. “Lieutenant. Doctor.”
They watched him walk down the hall, shoulders slumped. After a moment, Jo said, “I was going to tell you Possibility Number Three.”
“Please.”
“Tasia planned to shoot somebody besides herself. But an unknown person in that swarm of fans got hold of the trigger and shot her first.”
“Now you believe somebody was out to get her?”
“Now you don’t?” Jo said.
“I don’t know. I mean, you heard her. ‘Liar’s words all end in pain.’”
9 (#ulink_7788e037-fa8b-56db-a880-a8f413d72181)
TANG DROPPED JO AT HER HOUSE ON RUSSIAN HILL. SHE HANDED over a thick manila envelope.
“The concert video, photos of the scene, witness statements from the stuntman and stage crew. And Tasia’s ‘in the event of my assassination’ recording.”
Jo paused. “Using her ex-husband’s gun is a huge statement.”
“No kidding, Sigmund.” Tang pointed at the envelope. “Figure out what she was saying.”
The car grumbled away.
The night air was cool. The cable car tracks hummed with the sound of gears and cables ringing beneath the road. Jo climbed her front steps.
Her small house sat across from a park, surrounded by grander, brighter homes painted building-block colors. Hers was a fine San Francisco Victorian with iron-red gables. The front yard was a spot of grass the size of a paperback book, bordered by gardenias and white lilacs. Inside, her Doc Martens sounded heavy on the hardwood floor. Her keys echoed when she dropped them on the hallway table.
Jo never would have chosen the house for herself. She would have struggled to afford it. But her husband had inherited the home from his grandparents. He and Jo had redone the place. Knocked out walls, sanded the floors, installed skylights.
When Daniel died, his absence from the house had been excruciating. Early on, Jo had moments when she was overcome with an urge to shatter the windows and shout, Come back to me. Daniel’s parents would have loved for her to sell it to them. But she’d made it her home, and now couldn’t bear the thought of giving it up.
She went to the kitchen and fixed coffee. The magnolia in the backyard was laden with flowers. Under the moon they shone like white fists. Music from a neighbor’s house floated to her, a Latin tune with sinuous horns. She felt jacked up, like she’d spent the evening strapped to a rocket sled.
She heard a sharp knock on the front door.
She answered it to find Gabe Quintana standing on the porch, hands in the pockets of his jeans. One look at her and his eyes turned wary.
“Maybe I should have called first, ” he said.
“The concert ended with the star and a stunt pilot dead, fans trampled, and me signing up for a case from one of the more exotic rings of hell.”
“Want me to come back another time?”
His black hair was close-cropped. His eyes had a low-burning glow. Right, Jo thought. He didn’t believe for a second that she’d kick him out.
“Some day I’ll actually say yes. Just to keep your self-confidence under control,” she said.
His smile was offhanded. “No, you won’t.”
Laugh lines etched his bronze skin. He leaned against the door frame, his gaze rakish.
Jo grabbed him by the collar of his Bay to Breakers T-shirt and yanked him through the doorway. She kicked the door closed and thrust him against the wall.
“Watch it. I can push your buttons and bring you to your knees”—she snapped her fingers—“like that.”
“Promise?”
She held him to the wall. “I haven’t seen you for twenty-four hours, and it’s your fault that twenty-four hours feels like a long time.”
He wrapped his arms around her waist. “My buttons. Yeah, I’m the one whose control panel is blowing up here.”
He kissed her.
Sometimes he seemed as still as a pool of water. Sometimes he seemed reserved to the point of invisibility. She knew that the surface reflected little of the turbulence beneath, that it hid his intensity and resolve. He was an illusionist, a master of emotional sleight of hand.
His cool served him perfectly as a PJ, a search and rescue expert for the Air National Guard. He came off as affable and reassuring. But sometimes, when he was challenged or threatened, his attitude changed, and Jo glimpsed the warrior he had been.
And was about to be again.
One day gone, eighty-seven left. Gabe had been called up to active duty. At the end of the summer, he and others from the 129th Rescue Wing had orders for a four-month deployment to Djibouti, to provide combat search and rescue support for the U.S. military’s Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa. He’d be back at the end of January. After that he’d remain on active duty for another eight months, but thought it possible he would serve much of that time at the Wing’s headquarters, Moffett Field in Mountain View.
But as always when reservists were called up, Gabe’s life was getting blown to the wind. He wasn’t just a pararescueman; thanks to the G.I. Bill, he was also a graduate student at the University of San Francisco. Deployment was going to tear up his academic schedule. But his first priority was his ten-year-old daughter, Sophie. He was a single dad. His ex-girlfriend lived in the city but on the fringes of competence, and saw Sophie only twice a month. Gabe had gone to painful time and expense to modify his custody arrangement so that Sophie would live in San Francisco with his sister and her husband while he was deployed. Sophie wasn’t happy that he was going. But she knew it was his job. She’d been through it before.
Jo hadn’t. But, holding him, she set that aside. She tried to stop the ticking in her head.
He brushed her curls from her face. “You okay?”
“Once I saw Tina, I was great.”
His face looked sober. “It was only a close call. But I know that’s too close.”
She suppressed thoughts about any dangers involved in his deploying to the Horn of Africa. And she knew she was far more head over heels for this man than she could ever have imagined.
“What part of hell does your new case come from?” he said.
“I’m going to perform a psychological autopsy on Tasia McFarland. It seems I’m going to ride the tiger.”
His eyes widened. “Excited?”
She had to think about it a moment. “Yes.”
“Ready for the predators to come at you out of the tall grass?”
“Undoubtedly not.”
“You really are a thrill seeker, aren’t you?”
Sharp guy, Gabe Quintana. She put her hands on his shoulders. “I am. How long can you stay?”
He smiled and pulled her against him. And his cell phone rang.
Jo leaned back. He answered the call.
“Dave Rabin, what’s up?” he said, and within five seconds she knew that thrill seeking of a radically different kind was on his agenda.
“Sixty minutes. I’ll be there.” He flipped his phone off. “Merchant tanker five hundred miles off the coast, reports a fire in the engine room. They’re adrift and down at the stern. Multiple casualties.”
Jo reluctantly let him loose. A buzz seemed to radiate from him. He put a hand on her hip and kissed her again.
“Bring ‘em back,” she said. “Be safe.”
He ran down the steps toward his truck. She hung in the doorway and watched him go. She didn’t want to close the door, to turn back to Tasia McFarland and the unblinking certainties of death. She watched him go until he was out of sight.
10 (#ulink_fef054a3-b105-5320-bda3-6d26a66403d8)
NOEL MICHAEL PETTY THUDDED UP THE HOTEL STAIRS, SWEATY AND winded, cradling the artifact inside the fatigue jacket. The hallway was dank but empty. Petty rushed inside the hotel room, slammed the door, and leaned back against it, breathless. Nobody had followed. Nobody had even noticed. Not at the ballpark or anyplace along the route to the Tenderloin.
That’s because, when you hover like an angel, you become invisible.
Quick, latch the chain. Clear a space on the table. Shove aside the scissors and the news cuttings. Let the tabloid articles and glossy magazine photos flutter to the floor. Take a breath.
Carefully, ceremoniously, Petty pulled open the fatigue jacket and removed the artifact. It was a piece of turf from the baseball field, a lump of grass and earth about the diameter of a compact disc. Petty set it on the table and ran a hand across it, stroking the grass like a baby’s soft hair.
Victory is mine.
Stepping back, Petty pulled off the green watch cap and turned on the television. Tonight’s events were historic. It was vital not to miss a moment, not one beautiful second.
There—news. Images sparkled on the screen, familiar and thrilling. The smoke so black, the blood so messy, Tasia’s hair so thick, fanning around her head in a gold comet’s tail. People screaming, fleeing from her body. Tasia had terrified the crowd, dying like that. What a cow.
Bursting through the crowd came Searle Lecroix. Petty grimaced.
Too late, Searle. She’s gone. She can no longer suck the love from a man’s bones. We’re free.
Free. Petty glanced at the artifact. It was a memento of deliverance, like a chunk of the Berlin Wall.
Lecroix shoved his way past the ravenous onlookers on the field, gawky strangers who wanted a piece of Tasia McFarland, who wanted a chance to say, I was there. But they were only about celebrity and sentiment. They would never understand. Tasia’s death was not an accident. It was a triumph.
On-screen, Lecroix dropped to his knees beside Tasia’s body. Petty cringed.
“Searle, you fool.”
The death of a cow should not affect a man so. It was a painful sight. It diminished the victory.
If you believed the gossip, Tasia had lured Searle Lecroix into her bed. But he couldn’t have known her. He couldn’t have given himself to her and received back in turn. Not from an unhinged, half-lunatic fame-whore who had fucked the president to get where she was.
Lecroix gripped Tasia’s hand. He begged, “Help her.”
Smarting, Petty turned away. But Tasia’s face followed. She stared down from the walls of the hotel room. Hundreds of photos, her beautiful face, her filthy gaze, her dark inner light, staring, knowing.
Petty stared back. “But you didn’t know what was coming. You refused to listen.”
Tasia had snubbed NMP. Then ignored NMP. She’d had the gall to rebuke and disregard NMP.
A smile squeezed Petty’s lips, full of pain.
Stop that. You are not a fat, weak-kneed fan. You are a righteous guardian and protector of the truth and the Good Ones. Petty scratched an armpit.
The hotel room smelled stale and fuggy, like a cheap costume for a stage play. But that’s what this Tenderloin dive was—a disguise. Nobody would look here for a hovering angel.
The news switched to a White House press conference. Robert McFarland was praising Tasia. He was waxing melodic about her talent.
The thrill of victory subsided. Petty sloughed off the fatigue jacket and sat heavily on the bed. Generosity of spirit…was McFarland joking? The president of the United States was beatifying Saint Tasia, the Holy Cow.
Slut, thief, liar.
A heart as big as the sky. Letting out a moan, Petty thundered to the table, grabbed the artifact, and threw it at the television.
This was insane. It was…a spell. The vixen had bewitched even the leader of the free world.
All Petty’s work had been in vain. The king rat of politicians, a man of the smoothest tongue, a hypnotist, was spreading the lie. People would buy it. Heart as big as the sky would become conventional wisdom. It would twist people’s minds, turn them into Tasia-lovers. It would burrow under the skin of people who needed protection. Tasia, thief of hearts, would steal yet again, just as she’d stolen from NMP, but this time from beyond the grave.
Her death hadn’t ended the battle. It had only intensified it.
Petty heard a voice, a whisper, a promise. Don’t tell. You’re my eternal love. Shh.
Deep breath. It was time to slough off Noel Michael Petty. Time to put on the camouflage that kept the Protector safe and anonymous. It worked on the Net, where nobody knows you’re a dog. Now, offline, Petty needed to assume the guise. Full-time, with no slipups.
