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“Ghostwriter?”
“Man named Ace Chennault.”
Jo took out a notebook and wrote it down. “Know how I can reach him?”
“He’s around. He’s a music journalist, was on the road with her for the last few months, gathering material.” She smiled briefly, a flash of teeth. “There’s family, and then there’s entourage.”
“When was the last time you spoke to your sister?”
“Yesterday morning. She called to make sure I’d gotten the tickets she sent.”
Jo stopped writing. “I’m sorry, I should have known you were at the concert.”
“Yeah.”
The clipped syllable sounded like pain itself.
“How did she sound?” Jo said.
“Soaring, but agitated. Sort of…” She tilted her hand side to side. Comme ci, comme ça. “Disconcerted. Fizzing like peroxide.”
“How long had she sounded that way?”
“A few weeks. But she could swing from mania to depression within days.”
Rapid cycling indicated a deteriorating psychological condition. It meant the bipolar disorder wasn’t under control. Rapid cycling could result from the disorder’s progression over many years, or from poor medicating, self-medicating, or a patient going off her meds.
“Did she ever have mixed episodes?” Jo said.
Vienna frowned. “Not as far as I know.”
“What was she like when she was hypomanic?”
“Like a Saturn rocket. Full throttle, roaring straight for the sky. Incredibly creative. She’d write songs and record all night. Funny and outgoing.”
“And when she experienced full-blown mania?” Jo said.
“Challenger. Blast off, screaming for outer space, ka-blooey.”
“Did she engage in dangerous behavior?”
“She’d hit the sack with every man in arm’s reach. Snort cocaine, even out the coke with vodka-and-OxyContin smoothies, cool off by driving the Pacific Coast Highway, headlights off, hundred miles an hour. Surely you’ve seen her mug shot online,” she said. “I posted her bail.”
She stared at the whitecaps on the bay. “Listen, I’m venting here. But the last few years, Tasia worked at managing her life. She quit the drugs and the booze binges. Stopped being promiscuous. She didn’t crash into the dark, dark holes like in the old days. She didn’t have weeklong sleepless jags where she rewrote the Ring Cycle as an epic about stock car racing. She was stable.”
“Did you see her often?”
“No. She has a house near Twin Peaks, but she’s been touring.”
“Did she talk to you recently about ending her life?” Jo said.
“No.”
“Did she seem to be making any preparations—had she given away any of her possessions? Made a will?”
“Wrote a will ten years ago. Otherwise, no.”
“Did she have any enemies?”
Vienna turned her head slowly, and gave Jo the remorseless grizzly bear gaze. “The police played her ‘I’m going to be assassinated’ recording for me. It was…shocking. But I have seen no evidence that anybody killed her. If you have any, tell me. I mean now, Doctor.” The gaze didn’t relent. “I want the truth.”
Jo knew that Vienna didn’t simply want the truth; she needed it. Without it she would live like a wounded animal, bleeding and pain-stricken, burdened with doubts and guilt her entire life.
Jo hoped she could help provide her with it. That’s why she did the job.
“I don’t yet know what happened, but I’m trying my best to find out. Could anybody have wished your sister harm?”
Vienna fought her emotions. “Real harm, not conspiracy theory bullshit? People are saying she took a bullet meant for Searle Lecroix, or that the stuntman shot her—he has a Muslim name, Shirazi, so it’s a jihadist plot to destroy country music. Or she was given hallucinogenic drugs that made her shoot herself.”
That, Jo thought, was actually an interesting possibility.
“She made enemies right and left. She was a diva. Ninety percent were showbiz rivals or family members she antagonized. But did people hate her enough to what, secretly load bullets in a gun she thought was unloaded? How preposterous is that? How many people had access to that gun? Not many.”
Vienna looked at the windsurfers on the bay, their sails iridescent in the salt spray and sunshine. “The medical examiner’s expediting the autopsy. They’ll be releasing her body, and I have to plan the memorial service. I need to bury my sister. You understand that, Dr. Beckett?”
“Perfectly.”
She looked at Jo. “Did somebody kill her? I have no idea.”
13 (#ulink_bac48be9-dcc2-566e-a5d4-3547a565b921)
These are the times that try men’s souls.
—Thomas Paine
THE CURSOR BLINKED ON THE SCREEN. HIS FINGERTIPS TINGLED. HE typed the words that transformed him.
Call me Paine.
His thoughts pulsed. When he spoke aloud, people found him clumsy. An awkward white guy, soft around the middle—human mayonnaise. But when he sat before the glowing computer screen and reached into the minds beyond it, he became fluent and convincing. Power surged through his fingers.
The jackal in the Oval Office is playing games with us. Legion is plying us with lies. He thinks we can’t see his ass hanging out.
Beyond the rooftops, downtown San Francisco gleamed in the morning sun. The Transamerica pyramid was a lustrous white edifice, the waters of the bay deceptively smooth. The postcard view disguised the degenerate reality. Whores, addicts, gays. And everywhere, coming out of drainpipes and cracks in the sidewalk, illegals. The ROW—the Rest of the World—a seething mass infecting the nation with their leprosy and laziness.
The city was a magnificent arena. What exquisite irony that the end game should play out here.
Watch the video footage from last night’s concert. Not the film shot by the official camera crew—that footage has already been altered to depict the story the gubmint wants sheeple to believe. Watch videos shot by concertgoers. Raw footage of Tasia’s death. It reveals the shocking truth.
He wiped his palms on his jeans. He was logged on through an anonymizer, a tool that stripped out identifying information about his computer and made his activities on the Net untraceable. Supposedly.
The discussion boards at Tree of Liberty were heaving. Thousands of comments. Battle cries. Pledges to fight to the death. The passion was unbelievable. His people, the online rant-’n’-ravers, loved Paine. They needed him. They bought him. The stock he owned in ammunition manufacturers was going to shoot through the roof. And some commenters were more than mere armchair insurgents. Tom Paine had real volunteers out there.
But these were nerve-racking days. Tasia was gone, and time was desperately short. To save himself from a full-blown attack, he had to act now. Fear touched the back of his neck with a dry heat.
The truth, despite what the more excitable members of our community believe, is that the shooter did not execute Tasia from the stunt helicopter.
I know what some of you think—Look at the stuntmen’s names. Shirazi. Andreyev. And yes, Shirazi is a Muslim name. Andreyev is Russian. These men come from enemy stock, but the facts are indisputable: Neither shot Tasia. The angle of fire is wrong.
In the hall beyond the door, people passed by, laughing and chatting. Paine pulled his hands from the keyboard. His heart was racing.
He was a jack of many trades, but he was a master of persuasion—written, emotional, and political. He hated the word prankster. Intimidator suited him better. He was the rock in the gears, the sugar in the gas tank. He stopped things. Or kicked them off. Politicians talked; Paine turned propaganda into deeds.
He picked up a matchbook and flipped it between his fingers. He needed to stoke the fire.
Analyze the videos. They’re blurred and shaky, but look. Her murderer fired a single shot from a high-powered rifle from the stage rigging in centerfield.
The gubmint will use Tasia’s murder as an excuse to confiscate our firearms. Expect the second amendment to be suspended within the week. National Guard checkpoints will be erected after that. We’ll be stopped, arrested, and interned. Be ready, people.
Yeah, that was good. He was getting warmed up now. His blood heated his hands.
The police investigation into Tasia’s death is puppet theater. The SFPD will never produce the bullet that ended Tasia’s life. Doing so would prove, incontrovertibly, that she was killed by a round fired from a military-issue sniper rifle, not a Colt .45.
And now the authorities have thrown another curve ball. They can’t silence the outcry over Tasia’s assassination, so they’ve decided to smother us with psychobabble. They’ve hired a psychiatrist to analyze Tasia’s death.
This is not a joke.
Tasia’s murder had been bold, incredibly so. She was a fire, and she’d been put out. But much worse was coming, straight at him, unless he took action immediately. Government minions—Legion’s legions—would descend on him like demons. Robert McFarland could cry for the TV cameras, but his people certainly weren’t. They were thinking Finish the job. They would come for Tom Paine.
Authority always did. He had to strike first.
We’ll get “insights” into Tasia’s “tortured” mind. This psychiatrist will give us a sad, I’m-so-sorry face, and blame Tasia’s mother and American society for her “tragic suicide.” You know she will—she’s from San Francisco. She’s a gubmint lackey, a useful idiot.
This is how tyrants plant their boot on our faces. Not always with a midnight knock on the door, but through the comforting lies of a quack.
A chill curled down his arms. He would put out the call. Keyes, the ex-merc who now drove for Blue Eagle Security, would answer, and that atavistic white power groupie he worked with, Ivory.
Tasia warned us. She came to the concert armed with the jackal’s gun. She raised it high. She could not have shouted a louder message: True Americans will not go quietly.
To quote Thomas Paine: Lead, follow, or get out of the way.
Who’s with me?
Yes, Keyes and Ivory would be dying to ride to the rescue. The question was how many people could they take with them when they rode off the cliff?
AFTER JO SAID good-bye to Vienna Hicks, she walked back to her truck along crowded streets. Businessmen’s ties writhed like snakes in the wind. Above skyscrapers, clouds fled across the blue sky. When she turned on her phone it beeped with multiple messages from Tang.
But the message she wanted, one from Gabe saying he was safe on dry land, wasn’t there. Her breath snagged. Her emotions caught on a bramble, fear glinting in a corner of her mind.
She shook loose from the feeling. He would call. She wouldn’t. She would wait, because that was the unspoken rule. Instead she called Tang, who sounded like she’d been chewing on sandpaper.
“Give me joy, Beckett. I need progress.”
“Tasia’s sister thinks it’s fully possible she committed suicide.”
“ ‘Fully possible’ doesn’t work. I need concrete results.”
“You sound like you’re sitting on a sharp rock.”
“You been watching the news? ‘Still no information on the bizarre death of Tasia McFarland, and with each passing hour speculation grows that the police are incompetent, in on the conspiracy,’ blah blah repeat until nauseated. The sharp rock’s sitting on me.”
Jo stopped at a corner for a red light. Taxis and delivery trucks jostled for space at two miles an hour, horns quacking.
“I need Tasia’s medical and psychiatric records. All of them, including files from the years when she was married to Robert McFarland,” she said.
“Army records, yeah. Getting paperwork from the military is going to be like pulling teeth from a chicken.”
“You expect them to drag their feet?” The light changed and Jo crossed the street, dodging oncoming pedestrians. “Who’s got their thumb on your neck, Amy?”
“You want the list alphabetically, or in order of political throw-weight? The White House wants this to go away. K. T. Lewicki called the mayor to express the administration’s support for our investigation. In other words, the president’s chief of staff wants us to turn off the gas and snuff this story out. Get me something we can use, or we’re going to get squashed.”
“Still nothing on the search for the bullet?” Jo said.
“The Tooth Fairy is more likely to put it under your pillow than I and the department are to find it.”
“The Warren Commission found a magic bullet on a hospital stretcher in Dallas after JFK was assassinated.”
“Beckett.” Tang’s next words were barked at her in sharply inflected Mandarin. “Don’t you dare inflict that conspiracy garbage on me.”
“Political paranoia is as American as apple pie and obesity. We dine on it as a nation.”
“The departmental powers want me to clear the case by the end of the week. Get me something solid, Jo. I need progress by tomorrow so I’ll at least have dog chow to feed to the brass.”
“On it.”
“Have you gone to Tasia’s house yet?”
“Next stop.”
“Step lively, chickie.”
NMP—YOU ARE not Noel Michael Petty, you are NMP, the big bad bastard, the sword of truth—gazed down the hillside. He was invisible in the thick brush, hovering like an angel.
A man was inside the house below. A man in a shiny blue blazer who had parked in the driveway and jogged to the door, sorting keys in his hand.
Hours of surveillance were about to pay off. Hours of silent hovering, of waiting for the chance to get inside the house without breaking in, because break-ins brought the police, or left forensic evidence, and—Don’t tell, precious love, promise me—NMP was no fool. And now, finally, the property manager had shown up.
To Tasia’s house. The battle was about to be joined.
