Speaking in Tongues (37 page)

(Very stupid idea to send a picture like that to a seventeen-year-old, Kayleigh’s age at the time. By the by.)

Usually she was cautiously amused by the attention. But not always and definitely not now. Kayleigh found herself snagging her denim jacket from a nearby chair and pulling it on to cover her T-shirt, providing another barrier to any prying eyes. This, despite the characteristic September heat in Fresno, which filled the murky venue like thin stew.

And more of those clicks and taps from nowhere.

“Kayleigh?”

She turned quickly, trying to hide her slight jump, even though she recognized the voice.

A solidly built woman of around thirty paused halfway across the stage. She had cropped red hair and some subdued inking on arms, shoulders and spine, partly visible thanks to her trim tank top and tight, hip-hugging black jeans. Fancy cowboy boots. “Didn’t mean to scare you. You okay?”

“You didn’t. What’s up?” she asked Alicia Sessions.

A nod toward the iPad she carried. “These just came in. Proofs for the new posters? If we get them to the printer today we’ll definitely have them by the show. They look okay to you?”

Kayleigh bent over the screen and examined them. Music nowadays is only partly about music, of course. Probably always has been, she supposed, but it seemed that as her popularity had grown, the business side of
her career took up a lot more time than it used to. She didn’t have much interest in these matters but she generally didn’t need to. Her father was her manager, Alicia handled the day-to-day paperwork and scheduling, the lawyers read the contracts, the record company made arrangements with the recording studios and the CD production companies and the retail and download outlets; her longtime producer and friend at BHRC Records, Barry Zeigler, handled the technical side of arranging and production, and Bobby and the crew set up and ran the shows.

All so that Kayleigh Towne could do what she did best: write songs and sing them.

Still, one business matter of interest to her was making sure fans—many of them young or without much money—could buy cheap but decent memorabilia to make the night of the concert that much more special. Posters like this one, T-shirts, key chains, bracelets, charms, guitar chord books, headbands, backpacks . . . and mugs, for the moms and dads driving the youngsters to and from the shows and, of course, often buying the tickets as well.

She studied the proofs. The image was of Kayleigh and her favorite Martin guitar—not a big dreadnought-size but a smaller, 000-18, ancient, with a crisp yellowing spruce top and a voice of its own. The photo was the inside picture from her latest album,
Your Shadow.

Him . . .

No, don’t.

Eyes scanning the doors again.

“You sure you’re okay?” Alicia asked, voice buzzing with a faint Texas twang.

“Yeah.” Kayleigh returned to the poster proofs, which all featured the same photo though with different type, messages and background. Her picture was a straight-on shot, depicting her much as she saw herself: at five-two, shorter than she would have liked, her face a bit long, but with stunning blue eyes, lashes that wouldn’t quit and lips that had some reporters talking collagen. As
if
 . . . Her trademark golden hair, four feet long—and no, not cut, only trimmed, in ten years and four months—flowed in the fake gentle breeze from the photographer’s electric fan. Designer jeans and high-collared dark-red blouse. A small diamond crucifix.

“You gotta give the fans the package,” Bishop Towne always said. “That’s
visual
too, I’m talking. And the standards’re different ’tween men and women. You get into trouble, you deny it.” He meant that in the country music world a man could get away with a look like Bishop’s own: jutting belly, cigarette, a lined, craggy face riddled with stubble, wrinkled shirt, scuffed boots and faded jeans. A woman singer, he lectured—though he really intended to say “girl”—had to be put together for date night. And in Kayleigh’s case that meant a church social, of course: the good girl next door was the image on which she’d built her career. Sure, the jeans could be a little tight, the blouses and sweaters could closely hug her round chest, but the necklines were high. The makeup was subtle and leaned toward pinks.

“Go with them.”

“Great.” Alicia shut off the device. A slight pause. “I haven’t gotten your father’s okay yet.”

“They’re good,” the singer reassured her, nodding at the iPad.

“Sure. I’ll just run it by him. You know.”

Now Kayleigh paused. Then: “Okay.”

“Acoustics good here?” asked Alicia, who had been a performer herself; she had quite a voice and a love of music, which was undoubtedly why she’d taken a job for someone like Kayleigh Towne, when the efficient, no-nonsense woman could have earned twice as much as a personal assistant for a corporate executive. She’d signed on last spring and had never heard the band perform here.

“Oh, the sound is great,” Kayleigh said enthusiastically, glancing at the ugly concrete walls. “You wouldn’t think it.” She explained how the designers of the venue, back in the 1960s, had done their homework; too many concert halls—even sophisticated ones intended for classical music—had been built by people without confidence in the natural ability of musical instruments and voices to reach the farthest seats with “direct volume,” that is, the sound emanating from the stage. Architects would add angular surfaces and free-standing shapes to boost the volume of the music, which did that but also sent the vibrations in a hundred different directions. This resulted in every performer’s acoustic nightmare, reverberation: in effect, echoes upon echoes that yielded muddy, sometimes even off-key, sounds.

Here, in modest Fresno, Kayleigh explained to Alicia, as her father had to her, the designers had trusted in the power and purity of the voice and drum skin and sounding board and reed and string. She was about to ask the assistant to join her in a chorus of one of her songs to prove her point—Alicia did great harmonies—when she noticed her looking toward the back
of the hall. She assumed the woman was bored with the scientific discussion. But the frowning gaze suggested something else was on her mind.

“What?” Kayleigh asked.

“Isn’t it just us and Bobby?”

“What do you mean?”

“I thought I saw somebody.” She lifted a finger tipped in a black-painted nail. “That doorway. There.”

Just where Kayleigh herself had thought she’d seen the shadow ten minutes before.

Palms sweating, absently touching her phone, Kayleigh stared at the changing shapes in the back of the hall.

Yes . . . no. She just couldn’t tell.

Then shrugging her broad shoulders, one of them sporting a tattoo of a snake in red and green, Alicia said, “Hm. Guess not. Whatever it was it’s gone now. . . . Okay, see you later. The restaurant at one?”

“Yeah, sure.”

Kayleigh listened absently to the thumping of boots as she left and continued to stare at the black doorways.

Angrily, she suddenly whispered, “Edwin Sharp.”

There I’ve said
his
name.

“Edwin, Edwin, Edwin.”

Now that I’ve conjured you up, listen here: Get the hell out of my concert hall! I’ve got work to do.

And she turned away from the shadowy, gaping doorway from which, of course, no one was leering at her at all. She stepped to center stage, looking over the masking tape on the dusty wood, blocking out where she would stand at different points during the concert.

It was then that she heard a man’s voice crying
from the back of the hall, “Kayleigh!” It was Bobby, now rising from behind the mixing console, knocking his chair over and ripping off his hard-shell earphones. He waved to her with one hand and pointed to a spot over her head with another. “Look out! . . . No, Kayleigh!”

She glanced up fast and saw one of the strip lights—a seven-foot Colortran unit—falling free of its mounting and swinging toward the stage by its thick electric cable.

Stepping back instinctively, she tripped over a guitar stand she hadn’t remembered was behind her.

Tumbling, arms flailing, gasping . . .

The young woman hit the stage hard, on her tailbone. The massive light plummeted toward her, a deadly pendulum, growing bigger and bigger. She tried desperately to rise but fell back, blinded as the searing beams from the thousand-watt bulbs turned her way.

Then everything went black.

JEFFERY DEAVER
, a former attorney, is the
New York Times
bestselling author and originator of the acclaimed detective hero Lincoln Rhyme, featured in nine hit novels, including
The Bone Collector
—also a Universal Pictures feature film starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie—and
The Cold Moon
, which won a Grand Prix from the Japanese Adventure Fiction Association and was named Book of the Year by the Mystery Writers Association of Japan.

A lifelong fan of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, Deaver was honored to be handpicked by Fleming’s estate to carry on the literary tradition, beginning with his #1 international and
New York Times
bestseller
Carte Blanche
.

His new novel,
XO
, features special agent Kathryn Dance, who first appeared alongside Lincoln Rhyme in
The Sleeping Doll
and whose popularity inspired
Roadside Crosses,
first in the series. A former folksinger, Deaver penned songs featured in
XO
, which are downloadable from his website.

His many awards include the 2009 Best Novel of the Year award from the International Thriller Writers organization for his standalone novel
The Bodies Left Behind
. He’s been nominated for seven Edgar Awards, an Anthony Award, and a Gumshoe Award, and was short-listed for the ITV3 Crime Thriller Award for Best International Author. He is a three-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Readers Award for Best Short Story of the Year, and a winner of the British Thumping Good Read Award. He has also won a Steel Dagger for best thriller of the year (
Garden of Beasts
) and a Short Story Dagger from the British Crime Writers’ Association.

Visit the author on Facebook or go to
www.jefferydeaver.com
.

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AUTHOR PHOTO © CHARLES HARRIS/CORBIS

A
LSO BY
J
EFFERY
D
EAVER

Carte Blanche

Edge

The Burning Wire*

Best American Mystery Stories 2009
(Editor)

The Watch List
(
The Copper Bracelet
and

The Chopin Manuscript
) (Contributor)

Roadside Crosses**

The Bodies Left Behind

The Broken Window*

The Sleeping Doll**

More Twisted: Collected Stories, Volume Two

The Cold Moon*/**

The Twelfth Card*

Garden of Beasts

Twisted: Collected Stories

The Vanished Man*

The Stone Monkey*

The Blue Nowhere

The Empty Chair*

Speaking in Tongues

The Devil’s Teardrop

The Coffin Dancer*

The Bone Collector*

A Maiden’s Grave

Praying for Sleep

The Lesson of Her Death

Mistress of Justice

Hard News

Death of a Blue Movie Star

Manhattan Is My Beat

Hell’s Kitchen

Bloody River Blues

Shallow GravesA

Century of Great Suspense Stories
(Editor)

A Hot and Sultry Night for Crime
(Editor)

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(Introduction)

*Featuring Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs
**Featuring Kathryn Dance