The Liar's Lullaby (24 page)

“Maybe.” For a second, she held back. “Come on.”

Hoisting her satchel, she strolled toward the door. She scrounged in the satchel and brought out a crumpled piece of notepaper.

“Sir? Excuse me, I think you dropped this.”

The man turned. Jo held out the crumpled paper, her pulse ticking like rats’ feet running across a wooden floor. His cigarettes were in his hand, one protruding, ready for insertion once he stepped onto the sidewalk.

He said indistinctly, “Sorry, could you repeat?”

He had two hearing aids. He’d also clearly had a stroke at some point. He was wall-eyed and his mouth drooped on one side. He wasn’t the attacker who had so nimbly raced away from Tasia’s house.

“Sorry, my mistake,” she said.

He turned and left. She went to the counter. In a strident voice, she said, “I’m having trouble staying online. Is something wrong with your Wi-Fi today?”

Ferd looked around, waiting to see who looked up. Nobody did.

And Jo smelled Right Guard deodorant.

She stilled. Right Guard and perfumed fabric softener—the same sharp odors she had smelled when the intruder fell on top of her. Her skin prickled.

“He’s close,” she said.

She scanned the crowded room. The scents lingered but were quickly swallowed up by others—coffee, sugar, sour baby spit-up.

“He’s here. No question.”

Her palms itched. Bohr’s plainclothes officer and Tang were still miles away.

How could she narrow it down? “May I see your phone again?”

Ferd handed it over, and she scrolled back through the e-mails and messages left by her quarry—as Archangel, as NMP, and as Noel Michael Petty.

His descriptions of Tasia.
Greedy for men . . . voracious . . . selfish . . . Queen bee, hoarding all for herself . . .

All the talk was of possession, consumption, ownership, and entitlement. It pulsed with jealousy. And yet it did not sound possessive of Tasia. Not in the way violent stalkers often talked.

And Jo realized what had sounded wrong to her about Archangel’s messages. The subtext didn’t lie in Archangel’s words, but in what was missing from them.

Archangel never talked about Tasia being his, of her belonging to him. He talked about her taking others away, of hoarding men and locking him out.

“Oh, man,” she whispered.

Archangel was enraged at Tasia, but not because she had spurned him. He didn’t think she belonged to him. He never spoke about her as though they had a relationship.

He spoke about all the men she took and kept for herself.

Archangel hadn’t wanted Tasia for himself. He resented her for taking another man away from him.
We wait, still, but she made it all impossible.

In the crowded coffee bar, the mother with the stroller nudged past. The baby was howling. The stroller bumped Jo’s shins. The woman mumbled, “Excuse me.”

Jo reset her thoughts. She’d been looking at everything from the wrong angle. Archangel was obsessed, and blamed Tasia for ruining his life. But he never expressed fantasies or delusions that they had a relationship. She saw that now.

Was he gay, and obsessed with another man?

Her palms began to sweat. The mom struggled to open the door. Another woman, the one in the green beanie, squeezed through it ahead of her.

“Well, it’s not like I have anything else to do,” the mom said, snark breaking through her composure. The woman in the beanie flipped her the bird and walked off.

Jo smelled it again, the scent of Right Guard men’s deodorant.

“Oh no.”

She redialed Tang as she hurried for the door.

Ferd trailed behind her. “What?”

She looked out through the plate-glass windows. The women had disappeared from sight.

“It’s Archangel.” She rushed toward the door. “It’s not a man. It’s a woman.”

It was the woman in the beanie. And she was gone.

N
OEL MICHAEL PETTY STORMED UP KEARNY STREET. HEAD DOWN, lips tight, shoes slapping the sidewalk. Anger jangled in the air, sharp as shards of red glass.

Who was after Archangel? It was not coincidence that wireless access had been cut off at the Starbucks. Somebody had done it deliberately. Tasia’s people? Robert McFarland? The police?

They’d silenced Archangel. Halfway through the grand finale, the ultimate truth telling, Archangel’s digital throat had been cut.

They were on to Archangel. That meant they were on to NMP. The disguise hadn’t held up.

Petty pulled off the beanie and threw it in the gutter. Kept walking. Took off the jean jacket and stuck it under a parked car. Pulled hard at the buttons on the man’s denim shirt, trying to rip them off. Big Bad Bastard hadn’t worked. Thinking of NMP as the meanest man in the Tenderloin, so nobody would see little Noel inside the coat and hat and attitude, hadn’t worked. Somebody must have told on her.

She knew who.

She tore at the denim shirt, popped a button, pulled it off and stuffed it in a trash can. Her T- shirt was thin and the misty breeze curled around her, cooling her to sheer, reflective rage. She squinted through the cloudy lenses of her glasses. She had only minutes to get out of sight before the rest of the world found her. She had to get out of the Financial District. She had to become somebody else, fast. She broke into a run, cut across Kearny and headed west on Sutter. She knew who to blame. She knew who to punish.

J
O BURST THROUGH the door of the Starbucks onto the sidewalk. Ferd stumbled out behind her.

“What do you mean, a woman?” he said.

“Where’d she go?”

Jo looked up and down Kearny. The mother with the iPhone baby was halfway up the block, fumbling with her purse and her to-go cup.

Jo put a hand on her head. “Archangel’s a woman. I should have seen it before.”

Ferd’s mouth slowly opened. “That big woman in the beanie?”

“We have to find her.” She pointed north on Kearny. “You go that way.”

Ferd took off, lumbering up the street.

“Don’t approach her,” Jo called. “If you see her, phone me and we’ll tell the cops.”

She ran the other way, redialing Tang as she went.

“I’m coming, Beckett.”

“It’s a woman. Noel Michael Petty. We missed it.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“No.”

She jogged down Kearny past her truck. At the corner with Sutter she stopped and looked around. Old brick buildings, wild with fire escapes. Overhead electrical wires for the Muni buses. Down Sutter, sleek glass and granite skyscrapers. Chic retail stores.

No sign. Then she spied, in the gutter, the green beanie.

“She’s dumping the clothes she had on. She knows something’s wrong.”

“Are you sure about this?” Tang said.

“As positive as I can be without seeing her in a lineup and reading her driver’s license. Same deodorant, same fabric softener. Same
size
as the guy who tackled me at Tasia’s. Amy, we presumed it was a man because of the intruder’s size and because all Archangel’s e-mails to Tasia sounded so jealous and possessive. And the overwhelming majority of stalkers are heterosexual. My mistake.”

“No, not a mistake. You’ve caught it. If this is for real, Petty was disguising herself. She wanted everybody to think she was a man.”

“She’s wearing a jean jacket and green combats. But if she’s dumping the disguise, she’s trying to get away. I think she’s gone out to do something bad.”

“What kind of bad?”

“I think Tasia isn’t her only target.”

Scanning the street, she caught a flash of green. Up a block on Sutter, a person in combats was running away. A bus passed in front of Jo. When it went by, the figure was gone.

“She’s heading west. Can you get a patrol unit to look for her?” she said.

“On it.”

Jo took a step back in the direction of her truck, and hesitated. Kearny was a one-way street, and by the time she could drive around the block and turn around to head in the direction Archangel had gone, the woman could take a dozen different paths.

“I’m going to follow her on foot,” Jo said.

“Don’t get near her,” Tang said sharply.

Jo darted across the street and headed up Sutter.

“Tang, I’m worried. I saw a message she was writing before she took off. It was an obituary.”

T
HE STORES ON UNION SQUARE WERE BRIGHT AND FLASHY, HUGE boxes where advertising posters in the front windows showed perfect young people airbrushed and half undressed. Noel Michael Petty hustled through the doors at Gap and grabbed the first shirt off the rack that was extra large. She grabbed a pair of tan slacks from a pile. Wiping her brow, she stormed to a dressing room. She changed and ripped the tags off.

At the cash register, the sales girl, a twig with breath like spearmint gum, looked at her funny.

“What?” Petty said.

“Nothing, ma’am. That’s eighty-nine fifty.”

She shoved a hundred- dollar bill at the twig. “It’s important to look well-groomed. You should think about that.”

Petty smoothed down her hair. Pushed her glasses up her nose.
Stop looking at me,
she thought. Everybody wanted to look at her, and that wasn’t good.

She got her change and hurried outside into the chilly sunlight.

 

 

B
Y THE TIME Jo had gone two blocks uphill, she was breathing hard and beginning to lose hope. Archangel had vanished into the teeming downtown streets.

“I’ve lost her,” she said to Tang.

“I’ve given her description to all units. They’re issuing a BOLO.” Be on the lookout.

Jo slowed at a corner. Which way to go?

“What’s she going to do?” Tang said.

“End a life.”

“Her own?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe somebody else’s life as well.”

“I’m on Market, driving north.”

Jo had a flash. “Can you head for Union Square?”

“Sure. Why?”

Jo broke into a run again. “I think she’s after—”

“Jesus Christ, the president isn’t here, is he?”

Jo held tight to her satchel and aimed through the canyon of skyscrapers for the St. Francis Hotel.

“No. I think she’s stalking Searle Lecroix.”

 

 

A
T THE TELEVISION studio, Edie Wilson picked through a salad, flicking black olives and carrot shavings aside with the tines of her fork. A plastic fork—she wasn’t a snob, could get down in the trenches with the best of them. Even though she constantly had to prove it to people like that skinny young producer, Tranh. Just because she had gotten her break on a natural disaster, some folks thought she was lucky. That her career was a fluke, that she’d taken advantage of human suffering to put a shiny star around her name at the network.

Damn straight, and she wasn’t about to apologize. Twenty Hours of Terror in Topeka had been her story from start to finish—because she was the only reporter brave and lucky enough to have been on the ground near the massive super cell that day. She’d been following a team of storm chasers from Oklahoma University. Yeah, she’d gotten lost, and yeah, she ended up hiding from a tornado in a trash can. She wasn’t ashamed of that. Hell, she talked about the trash can in the network promo for her show. She’d had the guts to drive through a swarm of twisters and report the news. Ninety-six dead, and she’d told the nation. She’d held on to the shoulder of that old woman while firefighters searched for her husband in the wreckage of their mobile home. Top that, Brian Williams.

Edie Wilson, The Bravest Woman in Television News, apologized to nobody.

When her phone rang, she asked the intern to answer it. She ran her tongue over her teeth, making sure her smile was white.

Finally she took the call. “Tell me you have information.”

“The SUV is registered to a Gabriel Quintana.”

She wrote down the address. “Find me everything you can on this guy. Especially any connection with Dr. Jo Beckett.”

She shut the phone off. Handed the salad plate to the intern. “Where’s Andy?”

If her cameraman was eating lunch, he could leave it. They had investigative reporting to do.

 

 

J
O DODGED PEDESTRIANS, working her way through busy streets toward Union Square. She pressed her phone to her ear.

“In some of Archangel’s e-mails to Tasia, she referred to Tasia taking all the men. But she particularly mentioned Searle Lecroix.”

“You think he’s in danger?”

“Call the Saint Francis. Tell him to watch out.”

At the corner with Grant she stepped onto the crosswalk and heard a horn blare. She jumped back and a yellow cab roared past.

“I’ll call you back,” Tang said.

Jo waited for a break in traffic. The wind coiled her hair around her face. Did she think Lecroix was in danger? She couldn’t afford not to think so.