The Liar's Lullaby (6 page)

He peered into the lights. “The news tonight from San Francisco has come as a shock, and has saddened me, deeply.”

He let that last word fall heavily. He let it roll across the press corps until it pinned them to their seats and smothered all noise in the room.

“My thoughts are with the family of the pilot who lost his life, and with all those who were injured.”

McFarland was an outlier: a working-class liberal, a warrior turned antiwar. He had grown up in a double-wide trailer on a cattle ranch outside Billings, son of the ranch foreman and his Salvadoran wife. He won the state cross-country championship, received a commission to West Point, and served as an army officer in hot zones across the globe before—famously—resigning his commission in protest over a friendly fire incident for which junior officers took the blame while higher-ups escaped censure. He returned to Montana, went to law school, practiced environmental law, and went into politics. His rise was swift. He won the presidency after serving five years in the Senate.

He had a reputation as a quick-thinking, hard-driving politician, a man who held everything in his head like a mental battlefield map and maintained rapport with underlings and rivals. In other words, a commander.

Along the way he’d married and divorced Fawn Tasia Hicks. And for two decades he had carefully avoided talking about her. He’d been remarried, to the calming, outdoorsy First Lady, for seventeen years. They had twin sons and a golden retriever, and kept roan quarter horses on their spread outside Missoula. As a political liability, Tasia had been no cause for alarm, not even a wisp of smoke on the horizon. She’d been a curiosity.

Not anymore. Jo watched him, thinking:
Let’s really see who I voted for here.

McFarland gazed around the pressroom. “Tasia’s death is a tragedy. Sandy and I extend our sympathies to her family, and join her friends and all those around the country who are tonight mourning this . . .” He slowed, and his voice deepened. “. . . loss.”

He looked down and shifted his weight. Still gripping the podium, he shook his head. Then he seemed to throw a switch.

“Prepared remarks don’t cut it at a time like this.” He looked up. “This news is a kick in the gut. Tasia was too young to die.”

Behind him, at the edge of the screen, stood presidential aides and the White House chief of staff. McFarland glanced their way. Their presence seemed to bolster him. He straightened.

“Tasia was a force of nature. Plain and simple, she had more personality than anybody I’ve ever met. She could have moved mountains with a stare if she wanted. And for all her singing talent, and her fame, what marked her out was her generosity of spirit. She had a heart as big as the sky.”

He paused. “Learning that she was shot to death with a pistol I bought is shattering. There’s no other word for it.”

A buzz ran through the pressroom. McFarland took time to consider his next remark.

“I didn’t intend to take questions this evening, but on my way in, I heard somebody asking if I knew Tasia had bipolar disorder when I left the gun with her.”

In the background, the White House chief of staff stiffened. K. T. Lewicki had the bullet head of an English bull terrier, and he looked like he wanted to tackle McFarland. The president didn’t see it, or deliberately ignored it.

“The answer is no,” he said. “Tasia and I were married for two years. She was twenty-three when we divorced. As I understand it, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in her early thirties.”

He scanned the room, making eye contact. “I bought the pistol before I deployed for duty overseas. She was going to be home on her own. I wanted her to have a reliable means of defending herself.” His tone sharpened. “And before you ask—it never crossed my mind to take it from her when we divorced. That pistol was supposed to protect—”

His expression fissured.

“. . . protect her.” A glaring light seemed to shear across his face. “Offer a prayer for her. Thank you.”

He turned and left the podium. He couldn’t have left faster if the room had been burning. A reporter said, “Mr. President, had you spoken to her recently?”

McFarland raised a hand as he walked away. “No.”

Another reporter called, “Do you know why she brought your gun to the concert? Mr. President, did she ever speak about suicide?”

He shook his head and strode out the door.

In the hospitality suite, people wandered away from the television. Behind Jo, a man said, “Conscience has him by the throat.”

Tang turned. “Mr. Lecroix.”

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.’ ”

T
ANG 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.

N
OEL 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 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.