The Miraculous Plot of Leiter & Lott (34 page)

She didn't know his background, obviously, but he was a human being, after all, and any human being could crack under the weight of propaganda.
 
Especially someone who'd never considered that advertisers needed to sell insurance, comfort foods and escapist programming. How could anyone escape thinking about the future for long, when even the Bible told of an asteroid that would destroy a third of the Earth in the book of Revelations? It was why she'd succumbed to the obsession herself, along with everyone else, of seeking that jealously coveted affluent life.
 

Before it was too late.
  

To really believe true happiness was possible, beyond the shallow vanity that passed for it, as David claimed, required more than simple courage or faith, given the chaotic state of the world. What it did require, however, she had only a clue. If David had indeed known it, perhaps it was in his journal, this secret--this simple vision that had flowered out of blindness. And maybe she could hold onto it longer than he had, given her own experience.

Whatever David's experience had been in Dubai, beyond what his former colleague was saying, perhaps that was in his journal, too.
 
It would certainly help to see
those
puzzle pieces, she realized. Considering that there were billions of stories out there, competing for attention, it might even help explain why his was just about the only one that not even its author cared to tell. Although it did make perverse sense that David remain a man without a story if he truly believed stories only hinted at the truth, and weren't an end in themselves any more than a church building was a temporary refuge from the world's insanity, as witnessed by how many folks pretended to believe what few practiced outside the sanctuary.

What his story really needed, she thought, was at least one more dramatic twist. Something to propel both it and her forward toward real change. After all, wasn't change only possible, as he'd said, when--
  

As if on cue, her cell phone rang. She flipped it open, warily. “Yes?”

“Val, it's me.”

“Greg? What's. . . what's wrong now?”

“Nothing. Good news. They've got the Melendez girl.”

She heard Greg's voice saying the words, but his tone was what threw her off.
 
He even sounded mildly disappointed, somehow.
“What?”

“She was found at Tucson Mall, abandoned by a stranger at the southwest entrance, next to Sears.”

“That's. . .” Val searched for the word, “wonderful.”

“Yeah,” Greg conceded, “full of wonder. Did you get Vasquez to commit to an interview? You with him, or what?”

“No, he's agreed to it, but I just haven't spoken to--”

“Forget him for now, then,” Greg interrupted, “and get down here right away. There's reporters from other stations here already, asking for a statement.”

Greg clicked off.
 

Val closed her phone, and then imagined all the TV sets in Sears' electronics department, every one of them showing the same girl's face in close-up. Only she couldn't imagine the expression on her face. Was she crying, or was she happy?

Val took a moment before leaving the park. She returned to her Cavalier, only to sit inside it and stare out past the ball field at the flower garden in the distance. A desert dove chirped in a tree above her windscreen, and dropped a tiny parcel of waste that plopped and ran down the glass, like the tear of an angel.
 
Looking closer, she then saw that the drop had landed on an ant, which now struggled to escape, not unlike a fossil insect resisting the drop of resin that might harden into amber and transport it, unchanged, from the distant past into the far future.
 

She refocused her gaze past the ant toward the gazebo, and once more tried to imagine David there alone, struggling to escape being trapped, himself. But even David's face was gone now, too.
 

The little girl's blank stare had taken its place.

She was on her way to the station when her cell phone rang again. And again it was Greg. “Listen, Val,” Greg said, his tone evoking more of an edge, “it might be better if you stay away from here for a while, after all.”

“What? Why?”

“Well, people around here are starting to point fingers. I don't mean people, exactly. I mean competing reporters."

“Which ones?”

“KGUN, the Star, couple radio stations."

“What are they saying?”

“It's not accusations, really. It's more in the tone. Can you see where this is going? Innuendoes of incompetence.”

She could hear voices in the background, now. Several eager voices. “They think. . .
you
think. . .”

“Doesn't matter if you didn't know, or couldn't know. Now that Melissa is safe, the gloves are off. Maybe
Leiter
did respond to your plea on TV, but he's somewhere out of reach, and Trent isn't talking, except to say that a former associate of
Leiter's
has come forward to confirm his distress, and hasn't heard from him in months. So if you're here. . .well, there you are. They need to punch at something.”

“What about David's journal, his diary?”

“I've asked about that again, and they keep telling me it's evidence. If it's any consolation, they won't let anyone near
Leiter's
house. Or his trailer.”

She felt the heat of frustration as she braked for a red light. “If I don't come in, just what am I supposed to do?”

“Go back and interview Ramon,” Greg suggested. “I'll tell people you're busy doing your job, business as usual. Then, I don't know, go shopping or something! Let's not give these busybodies more lead for their pencils until we know the final chapter.” He paused. “Okay, Ms. Producer?”

Her red light turned green.
 

A car behind her beeped.
 

Val closed her phone without replying, and then reluctantly but dutifully did a U-turn, circling back to the park where it had all started, once more.

Round and round it goes,
she thought,
and where it stops the Shadow knows?

~ * ~

She found Ramon Vasquez ruggedly handsome, with close cropped hair and a mischievous, spontaneous smile that lit his face like a bright bulb in a dark room. Together, they walked outside the stadium administration building to sit on yet another bench near one of the new practice ball fields that taxpayers had bonded the previous year in order to attract such star players.

“Thanks for meeting with me,” Val said, admiring the way his biceps shifted beneath the toned brown flesh of his bare arms.

“Not at all. Thanks to you.”

“Of course this is just preliminary. Is there a time you prefer for the on-camera part of the interview?”

“I'll make time. You just say when, honey.”

Honey again?

“When,” Val said, impulsively.

Vasquez gave a short chuckle. “What?”

“Sorry, you asked me to say when. So, you want to tell me how you see the season shaping up?”

“Great, actually. Terrific potential, with the talent we got. Have a real shot at making it to the finals.”

“This year or next year?”

Vasquez' dark brown eyes narrowed, then he laughed expansively.  “Come on, now.”

“Well, it's never really final, is it?” Val said. “There's always another game, another season. It's all anyone talks about, anymore.”

The star now made another face--a cross between confused and amused. Val studied him, and decided the reaction did, in fact, take away something from his formidable arsenal of concupiscent weapons. This was confirmed when he asked, “What do ya mean by that?”

What did she mean?
 
“Nothing. And of course you do experience the present sometimes, so there's that. Maybe it's why the game doesn't seem the same to you each time out. It's new to you, somehow, and to your fans. Makes you feel alive, briefly. Even if the competition itself is a bit barbaric, when you think about it.”

“Huh?”

“Silly too. Bat some balls, run in circles, sleep and repeat? Darwin might understand the conquest, the pecking order, but where does that leave higher evolution? Compassion. Empathy.”

“You're kidding, right?”

She sighed on cue, already bored in confirming his lagging social acuity. “Right. So you're happy with your contract, are you, Ramon?"

“Contract. . . Well, why wouldn't I be? But hey, ah. . . I'd really rather not discuss the particulars of that on camera, if ya don't mind.”

“Well, how about off camera, then?  Like right now. Two point six million for, what. . .twenty-six games or so? Isn't that true?”

Vasquez' face lost all expression. Then his dark eyebrows furrowed again, and he cocked his symmetrically masculine chin. “Okay, you're right,” he conceded, giving her the same grin he probably used in singles bars--not sure where this exchange was leading, but hopeful. “Impressed?” he concluded, adopting his own belated experimentation.

Val smiled. “Oh, absolutely. After all, that's more than twenty-six high school teachers make, combined. All for hitting the same ball you did in sixth grade. Only a little harder, of course. And for chewing the right product, there's a bonus, too.”  She paused. “Do some charity work, though, don't you, Ramon?”

Another and longer pause. “I do some, yeah.  Don't like what you're implying, though.”

“Not implying anything,” Val said. She resurrected one of his impish smiles. “Got you there, didn't I?  Like on 60 Minutes or Hardball?”

Vasquez nodded, his wary, cocky grin now wavering at the edges. “Yeah, I was warned about you. Yer good at what you do too, aren't ya?”

Val looked away from his striking face toward a certain gazebo beyond the fence, next to where a large, familiar cottonwood tree sat. “I'm not sure what you mean."

“Sure you do.  I saw you on TV last night.  I mean, they showed me the rerun. The
home
run.”

She looked back at him, meeting a more intrigued gaze this time. A different look that what had obviously worked well with women in awe of celebrity. “You know something, Ramon,” she reinforced his fascination, “there's another star I met once, that I'd like to tell you about. On another assignment I had once.”

“A bigger star than me, is that it?”

She smiled politely at his tardy assimilation. “I'll let you decide. Actually, it's a tiny point of light in the sky that I was told about. Looks like a star. But with the telescope atop Mt. Graham, it comes into view as an elliptical galaxy three times the size of our Milky Way, with over a trillion suns surrounding the largest black hole known--something containing three billion solar masses. Doesn't have a name, though. Just a number. M87. Yet the weight of that warped space, where this monster sits, can't even be imagined. A light year wide disk of superheated gas orbits it, whirling at a good fraction of the speed of light, before it plummets along twisting magnetic field lines toward what nothing can escape. The astronomer told me, during my story on her, that at the poles of this bottomless well of gravity, all matter is ripped into atoms and then partly beamed as plasma so hot and fast that it could vaporize anything in its path, including the Earth. That beam shoots out over seven thousand light years from the core before it even begins to disperse. And further out, over fifteen thousand globular clusters of stars surround M87 like a halo of bees over a flower. Some of
those
clusters contain over a hundred thousand stars each, just like our sun. And yet all of it, if you looked up at the sky, Ramon, looks like a dim point of light. A minor star that you wouldn't notice at all.”

“
Wo-ww
,” said Ramon with exaggeration, after a pause. “I guess there is a bigger star than me, after all.  Although not as famous.” His lips turned upward in a slow grin as he gauged her reaction. “And, ya know, with all that hot talk of plasma, there, I must confess I was wondering just how well you wanted to know me, Ms. A-Lott.”

“Oh, I think I know you already,” Val told him. “I'm just wondering if you'll ever know yourself.”

She couldn't resist smiling thinly as she got up from the bench. Glancing toward the gazebo, she apologized for not having more time. Vasquez did seem astonished to see her walk away, but by then she'd already decided to suggest to Greg that
he
should do the on-camera part of the interview, being such a fan. Maybe she could even call in sick that day, and go search for David instead.

If only she knew where to look.

Driving toward her apartment, Val thought about April Ellis again. Of course she'd thought of April often enough in the past two years, but never as a potential friend or confidant. A slender woman with long red hair, April had been a gracious host, taking Val on a two hour tour of the Large Binocular Telescope atop Mt. Graham to the east of Tucson. But while standing beneath two massive mirrors, each over twenty-seven feet across and mounted on a tilting hydraulic platform that weighed over five hundred tons, April had also described her own career path as though explaining the workings of a high tech laser. Ever since high school--ironically graduating the same year as Val--April had successfully climbed a ladder of calculated professional achievement, first majoring in math and science before earning a doctorate in astrophysics. In a male dominated field, her focus had centered on the development of galaxies, on black hole formation, and on the theoretical influence of dark matter on the birth of large scale structure. She'd even authored papers on her research for Astrophysical Journal, and had been awarded a Magellan prize for outstanding contribution to astronomy. There'd been no designation "By a Female Under 40," and no mention in Entertainment Weekly, either. She'd done it on her own, without the aid of luck, and all because she'd followed her bliss, oblivious to the vain machinations of back seat drivers.