The Liar's Lullaby

by Meg Gardiner

“This case is holding together like a carnival ride that just broke loose from its moorings. Get ready to careen across the fairground.”

  Tang’s phone bleated. She looked at the display, exhaled, and ignored it.

  “Amy?”

  “You first. What’s got your back up?”

  “Somebody may have been stalking Tasia.”

  Tang turned sharply. “How’d you find that out?”

  “She had a cell phone we didn’t know about.”

  She told Tang about the messages she’d found. “Cyberstalker at a minimum.”

  The elevator stopped and Tang marched out with Jo behind her.

  “What’s your news, Amy?”

  “A new twist in the case. Unfortunately, it comes via tabloid television.”

  She headed for the nurses’ station, badge out. Jo fished her UCSF ID from her satchel and slipped it around her neck.

  At the desk Tang said, “Here to speak to Mr. Chennault. I called up.”

  Her phone beeped again. The nurse behind the desk pointed to it, but Tang raised a hand. “I’m turning it off.”

  The nurse directed them to Chennault’s room, reiterating, “Five minutes.”

  They found Chennault propped up in bed, face sallow, eyes reflecting the light from the television. His left arm was encased in a blue cast and immobilized in a sling. A patch of his blond hair had been shaved. Stitches ran across his scalp, Frankenstein- style. He muted the television.

  “Not quite the writer’s normal day, was it?” he said.

  Jo smiled. “Glad you’re going to be all right. How do you feel?”

  “As lousy as I look. The SS matrons at the nursing station won’t give me anything stronger than Tylenol.”

  Tang crossed her arms and hunched into herself. “Can you can tell us anything about the person who attacked you?”

  “Packed a punch like a rock. Actually, it was a rock, wasn’t it?”

  “Did he say anything?” Tang said.

  “Not a word. And I didn’t see his face, just his back. Big bugger. Hauled ass, and I mean that literally. He had a butt like a rhino.”

  He tried to look wry, but beneath the pudgy, boyish features, his smile seemed exhausted.

  “Anything else?” Tang said. “Any logos on the clothes?”

  Chennault shook his head.

  “Anything unusual in the way he ran? His stride?”

  Another shake of the head. He swiped at the thermal blanket that had slid off his leg. He had a tattoo running around his ankle. In italic script, Jo saw SEMPER T—Chennault pulled the blanket up.

  Tang nodded. “What did he smell like?”

  Fabric softener and Right Guard deodorant, Jo thought.

  “Clean clothes. And—aftershave, maybe,” Chennault said. Tang said, “Did you go with the tour to Washington, D.C., last week?”

  “No.” The smile seemed ever more forced. “The publisher wouldn’t spring for me to tag along.”

  “Did you talk to Tasia about the time she spent in D.C.?”

  “A bit. Why, Lieutenant?”

  The television flickered blue on the wall. Chennault glanced at it. His bonhomie fell away like a dropped towel. A banner headline read, NEW TASIA SHOCKER.

  The door opened and a nurse bustled in. “Time’s up.”

  Jo tried to watch the screen but the nurse hustled her toward the door.

  Chennault said, “Wait.” His smile seemed pathetic. “Can I give you a call tomorrow?”

  “Of course.” Jo gave him her card.

  Back at the elevator, Tang turned on her phone. Within seconds it began beeping. She hissed like an angry cat.

  “What’s going on?” Jo said. “What’s the New Tasia Shocker?”

  The phone rang. Tang glared at it. “Sorry. Got to take this.”

  She answered, and spoke in monosyllables all the way down to the lobby. Outside, backlit by a crimson sunset, the press had clotted around a man in a suit the color of bone. The reporters, camera people, and sound- folk looked like iron filings pulled toward a magnet on an Etch A Sketch. The man raised his hands as if urging caution.

  “What’s this?” Jo said.

  She and Tang went through the automatic doors.

  “. . . yet again remind you that the police department is doing everything in its power to bring this investigation to a conclusion.”

  Beneath her breath, Tang said, “We’re screwed.”

  The speaker’s dark hair and mustache were neatly clipped, as though by a gardener prepping the grass at Wimbledon. His aviator shades reflected the fiery sunset.

  A reporter said, “Has the FBI been brought into the investigation?”

  The man shook his head. “No. There’s no indication that a federal investigation is warranted. The San Francisco Police Department is fully engaged in resolving the matter of Ms. McFarland’s death.”

  Tang nudged Jo around the fringes of the press pack. “Donald Dart. Departmental spokesman. If he’s here it means the brass is covering themselves with grease and trying to slide out from inside this case as slick and fast as they can.”

  Another reporter said, “But what about the attack today?”

  “That’s suspected burglary and assault. We’re searching for the assailant.”

  Behind Dart another man stood at parade rest, hands clasped behind his back. His bald skull was sunburned. He was chewing gum, trying to look intimidating.

  His gaze lit on Tang. He walked toward her.

  “Give me a minute,” she said to Jo.

  The bald man led her aside.

  Jo didn’t consider Lieutenant Amy Tang to be combative. She was dogged and unyielding, but didn’t lash out in anger. When challenged or cornered, she drew in on herself, like a porcupine flashing its quills.

  That’s how she looked talking to Baldy.

  He towered over her. Jo couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he articulated each word with toothy care. Tang’s face had emptied into blankness.

  In front of the microphones, Dart wrapped up his remarks. “That’s all for now. Thank you.” He turned and walked away from the press. A few reporters shouted questions after him, but none followed. The lights shut down and microphones retreated. He strode toward Baldy and Tang.

  Tang raised her voice. “Because it’s an open investigation.”

  Baldy continued chewing his gum.

  Tang shook her head and walked away from him. “I’ll speak to my captain. Take it up with him.”

  “We already have,” Baldy said. “Don’t march off, Lieutenant.”

  Tang swept past Jo. “Let’s go.”

  “Lieutenant. This is out of your hands,” Baldy called.

  Jo glanced at him. Baldy propped his hands on his hips. She could swear he looked pleased.

  She jogged to catch up with Tang. “Amy.”

  Tang walked down the drive, face splashed with the dying sun. “Cowards.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “That’s Captain Chuck Bohr, one of my superiors. He’s taking charge.”

  Jo glanced back. Bohr and Dart were chatting. Dart stroked his mustache. He looked like an extra from Reno 911!

  “I’m being sidelined,” Tang said.

  “You’re off the case?”

  “No, but I might as well be. They’re taking official charge of it, because it needs massaging at a higher level. They think they can massage the case out of existence.” She pulled out her cigarettes. “They can’t.”

  “What’s going on? What’s the new Tasia shocker?”

  “Last week, the Bad Dogs and Bullets tour played a concert in Washington,” Tang said. “Tasia and the band stayed at the Four Seasons in downtown D.C. But the tabloids just published a cell phone photo somebody snapped in the bar at the Hyatt, in Reston, Virginia. Tasia’s telling the bartender to hand her the entire bottle of Stolichnaya.”

  “That’s not a shocker,” Jo said.

  “Shortly afterward, the same citizen snapped a man leaving the Hyatt vi
a the loading dock.”

  They walked down the hill. Jo spread her hands. And?

  “It was nighttime. But the tabloids enhanced the photo. There’s no question. It’s Robert McFarland.” Tang lit her smoke. “Hail to the Chief.”

  21

  CAN YOU PROVE THEY MET?” JO SAID. “I was afraid you were going to ask.”

  “But you don’t think Tasia and the president were both at the Hyatt for a quilting bee.”

  “No. They were having a private summit.”

  Jo’s pulse beat like a conga. “Last night at the White House press conference, a reporter asked McFarland if he’d spoken to Tasia recently. He said no.” She reran it in her head. “I’m sure he said no.”

  “He lied.”

  “That means—”

  “Don’t say it,” Tang said. “I know what it means. It means you’re going to stick your finger in an electric socket.”

  Tang was right. The implications washed over her like a wall of water. They filled her with trepidation and excitement.

  “So do I call the White House switchboard, or can you get me the number for the president’s private secretary?” she said.

  WHEN JO HAD asked Searle Lecroix for an interview, it had been a piece of cake. It had been a piece of pecan pie. Reaching the president of the United States was another matter. Getting a chance to ask him, directly, about meeting his first wife three days before she was killed with his gun, would be like lassoing an ICBM in flight.

  Tang left Jo outside UCSF Medical Center, with a list of names and phone numbers at the White House. Jo gazed across Parnassus and down the hill, past the pale stone of Saint Ignatius Church and the University of San Francisco, across the forested hills of The Presidio, to the Golden Gate Bridge. The Pacific and the bay shone in the sun like mercury.

  She took out her phone. She couldn’t Facebook McFarland, or leave a comment on the First Lady’s Twitter feed, or crash through the White House Rose Garden and knock on the window of the Oval Office.

  She cleared her throat. She was a professional. She had the duty and the authority to do this. She punched in the switchboard number.

  “White House.”

  She stifled a whimper and the urge to squeal, Omigod, omigod. She asked to speak to Sylvia Obote, the president’s secretary. When Obote answered, “Office of the president,” Jo heard her own voice wobble like an unbalanced bicycle tire.

  “This is Dr. Johanna Beckett calling from San Francisco.”

  “How may I help you?”

  Just speak. The woman is not going to ban you from the White House tour for daring to call. “I’m conducting a psychological autopsy on Fawn Tasia McFarland for the San Francisco Police Department.”

  Silence.

  “I’m reconstructing Ms. McFarland’s final days. It’s important that I speak to the president about his meeting with her.”

  Obote must have been expecting something like this call. “If you’ll e-mail me your bona fides and attach a list of questions, I’ll forward them to the White House counsel.”

  “Certainly. I’d be grateful for any information the president can give me, and I’m aware that his time is valuable.” Suck-up. “But time is also of the essence to the investigation. Speaking to the president directly will be of even greater value than having an e-mail exchange.”

  Obote reeled off an e-mail address. “I’ll forward your request to the appropriate people.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Obote.”

  Obote ended the call. Jo held the phone like it was glowing red. She wondered whether Obote would go back to filing her nails and moving tiny armies around the board in the game of Risk she was playing on her desk, or whether black helicopters and parabolic microphones and men with tiny earpieces were even now being moved into position outside her house on Russian Hill.

  Maybe this was how paranoia began.

  WHEN JO PULLED into Gabe’s driveway, the evening star was skimming the western hills. His two-bedroom home in Noe Valley was tucked beneath a live oak on a quiet street, packed in among houses filled with young families. His 4Runner was in the drive. The leaves of the live oak rustled in the night wind. She rapped on the door.

  When Gabe opened it, his face was shadowed. Even without seeing his eyes she knew he was exhausted.

  She held back. “Bad time?”

  He pulled her inside, wrapped her in his arms, and buried his face in her hair. “Never.”

  The lights were amber. The house smelled like strong coffee. His laptop was open on the living room coffee table.

  “How’s Sophie?” Jo said.

  “Sleeping like a zombie. Moaning and puking.”

  Arm around her shoulder, he headed to the living room, dropped onto the sofa, and pulled her down beside him. On the wall hung prints of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Hindu Kush, beside watercolors Sophie had painted in bold greens and blues. Next to the computer, a marked-up chapter of his dissertation slumped across a copy of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. He stared at them vacantly.

  Whenever Jo asked him why he’d chosen to study theology, he gave her facile reasons. “I was a good little altar boy” was his favorite.

  But few air force enlisted men chose to study Catholic moral theology as a career plan. His courses provided a respite from the rough world where he worked. But she suspected that something personal underlay his quest to unpeel the universe. Perhaps it was a longing for connection, or an ache he wanted to soothe. He wasn’t mystical. He didn’t bow to doctrine, or pine for stigmata. At times he tunneled into his studies, attempting to connect with an eternity that surrounded the broken world of time and space he was stumbling through.

  Sometimes she liked that. But sometimes she felt a grabbing sensation in her chest, and wished that, instead, he would bury himself in her life.

  And Gabe’s pensive side was at odds with his professional life as a pararescue jumper. At Moffett Field, the motto of pararescue was written on a hangar wall in letters six feet tall: SO THAT OTHERS MAY LIVE. On the back of those words, he threw himself bodily into the abyss, day after day.

  His chief master sergeant had once joked to Jo that a PJ’s job boils down to “recess with toys.” In search and rescue work they skydived, drove snowmobiles and Jet Skis and ATVs—sometimes straight off the loading ramp of a transport plane. They scuba dived, and jumped out of helicopters and fixed-wing military aircraft. They didn’t earn movie-star salaries. They weren’t famous like Delta Force or the Navy SEALs. They ate adrenaline for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and sometimes they got thrown onto the front lines in combat, performing rescues and surgery on the battlefield.

  Sometimes they flew five hundred miles offshore to rescue sailors from a burning ship. She laced her hand with his. His face was drawn.

  “The merchant tanker was sinking when we reached it. Fire started in the engine room but had spread out of control by the time we arrived on scene,” he said. “Three crewmen were already dead. Fire, or drowned belowdecks. Eighteen others had gone into the water. Only half of them got into their survival suits beforehand. And three-quarters couldn’t swim.”

  “Bad day at black rock,” she said.

  “We rescued four.”

  “Thank God.”

  He nodded. But Jo sensed that more was coming. She hung on to his hand. He leaned back and closed his eyes.

  “Dave Rabin got hurt.”

  “Bad?”

  “A bulkhead failed from the heat of the fire. It blew out and caught Dave in the back of the head.”

  “Where is he?”

  “ICU at the General. In a coma.”

  Against her instincts, she didn’t try to salve him. She simply held tight to his hand. Gabe didn’t add anything to his brief report. He didn’t want to talk about it. Like so much. Like his past, and his air force days.

  She knew that he didn’t want to show weakness in front of her. And he didn’t want Jo to be afraid for him. He wanted her to stand behind him. And she was a physician—to speak reas
suring words about Rabin’s condition, about his chances of survival and recovery, would have rung false.

  Gabe ran his hands roughly across his face. Finally he turned to her. The lights were warm. His eyes seemed fraught and yearning. Without a word he stood and led her upstairs.

  He shut the bedroom door. The lights were off, the window open. Beyond plum trees and crowded rooftops and the city’s knitting yarn of phone and electrical wires, the western sky had deepened to indigo. Overhead, the stars poured down.

  He picked her up and swung her onto the bed. He rolled on top of her, raked his fingers into her hair, and kissed her.

  He hauled her sweater over her head. She fumbled his T-shirt off. He pressed her against the pillow and worked his way down her body, kissing her neck, her chest, her ribs. He unbuttoned her jeans and kissed her belly button.

  In the half-light from the window she saw the bruises on his neck. They extended in an angry line down across his clavicle and along the right side of his chest. She saw the old scars by his hip, the ones he didn’t talk about. The ones she was still waiting for him to explain.

  Jo tried to slow him down but he seemed famished. He threw off the covers and wrangled her to the center of the bed.

  He didn’t look at her but put his head next to hers and wrapped himself around her. His heart pounded against her chest. A part of her wanted to speak, to pause, to savor his body against hers, to tell him what he meant to her, how she ached for what he was feeling. But in the dark, adrift on pain and regret, he wanted only to prove that he was still alive. They made love fiercely, clinging to each other, their bodies growing hot. At the end she reached overhead to grab the headboard and steady herself. He threw himself against her over and over, his eyes shut tight, and she bit his shoulder to stifle her own cry.

  Afterward, he held tight for a minute, chest heaving. He rolled away and lay on his back, spent. Then he pulled her against his side and stroked her hair.

  Finally, in her ear, he whispered, “Thank you.”

  She wanted to say, Stay with me. Don’t leave. Let me in. Be mine. But as he stared at the ceiling, she shut her eyes and said, “Any time.”

  22