The Liar's Lullaby

by Meg Gardiner

  You are NMP. Badass bastard. A man nobody wants to mess with.

  But things were near catastrophe. Shh. Tasia is bad. She’s dangerous. NMP stuck the computer in a backpack. He needed to get online, needed to see if there were any messages for him. Hush, precious love, don’t tell, they’ll ruin you, they’ll ruin everything.

  Mr. Don’t-mess-with-me got the car antenna he’d torn from the old pickup truck, telescoped it down, and put it in the pocket of the jean jacket. Looking at the walls of the hotel room, Tasia’s beautiful hideous cow face, her kissing Searle, waving to the president, NMP inhaled and left to begin the hunt.

  28

  THE CABLE CAR CLATTERED UP RUSSIAN HILL. JO STOOD ON THE outside steps and hung on against the steep angle. She drank from her ever-ready stainless steel coffee mug. Apartment buildings and struggling pedestrians slid past. The cable car crested the lip of the hill and stopped at the corner. She hopped down. Immediately a Japanese tour group swarmed aboard, eager, smiling, dressed spotlessly in Burberry. The gripman rang the bell. Jo crossed the street and saw another group, clustered on the sidewalk outside her house.

  Cameras. Boom mikes. Makeup and cigarettes.

  Her face heated. How the hell did the press get her address? And if she threw herself headfirst into the hedge, would they see?

  She veered across the street, pulled out her phone, and hit speed dial. A second later she heard, “Tang.”

  “They found me. The press is parked outside my front door.”

  “Christ.”

  “How? Somebody from the police department?”

  “I hope not.”

  Jo continued along the sidewalk beside the park across the street from her house. In the middle of the press pack was a blond mane. Jo thought her head might explode.

  “Edie freakin’ Wilson’s here. What am I supposed to do, hide until dark, when they go in search of alcohol?”

  “Beckett, I’m sorry. But you’re going to have to soldier through it.”

  “I know. And dammit, I can’t run from my own house.” She hung up.

  At the far end of the block an engine revved. She glanced up. In her head she heard a bugle, heralding the arrival of the cavalry. Gabe’s 4Runner was waiting at the corner. Behind the wheel, he waved for her to hurry.

  She picked up her pace. And a man in a wrinkled black shirt, who was sitting on her lawn, pointed.

  “Hey,” he called. “Jo Beckett.”

  The herd turned around. She kept going. Shit.

  “Doctor.”

  “Jo, wait.”

  Gabe’s truck was a hundred yards away.

  “Jo, did Tasia kill herself?”

  Edie Wilson’s strident voice carried on the breeze. “Who killed Tasia McFarland, Dr. Beckett?”

  They swarmed from the sidewalk between parked cars and streamed across the street. Ahead, Gabe pulled out and drove toward her. My getaway driver, she thought, with a surge of affection.

  “Why are you running away? What are you trying to hide?” Wilson called.

  Jo stopped.

  She couldn’t run away. Gathering herself, she turned and walked toward them. Microphones sprouted near her face like pinecones. Shutters clicked.

  “Jo—”

  “Tell us—”

  Stick to the script. She raised a hand to quiet them. “I’m afraid I can’t answer most of your questions, because my investigation is ongoing. Once I file my report, I’ll be able to describe my findings.”

  “How many shots were fired from the Colt forty-five?” a man shouted.

  “Is it true Tasia posted a suicide note on Twitter? Was the site hacked to delete it?”

  “Is the intruder who attacked Tasia’s biographer a staffer for the McFarland reelection campaign?”

  The questions felt like spittle. “Sorry, I can’t answer those”—dumbass—“questions.”

  Gabe pulled up behind them and stopped in the middle of the street.

  Edie Wilson turned a shoulder edge-on to the pack and chipped her way to the front. She shoved a microphone in Jo’s face like a spear. “Why didn’t the Secret Service protect her?”

  Jo blinked and her lips parted.

  “Were they directed not to?” Wilson said.

  The question was so mind-bogglingly inane that, momentarily, Jo simply stared. “Ms. McFarland didn’t have a Secret Service protection detail.”

  “Why not? Were they pulled off the case?”

  “No.” Under the glare of the cameras, she tried to think. What, exactly, were the rules on Secret Service protection? “I believe that Secret Service protection is limited to the president’s immediate family. If—”

  “If Tasia wasn’t immediate family, who is?” Wilson said.

  Gabe gunned his engine. Over the tops of the reporters’ heads Jo saw him through the 4Runner’s window, waiting grimly.

  “Excuse me, but that’s my ride,” Jo said. “As soon as I’ve finished my report the SFPD will issue a statement.”

  She dodged the pack like a broken field runner and headed for the 4Runner. Wilson dogged her.

  “Why don’t you want people to know the truth?” she said.

  Don’t rise to the bait. “I’m digging for the truth.”

  “What can psychiatry offer to this case other than fuzzy feelings and soft excuses?”

  Jo grabbed the door handle and held on, tight, to keep from taking a swing at Wilson. She got in the 4Runner and through force of will, smiled pleasantly. Like a Miss America contestant. Who had a pit bull biting her ass.

  Wilson blabbered about subjectivity and excuse-making. Jo heard the subtext. What are you hiding? Don’t you love America?

  Through gritted teeth, she said, “Drive.”

  Gabe put it in gear. “Over them?”

  Jo pointed down the street. He pulled out.

  She put on her seat belt and forced herself not to look back. She knew if she did, she’d see pitchforks and torches.

  “Thanks for the rescue.”

  “Where to?” he said.

  “Anyplace.” She got her phone. “Except Lombard Street. They could catch us on the twisty part.”

  She phoned Vienna Hicks to warn her that national heavy hitters had joined the roving press pack. Vienna’s laugh was bold and melancholy. “I don’t talk to them. The head of the law firm issued a statement on behalf of ‘the family.’ That’s it. No tears, no gossip, no hissy fits. Good luck, Jo. Welcome to the blender.”

  Gabe gunned the truck up the hill past Victorian apartment buildings with blue and gold gables. Behind his sunglasses, his face remained solemn.

  “Great timing, dude,” she said.

  “I was in the neighborhood.”

  That wasn’t it. “You just decided to drop by?”

  He stopped at a stop sign. No traffic was coming, but he didn’t pull out. He stared emptily up the cross street. Something was wrong.

  “Did you go by the hospital to see Dave Rabin?” she said.

  “Only family’s allowed in the ICU. I didn’t get to see him, just talked to his wife.”

  Jo put a hand on his knee.

  “No change.” Lowering his shoulders, almost physically snapping himself back, he pulled out. The sun fell in a stripe across his face. “He needs to wake up.”

  And wake up now. The longer Rabin stayed unconscious, the less likely it was that he would ever come back. She kept her hand on Gabe’s knee. His hands were tight on the steering wheel.

  “What?” he said.

  “I was about to ask you the same thing.”

  Apartment buildings streamed by as they headed down a steep hill. He pulled off his shades and pinched the bridge of his nose. The laugh lines around his eyes looked tired. He looked as if he couldn’t bring himself to talk.

  “What is it?”

  “I’ve been driving for an hour. I . . .”

  He wouldn’t look at her. She tried to puzzle it out and couldn’t.

  “Sophie?” she said.

 
“She’s improving. Stayed home from school today, but she’s better. My sister came over to stay with her so I could go by the hospital.”

  “Gabe, what’s wrong?”

  He stared dead ahead. “I got new orders today.”

  It took her a second. “New military orders?”

  “I report for duty in seventy-two hours.”

  All at once the sun felt hot and painfully bright. “You’re serious.”

  “I report Friday morning. Fly to New York, transiting to Afghanistan next week.”

  The summer sun hardened into a yellow light that seemed to screech in her ears and fill the car with the noise of blowing sand.

  “Next week. Next week—Afghanistan?”

  “No joke.”

  She blinked. Jesus God, going active, straight into a war zone, and PJs didn’t wear a red cross on their sleeve, they performed combat search and rescue. The yellow light jaundiced everything in the truck: her hands, the air, Gabe’s rugged, beautiful face, which was set like stone. She couldn’t cry. Had to keep it under control.

  “What happened?” she said.

  “It’s the United States military. It’s a vast, relentless bureaucratic machine. Somebody changed my orders. I say, Yes, sir, I’ll go where you point me, sir.”

  She was gripping his leg so hard that her hand was trembling. She pulled it back into her lap. Maintain. Clear your head of that awful sound, that rush like radio static, bright and harsh, that filled the car and pressed on her until she couldn’t breathe.

  There had to be a mistake. He could talk to his commanding officer and find out how the paperwork had gotten screwed up.

  A cold fever swept through her, a moment of panic. The abyss yawned open and showed her a glimpse of its black depths, the eternity that swallowed people whole and snuffed out, their breath, their hearts, their promise.

  She dug her fingernails into her palms. For a hideous instant Daniel’s face appeared before her, his eyes pinned on her in the seconds before the abyss drew him into the irrevocable realm of death.

  She shut her eyes. Stop it, Beckett. “Have you told Sophie?”

  “No. I got the call while I was at the hospital.”

  Gabe didn’t need her mewling. He had sought her out. She had to stand up.

  “Pull over,” she said.

  He looked at her. She nodded at the curb. He pulled over and stopped.

  Jo got out. A moment later Gabe did as well. He walked around to the sidewalk.

  She took his hands in hers, gripped them fiercely, and put them to her lips.

  “Anything,” she whispered. “Whatever you need. You say the word. You don’t say the word, and it’s still anything. I’m with you.”

  He nodded.

  She swallowed, and opened her mouth to speak. He drew her close. Pulled her head onto his shoulder, held her, rested his head against hers.

  Seventy-two hours. How could orders get changed so quickly, and so radically? She thought of everything he had worked painstakingly to arrange. Sophie, and the custody arrangement. Dawn. Would Dawn now try to take custody of Sophie?

  He spoke into her ear. “It’s going to be fine.”

  She nodded. Seventy-two hours. It was nowhere close to fine.

  “I’ll be back. We’ll make things work. I love you, Jo.”

  She held on to him. The wind poured over her back.

  29

  PAINE TAPPED HIS KEYBOARD, SORTING THROUGH MORE OF THE photos Keyes had sent him. The television was tuned to a news channel, the constant, flickering background to his life. News channels offered hints about reality, distortions that barely touched the heaving, snarling, matted- fur actuality that lurked beneath, hidden from view. News wasn’t effective mass communication; it was an opiate of the sheeple.

  The only truly effective form of mass communication was political violence. And Paine was its messenger.

  And though he was a superb writer, his biggest impact had been . . . call it performance art, rather than essays. A fire here, an electrical mishap there, a severed brake line someplace else. The key was, he never attacked the target directly. The people who hired him paid lots of money to make sure he didn’t. All he had to do was get an assignment: Convince this state senator that his vote on the highway bill was ill informed. Show that community organizer that she shouldn’t protest chemical dumping in protected wetlands.

  And Paine, though that’s not what he called himself during these—lobbying efforts—would do so. He’d persuade the state senator to vote intelligently. Maybe his granddaughter would show up for kindergarten to find that her school had burned down. That’s all it took. That, and a matchbook that arrived in the mail at the senator’s office the same day.

  But now he had a major problem.

  He was in San Francisco working on the biggest message of his career. This message was to be his legacy, his gift to the nation, and his retirement fund, wrapped up in one spectacular package. But his meticulously constructed scheme was close to collapse, thanks to traitors, vultures, and Legion’s legions. Plan A had turned to dust, and Plan B was hanging by a thread.

  The thing was, he had already been paid half his fee in advance. He couldn’t fail. If he didn’t finish the job, didn’t get the message out, he wouldn’t simply lose the second half of his payday. He’d get a bullet to the head.

  The television screen flickered. Paine looked up. The report switched to a shot of a San Francisco neighborhood. Reporters jostled to intercept a young woman with long brown curls. A caption read Jo Beckett, Forensic Psychiatrist.

  Edie Wilson shoved a microphone in Beckett’s face. “Why didn’t the Secret Service protect her? Were they directed not to?”

  Paine stilled. A poisonous vine tangled itself around him.

  They might go after Beckett next. And she would talk. He watched her on the screen, a slight woman with a calming voice, parrying the reporters’ bombardment. Easy, when all that was at stake was her dignity and self-control. Impossible, when the Usurper’s storm troopers tore through her life.

  He looked at the photos Keyes had sent. Beckett, her hair blowing in the breeze as she stood outside the St. Francis. She knew too much. She needed to get the message. And he was the man to send it.

  30

  GABE DROVE JO HOME, BUT FIRST HE DID RECON. HE CRUISED PAST her street, just fast enough that he wouldn’t look like a burglar casing the neighborhood. They saw no signs of a press presence, such as neighbors dragging themselves down the street with their legs as neighbors dragging themselves down the street with their legs gnawed off by ruthless questioning.

  Jo’s face felt hot. “I pride myself on my belief in free speech. But I want to jab those people with a cattle prod until they squeal like broken microphones.”

  “ ‘And crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea.’ ” Gabe glanced in the rearview mirror. “Love of country is full of contradictions.”

  America, America, tearing him away—and he’d signed up for it. Her stomach clenched again.

  When he stopped outside her house, he said, “Come over tonight. They’ll be back, and you don’t have to be here.”

  “I’ll grab some things and clear out before they show up again.”

  His face was intense, his eyes poring over her, almost swallowing her up. She leaned across the cab and kissed him. Then she jumped out and ran up her front steps.

  Inside she hurried upstairs and stuffed clothes in a backpack. In her office, she gathered her notes. Don’t think about Gabe’s new orders, she told herself. But the rough hand of fear grabbed her by the throat. And in the depths of her mind, a worm of suspicion began to stir. Why Gabe? Why now?

  “No.” She shook her head. That kind of thinking was paranoid.

  She picked up her files to put them in her satchel. On the top of the stack were e-mails Archangel X had sent Tasia.

  Why did you do this to me? You could have any man on the planet. And you betrayed me.

  I’m waiting for you.
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  Beneath that message were more in the same vein. Angry, rambling, ambiguous, self-absorbed messages, bemoaning Archangel’s own sad sorry life and punctuated by sharp jabs at Tasia for ruining things. Once again Jo felt that she had missed some meaning in the messages. Maybe that was because Archangel was an out-of-whack personality, prone to whiny, recursive navel gazing. But Jo had the nagging sense that the messages could be deciphered, that she should be able to get inside Archangel’s frame of reference, and find out what his reality was.

  Her phone rang, loud and close. She jumped. Picked it up with her heart jitterbugging.

  “Jo, I’ve found him,” Ferd said. “I’ve found Archangel X.”

  NMP HUNCHED OVER the table and stared at the computer screen. The place was annoyingly noisy. Nasal voices, businessmen laughing at some kind of financial wizardry they’d performed, dishes and silverware clattering. It degraded NMP’s ability to concentrate. The Big Bad Bastard needed some mental space in order to focus.

  Tasia’s official Web site had been updated. The front page read In memory, with a soft-focus photo in which she looked about seventeen and ready to recite the Pledge of Allegiance at a 4-H Club convention.

  Appropriate. A cow, mooing to the cows.

  Hush, precious love. Don’t tell anybody. It’s dangerous.

  Almost two hundred thousand people had digitally signed the site’s condolence book. The comments expressing sympathy ran into the thousands. And new information had just been added: The memorial service was confirmed for Grace Cathedral.

  The Web site pretended the memorial service was the farewell performance to end them all. But it wasn’t; just a pathetic encore to Tasia’s exit from the stage at the ballpark. The site didn’t list the celebrities who planned to attend, but a little window had links to the latest news—read that, screaming pop gossip and headlines about their dead heroine—and those headlines listed the famous and glittering and sickening people who were going to dress in designer black and grab hymnals and weep crocodile tears over the cow in the casket. The head of Tasia’s record company. The mayor. The winners of twenty-five cumulative Grammys.