The Liar's Lullaby

by Meg Gardiner

  Tasia McFarland had been a message too. Her death was collateral damage. Today’s damage would strike harder, spread deeper. Today’s damage would not be merely collateral, or family-oriented, though that was his specialty. And really, “family” could not truly describe the relationship of the Usurper and the new succubus who shared his bed. Today’s damage would be direct and irrevocable. It would light the fire, the big one, the one that would cleanse and purge the nation.

  Stuffing his own clothes in the sports bag, he walked out of the men’s room, staring straight ahead. Man in a company uniform, quiet, bland—he would blend with the furniture, the background, and a crowd. He would become invisible.

  So when he struck, it would seem to come straight out of nowhere.

  50

  JO PAUSED OUTSIDE WAYMIRE & FONG’S ART DECO OFFICE BUILDING. She kicked off one of her heels to get rid of a pebble. She braced a hand against the wall of the building and, for a moment, wished this weren’t a city street but a mountainside, that this wind was funneling between spires in the high country, beckoning her to funneling between spires in the high country, beckoning her to climb.

  All the mountains could do was kill her. They wouldn’t laugh over her grave and toast their success at dragging her name through the mud. They wouldn’t punish her lover. They wouldn’t shoulder her aside when she tried to warn people of danger.

  She put her shoe back on, smoothed her hair, and entered the building to face K. T. Lewicki.

  PARKED BENEATH A freeway interchange outside San Francisco airport, Ivory held a map and talked into her phone, though nobody was on the other end. Overhead, foreign jumbo jets lugged themselves into the air, engines annoying the hell out of her already ragged nerves.

  Half a mile away, a gate in the airport fence rolled open. On the tarmac Ivory saw seagulls, coast guard planes, private jets, and in the distance, the white-and-blue paint on the 747 with the lettering on the side that said UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

  Through the gate came a parade of police motorcycles and black Chevy Suburbans. They accelerated and roared past, three vehicles, four—how did you know which one the bastard was riding in?—and zoomed onto the freeway.

  She dropped the map, started the car, and pulled out to follow them.

  THE RECEPTIONIST AT Waymire & Fong, Dana Jean, invited Jo to take a seat, but Jo couldn’t sit still. She paced in front of the windows. Below on Sacramento Street, traffic burbled in the gleaming day.

  A constant stream of people headed for the elevators. The office was emptying out. Everybody was heading for the memorial service.

  Her phone rang. She saw Gabe on the display and her nerves sparked, hotter. “Hey.”

  “Jo Beckett, Harpy Slayer. I don’t know how you did it, but I want to hear. In lingering, sarcastic detail.”

  She grinned. “I’m at a meeting downtown, can I—”

  “I’ll pick you up. I’ve got forty-five minutes free today, and I want to spend them carrying you around on my shoulders. You can howl like a warrior queen. Change your name to Boudicca. Where are you?”

  Still grinning, she gave him the address. “See you soon,” she said, and hung up, feeling better than she had in days.

  “Jo.”

  Vienna strode into the lobby. She was wearing a black suit with a jacket that swept below her knees like a duster, and a red silk blouse with ruffles like exploding roses. In black patent leather boots, she was six foot two. She looked like the new sheriff from the land of the Amazons, riding into town to clear out the outlaws.

  Her smile was rueful. “Tasia wouldn’t want me to dress like a mouse. We are going to celebrate her in style.”

  She locked her elbow around Jo’s and swept her down the hall to her office. “It’s going to be beautiful. Music, flowers—the concert promoter paid for the sound system, and bless dumb old Ace Chennault, he spent an hour at the funeral home helping with the floral arrangements.” She smiled. “Ready for Kelvin?”

  “You bet.”

  “Sure you are. Want a Zoloft or something?” She laughed. “Kidding. You should see your face.”

  She cleared a pile of papers from a chair for Jo. “Lewicki’s a pussycat. And by that, I mean he’s a blood letter. But he’ll listen, as a favor to me. For ten seconds. After that, you’d better hold his attention.”

  Jo wiped her palms on her slacks. “I’m ready.”

  TWO HUNDRED YARDS behind the Presidential motorcade in downtown San Francisco, Ivory was stuck at a stoplight. The armada of SUVs and police motorcycles had raced up the freeway and along the waterfront—grandstanding, sirens blaring, El Presidente telling the peons to get the fuck out of his way. Ivory stuck her head out the window of her car to see past traffic, and spotted the motorcade pulling into the Hyatt Regency at the Embarcadero Center. So that’s where Legion was going to stay until the memorial service. The lap of luxury.

  She called Keyes. “Hyatt Regency. They just drove into the garage.”

  “On my way,” he said.

  The light turned green. She veered across lanes and raced ahead of traffic. But when she reached the turn-in to the hotel, the cops had blocked it off. She braked, swearing.

  And she saw that one of the SUVs hadn’t driven into the hotel’s underground garage. It was idling at the curb. Its doors opened and two young suits hopped out and bustled toward the hotel. Then the SUV pulled out behind a police motorcycle and headed toward the heart of the Financial District.

  “One of the Suburbans just drove off. What if it’s him?” Ivory said.

  “Just one?”

  “With an escort.”

  Keyes was quiet a second. “Follow it.”

  “What if it’s not? Doesn’t he ride in a special car—the Beast?”

  “That’s Secret Service disinformation. Nobody actually knows which vehicle he’s in. The point is, he’s either in the Suburban that just pulled out . . .”

  “Or he’s at the Hyatt. But if he did just drive away—”

  “Then we’ll get the jump on him.”

  She sped up and cut around the Hyatt toward the Financial District. When she turned the corner, the black Suburban was fifty yards ahead.

  VIENNA BROUGHT JO a cup of scorched instant coffee. “What’s this?”

  Jo had spread copies of Tasia’s last songs on Vienna’s desk. “Your sister wrote puzzles into these songs. Can you help me decipher them?”

  Vienna bent over the music. Just as she did, Jo’s phone rang. Ferd Bismuth.

  “Excuse me.” She answered. “Has Mr. Peebles recovered from playing Mad Max?”

  “Mr. P saw a replay of the incident on television and threw a bowl of oatmeal at the screen. I fear that now he has a complex about blondes. My heavens, the way that woman screamed.”

  Yes, it was Mr. Peebles who had the complex.

  “I’ve been digging around online, tracing Archangel X,” he said.

  “Why?” she said. “What have you found?”

  “Strange connections. Archangel commented on political forums that discussed Tasia’s link with the president. To be precise, right-wing forums that talked down Searle Lecroix as a ‘betrayer of the cause’ because he was sleeping with ‘the enemy.’ You know, because Tasia was once married—”

  “Got it. Archangel was trawling for mentions of Searle online, defending him in cyberspace.”

  “Basically. And she got some push-back. A character named Paine.”

  “As in infliction of?”

  “As in Thomas. Jo, this guy isn’t just any Internet troll. He has a following. And he’s extreme. He runs a site called Tree of Liberty.”

  “I know that site—Tasia visited it. It’s ugly.”

  “It’s given me indigestion and a definite shortness of breath. This guy, I’m not exaggerating, he’s a guru to some of the extreme antigovernment people out there. And he was slapping Archangel around, brutally, in the forums. There’s also an e- mail reply from her to him. They were sending each other personal messages.�
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  Vienna glanced at Jo and frowned. “What?”

  Ferd said, “I’ll forward the e- mails to you. But there’s more. Archangel thought she was having an e-mail correspondence with Searle Lecroix.”

  Jo stood up as straight as a stick. “What?”

  “I . . . oh gosh, I managed to get a peek into her Hotmail account. Don’t ask me how, because I’ll break out in a rash. But she was e-mailing somebody she thought was Lecroix. Somebody who wrote her love notes and told her to keep quiet about it all.”

  “Ferd, the police need to see those.”

  “I know. I’m going to call them, right away. But here’s the thing. I think the ‘Lecroix’ e-mails came from an address associated with Tom Paine.”

  Jo went quiet. Ferd talked about IP addresses and traceroutes and X-Originating e-mails. Her head was ringing.

  “And one other thing. Petty made a reference that just seems . . . spooky. Archangel wrote to Paine and said something about a matchbook.”

  Jo stilled. “What about it?”

  “She said, ‘You sent it, didn’t you? Are you trying to burn me?’ ”

  Jo tried to slot the information into the missing pieces of the puzzle. “Thanks, Ferd. Call Captain Bohr, right away.”

  Vienna eyed her. “Good news?”

  “Maybe major.” Tom Paine, goading Noel Petty with fake love letters? What was going on?

  Vienna picked up Tasia’s sheet music. “We only have a minute. What did you want to know?”

  Jo focused. “Tasia told both Lecroix and the stuntman that the truth was in her music. There has to be meaning in here.”

  They leaned over the pages and read the lyrics. After me, what’ll you do? The song was written in 4/4 time. No sharps or flats. The chords were too dense for Jo to decipher by sight. She picked up a pencil, found a piece of scratch paper, and wrote down the chord progression. C-E-A-C . . . D-E . . .

  It was all of a piece. Independently, the words and music each made partial sense. But the composition only truly held together as a whole: lyrics, melody, harmony, arrangement.

  After me . . .

  The refrain began on the downbeat. The melodic line hovered around C while a riff went on below it in the accompaniment.

  He wants me . . .

  She tried to decipher the chord. “Vienna?”

  “It’s a D, just voiced differently.”

  It still didn’t make sense. Then Tasia’s manic soliloquy popped back into her head. Not just A, B, C, but Do, Re, Mi.

  “When you play Do-Re-Mi it starts on what?” she said. “Middle C?”

  “No. Depends on the key. It starts on the first note of the scale. D, if it’s in the key of D. G, if it’s in G.”

  “And this song is in C, right? No sharps or flats.”

  Vienna shook her head. “A minor.” Her phone rang. She answered, listened, and said, “Thanks.”

  Jo scribbled:Do = A

  Re = B

  Mi = C

  Fa = D

  Sol = E

  La = F

  Ti = G

  Do = A

  Vienna hung up. “Time’s up, puzzle girl. Lewicki’s here.”

  IVORY WATCHED THE black Suburban pull up outside a sleek office building in the Financial District. She was eighty yards behind it in heavy traffic on a one-way street. A Muni bus partially blocked her view. The Suburban stopped and somebody climbed out. But she couldn’t see who.

  She called Keyes. “Sacramento Street. Big gray stone building. The Gub SUV stopped out in front.”

  “You sure?” Keyes said.

  “Positive. I can’t see what’s happening because a bus is in my way, but—”

  The brief whoop of a siren jolted her. She looked in the rearview mirror. A motorcycle cop was behind her, face hidden behind mirrored sunglasses. His lights were flashing.

  “Porky pig. Oh God,” she said.

  “Be cool. Get off the phone. Maybe he’s after somebody else.”

  The cop pointed at her.

  “He wants me. Keyes, he’s onto me. I don’t know how, but—”

  “Don’t panic. Ivory, be a law- abiding citizen and go with traffic when the light changes. I’m on my way. Just drive. See if he’s after somebody else.”

  “No, he wants me. If he stops me and sees my driver’s license, he’ll know for sure. I can’t let him. Keyes, this is it. This is fucking it.”

  “Ivory, no—”

  She dropped the phone. The light changed. She screeched away from the intersection, zooming past the Muni bus. She grabbed a glance at the black Suburban. It had its flashers on. It was definitely planning to stay outside the office building.

  Behind her, the cop burst from traffic in pursuit. His lights were hysterical in her mirror, blue and red. His face was a shiny mask.

  They knew. They’d found her out, and they were hunting her down, the cops who had murdered Noel, shot Noel in the head. The Gub and its machinery were going to take her off the board.

  The cop hit his siren again, a bright yelp. Ahead the traffic light turned yellow. She gunned it through the intersection and headed up the hill toward Chinatown. But after a hundred yards, traffic snarled. Damn, damn, damn.

  She had no choice, and no time. She had to act. She braked and pulled to the curb. She clenched her fists so they wouldn’t shake. The cop parked his bike behind her. In the mirror, she watched him approach.

  She felt under the driver’s seat for the Glock.

  51

  VIENNA BECKONED JO. “REMEMBER, LEWICKI WILL GO FOR YOUR knees. Get him around the throat first.”

  Jo grabbed the sheet music from the desk. Vienna led her to a conference room at the end of the hall, where sunlight fell through tall windows onto a burnished teak table. On a credenza, beneath a plasma-screen television, coffee was set out on a silver tray.

  “I’ll get Kel,” Vienna said. “Shake out your nerves before we get back.”

  Jo spread the music on the table. “After Me.” The lyrics read, What’s next? Who’s next? On her scratch paper, she wrote down the notes in the melody. B. G. C. D. F. A.

  Do-re-mi. On her cheat sheet—the decoder pad—she translated. Re-Ti-Mi-Fa-La-Do.

  Did it mean anything? She mouthed it, separating the mini musical words. Re. Ti.

  The door opened and Vienna swirled through. She stepped aside to reveal the man who’d been eclipsed behind her Shootout-at-the-OK-Corral suit.

  K. T. Lewicki’s small, bull terrier eyes zeroed on Jo. He looked like he could barely keep his teeth sheathed. For a second Jo thought he was going to throw a chair through the windows.

  Vienna hadn’t told him Jo was going to be there. She shot Vienna a look. Vienna merely inhaled and said, “Kel, this is Doctor Beckett.”

  Jo extended her hand. “Thanks for taking the time, Mr. Lewicki.”

  Brusquely, he shook. “Vi has powers of persuasion.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  His little eyes blinked in his bullet head. For a moment, he seemed disarmed. Then he checked his watch. “I have ten minutes.”

  “I won’t waste them. The single point I must emphasize is that I believe there’s a threat to the president’s safety.”

  “The Secret Service is here in force.”

  “The night Tasia died she was fearful. She was possibly homicidal. That should concern you.”

  “The president can’t shed any light on that.” Lewicki stuck his hands in his pockets and walked to the windows.

  “I can’t take your word for that. Tasia and Searle Lecroix are dead. And the president can certainly shed light on why Tasia showed up at the concert armed with his Colt forty-five.”

  “The media has made hay over that, but reasonable people understand that the president hadn’t seen that weapon in twenty years.”

  “The president hadn’t seen Tasia in almost twenty years, either, yet last week he secretly met with her in Virginia. Three days later, she left Searle Lecroix a message saying things had gone hay
wire, that her life was in danger, and that if she died, quote, ‘It means the countdown’s on.’ ”

  Lewicki paced in front of the windows as if positioning himself. As if other people were opponents. Or lunch. Pausing, he opened a window and drew a breath of fresh air. The sounds of city traffic floated in. He stared down at the street.

  “Prove that’s a threat to the president. Give me one good reason,” he said.

  IN THEWING mirror, Ivory watched the motorcycle cop approach her car. That helmet and mirrored sunglasses, the tight uniform, like the Gestapo.

  They knew she was using her sister’s ID. Her driver’s license had Noel’s name on it. Her lousy sister, Noel, fat crazy Noel who only loved music and singers and for that got shot in the head by the same SFPD that was now storming toward her car.

  She set the Glock on her lap. She looked out the windshield at the street. Crowded, packed with cars and trucks parked for delivery, pedestrians, skyscrapers. Nowhere to run. The cop swelled in the mirror, his badge filling it.

  He tapped on the window.

  She raised the gun, put it to the glass, and pulled the trigger.

  52

  JO’S TEMPER IGNITED. “ONEGOOD REASON? YOU DON’T WANTA GOOD reason. You want any excuse to knock me down.”

  Turning from the window, Lewicki stepped toward her, eyes sharp. “Tasia played games. Love, life, war, it didn’t matter. She played people against each other like they were toys in her playhouse of mania. So I want one single shred of evidence that the night she died, she wasn’t playing one last game, killing herself with Rob’s forty-five to ruin his reputation.”

  “Toys in her playhouse? What—”

  Vienna stepped between them like a referee. “Cut this out.”

  Jo pointed at him. “Please clarify what you meant by—”

  “Stop it.” Vienna put up a hand. “Now.”

  Jo closed her mouth, but wondered what had inspired Lewicki’s remark. Vienna turned to him.