“All right,” said Aaron. “Tell the guards to find Tommy, not Corinne. Tell them to say his daughter’s looking for him, he needs to take some medicine or something. That shouldn’t tip her off. Meanwhile we’ll tell other people the same thing. I’ll search the main floor galleries and you do the ones up here. We’re bound to find them soon.”
But it wasn’t soon. I called the guards, and we all worked the crowd, but it was a harrowing, endless half hour later before I got a response. It came when I related our little fiction to one of the Sentinel’s receptionists in the Milestones gallery.
“Oh, poor Tommy!” she said absently, absorbed in a display on hip-hop artists. “He looked kinda sick, so I wondered why Corinne was taking him into that Lab place—”
I was gone before she finished, racing around the atrium and into the Sound Lab. It was full of guests, mostly younger ones in a state of inebriated hilarity, pounding on the huge electronic drum in the center of the space and moving in and out of the various practice rooms. The lights were low, and I had to peer into faces and haul open the heavy door of each room to make sure I wasn’t overlooking my quarry.
But it seemed that they must have gone elsewhere. In the booth where Aaron had been, two hulking fellows were savaging the drums and singing along to an indecipherable tune. A larger chamber, with drums, guitar and keyboard, held five young women who were squealing with laughter while making passable music. And in the microphone room, Boris Nevsky was belting out the Russian national anthem to a stunned-looking audience of three who were probably afraid to walk out on him.
“Boris, come help me!”
He looked affronted. “I am not finished!”
“You are now.” I towed him out by the elbow and cupped my hand to his ear to make myself heard in the din. “I have to find Tommy Barry. Have you seen him?”
“Who is that?”
“The best man, the old guy with the shaved head? Help me look for him, Boris, please.”
He shrugged affably. “I forget second verse anyway.”
We searched the rest of the rooms, to no avail, and then Boris gestured at some steps in a far, dim corner. They led up to two more practice booths, but a chain was draped between the railings to keep tonight’s crowd off the Lab’s upper level. I remembered the barrier across the shorebird exhibit at the Aquarium, and groaned aloud.
“Tommy—”
Boris, sensing my urgency at last, forged ahead of me through the crowd like an icebreaker and flung the chain aside. We mounted the steps and checked the first room: empty. But the second room was dark, and when we pulled open the door, the shifting light from the party below faintly illuminated an overturned chair, a guitar dangling by its cord over the edge of an electronic keyboard—and the body of Tommy Barry.
He was sprawled facedown, halfway under the keyboard stand. His outflung hands were still, and between his shoulder blades, just barely discernible as a dim gleam against the matte black of his tuxedo jacket, was a patch of blood spreading darkly outwards from a large, ragged wound. The exit wound from a bullet.
Boris lifted the guitar away so I could crouch down and feel Tommy’s throat for a pulse. “I think…yes! He’s still alive. I’ll call—”
But I couldn’t call Rhonda, or the guards, because the walkie-talkie was in my purse and my stupid goddamn bloody purse was lost in the shuffle somewhere. “Boris, stay here. Try and stop the bleeding, and don’t let Corinne anywhere near him. I expect she’s left the building by now but—”
“Corinne did this?” His eyes were round. “Did she vant to merry him, too?”
But I was already halfway down the steps, and shouting out the request that no event planner ever, ever wants to utter: “Is there a doctor here? Anybody know if there’s a doctor here?”
The only response was alarm and perplexed confusion, so I pushed through the crowd and out to the atrium, heading for the little glass-walled balcony that hung over the Sky Church. Surely Travis would be able to communicate with Rhonda, and she could find a doctor and mobilize the guards and the police. I could see him in the gaps between the milling people, apparently giving a couple of guests a private tour of his electronic marvels.
As I toiled through the crowd and got closer, the two guests were revealed as Roger Talbot and the girl from the art department. Irrelevantly, some part of my mind groped for her name: Ruby? Jewel? Crystal, that was it. Crystal was a pocket Venus, five-one or so with short, feathery white-blonde hair, and she was gazing up at Roger with a different kind of high voltage in mind. The publisher, forgetting for the moment that the wall behind them was made of glass, had let one hand slip from Crystal’s waist down to her velvet-clad derriere. They jumped apart when I pushed open the door, calling out as I went.
“Travis, we need the police!” He looked at me—or was it past me?—with blank dismay. “Call Rhonda and—”
A scream, an anguished shriek of pain and outrage, froze me in my tracks. Roger and Crystal were staring past me at the person who had screamed. Slowly, with a dreamlike dread and yet certainty about who I would see, I turned around.
Corinne Campbell, with her lush figure straining against her rose satin gown, and a demented light shining in her aquamarine eyes, was pointing a wavering pistol at Roger Talbot’s head.
Chapter Thirty-Five
MY FEET HURT. I’D BEEN RUNNING AROUND ALL EVENING IN rose-pink dyed-silk stilettos instead of my usual comfy flats, and now I couldn’t sit down because I was stuck on a tiny balcony overhanging a fifty-foot drop with three other terrified people and a crazy lady with a gun, smack in the middle of somebody else’s love triangle, except one side of the triangle was already dead. Or would it be one angle?
This must be what hysteria feels like, I mused, as my thoughts rear-ended each other like cars in a freeway pileup.
Interesting.
“You said you loved me!” Corinne whimpered—the old, trite, unbearably painful plea of the spurned woman. And in this case, in these circumstances, tantamount to a confession of murder. After the secret killings, and all the clever deceptions to maintain her innocence, she had cracked and revealed herself at the sight of her lover with another woman. A woman he had only just met.
Corinne stood just inside the balcony door, her back to the atrium. Although a few heads had lifted when she screamed, most of the crowd outside had shrugged it off as mere high spirits, and went on with their party. But then Roger tried to speak, and an upsurge in the music erased his words.
“Stop the noise!” said Corinne, desperate, but still— barely—in command of herself. The ugly blind eye of the gun swung toward Travis. “Make it stop!”
The sound man gulped and nodded, his long locks brushing at the shoulders of his EMP T-shirt. He moved his hands slowly, slowly to one of his consoles, and as if he had lifted the needle from some gigantic record, the music instantaneously ceased.
The abrupt and utter silence in that great space was shocking, and somehow beautiful. But it was quickly sullied by a rising drone of voices, like the buzz of baffled and then angry bees, as hundreds of dancers and diners and general merrymakers questioned and then protested this break in the action.
“Hey, whassup?” An amiably drunk young man with a girl in each arm marched across the atrium to our glass wall.
His sloppy smile froze as Corinne’s gaze, and her gun, swerved in his direction. One of the girls screamed, long and piercingly. This time everybody heard it. Revelers poured out of the Sound Lab and the galleries, at first to gape, but then to flee, as news of the situation rushed through the crowd like toxic fumes. Within minutes, the mezzanine was empty—except for the two people that only I knew about: Boris, faithful at his post up in that soundproof booth, and Tommy Barry, bleeding his life away.
“Corinne,” I said gently. She stared at me with blank, panicky eyes. “It’s me, Carnegie, remember? I’ve been so worried about you lately.”
Behind me, Talbot stirred slightly, and I tried to will him into silence. If Corinne stayed foc
used on her sorrow, instead of her wrath, maybe we could survive this. She continued to stare at me without answering, but at any rate, I didn’t seem to be making things worse. Her chest rose and fell in short, shuddering breaths, as if she couldn’t quite take in enough air, and her round, fair face was misted with perspiration. She backed away from me with uncertain steps, until she felt the balcony railing at her back.
“You’ve been very unhappy, haven’t you?” I said.
The murmuring from the dance floor down below had subsided to a mass shuffling of footsteps and the occasional clipped sound of someone giving directions; Rhonda must be clearing the building. We were marooned up here, hanging over open space, flanked by the light towers and dazzled by the monster images that were still moving on the enormous video screen, the huge mouths of singers working silently, giant hands playing soundless guitars.
That was the view before us, across the Sky Church. Behind us lay the empty atrium, the guitar sculpture spreading above deserted corridors and stairs. No rescuers could approach us from the atrium or reach the Sound Lab without Corinne seeing them through the glass wall. And there was no telling what she would do when that happened.
“You’ve been unhappy, and worried about the future,” I continued in a low, lulling tone. “You’re scared about what’s been going on lately. It must seem like a nightmare.”
Corinne nodded at that, and her grip on the pistol seemed to relax ever so slightly.
“You must be tired,” I said. “Has it been difficult to sleep?”
“Yes,” she whispered, in a voice like a weary child’s. The blue eyes blinked back tears. “I have dreadful dreams.”
“That’s hard,” I said sympathetically, staying perfectly still, trying to reach her with my voice and my eyes. “It’s hard when you can’t get any rest. It makes everything so confusing. But you need to rest.”
Corinne was listening, wavering a little, and for a moment I could feel her exhaustion and despair. But my own exhaustion was so intense, and my sympathy for her so vivid, that I made a ghastly mistake.
“You need to rest,” I repeated. “You need to take care of your baby.”
“Roger’s baby,” she said reverently.
“Mine?” Roger Talbot, the philanderer, the moron, the monster of ego, actually stepped past me and confronted her, his bold dark eyes blazing under the patrician silver hair, for all the world as if he were just as invincible to bullets as he was to any sense of decency or conscience. “I don’t believe for a minute—”
“It’s true!” Corinne howled, and the gun swung wildly from him to me and back again. “You wouldn’t listen, you didn’t want to hear, but once I found out about the baby I never let another man touch me again. I was faithful to you, and all the time you were fucking that snotty Mexican bitch. She wasn’t even an American!”
This last bit of lunacy seemed to startle her as much as it did the rest of us. Talbot retreated a step, and young Crystal began to cry, in little hiccupping gasps that were sure to catch Corinne’s attention at any moment. From the corner of my eye I saw Travis take Crystal’s hand, and she managed to silence herself. All four of us knew what might happen to any rival for Talbot’s interest, however recent or casual that interest might be.
“How could you, Roger?” Corinne herself was sobbing now, but they were angry sobs, and her knuckles were white once more on the handle of the gun. Beyond her, on the screen, a woman’s giant face was contorting in pain or ecstasy as she sang words we couldn’t hear. “How could you give her the ring? It was my ring, you said so when you showed it to me, you said we just had to wait, but you lied, you gave it to her!”
She was working herself up to a climax, I could see it coming, and all I could think to do was interrupt. “Is that why you killed Angela, Corinne? Because she saw you throwing a necklace into the harbor? It wasn’t a necklace, it was the diamond ring on a long gold chain, wasn’t it?”
That broke her momentum, and she looked at me like a scolded puppy. The mood swings reminded me, horribly, of the last time I saw Mercedes alive.
“It wasn’t my fault,” she whined. “None of this was my fault.”
“Of course it wasn’t, honey. You couldn’t help it. But don’t make it any worse, all right? Corinne, Tommy is still alive.” The others stared at me as they absorbed this new horror, the idea that she had already attacked someone, here, tonight. “He’s alive, but he needs a doctor. Let Travis go and find him a doctor, OK? You don’t want to hurt Travis, do you? Just like you didn’t really want to hurt Tommy. You want to help Tommy, don’t you, Corinne?”
She looked baffled by all the questions, but at least I was distracting her from Roger, who was surely the short fuse to her final explosion.
“Won’t you let Travis go help Tommy? Please?” I made a small, appealing gesture with one hand. Another mistake.
“No!” she shrieked, and we all recoiled, waiting for the shot. But Corinne Campbell had more to say.
“Don’t move, don’t anyone move, y’hear me? And stop talkin at me. Just listen.” Her Southern drawl was coming back, and with it a subtle shift in her mood, a sense of power, even pleasure, at finally having the upper hand over the man who had tormented her. “Are you listening, Roger?”
He licked dry lips and nodded, finally understanding just how close we were to the final disaster.
“This is your fault,” she said, using the little gun like a pointer to gesture at Talbot’s impeccably tailored trousers. He flinched, and she gave a foolish little giggle. “You’re the one who should have gone overboard, not me.”
I tried to calculate the best way to move, once Corinne fired at him, as she inevitably would. Drop to the floor? But what if she keeps shooting? Rush at her? And send us both over the railing? I was closer to her than Crystal or Travis, so anything I did would protect them for a few critical seconds, but the thought of plummeting through all that empty air, of the floor below rushing upwards to meet us, sent a paralyzing chill through me that seemed to freeze both breath and blood, thought and action. But I’ll have to do it. When the gun goes off, I’ll throw myself at her—
“Hey, Corinne, look at me! Is this wild or what?” Comically, insanely, Aaron’s head and shoulders had appeared in midair, six feet or so beyond the railing. He was forcing a grin, but his face was blanched white as his shirt, and the sweat pouring from his forehead had dissolved the makeup and exposed his black eye. This man, this wonderful foolish man who was afraid of heights, had climbed the struts of a light tower, fifty feet into the air, leaving his tuxedo jacket and shoes behind and moving silently in his socks until he could give us the distraction that we needed to save ourselves.
Corinne whirled to face him, bringing the gun around with a wild cry of alarm. Aaron, exposed on his perch, clung to the metal bars and closed his eyes. In the same infinite moment, Roger Talbot bolted for the balcony door, Crystal slumped over in a faint, and Travis and I launched ourselves at Corinne. He went high and I dove low—the side slit in my gown ripped almost to the waist—as we knocked the gun from Corinne’s hand and brought all three of us crashing to the floor in a chaotic and very painful heap.
Travis seemed to have stunned himself, and Corinne went completely limp and began to weep and moan. As I struggled out from under their combined dead weight, I heard the pistol strike the Sky Church floor far below with a tiny, harsh clang and a drawn-out metallic clatter that seemed to go on echoing forever in my mind.
Chapter Thirty-Six
THANKSGIVING IS THE PERFECT HOLIDAY. YOU COOK, YOU eat, you count your blessings. Except for the dirty dishes and the indigestion, what could be better?
One of my blessings in recent years—having Lily as a friend—brought with it the fine fringe benefit of a turkey feast at her house. Who knew that I’d also be thankful for not getting splattered all over the floor of the Sky Church? But on this particular Thanksgiving morning, less than a week after the crisis, it was much on my mind. Especially with my mother on the
phone talking about it.
Mom had called the day after the wedding, of course, because she buys The Seattle Times in Boise, and could hardly miss “Shooting at Experience Music Project Leaves One Critical, Suspect Arrested” on the front page. Now she was calling again, from my brother Tim’s home in Illinois, to wish me happy Thanksgiving and to fret some more.
“I’m fine, Mom,” I said again as I sat in my chilly kitchen, muffled up in my robe, and contemplated the culinary adventure before me. In a fit of holiday spirit I’d promised Lily a pie, and although she assured me that store-bought would be fine, I was determined to concoct the thing myself.
“But this crazy woman could have shot you,” said my mother. Now that she knew her darling daughter was safe, she seemed to almost relish the idea. What a story for her poker club. “You could have been killed.”
“Well, I wasn’t, and you’re beginning to sound ghoulish about it.”
“Don’t be silly, Carrie!” Only my mother called me Carrie. “I was worried sick. You should have called me before I read about it in the paper.”
“I was busy, Mom. It was a long night, and Tommy was in surgery for hours. I’m sorry, I just didn’t think about it.”
“But he’s all right now? The poor man.”
Lucky man was more like it. Boris had stopped Tommy’s bleeding with his wadded-up dress shirt, and clever Rhonda had summoned an ambulance crew the minute she heard there was a gun in the building. Tommy was back in a room at Harborview, but in satisfactory condition, and managing a faint wisecrack or two for his constant stream of affectionate visitors. The whole affair, dreadful as it was, could have been far, far worse.
Mom went on, “I read that the publisher, is his name Talbot? I read that he’s running for mayor over there. It’s wonderful, how brave he was.”
I sank my head in one hand, listening to her rattle on and deciding not to disabuse her of the heroic impression that Roger Talbot had managed to convey to the press. The man was a master. While the rest of us were at the hospital worrying about Tommy, he gave a long, nonexclusive interview to anyone with a mike or a pen.
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