bed, checked that my gun was easy to reach, and switched off the lights. I was so tired that the bones in my skull felt as though they were separating, but I couldn’t relax into sleep. I was trying to tie together the many threads I’d been unknotting for the last month. The threads became yarn behind my sand-filled eyelids. Olympia Koilada was scarlet, attached to the metallic pewter of Anton Kystarnik by her heavy debts so that Rodney Treffer—a nasty mustard color—had free run of the club and the Body Artist.
Everything came through the Body Artist. She was a blank canvas where people imagined whatever they wanted. Usually an erotic fantasy, but Kystarnik used her as a message board, Nadia used her to display her grief.
Chad Vishneski had gone to see the Artist for entertainment, for erotic relief from his war traumas. And then he saw the Achilles logo and thought Nadia and the Artist were taunting him. It was a typical reaction of someone in psychic distress: everything in the world around you is about you.
I sat up. Chad and Alexandra had never met. It was the luck of the draw that Chad came to Club Gouge the night Nadia began her drawings.
I imagined a scenario. When Chad was in Iraq, he had seen the Achilles logo every time he and his squad inserted the shields into their vests. Then he saw Nadia painting the same logo at Club Gouge.
He freaked out, got thrown out of the club, came home furious with the world and furious with the shield maker, and shot at the shield. He wasn’t testing it, as I’d thought at first: he was taking out his rage on it. And then he saw that the bullets had gone right through the shield. And he realized his buddies had died because their protection was a sack of sand.
So he blogged about it. Someone at Tintrey, monitoring references to the company in the blogosphere, came on his postings. And then Gilbert Scalia and Jarvis MacLean actually felt afraid.
Alexandra’s murder had been a minor problem. A lawsuit by the Guamans might have made for unpleasant publicity, but it wouldn’t have threatened the future of the company. They’d dispatched their outside counsel, Cowles, to buy off the Guamans, and considered that problem solved. Indeed, other private contractors had been able to avoid both civil and criminal damages from claims of rape from their employees, which made Tintrey’s payout to the Guamans almost an act of benevolence.
But Chad’s outbursts threatened Tintrey’s very future. They had grown to a multibillion-dollar empire through their Defense Department contracts. Jarvis MacLean and Gilbert Scalia could watch their stock fall through the floor if word spread that his company had sent our overstretched troops sand-filled body armor, no more protection against a sniper than a wet sock at the beach. Even if Tintrey had finally started delivering the fullerene nanoparticle-filled shields they advertised, a persnickety member of Congress might demand an inquiry, might see that they lost DOD support.
Scalia and MacLean summoned Prince Rainier to a council of war. Chad needs to be shut up, for keeps. No threats or blandishments, such as they offered the Guamans, would work here.
With Rainier’s help, they thought it through and came up with a brilliant plan: dispose of two birds with one bullet. Shoot Nadia, frame Chad for her death, then make it look like he committed suicide by lacing his beer with roofies. Just another PTSD Iraqi vet who took the violent way out. The neighbor who thought there was too much of the MYOB said two men in overcoats came home with Chad. Scalia and MacLean? MacLean and Prince Rainier? Not Kystarnik’s leather-clad thugs, at any rate.
And then they’d rummaged through his things and found the Achilles vest, which they dumped in the garbage. They just hadn’t noticed the shot-up shield in the bottom of the bag. They left poor Chad full of beer and roofies, gave him six or seven hours to die, and called the cops.
Only Chad had survived. And John Vishneski had hired me.
It was seven in the morning. I could hear street noises as the neighborhood came to life. Jake would have landed in Amsterdam by now. I wished I was there, in the world of music, not here in the world of violence.
I turned off the phones and went to soak in the bath. With a hot washcloth over my eyes, I tried to imagine how I could get Rainier Cowles