When Cristina and Lazar Guaman got Captain Walker’s letter, they must have tried to find out why his report was so different from what Tintrey had told them. Had they considered an exhumation so they could order their own autopsy by an impartial pathologist?
Maybe Cristina called Tintrey’s office up in Deerfield. Or maybe it had been Ernest, Ernest, the good and loving brother before his injuries took his mind from him. I wondered again whether Ernest’s accident had been arranged, if he’d been run down deliberately, targeted as the one person who might really push for an investigation into his sister’s death. I’d never be able to prove it one way or the other, but it might be important to find out the timing of the accident—had he been injured before or after the Guamans received Walker’s letter?
However it happened, as Cristina and Lazar were agonizing over how to handle the pathologist’s report, Rainier Cowles suddenly arrived, waving a large check under their noses.
Take this. It will cover Ernest’s medical care, with enough left over to send Clara to college as Alexandra wished. All you have to do in return is never discuss Alexandra’s death with another living soul.
Nadia had been furious. Blood money, she’d called it. She and her mother fought so wildly over taking the money that Nadia felt she had to move out. Clara hadn’t been privy to the details, either of Captain Walker’s letter or Rainier Cowles’s offer. She was told simply that she must never discuss Alexandra’s death with anyone.
It had taken over a year for Nadia to feel strong enough to read Alexandra’s journal. But when she did, the description of her sister’s unhappiness, and Alexandra’s ongoing torment over her sexuality, drove Nadia to desperate action. She made a crucifix with a doll’s head, her sister, superimposed on Christ’s body.
She sought out the Body Artist, who left her feeling even more helpless. Nadia wanted someone who could talk to her about her adored sister, but the Artist was like a black hole: she drew emotions in, but reflected nothing out. Nadia’s anger kept growing. She started coming to the club and painting on the Artist, painting the fire that had burned her sister, the fire that burned inside Nadia herself as rage. I could feel Nadia’s helplessness and fury. I could imagine why she did what she did, but I couldn’t imagine a way to prove it.
I went to my bedroom, where Clara was deeply asleep, fingers still clutching Peppy’s fur. Peppy softly thumped her tail, but she seemed to realize she shouldn’t leave the girl. Clara didn’t stir as I tiptoed into my closet to put the autopsy report into the safe.
I went to the kitchen and surveyed the backyard, returned to the front room and looked up and down the street. No one seemed to be watching my building.
I climbed back into the sofa 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.