The Liar’s Lullaby. Meg Gardiner
see if I could get to her on the balcony. But I heard the gunshot.” His voice ebbed. “I ran out of time.”
Tang gave him her card, and said she’d be in touch. He headed out the door.
“Initial assessment?” Tang said.
“Besides the fact that Shirazi feels guilty that she died?” Jo said. “Get a tox screen on Tasia. If she wasn’t on cocaine or amphetamines, she was having some kind of manic episode.”
“You don’t sound convinced about that.”
“Manic episodes are characterized by euphoria, and Tasia sounds far from euphoric. But other things fit,” she said. “With mania, people can’t stop talking. Their speech becomes pressured. And they’re showy. They wear bright-colored clothes and tons of inappropriate makeup. It looks…off.”
Tang nodded. “ ‘Playing in the crayon box’ is the phrase the makeup woman used.”
Jo thought again about the game Tasia had acted out with the Colt .45. “They can also be hypersexual. And they can have grandiose delusions.”
“Like they’re the target of an assassination plot?”
“When people with bipolar disorder become paranoid, they think massive forces are threatening them. Not merely the neighbors and the mother-in-law and their shrink.”
“Such as the president of the United States?”
“There’s the rub,” Jo said.
Behind them, conversation bubbled above the noise from the television. Jo mulled what she’d seen and heard.
“Three possibilities. One, the pistol was defective. It just went off,” she said.
“Unlikely. But we’ll tear it apart and find out.”
“Two, Tasia McFarland put the gun to her head and pulled the trigger.”
“You believe that less than you did ten minutes ago.”
“Three—”
On the TV, a news anchor said, “Now we go to the White House, where President McFarland is about to speak about the death of his ex-wife.”
JO AND TANG CROWDED AROUND THE TELEVISION WITH THE COPS AND stadium officials in the suite. On-screen, the White House press secretary stood at a podium, pudgy and diffident. The pressroom was a forest of jutting hands, all raised to ask about the death of Robert McFarland’s first wife, the lovely, tragic, maybe crazy Fawn Tasia.
A reporter asked, “Did the president know that she was in possession of the Colt forty-five?”
“The president isn’t going to comment on matters that might fall within the scope of the investigation into Ms. McFarland’s death. Obviously he wants to avoid any remarks that could compromise the investigation.”
“But did he deliberately leave the gun with her when they divorced?”
The press secretary adjusted his glasses. His forehead looked shiny. “The president will issue a statement momentarily. If I could—”
“Tasia McFarland was a diagnosed manic-depressive. Did the president know of that diagnosis at the time he left a large caliber semiautomatic pistol in her possession?”
Jo said, “Wow.”
There was a stir in the pressroom. The press secretary said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the president.”
The camera swiveled. Robert Titus McFarland strode toward the podium, grave and purposeful.
He had the ascetic build and weightless gait of a cross-country runner. His hair, black as a priest’s cassock, was shorn unfashionably short, a legacy of his army years. His temples were salted with gray.
He gripped the edges of the podium. He looked drawn. He didn’t have the aw-shucks charm of Bill Clinton, didn’t have Kennedy’s élan or Reagan’s disarming ability to project whimsy. He had a craggy dignity and laconic style that pundits called “western” and attributed to his Montana roots.
He peered into the lights. “The news tonight from San Francisco has come as a shock, and has saddened me, deeply.”
He let that last word fall heavily. He let it roll across the press corps until it pinned them to their seats and smothered all noise in the room.
“My thoughts are with the family of the pilot who lost his life, and with all those who were injured.”
McFarland was an outlier: a working-class liberal, a warrior turned antiwar. He had grown up in a double-wide trailer on a cattle ranch outside Billings, son of the ranch foreman and his Salvadoran wife. He won the state cross-country championship, received a commission to West Point, and served as an army officer in hot zones across the globe before—famously—resigning his commission in protest over a friendly fire incident for which junior officers took the blame while higher-ups escaped censure. He returned to Montana, went to law school, practiced environmental law, and went into politics. His rise was swift. He won the presidency after serving five years in the Senate.
He had a reputation as a quick-thinking, hard-driving politician, a man who held everything in his head like a mental battlefield map and maintained rapport with underlings and rivals. In other words, a commander.
Along the way he’d married and divorced Fawn Tasia Hicks. And for two decades he had carefully avoided talking about her. He’d been remarried, to the calming, outdoorsy First Lady, for seventeen years. They had twin sons and a golden retriever, and kept roan quarter horses on their spread outside Missoula. As a political liability, Tasia had been no cause for alarm, not even a wisp of smoke on the horizon. She’d been a curiosity.
Not anymore. Jo watched him, thinking: Let’s really see who I voted for here.
McFarland gazed around the pressroom. “Tasia’s death is a tragedy. Sandy and I extend our sympathies to her family, and join her friends and all those around the country who are tonight mourning this…” He slowed, and his voice deepened. “…loss.”
He looked down and shifted his weight. Still gripping the podium, he shook his head. Then he seemed to throw a switch.
“Prepared remarks don’t cut it at a time like this.” He looked up. “This news is a kick in the gut. Tasia was too young to die.”
Behind him, at the edge of the screen, stood presidential aides and the White House chief of staff. McFarland glanced their way. Their presence seemed to bolster him. He straightened.
“Tasia was a force of nature. Plain and simple, she had more personality than anybody I’ve ever met. She could have moved mountains with a stare if she wanted. And for all her singing talent, and her fame, what marked her out was her generosity of spirit. She had a heart as big as the sky.”
He paused. “Learning that she was shot to death with a pistol I bought is shattering. There’s no other word for it.”
A buzz ran through the pressroom. McFarland took time to consider his next remark.
“I didn’t intend to take questions this evening, but on my way in, I heard somebody asking if I knew Tasia had bipolar disorder when I left the gun with her.”
In the background, the White House chief of staff stiffened. K. T. Lewicki had the bullet head of an English bull terrier, and he looked like he wanted to tackle McFarland. The president didn’t see it, or deliberately ignored it.
“The answer is no,” he said. “Tasia and I were married for two years. She was twenty-three when we divorced. As I understand it, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in her early thirties.”
He scanned the room, making eye contact. “I bought the pistol before I deployed for