“And Hayley felt differently?”
“Both she and Ethan did. He blogged about how sponsorship not only wrecks creativity and judgment but also, if you take a company’s money, you’re accepting its values too. Like profit and greed don’t belong in nature, you know. Like it’s wrong or something.” Jordan looked up as a well-dressed couple came through the lobby. Aloa willed them to go to their room and not stop at the bar. She needed more time.
“Did Hayley ever use the word ‘evil’?” Aloa remembered the mechanic’s mutterings.
“Yeah, I think. She was acting strange.”
“And you’re still doing the documentary?”
Jordan watched the couple glide past and get on the elevator.
“I am. The main focus now, as it turns out.”
“A lucky break.”
Jordan’s nostrils flared slightly. “You think it’s luck when your best friend dies?”
“Sorry,” Aloa said, and shifted tacks. “When’s your next race?”
“I’ve got France at the end of this month and I’m going to Italy in October.”
“So you’re deep in training?”
“I am.”
“And dropping acid with alcohol is OK?”
Jordan’s eyes narrowed. “I know what you’re trying to do. Don’t pin that on me. We were partying. Nobody forced Hayley to do what she did.”
“I’m not pinning it on you.” Aloa backpedaled. “Hayley was a big girl. She made her own choices.”
“She needed to relax. Get out of her head for a while. It was no big deal.”
“But you knew she was an addict, right?”
Jordan wiped at the bar with a damp cloth, not looking at Aloa. “That’s the line they fed her in rehab. Not everybody who likes to party is an addict.”
“Do you know if she was still high when she left the campsite?”
“Maybe a little. She went at the vodka pretty hard.”
“How about you?”
“I know my limits.” She lifted her chin.
“The police report said Hayley had gotten into an argument with someone.”
“I think they meant T.J. He got mad because she was drinking and also they had this whole thing over her shins and whether she was overtraining.” Three men in pressed shirts and expensive slacks came through the hotel’s front door and Jordan looked over at them.
Aloa tapped the bar with her index finger to gather Jordan’s attention. “A bad argument?”
“Bad for the two of them. T.J. and her were close.”
“Did he seem upset when he found out Hayley was dead?”
“What kind of question is that? Of course he was upset. So was I.”
“Sorry. Just covering all the bases,” Aloa said. “How about that guy named Boots? I’d like to find him.”
Jordan glanced down the bar, checking the two businessmen with their scotches. “I didn’t really know the guy. He was driving by, stopped, then stuck around for a day. I didn’t ask his real name.”
Another dead end.
“Is there any reason somebody might be tracking Hayley?”
Jordan cocked her head. “What do you mean, ‘tracking’?”
The night before, Doc had identified the device Calvin had given to Aloa as a starter interrupter with GPS tracking that could be used to monitor and also disable a vehicle. Aloa wasn’t sure if the apparatus had anything to do with Hayley or if it was just another creation of the mechanic’s damaged mind, but it didn’t hurt to ask.
“I mean, if somebody put something in her truck that could record where she was and maybe even shut down the engine?” Aloa clarified.
Jordan glanced over at the nicely dressed men. One was gesturing toward the outside while the other two nodded their heads toward the bar.
“It’s called a starter interrupter,” Aloa said, trying to regain the bartender’s attention.
“Oh yeah,” Jordan said as the men laughed and headed for the bar’s upholstered stools. “There was one in Hayley’s truck. The lender put it there. Her credit was terrible.” Her eyes were still on the men. “I gotta go.”
“Did she ever talk about having somebody take the thing out?”
“I don’t know. She called it her ball and chain.”
The men settled at the bar. One lifted a finger. “Miss?” he said.
“That’s it. I need to get back to work,” Jordan said.
“Can’t they wait another minute?”
“Are you telling me how to do my job?”
“How come you didn’t stick with her? How come you let her drive off by herself?”
Jordan leaned close. “Listen, if Hayley wanted to kill herself there wasn’t anything any of us could do. We all tried to help her. Go tell your journalist vulture-friends to find some other life to feed on.”
She straightened, turned to the three newcomers at the bar, and smiled. “Welcome to Hotel L,” she said.
CHAPTER 15
Seagulls circled above as Aloa sat on a wrought iron bench, her boots propped on a concrete railing fifteen stories above Sansome Street. It was one of those places that gave San Francisco its reputation for whimsy and freethinking, a rooftop hideaway atop a handsome office building open to whoever wanted a bit of peace. Aloa listened to the hum of traffic below, finished jotting down a few notes, and considered the feelings the beautiful bartender had set off. Annie, the counselor who had diagnosed her eating disorder, would not have approved.
Aloa pictured Annie, a tall woman with a fall of dark braids, who she’d met her first year of college. Aloa had gotten a Regents’ scholarship to UC Berkeley, a place sometimes labeled a liberal outpost of do-your-own-thingness. But whoever had given it the description had never attended the school. It was filled with goal-oriented, whip-smart young people and sharp-minded professors who triggered every one of Aloa’s needs to prove herself. She spent hours in the library, finished every required reading, and turned in papers days before they were due. It was two months into classes, after Aloa had spent four hours studying in her room and devouring a package of chocolate chip cookies, that her roommate, a seasoned bulimic named Sloan Morgan, had introduced her to the world of eating disorders.
“I wish I was like you and didn’t care what other people thought about how I looked,” Sloan said when she came in and saw Aloa surrounded by books and scattered crumbs.
It was the kind of camouflaged attack Aloa had lived with for most of her life. “She has her great-grandmother’s build,” her mother, a former Miss Georgia Peach, would tell her friends as she eyed Aloa’s frame, her own slender body the product of celery-stick lunches and a never-ending parade of Virginia Slims cigarettes. “That woman pushed out one baby after another and was back in the fields the next day.”
As a little girl, Aloa had worked hard for her mother’s approval, but when she grew older she realized she would never satisfy a woman whose bitterness rose from her own failure in life—the winning of a handsome young man who she believed would become a university professor but instead ended up a high school biology teacher—and yet, Aloa tried.
She tried with good grades, as the editor of her high school newspaper, and with a cello scholarship to the prestigious Idyllwild summer music program.
“Why do you have to play such an ugly instrument?” her mother had said.
Perhaps that was why having a girl she barely knew point out the imperfection of her body allowed Aloa to fall so easily into restriction. Or perhaps it was the other thing she’d never told anyone about.
Sloan had been more than happy to share her own secrets: the fingers down the throat, the syrup of ipecac taken in just the right dose, the herbal laxatives, the powders with names like Colon Cleanser when that didn’t work. The vomiting and continual quest for bowel movements had been too much for Aloa. But standing in front of the spaghetti and chicken potpie in the cafeteria a few days later, she thought if she restricted what went in, it would accomplish the same caloric effect of her roommate�
��s purging. She put a few leaves of lettuce and a tomato slice on her plate and watched others eat, feeling pious and punished at the same time.
Aloa lost five pounds fairly quickly, then three more. She liked how her stomach flattened and her jeans loosened. But, even more, she liked the sense of achievement and the peace that being in control gave her. People began to tell her how good she looked and her mother eyed her frame without her usual frown. Aloa told herself she was just getting healthy when she began jogging and lost seven more pounds. She set timetables for when she would eat and then pushed herself past them. Her mind felt clear, her body like a feather. Ten pounds. Then fifteen.
Aloa made excuses to herself when her hair stopped growing and her period stopped. Her breath turned rancid and she shivered with cold. Aloa told herself to stop but she couldn’t. Starving was her accomplishment. Starving was the thing she could do well.
When Aloa came down with pneumonia toward the end of her freshman year, the physician at the health clinic took one look at her and called in Annie.
Annie sat on one of those rolling stools while Aloa shivered and coughed on the exam table. “What you have is a disease,” she said. “Your brain is acting like a bully. It’s feeding you a line of crap because of its own insecurity. Bullies need to be ignored. They need to be put in their place.”
The logic appealed to Aloa’s need for accomplishment, but Annie warned her things weren’t as straightforward as they might seem. It took Aloa all summer and daily support group meetings just to learn how to eat again. But then school resumed and, by February of her sophomore year, Aloa was eighty-seven pounds and in the hospital with a heart that fluttered in her chest like a frantic bird. Two weeks later, she was in a psych ward her mother had found. A place filled with girls who threatened suicide or cut their skin with razors or talked to people only they could see. Aloa had escaped only after she’d used the willpower she’d relied on for restriction to push through the nausea and shame that filled her with every bite of food. They’d let her go when she had gained ten pounds, and she vowed never to go back.
She’d relapsed twice since then—the second slipup just before her firing from the Times, with her mother gone and all the guilt and old feelings piling up.
She would not let restriction rule her life again.
She had a job to do and questions to answer, even though Hayley’s mother had left her wondering at the gullibility that grief could inspire. Still, Aloa thought there was something wrong with the picture the cops had painted of Hayley’s death, something in her gut that told her the runner’s demise was more than suicide. Instinct was one of the things Aloa still trusted in herself.
She rode the elevator down, strode into a nearby coffee shop, and bought a chocolate croissant, almost slapping the money onto the counter. Then she walked into the sunlight, taking a deep breath of the city Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane had once called “forty-nine square miles surrounded by reality,” and bit into the pastry.
She tasted butter, the sweetness of dark chocolate, felt golden flakes of crust tumble onto her hand. She wiped bits of chocolate from the corners of her mouth.
All around her, the city moved and breathed.
CHAPTER 16
Aloa’s father always said that when you walked into a forest or meadow or slough, the first thing you needed to do was be still and let the habitat recover from the shock of your arrival. Birds that had wheeled into the sky would settle, animals that had scurried into the brush would venture back, and insects that had frozen in their tracks would move again. She’d let that advice guide her now. She’d wait and see what developed.
She had just balled up the bakery bag and tossed it into a trash can when she heard a text alert chime.
Need to see you tonight if possible. Something important has come up. It was Michael.
I’m not flying to New York, she texted back.
At my SF house. Had a meeting. Will send a driver for you at 9, came the almost immediate reply.
“Dammit,” she muttered under her breath.
The city was settling toward evening and Aloa sensed the fog sitting just offshore. She climbed the last hill to her house, her lungs, as always, rebelling at the steep incline. She thought that if you wanted to live in San Francisco, it would help to have a little bit of mountain goat DNA.
As she approached, she fished her keys out of her pack, looked up, and groaned. There on her front porch was the Brain Farm, mugs in hand, a box of Cabernet beside them.
“Ink,” Tick said, lifting his cup in salute.
“What are you guys doing here?” Aloa put her hands on her hips.
“When you didn’t show up at Justus we got worried,” Doc said. “We came here to wait.”
“I had a long day,” Aloa said. “I just want a shower.”
Doc lifted up a brown paper sack. “We brought food. Guillermo insisted. Ginger-carrot soup with pork dumplings or something.”
They were like old dogs who limped and farted and accidentally peed on the carpet, Aloa thought: lovable but energy-sucking.
“Look, I appreciate all you guys did, the computer search and the van and everything,” Aloa said. “But I can handle things from here on out.”
“Yeah, but you haven’t heard this part yet,” Tick said. He drained his cup and clunked it down on the step next to him. It was obviously not his first mug of wine.
“We’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” Doc said.
Uh-oh, Aloa thought.
“Remember how I couldn’t find anything about Samantha Foster?” Tick said.
Aloa nodded.
“Well, that just doesn’t happen anymore. Credit cards, prescriptions, cell phones, social media. We all leave technological bread crumbs, so to speak.”
“True that,” Doc said.
“But this gal’s trail stops a week or so after your girl died. I called her sister and then her mother.”
Aloa put her palm to her forehead. “Tick, you didn’t.”
“Hell yeah, I did. And guess what?”
“What?” Aloa asked tiredly.
“They haven’t heard from her. Not a word. And she usually checks in every other day, even when she’s traveling.”
“And something else. How’d Hayley’s truck end up so far from the highway?” P-Mac chimed in.
“She was coming down from her high and the roads are a mess out there,” Aloa said. “It wouldn’t take much to make a wrong turn.”
“But who slipped her the acid?” Tick asked.
“They were partying,” Aloa said. “I talked to her friend, Jordan Connor, this afternoon. She was at the campout. She said Hayley wanted to relax.”
Tick lifted a finger. “Or maybe somebody there wanted her compliant.”
“Yeah, just like at Edgewood Arsenal,” P-Mac said, continuing when he saw the blank look on Aloa’s face. “That’s where the army fed drugs to so-called volunteers in the name of national defense. Acid, ketamine, BZ. They wanted to study enhanced interrogation and gas warfare.”
All three men nodded.
“Maybe she knew something. Maybe somebody wanted her gone,” Doc said. “Tick looked up her boyfriend’s blog. He was writing about how corporations buy the lives of extraordinary people as masks for their corruption. Athletes hawking for pharmaceutical companies, actors shilling for crooked banks, musicians selling out to carmakers, even climbers like him.”
“They buy you and then call it freedom,” P-Mac chimed in.
“It’s how corporate America runs our lives,” Doc continued. “They have us by the balls.”
“And the only way out is to hit back. Kick ’em where it hurts,” Tick said.
“Like Ethan did,” Doc said.
“And look what happened to him. He wound up dead,” P-Mac said. “Killed by bandits? My ass.”
“Hayley must have known something, and they came after her too,” Tick said. “Ever heard of The Syndicate? A secret society of corporate types trying to take over Amer
ica. Very clandestine. All undercover.”
Aloa took a deep breath. “This isn’t a Dan Brown novel, guys.”
“What about Uranus and the High Priest? That’s code, man,” Tick said.
“And what about the annuity, huh?” Doc said. “That stinks like my grandfather’s socks.”
“Ethan’s sponsor bought the annuity. It was in Ethan’s contract. Like life insurance,” Aloa said.
“Oh.” The men’s faces fell.
“What about that starter interrupter?” Doc asked.
“Subprime lender. Hayley knew it was in her truck.”
“Then how did the mechanic get it?” Tick pressed.
“Not sure. Maybe he took it out for her. It’s on my list of questions.”
“What if . . . ,” Tick started.
Aloa held up her hand. “Just stop. Please.”
The three men looked at each other. “Are we off the case?” P-Mac asked.
“I don’t remember you guys being on the case.”
“Implied contract,” Doc said.
“Could we at least look for that Samantha girl? Her mom is real worried,” Tick asked.
“Maybe check out those crime scene photos too?” P-Mac said.
Aloa looked at their lined faces, their hopeful eyes. This was the most excitement they’d had since the Occupy movement, which had broken their anarchistic hearts when it fell apart.
“All right, but just for a little while,” Aloa said. “I have an appointment at nine.”
The men stood, dusting off the seats of their faded and baggy pants. Tick tucked the wine box under his arm.
“And no more conspiracy stuff, all right?” Aloa asked.
The men didn’t answer.
CHAPTER 17
Aloa came out of her room, spiking her damp hair with her fingers. “Good enough,” she told herself, even though she’d changed three times: from jeans and a shirt to a knit dress over tights, and then back to jeans and a black pullover with her Timberlands. Did she look too much like Steve Jobs? This is ridiculous, she told herself. She would wear whatever the hell she wanted.
See Her Run Page 8