The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [78]
“Well, Solomon Gold isn’t the only local artist Marlena has a connection to, apparently. There’s this guy called Burning Patrick. You ever hear of him?”
Bobby shook his head. Reggie was watching the game.
“He used to be homeless. But now he’s an artist and his paintings go for thousands of dollars. He’s also a singer in this band called the Bat Wing Vortex. Most important, this Burning Patrick—real name Patrick Blackburn—was also once a patient of Marlena Falcone.”
“Oh yeah?” Bobby didn’t really care, except for the fact that Della was saying it.
“Marlena lost her medical license because she altered the neurostimulators to treat ADHD despite a warning from the FDA. Canada Gold got one, but a bunch of other kids who got the procedure went crazy, right? They had to have them removed. This Patrick Blackburn—Burning Patrick—he was one of them. Marlena even wrote a paper about him for a medical journal. I guess she kept track of him even after he had the device removed and collected a big settlement.”
“And how is that related to her murder?”
“I don’t have any idea. I just want someone to take me to a rock show.”
The part of Bobby’s brain that was in charge of pleasure—the dominant part, no doubt—was parsing the invitation a million ways. He accepted casually and then changed the subject before his imagination made an ass of itself. “Speaking of, you heard from Canada Gold?” he asked Reggie, who shook his head.
Whatever thrill Kloska got from the thought of a date with Della was suddenly tempered by a big ball of sick in the bottom of his stomach. No word on Canada’s whereabouts. That prosecutor in Clark County hadn’t returned his calls, either. If Canada Gold really was the common denominator in these murders, he had to catch this shithead before her body was found half-buried in the Mojave, because once that happened, whoever was warming his seat at Area 3 could count on a call from the feds.
Reggie stood to cheer a bases-loaded walk, and Kloska rubbed his leg subtly against Della’s. She didn’t reciprocate.
Federal prosecutors didn’t usually want jurisdiction unless the connection between crimes was rock-solid—there were ambitious feds and lazy feds, same as cops—but once you had bodies in two different states and both of them had connections to one of the most infamous murders of the decade, there was no way they’d be able to keep their manicured hands off his case. Bobby was really working two fronts here—trying to solve it on one side and trying not to attract interest from the G on the other.
And he had to work them both while officially off the job.
25
IT WAS HER FATHER’S DESK, although Solomon Gold had almost certainly never sat behind it the way she did now, with a purpose, a project, a job. Her father had never worked sitting down. His private work spaces had all been at standing height, like a podium, and when he wrote music, he leaned against the furniture as if he were pushing a car, his feet in front of each other, waist forward, his shoulders hunched over the paper, his arms surrounding his pencil like a fence. After a few minutes, he would step away and play his piano or even his beautiful violin, fingering the strings of the Guarneri folk-style, and then return to write down what he had experienced with his hands. When he began using computers, he always had the monitors on stands above his head, with the keyboard at shoulder height, and she remembered watching him type with one hand while the other paged through a book or drew lines across the paper, as if the calculations from the computer were traveling across his right arm and through his head and then down his left arm, where his wrist translated it into an idea. A melody. A note. A theme.
This was a desk Solomon Gold had purchased to intimidate other people. It was broad and arrogant, same as he had been. When someone sat on one side of it and Solomon Gold stood on the other, her father, already a giant, tripled in size.
She remembered