pulled Tina against a pillar and watched, eyes stinging. The stampede flowed toward the right field stands. People poured over the railings and fell into the dugout.
A stadium official took the microphone and begged for calm. The screams turned into wailing and an eerie quiet in the upper reaches of the ballpark.
“What just happened?” Tina said.
“The worst stunt catastrophe in entertainment history,” Jo said.
She wasn’t even close.
TWILIGHT VEILED THE SKY, BLUE AND STARRY, WHEN JO AND TINA walked from the ballpark onto Willie Mays Plaza. But the stadium lights blazed. Police cruisers lined the street. On the bay, searchlights on a salvage barge illuminated the rough waters where the helicopter had crashed. Third Street was lit by television spotlights. The night was whiter than a starlet’s red-carpet smile.
Jo hung her arm across Tina’s shoulder. Exhausted and numb, they headed toward her truck.
Ahead, leaning against an unmarked SFPD car, was Amy Tang.
The young police lieutenant had a phone to her ear and a cigarette pinched between her thumb and forefinger. A uniformed officer stood before her, getting instructions. Her coal-colored suit matched her hair, her glasses, and, it seemed, her mood. Barely five feet tall, she was tiny against the Crown Vic. She looked like a disgruntled hood ornament.
Jo veered toward her. Tang looked up. Surprise brushed her face. She ended her call and dismissed the uniformed officer.
“You were at the concert?” Tang said.
“Tina was on the field.”
Tang’s mouth thinned. She glanced at her watch. Two hours had passed since the stunt disaster.
“Fire Department and paramedics were swamped. We stuck around,” Jo said.
Tang nodded slowly. “Lucky thing you love country rock so much.”
Tina pulled off her straw cowboy hat. Her curls were lank. “Yeah, every stadium should have a barista and a shrink on emergency standby.”
“Brewing coffee and listening to people’s problems—I’m sure that’s what you did, and well,” Tang said.
Jo and Tina had helped ferry supplies and comfort distraught concertgoers. But Jo didn’t want to talk about that.
“Congratulations on your transfer to the Homicide Detail, Amy. Why are you here?”
Tang’s sea-urchin hair spiked in the breeze. She didn’t answer.
Jo stepped closer. “A body’s lying on the field, covered by a tarp. And tonight came close to being a remake of the Twilight Zone disaster, starring my sister as Woman Hit by Crashing Chopper. I want to know what happened.”
“It’s Tasia McFarland.” Tang’s face turned pensive. “And I want you to know what happened. I think I want your professional opinion on it.”
Jo felt a frisson. “Her death is equivocal?”
“Fifty points for the deadshrinker.”
Jo was a forensic psychiatrist who consulted for the SFPD. She performed psychological autopsies in cases of equivocal death—cases in which the authorities couldn’t establish whether a death was natural, accidental, suicide, or homicide.
She analyzed victims’ lives to discover why they had died. She shrank the souls of the departed.
But the cops normally requested Jo’s expertise only when a death remained indecipherable even after a long investigation. If the SFPD already considered the death of Tasia McFarland—notorious, splashy, icon-of-Americana Tasia McFarland—to be equivocal, this case was going to be tricky, as well as inconceivably high profile. Jo had a brief image of her professional life igniting like a matchstick.
And she saw her sister beside her: tired, lovely, lucky to be breathing.
She handed Tina the keys to her truck. “I’ll catch up with you.”
Tina kissed her cheek and whispered, “I’m fine. There was no instant replay. Don’t dwell on it.”
Jo blinked. Tina squeezed her hand and headed off.
Tang flicked her cigarette away. “Come on.”
They headed back into the ballpark. Tang said, “Pilot of the first helicopter’s missing, presumed dead. Stuntman who was in the back of the chopper survived, barely.”
Jo ran her fingers across her forehead. Her face was stinging. Tang glanced at her, and hesitated.
“Sorry, Beckett. This must hit close to home.”
“That score’s already on the board. I can’t take it down.”
Her husband had been killed in the crash of a medevac helicopter. But she couldn’t avoid discussing aircraft accidents, any more than she could rewind her life three years and get a second swing at the day Daniel died.
“Keep talking,” she said. But as they walked, she sent a text message to Gabriel Quintana. Am OK. With Tang, will call.
“The second chopper managed to crash-land at McCovey Point with no fatalities,” Tang said.
They passed through a tunnel and emerged onto the bottom deck of the stands. The ballpark’s jeweled views, of San Francisco and the bay, were the greatest in Major League Baseball, and Jo usually met her parents at the stadium for a Giants game at least once a summer. Now forensic teams, photographers, and the medical examiner were working the scene. The yellow tarp stood out, as bright as a warning sign.
“I saw her drop,” Jo said. “Debris hit the stanchion where the zip line was anchored. It collapsed and she fell like…” A ribbon of nausea slid through her. “She fell.”
“The fall didn’t kill her,” Tang said. “She had a gunshot wound to the head.”
Jo turned, lips parting. “Somebody shot her? She shot herself? What’s confusing about her death?”
Tang walked down the aisle toward the field. “Aside from the fact that she slid down the zip line with half her throat blown away?”
“Aside from that.”
“And that at least seventy-five people in the crowd were hit by falling debris or trampled in the stampede?”
“And that.”
“And the fact that Fawn Tasia McFarland, age forty-two, born and bred in San Francisco, was the ex-wife of the president of the United States?”
Jo slowed to a stop. “No, that, without a doubt, most definitely covers it.”
