Winter Moon

the office, when she'd come out of the service station with Jack, she'd been virtually blind because smoke and soot had mucked up her contact lenses.
        Within two days of the shootout, Heather had been forced to change their phone number for a new, unlisted one, because fans of Anson Oliver were calling at all hours. Many had made accusations of sinister conspiracies in which Jack figured as the triggerman.
        It was nuts.
        The guy was just a filmmaker, for God's sake, not President of the United States. Politicians, corporate chiefs, military leaders, and police officials didn't quiver in terror and plot murder out of fear that some crusading Hollywood film director was going to take a swipe at them in a movie. Hell, if they were that sensitive, there would hardly be any directors left.
        And did these people actually believe that Jack had shot his own partner and three other men at the service station, then pumped three rounds into himself, all of this in broad daylight where there well might have been witnesses, risking death, subjecting himself to enormous pain and suffering and an arduous rehabilitation merely to make his story about Anson Oliver's death look more credible?
        The answer, of course, was yes. They did believe such nonsense.
        She found proof in another plastic window in the same wallet. Another decal, also a two-inch-diameter circle. Black background, red letters, three names stacked above one another: OSWALD, CHAPMAN, Mcgarvey?
        She was filled with revulsion. To compare a troubled film director who'd made three flawed movies to John Kennedy (Oswald's victim) or even to John Lennon (Mark David Chapman's victim) was disgusting. But to liken Jack to a pair of infamous murderers was an abomination.
        OSWALD, CHAPMAN, Mcgarvey?
        Her first thought was to call an attorney in the morning, find out who was producing this trash, and sue them for every penny they had. As.she stared at the hateful decal, however, she had a sinking feeling that the purveyor of this crap had protected himself by the use of that question mark.
        OSWALD, CHAPMAN, MCGARVY?
        
        Speculation wasn't the same thing as accusation. The question mark made it speculation and probably provided protection against a successful prosecution for slander or libel.
        Suddenly she had enough energy to sustain her anger, after all. She gathered up the wallets and threw them into the bottom drawer of the nightstand, along with the decals. She slammed the drawer shut-then hoped she hadn't wakened Toby.
        It was an age when a great many people would rather embrace a patently absurd conspiracy theory than bother to research the facts and accept a simple, observable truth. They seemed to have confused real life with fiction, eagerly seeking Byzantine schemes and cabals of maniacal villains straight out of Ludlum novels. But the reality was nearly always far less dramatic and immeasurably less flamboyant. It was probably a coping mechanism, a means by which they tried to bring order to and make sense of-a high-tech world in which the pace of social and technological change dizzied and frightened them.
        Coping mechanism or not, it was sick.
        And speaking of sick, she had hurt two of those boys. Never mind that they deserved it. She had never hurt anyone in her life before. Now that the heat of the moment was past, she felt… not remorse, exactly, because they had earned what she'd done to them… but a sadness that it had been necessary. She felt soiled. Her exhilaration had fallen with her adrenaline level.
        She examined her right foot. It was beginning to swell, but the pain was tolerable.
        "Good God, woman," she admonished herself, "who did you think you were-one of the Ninja Turtles?"
        She got two Excedrin from the bathroom medicine cabinet, washed them down with tepid water.
        In the bedroom again, she switched off the bedside lamp.
        She wasn't afraid of the darkness.
        What she feared was the damage people were capable of doing to one another either in darkness or at high noon.

CHAPTER TEN.
        
        The tenth of June was not a day in which to be cooped up inside. The sky was delft blue, the temperature hovered around eighty degrees, and the meadows were still a dazzling green because the heat of summer had not yet seared the grass..Eduardo spent most of the balmy afternoon in a