Burning Bright (Peter Ash #2)
Nick Petrie
For Margret and Duncan,
my heroes and role models
In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?
. . .
Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
—WILLIAM BLAKE
PROLOGUE
Don’t get in the car.
June Cassidy had heard this many times. From her mom, from her self-defense instructors, from her friends, the same thing, over and over.
No matter what, don’t get in the car.
Because then they have you.
It was good advice, she thought.
But it did her no good now that they’d gotten her in the fucking car.
She had her back against the locked door of a big SUV, plastic handcuffs on her wrists, and a witless slab of pseudogovernment beef leering at her from the next seat over.
Her options were limited.
? ? ?
JUNE WAS HAVING a particularly bad week in a challenging few years.
Her newspaper got bought out, just like practically every other big-city paper, and the new owners loaded it up with debt to pay themselves for their investment. When the classifieds plummeted like a rock—thanks, Craig, for your free fucking List—the paper began to lay off reporters, especially investigative reporters, who might take weeks or months to research a story for publication. June was young, cheap labor, and she was good at her job, so she lasted longer than most. But the economics were brutal and getting more unforgiving by the minute.
Then the ax finally fell and June was just another freelancer with a degree in journalism. In this age of technology, it was almost as useful as a degree in Klingon, or, God forbid, English.
For a woman on her own and pushing thirty, freelancing was no substitute for an actual job.
Somehow, after a year of scrounging for scraps and trying to learn how to drive traffic to her blog, she’d gotten invited to join Public Investigations, a nonprofit group of investigative journalists funded by a Kickstarter-like model, dedicated to doing the kind of work that many papers could no longer afford to pay for.
Public Investigations did awesome work. Their financial reporters broke the in-depth story about the attempted bank bombing in Milwaukee and the flash-crash that went with it. But the budget was small and June was still essentially a freelancer with editorial backup, which was not the same thing as health insurance and a byline in the Chicago Tribune.
Still, she was making real progress, splitting time between her garage apartment in Seattle and her mom’s little house in Palo Alto, which gave her an inexpensive platform to cover the West Coast. Her specialty was issues of privacy in the electronic age. After Manning and Snowden and the NSA revelations, privacy seemed permanently in the headlines, and her professional life was finally taking off again.
Then her mom, a yoga fanatic and vegetarian who also swam a half mile every day, was killed by a hit-and-run driver and died. A week ago today.
June’s mother, Hazel Cassidy, tenured professor at Stanford University, MacArthur “Genius” Grant winner, and renowned pain in the ass, killed by a plumber’s truck at sixty.
Like a lot of women, June had a complicated relationship with her mother. June’s career choices, her boyfriends, her hair—all were candidates for improvement, although her mother never made a direct assault.
Hazel’s trademark was a certain kind of passive-aggressive backhanded compliment. “That outfit wouldn’t work on me, but it looks very nice on you.” When June’s investigative series on data breaches in medical technology was nominated for the Pulitzer, Hazel threw her daughter a fabulous party, but also invited June’s ex-boyfriend, because June’s current flame didn’t meet Hazel’s high standards.
The worst of it, of course, was that she was usually right. She was right about the outfit, and she was right about the fucking boyfriend, too. About all the boyfriends, actually. June tried, sometimes successfully, not to be so stubborn that she couldn’t recognize how well her mother knew her, and how much she cared.
It was easier now that her mother was dead.
What June wouldn’t give for another snarky comment about her goddamn hair.
Her mom had been gone a week, and it already felt like forever.
? ? ?
JUNE HAD SPENT the first few days planning and surviving the memorial service, and the days after in her mother’s house, going through her things, crying and remembering and trying to figure things out.
Not least of which was the fact that her mother had apparently been working on some kind of classified software project for the Department of Defense. And she’d never even hinted at it to June.
Unable to sleep, June had planned to use her mother’s key card and code to let herself into the cluttered lab at Stanford. She told herself she was there to collect family pictures and the few plants her mother had managed not to kill, but mostly she just wanted to sit with the memory of her mom in the place she’d most fully inhabited, her computer lab.
Instead, June found a broken lock, the door held open by a chair, and a pair of thick, humorless men in dark suits with Defense Department IDs packing Tyg3r, her mother’s experimental bench-made mini-supercomputer, into a cardboard box with all the spare drives they could find. They’d already stacked their hand truck with banker’s boxes, apparently filled with the contents of her mother’s secure, fireproof file cabinet, which now stood open like a corpse for the medical examiner.