Sadie sat and stared at Aggie’s computer screen, trying to process what she’d discovered.
It hadn’t been hard to find news stories about Steve’s grandmother. She hadn’t even needed the woman’s surname because there’d never exactly been a rash of women named Sadie in Texas who’d gotten the death penalty for murdering their husbands. What she hadn’t expected was how easy it would be to find out Steve’s full name and why he was hiding out here in the mountains.
Make that Steve’s real name.
Jackson Cole. Steven was only his middle name.
The big news was that he just happened to have been the lead singer of the Diesel Rats, as well as their principal songwriter and guitarist.
Who died in a plane crash over the Atlantic twenty years ago, but his body had never been recovered.
Of course it wouldn’t have been recovered, Sadie thought. Because he’d never died. Instead, he was living here in the middle of nowhere. Add on a few years, and the pictures she found online looked exactly like younger versions of the man she’d met after Reggie booted her out of his car.
Why would he hide his identity? Better yet, what the hell was he doing here? If he needed to get away, shouldn’t he be kicking it back on some tropical beach? If she had his kind of money she’d be living high on the hog. She’d have the best of everything. Mansions and a private jet and fabulous clothes and jewellery—all the things that super rich people had.
And he had to have been rich, because the Diesel Rats were mega huge in their day. Still were, even if their singer had “died” and they hadn’t made a new recording in forty years. They’d sold hundreds of millions of records worldwide—like Michael Jackson numbers. Even she’d heard their music before, and not just the famously sampled riff from “Burning Heart” that helped DJ Krash take his “Dontcha Mess with Me” to number one last year. You couldn’t turn on an oldies station without hearing something by the Rats over the course of a couple of hours. “Gimme, Gimme, Gimme.” “Jenny Don’t You Cry.” “Stars Are Falling.” And every Christmas there seemed to be a couple of new covers of “Peace Will Come (We Can Make It Happen).”
Maybe he took off because the press at the time wouldn’t let go of the fact his grandmother was a murderer. That she was one of only five women who’d been executed in Texas since the seventies. But really? How big an impact would something like that have made on his life in those days? They didn’t even have the Internet, so it wasn’t like it could go viral. Though, if back then was anything like now, she supposed the press would still have been all over him, especially since that hadn’t been the only thing to go wrong.
Not long after Cole’s grandmother was executed, Sully—full name, Frank Sullivan, according to Wikipedia—Steve’s best friend since childhood and the bass player in the band, was found dead of an overdose in his hotel room. Before the autopsy report could be delivered, Cole and his drummer Martin Getty had a huge falling out over whether or not the band should get a new bass player and continue. Cole wanted some time; Getty insisted they should finish the twenty dates left on their tour.
Getty had stormed out of the hotel where they were staying and died in a car crash an hour later, speeding on the Interstate.
Cole’s longtime girlfriend, Toni Shaw, chose that same period of time to walk out on him, citing that their relationship had become toxic. Later, she tried suing him for division of property, claiming she’d supported him through the hard times when the band was just getting started. It went to court, where it was revealed she’d been having an affair with the band’s business manager.
Cole went from rock ’n’ roll megastar to poster boy for tragedy, especially after he “died” as well.
Sadie found link after link to articles about the band and their music, and the mystery death of Jackson Cole. It was music-nerd city out there in the blogosphere. It was stupid, how much was still being written about the band.
Which, she realized, probably meant that proof he was still alive would be worth big bucks to somebody. God, how much? Ten grand? Twenty? Lots, she was sure.
Except who could you trust? One of the gossip sites? Or maybe a tabloid? But who was to say they wouldn’t stiff you?
There were lots of books on the band as well, and one name kept popping up in the reviews about them: Leah Hardin. She’d apparently written the definitive biography on Cole, as well as a whole bunch of other books on the band, their humble beginnings, how they handled fame, their influence. She even had a book that chronicled every recording session they’d ever done, which just seemed like overkill, as well as one that reviewed every bootleg.
And if that wasn’t enough, she also had a blog named after the band’s third album, Rats on the Run, which she seemed to update at least every week. She’d written about other bands, politics and all kinds of crap, but she kept coming back to the Rats.
Hello, Leah. Get a life or what?
What could possibly be left to say?
But that very fanaticism of hers might make her the best person to contact. The woman would at least get another book out of it. Hell, with the amount of words she seemed able to churn out on every stupid detail of the band’s life, she could probably get three or four.
There was an email contact link on the blog. Sadie clicked on it and composed her message. She thought for a moment before sending it, then used the camera on the laptop to take a picture of Aggie’s painting of Steve. She attached it to the email before pressing send.
Clearing the browser cache, she shut down the laptop.
When she stood up, the red dog got up as well.
“I’m going to be rich, Ruby,” she told it. “What do you think about that?”
The dog just stared at her.
Sadie had too much of a buzz on to stay cooped up inside. She went out to walk around Aggie’s property, the dog following on her heels.