"You were an environmental activist, but then you left that life behind and went to work for Jim. And your old comrades didn't like that, did they? You betrayed their beliefs. They knew you were his gofer, so they figured you opened his mail too. They sent the package to Jim, but you were the target."
Willow laughed, a single short burst of sound. She sounded both surprised and amused. She shook her head and said, "Really--that's what you think happened?"
"If it's not, then tell me what did happen. I was looking at some old footage, Willow. And there you were, at the governor's press conference about food safety. You gave all that up, but they weren't ready to give you up, were they?"
Willow stood totally still for a long moment. Cassidy could tell she was balanced on the edge, trying to decide whether to tell a truth or a lie. Cassidy had been in that same position so many times herself. Finally Willow got her purse from a drawer.
"Come with me," she said. "There's something I want to show you."
Cassidy followed Willow down a corridor. Fumbling in her purse with one hand, Willow opened a door with the other. Inside was a long room filled with banks of equipment, watched over by a silver-haired man wearing headphones. A glass window separated the control room from a radio studio, this one empty.
The man pulled back one of his headphones, looking confused. "Willow, what are you doing?"
"You need to leave, Greg. Now. Leave or die."
Leave or die? What? And then Cassidy saw what Willow had just taken out of her purse--a small, black gun. She had seen far too many guns recently. Far too many guns, far too much blood, and far too many dead people.
Greg stared at Willow, uncomprehending. "But I can't leave. I'm running the board."
Cassidy felt like she was about to burst out of her skin. She had seen what guns could do, and she didn't want to see it again. "I think she means it, Greg," she said. At least that's what Cassidy meant to say, but it came out as more of a shriek. "Get out now. Get out!"
Greg yanked the headphones off, set them down, and left in a hurry. Her eyes never leaving Cassidy, Willow went to the door and turned the lock. Then she opened a drawer, scrabbled through it with her free hand, and tossed Cassidy a roll of silver duct tape. "Sit down in that chair and tape your ankles together. And do a good job."
Cassidy's eyes darted around the room, looking for something she could use as a weapon. Nothing. Then she remembered her purse, which was still slung over her shoulder. She could stab Willow with a pen or a metal nail file, or squirt hair spray in her eyes.
But there were problems with these ideas. One was that a gun was a far more efficient and effective weapon. The second was the near impossibility of actually locating any given item in the bottomless depths of her tote. Her only hope was that Allison was sure to be right behind her.
"So you did it," Cassidy said as she leaned over and taped her ankles together, trying not to do it too tightly. "Not your old friends."
"What? No." She shook her head. "SAFE is all about lobbying. Or, if they really feel like pushing the envelope, demonstrations. They're not willing to put their lives on the line. When I saw that they were just going to stick to their petitions and their protests, I decided someone needed to really fight back. The big food companies have deep pockets. They can get stories swept under the rug, pay people to go away and forget about what happened. But I can never forget. Never. Which is why Jim Fate had to die."
Whatever this was about, Cassidy realized, it was personal. "What is it you can't forget?" she said softly.
"I had a little sister, Sunshine. We called her Sunny. She died when she was six." Willow's mouth trembled and then firmed into a thin line. But the gun never wavered. It was pointed right at Cassidy's chest.
"What happened to her?"
"She ate peanut butter crackers. Something millions of little kids do every day. But the peanut butter was contaminated. She started throwing up. The next day she had bloody diarrhea, and my parents took her to the emergency room. She ended up in pediatric intensive care. In agony. They kept giving her painkillers, but they didn't help at all. She just lay there and whimpered. My parents were talking to the doctors when Sunny started crying and saying she knew she was going to die. And I was saying of course she wasn't going to, she was going to be okay, the doctors would help her." Willow's eyes shone with tears. "I was so scared, but of course I had to say those things. And at the time, I believed them. I still trusted the system to work.
"An hour later, she had a massive heart attack. All the doctors and nurses were there, trying to get her back, shocking her poor little body, but it was too late. They said there were no signs of brain activity. I was only sixteen years old, but I knew what that meant. They let us hold her, and then they unplugged the machines."
"Oh no," Cassidy breathed.
But Willow wasn't done. "A year to the day after my sister died, my mom killed herself. She was the one who bought those crackers for Sunny."