Chapter 136

The professor called me just as I was coming out of the workout room on Monday morning.

“Good morning to you, Grasshopper,” he said. I looked at the time on my phone. It was a little past six in the morning in San Diego.

“What in the hell are you doing awake?” I asked. “Didn’t you get the memo that you’re on vacation in the summer?”

My normal entourage, minus Conny and Melissa, gave me a strange look but I shook my head. I made sure to watch Jill, Skye, Liz and Bobbi as they headed off to change clothes and get on with their day.

“Hang on for a second,” I said into the phone. “I just wrapped up my morning rehab and I need to move to a different spot.”

“You can call me back,” the professor pointed out.

“Let me do that,” I said. “Give me five minutes.”

“Problem?” Ryan asked.

“Just ... a call I need to return,” I said. “How’s the knee feeling?”

“Better,” he said. The infection he’d picked up after surgery had receded and he was back to working out with us. But he was also walking with a cane again. “Is there anything I need to know before I get changed and meet with Liz?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Clayton Boudreau is starting on the first. He’s going to live here and probably move in this weekend. Veronica Park is already working here. You’ll meet her at lunch, I guess. Oh, and Liz is planning a red carpet thing on Saturday and a trip to San Diego for some business stuff right afterward.”

“She sent me the itinerary,” Ryan said, following me outside to where I could shield myself behind the waterfall. “I was talking about ... cryptic phone calls.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “It’s just the professor. I had him working on something. I hope he has good news.”

The old adage, no news is good news, isn’t always true in the PR world. The news cycle had gone cold on Sunday night. Liam had sent me a text just before I went into the workout room to let me know that they were trying to jump start it again with information about the streaming services (in spite of the fact it had been five in the morning out west when he’d sent the information to me).

“Sorry,” I said when the professor answered. “I have to get back into my sling and all that. I had just finished up when you called.”

“It’s not a problem from my end,” the man said. “Is all going well with your rehab?”

“It’s going,” I said. “But the progress is like a glacier. They tell me they can see improvement but it is in inches and not miles.”

“But inches make miles,” the professor said. “Never forget that each step gets you closer to a goal. That’s true in our business, personal life and in recuperating from an injury. Keep your chin up.”

“I will,” I said, touched by the encouragement. “How was your weekend?”

“Fruitless on one end; fruitful on two others,” he said.

“Oh?” I asked.

“The task I accepted did not bear out,” he said.

“You couldn’t find him,” I said.

“Oh, we found him in about 25 minutes,” the professor corrected. “But the end was not as we’d hoped.”

“OK,” I said with a tone that let him know I didn’t follow him.

“The leaks were coming from a 13-year-old boy in Winnetka, Minnesota,” he said.

“A kid?” I asked.

“A kid,” the professor confirmed. “My ... operative ... made contact. There is no more information coming from that source. She managed to convince him that if she found him those hoping to prosecute him would be able to do it just as quickly. He’s good but he’s sloppy, she said. She’s going to work with him to teach him how to do it without leaving breadcrumbs back to his father’s house.”

“I ... uh,” I stammered. I didn’t want to be responsible for the next generation of hacktivist.

“Don’t worry,” the professor said. “Nobody’s name came up. It was just a chat from a nice young woman to an awkward teenage boy. She’s not a lot older.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, don’t tell me that!” I said.

“She is old enough to vote and purchase cigarettes – everywhere but California,” the professor said. “But it will be a couple of more years before she can legally buy a beer or smokes here. The kids out here prefer weed anyway and no guy on the corner asks for ID. Luckily, she doesn’t live in the Mecca of personal freedom and responsibility so she can smoke if she wants. You’d like her if you ever met her. She’s a sweet kid, smart as hell but she’s savvy. Anyway, the kid got grounded for two days from his computer. So he doesn’t have anything to help with streaming services. And we have discouraged him from trying to find anything – at least until he refines his skills a bit.”

I purposefully ignored the end of the comment.

“It’s fine,” I said. “We can use what we have and let the public draw its own conclusions.”

“Or you can release the formula that MusicMayhem uses to determine how much it pays each artist and the memos explaining why it’s necessary to under-report their download totals if they want to survive,” the professor said.

“You said...” I began.

“I said the original source has nothing more,” the man interrupted. “The young woman that helps me out is a different breed of cat. She got in there in about five minutes and downloaded everything she could find. I spent the weekend sifting through the haul. They have a specific formula that determines what percentage of revenue goes to each artist. It isn’t predicated on purchases or downloads and it is a sliding scale depending upon popularity and genre. I have an internal memo that talks about certain industry heads asking for a larger cut and threatening lawsuits and legislation if they don’t get it.”

“No shit,” I said.

“It was rather interesting,” the professor said. “We went into a few other places but didn’t find anything as juicy. Most places are smart enough to keep information like that in places that can’t be accessed externally. I didn’t think you’d approve a real B&E but I think this will be enough to tip the argument in your favor and destroy any credibility the other side might still have.”

I blew out my breath and considered the ramifications of what I’d just heard. This was more than just pouring the soup on the floor. This was pouring it over the cook’s head and using the empty kettle to bludgeon him to death.

“I figured you’d need some time to assess the situation,” the professor said. “That’s why I’m awake in the small hours of the morning. You know I require my beauty sleep. This face doesn’t come about naturally!”

I chuckled.

“Yeah, I’m going to have to run this past a lot of people before we drop that bomb,” I said.

“As titillating as I found this, it wasn’t the most interesting tidbit I came up with,” he said.

For the life of me, I could not think of a single thing that was more explosive than what I’d just heard.

“I’m intrigued,” I said.

“I would imagine,” the professor said, laughing heartily. “This comes back to how this all began. You know that once I hear a name, I never forget it. Right?”

“Yes,” I said. I had learned that little factoid when I had mentioned casually that a coed on campus had a nice butt. More than a year later, the professor saw her walking past and agreed with my statement.

“The person that started all this is a name that would have stuck with me,” he continued in a light voice (possibly because he was, like me, remembering the smooth curves of Renita Lugo’s rounded behind). “But I’d never heard the name before. Didn’t it strike you as odd that a complete non-entity would take aim at such powerful targets? As big a viper pit as the entertainment industry is, even the stupidest rat knows that you don’t make an enemy of the king cobra. Right?”

I thought about what he said. I hadn’t had a lot of time to assess young Miss Featherstone’s motives. She had been sucked under the train wheels too quickly for me to even pay attention to her.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” I said.

“I could have seen it if she had prodded some people lower down,” the professor said. “That’s just upward mobility at its finest. I could see if she had framed her argument around gender inequity in Nashville and noted that it doesn’t seem to affect some people. That’s still a hot topic. But a peasant just doesn’t walk into the throne room and try to decapitate the queen.”

I found myself nodding.

“She got some really bad advice from somewhere,” I determined. “She wasn’t signed to RFN. Who made this decision?”

“She hired a new manager a few weeks ago,” the professor said, purposefully dangling just enough to keep me guessing, “someone that you are familiar with and somebody that, conceivably, has a problem with someone very close to you.”

“Stephanie?” I asked incredulously.

“One and the same,” the professor said. “As you pointed out, I know some people that know some people in that little corner of the world. I asked around after I spoke to you. It bothered me. I don’t like ... not knowing something. So I spent the weekend dissecting a young woman’s largely unremarkable life. That is the name that popped out.”

“God damn it!” I said in a loud voice. “You know...”

“I know,” the professor said when I trailed off. “That situation ... even I don’t know the full story. But I know that you went out of your way to paint the separation as mutual – in spite of the awkward timing. I know people, Travis. I’m saying that in the generic sense. I know how people behave; I know what motivates them; I know how to find the hidden meaning in their words. I got the distinct impression, mostly because I know how you operate, that you were content to have her out the way. She was no longer a factor and you were not going to destroy her simply for sport.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You did that with somebody else,” the professor said without rancor. “He was an object lesson for anybody that thought about it in the future. It was nicely done, by the way. You systematically destroyed him from top to bottom. Of course, you learned that there is a risk to taking away everything. I think I warned you about that but ... there are a lot of lessons that have to be learned firsthand, I think. You would think that somebody that had spent any time around you would know better.”

“Stephanie always thought that I was just ... a hack,” I said.

“I wonder if she still thinks that?” the man wondered.

“Probably,” I said. “She’s what you like to call ‘a legend in her own mind.’”

The professor chuckled.

“What should I do about her?” I asked.

“The options are somewhat limited by her own stupidity,” the man said. “Honestly, I spent time thinking about that very question in case you asked for my opinion. You could probably wreck her marriage by hinting she was a stripper and a prostitute in the past. But, really, to me that’s beneath you. If I were you, I’d do what I could to make sure that there were no jobs for her in Nashville. You told me that your friend had affection for the woman at some point. That has to play into your decision.”

I nodded and thought about how I could accomplish drying up the job market. Her former association with Liz opened up many opportunities, particularly with young artists.