They had told her in no uncertain terms that the time and space they’d given her during the “showdown” in Tycho’s yacht in Cannes was at an end.   Now that Peter was gone, only Trevor was pushing back on the pressure they were putting on Bette.

During the video conference with them that she’d asked Jackson’s help to set up, when she’d told them about Peter’s death, the majority of the core group had audaciously expressed that his untimely death only served to underline the urgency with which Bette should finally share her information about the gold cache. Their callous reaction had shocked Bette initially, but she’d recovered quickly, reminding herself that this was a group that had ruthlessly eliminated the first group that had first started putting pressure on Bette, after all (author’s note: from ”Love Soul Heaven Hell”).

Now that she was about to address the crowd gathered for Peter’s memorial, though, memories of the sharp exchange she’d engaged in with them during that video conference came rushing back. She set aside her speaker’s notes and adjusted the microphone again, playing for time to collect her thoughts.

Despite weeks of work that followed the sniper attack on Skydance, which claimed Peter’s life and critically wounded Diane, and, to a lesser extent, Brom, the official investigations had not been able to uncover much about the man who had shot at the estate. Police followed the trajectory of the shots taken and had discovered the body of a man in the slope of a hill half a mile from the estate, and were surprised to find that the man himself had been shot at, his head blown off, and a few bullets shot into his body. The man’s sniper rifle still rested against his shoulder, and his inert hands continued to cradle the rifle. Later, police were able to link the bullets fired into Peter, Diane, and Brom to the sniper’s rifle, but they were not able to establish why he’d shot at the estate.

Finally, they’d found out who he’d been, but, after an extensive investigation, they also found out that the sniper had had several aliases, and may have been formerly in the elite forces of one of the militaries of a country abroad. But there were no leads they could establish out of that, and investigators reported to Jackson, frustrated, that the sniper was almost like a ghost.