Solitude Creek

Chapter 3

The two people sitting at the long conference table looked her over with varying degrees of curiosity.

Anything else? she wondered. Suspicion, dislike, jealousy?

Kathryn Dance, a kinesics (body language) expert, got paid to read people but law enforcers were typically hard to parse so at the moment she wasn’t sure what was flitting through their minds.

Also present was her boss, Charles Overby, though he wasn’t at the table but hovering in the doorway, engrossed in his Droid. He’d just arrived.

The four were in an interrogation-observation room on the ground floor of the California Bureau of Investigation’s West Central Division, off Route 68 in Monterey, near the airport. One of those dim, pungent chambers separated from the interrogation room by a see-through mirror that nobody, even the most naïve or stoned perps, believed was for straightening your tie or coiffing.

A no-nonsense crowd, fashion-wise. The man at the table — he’d commandeered the head spot — was Steve Foster, wearing a draping black suit and white shirt. He was the head of special investigations with the California Bureau of Investigation’s Criminal Division. He was based in Sacramento. Dance, five six and about a hundred twenty pounds, didn’t know exactly when to describe somebody as ‘hulking’ but Foster had to figure close. Broad, an impressive silver mane, and a droopy moustache that could have been waxed into a handlebar, had it been horizontal and not staple-shaped, he looked like an Old West marshal.

Perpendicular to Foster was Carol Allerton, in a bulky gray pants suit. Short hair frosted silver, black and gray, Carol Allerton was a senior DEA agent operating out of Oakland. The stocky woman had a dozen serious collars to her credit. Not legend, but respectable. She’d had the opportunity to be fast-tracked to Sacramento or even Washington but she’d declined.

Kathryn Dance was in a black skirt and white blouse of thick cotton, under a dark brown jacket, cut to obscure if not wholly hide her Glock. The only color in her ensemble was a blue band that secured the end of her dark blonde French braid. Her daughter had bound it this morning on the way to school.

‘That’s done.’ Hovering around fifty, Charles Overby looked up from his phone, on which he might’ve been arranging a tennis date or reading an email from the governor, though, given their meeting now, it was probably halfway between. The athletic if pear-shaped man said, ‘Okay, all task-forced up? Let’s get this thing done.’ He sat and opened a manila folder.

His ingratiating words were greeted with the same non-negotiable stares that had surveilled Dance a moment ago. It was pretty well known in law-enforcement circles that Overby’s main skill was, and had always been, administration, while those present were hard-core line investigators. None of whom would use the verb he just had.

Mumbles and nods of greeting.

The ‘thing’ he was referring to was an operation that was part of a statewide push to address a recent trend in gang activity. You could find organized crime everywhere in California but the main centers for gang activity were two: north and south. Oakland was the headquarters of the former, LA the latter. But rather than being rivals, the polar crews had decided to start working together, guns moving south from the Bay Area and drugs moving north. At any given moment, there would be dozens of illicit shipments coursing along Interstate-5, the 101 and the dusty, slow-moving 99.

To make it harder to track and stop these shipments, the senior bangers had hit on an idea: they’d taken to using break-bulk and way stations, where the cargo was transferred from the original tractor-trailers to dozens of smaller trucks and vans. Two hours south of Oakland and five north of LA, Salinas, with its active gang population, was perfect as a hub. Hundreds of warehouses, thousands of vehicles and produce trucks. Police interdiction nearly ground to a halt and illicit business surged. This year alone the statistics cops reported that revenue in the gun/drug operation had risen nearly a half-billion dollars.

Six months ago the CBI, FBI, DEA and local law-enforcement agencies had formed Operation Pipeline to try to stop the transportation network but had had paltry success. The bangers were so connected, smart and brazen that they constantly remained one step ahead of the good guys, who managed to bust only low-level dealers or mules with mere ounces taped to their crotches, hardly worth the bytes to process into the system. Worse, informants were ID’d, tortured and killed before any leads could be developed.

As part of Pipeline, Kathryn Dance was running what she’d dubbed the Guzman Connection and had put together a task force that included Foster, Allerton and two other officers, presently in the field. The eponymous Guzman was a massive, borderline psychotic gang-banger, who reportedly knew at least half of the transfer points in and around Salinas. As near a perfect prize as you could find in the crazy business of law enforcement.

After a lot of preliminary work, just last night Dance had texted the task force that they had their first lead to Guzman and to assemble here, now, for a briefing.

‘So, tell us about this asshole you’re going to be talking to today, the one you think’s going to give up Guzman. What’s his name? Serrano?’ From Steve Foster.

Dance replied, ‘Okay. Joaquin Serrano. He’s an innocent — what all the intel shows. No record. Thirty-two. We heard about him from a CI we’ve been running—’

‘Who’s been running?’ Foster asked bluntly. The man was adept at interruption, Dance had learned. Also, it was true that law enforcers were quite sensitive about their colleague’s attempts to poach confidential informants.

‘Our office.’

Foster grunted. Maybe he was irritated he hadn’t been informed. His flick of a finger said, Go on.

‘Serrano can link Guzman to the killing of Sad Eyes.’

The victim, actually Hector Mendoza (droopy lids had led to the nic), was a banger who knew higher-ups in both the north and south operations. That is, a perfect witness — had he remained alive.

Even cynical, sour Foster seemed content at the possibility of hanging the Sad Eyes killing on Guzman.

Overby, often good at stating the obvious, said, ‘Guzman falls, the other Pipeline crews could go like dominos.’ Then he didn’t seem to like his metaphor.

‘This witness, Serrano. Tell us more about him.’ Allerton fiddled with a yellow pad of foolscap, then seemed to realize she was doing so. She aligned the edges and set it free.

‘He’s a landscaper, works for one of the big companies in Monterey. Documented. Probably trustworthy.’

‘Probably,’ Foster said.

‘He’s here now?’ Allerton asked.

‘Outside,’ Overby replied.

Foster said, ‘Why’s he going to want to talk to us? I mean, let’s be transparent. He knows what Guzman’ll do, he finds out.’

Allerton: ‘Maybe he wants money — maybe he’s got somebody in the system he wants us to help.’

Dance said, ‘Or maybe he wants to do the right thing.’ Drawing a laugh from Foster. She, too, gave a faint grin. ‘I’m told it happens occasionally.’

‘He came in voluntarily?’ Allerton wondered aloud.

‘He did. I just called him up. He said yes.’

‘So,’ Overby inquired, ‘we’re relying on his good graces to help us?’

‘More or less.’ The phone against the wall hummed. Dance rose and answered it. ‘Yes?’

‘Hey, boss.’

The caller was a thirtyish CBI agent in the West Central Division. He was Dance’s junior associate, though that was not an official job description. TJ Scanlon, a dependable, hardworking agent and, best put, atypical for the conservative CBI.

TJ said, ‘He’s here. Ready to go.’

‘Okay, bring him up.’ Dance dropped the phone into the cradle and said to the room. ‘Serrano’s coming in now.’

Through the mirror window, they watched the door to the interview room open. In walked TJ, slim, his curly hair more unruly than usual. He was in a plaid sports coat and red pants, which approached bell-bottoms. His T-shirt was tie-dyed, yellow and orange.

Atypical...

Following him was a tall Latino with thick, short-cut dark hair. He walked in and looked around. His jeans were slim-cut and dark blue. New. He wore a gray hoodie with ‘UCSC’ on the front.

‘Yeah,’ Foster grumbled. ‘He graduated from Santa Cruz. Right.’

Dance said stiffly, ‘Not graduated. Took courses.’

‘Hmm.’

The Latino’s right hand was inked, though it didn’t seem to be a gang sign, and on his left forearm, near the sweat jacket, you could just make out the start of a tat. His face was untroubled.

Over the speaker, they heard the young agent say, ‘There you go. There. Take a seat. You want some water?’

The somber man said, ‘No.’

‘Somebody’ll be in in a minute.’

The man nodded. He sat down in a chair facing the one-way mirror. He glanced at it once, then pulled out his cell phone and read the screen.

Foster shifted slightly. Dance didn’t need any body-language skills to understand his thoughts. She said, ‘He’s just a witness, remember. We don’t have a warrant to intercept. He hasn’t done anything wrong.’

‘Oh, he’s done something wrong,’ Foster said. ‘We just don’t know what yet.’

She glanced at him.

‘I can smell it.’

Dance rose, slipped her Glock out of its holster and set it on the table. She picked up her pen and a pad of yellow paper.

Time to go to work and uncover the truth.

Chapter 4

‘She works miracles, does she?’ Foster asked. ‘This kinesics stuff?’

‘Kathryn’s good, yes.’ Overby had taken a dislike to Foster, who was the sort to snatch credit and press time away from those who’d done much of the legwork. He had to be careful, though. Foster was roughly on Overby’s level, pay-grade wise, but higher up, in the sense that he was based in Sacramento and had an office no more than thirty feet from the head of the CBI. He was also within lobbing distance of the legislature.

Allerton adjusted her notebook, empty at the moment. She drew ‘1’.

Overby continued, ‘Funny. When you know what she does — that body-language stuff — then go out to lunch with her, you watch what you’re doing, where you’re looking. Like you’re waiting for her to say, “So, you had a fight with your wife this morning, hmm? Over bills, I’d think.”’

‘Sherlock Holmes,’ Allerton said. She added, ‘I like that British one. With the guy with the funny name. Like “cummerbund”.’

Overby, staring into the interrogation room, said absently, ‘That’s not how kinesics works.’

‘No?’ Foster.

Overby said nothing more. As the others turned to the glass, he in turn examined the two members of the Guzman Connection task force present at the moment. Foster, Allerton. Then Dance walked into the interview room. And Overby’s attention, too, turned that way.

‘Mr Serrano. I’m Agent Dance.’ Her voice crackled through the overhead speaker in the observation room.

‘“Mister”,’ Foster muttered.

The Latino’s eyes narrowed as he looked her over carefully. ‘Good to meet you.’ There was nothing nervous about his expression or posture, Overby noted.

She sat across from him. ‘Appreciate your coming in.’

A nod. Agreeable.

‘Now, please understand, you’re not under investigation. I want to make that clear. We’re talking to dozens of people, maybe hundreds. We’re looking into gang-related crimes here on the Peninsula. And hope you can help us.’

‘So, I no need a lawyer.’

She smiled. ‘No, no. And you can leave anytime you want. Or choose not to answer.’

‘But then I look kind of suspicious, don’t I?’

‘I could ask how you liked your wife’s roast last night. You might not want to answer that one.’

Allerton laughed. Foster looked impatient.

‘I couldn’t answer that anyway.’

‘You don’t have a wife?’

‘No, but even if I did I’d do the cooking. I pretty good in the kitchen.’ Then a frown. ‘But I want to help. Terrible, some of the things that happen, the gangs.’ He closed his eyes momentarily. ‘Disgusting.’

‘You’ve lived in the area for a while?’

‘Ten years.’

‘You’re not married. But you have family here?’

‘No, they in Bakersfield.’

Foster: ‘Shouldn’t she have looked all this up?’

Overby said, ‘Oh, she knows it. She knows everything about him. Well, what she could learn in the past eight hours since she got his name.’

He’d observed plenty of Dance’s interrogations and listened to her lecture on the topic; he was able to give the task force a brief overview. ‘Kinesics is all about looking for stress indicators. When people lie they feel stress, can’t help it. Some suspects can cover it up well so it’s really hard to see. But most of us give away indications that we’re stressed. What Kathryn’s doing is talking to Serrano for a while, nothing about gang activity, nothing about crime — the weather, growing up, restaurants, life on the Peninsula. She gets his baseline body language.’

‘Baseline.’

‘That’s the key. It tells her how he behaves when he’s answering truthfully. When I said earlier that kinesics doesn’t work that way? I meant it doesn’t work in a vacuum. It’s almost impossible to meet somebody and instantly read them. You have to do what Kathryn’s doing — getting that baseline. After that she’ll start asking about gang activities he might’ve heard of, then about Guzman.’

Allerton said, ‘So she compares his behavior then to his baseline, when she knows he’s telling the truth.’

‘That’s it,’ Overby replied. ‘If there’s any variation it’ll be because he’s feeling stress.’

‘And that’s because he’s lying,’ Foster said.

‘Possibly. Of course, there’s lying because you just machine-gunned somebody to death. And there’s lying because you don’t want to get machine-gunned. His deception’ll be that there’s a point past which he won’t want to cooperate. Kathryn’ll have to make sure he does.’

‘Cooperation,’ Foster said. The word seemed to take on extra syllables as it trickled from a cynical mouth.

Overby noted that Foster was or had been a smoker — slight discoloration of his index and middle finger. The teeth were yellowish.

Sherlock.

In front of them, in the small, sterile room, Kathryn Dance continued to ask questions, chat, share observations.

Fifteen minutes rolled past.

Dance asked, ‘You enjoy landscaping?’

‘I do, sí. It’s... I don’t know... I like to work with my hands. I think maybe I’d be an artist if I had some, you know, skill. But I don’t. Gardening? Now that’s something I can do.’

Overby noted his nails were dark crescents.

‘Here’s what we’re looking into. A week ago a man named Hector Mendoza was killed. Shot. His nickname was Sad Eyes. He was coming out of a restaurant in New Monterey. On Lighthouse.’

‘Sad Eyes. Yeah, yeah. On the news. Near Baskin-Robbins, right?’

‘That’s it.’

‘Was— I no remember. Was a drive-by?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Was anybody else hurt?’ He frowned. ‘I hate it when children, bystanders are hurt. Those gang people, they don’t care who they hurt or don’t hurt.’

Dance nodded, on her face a pleasant expression. ‘Now, Mr Serrano, the reason I’m asking you this is that your name came up in the investigation.’

‘Mine?’ He seemed curious but not shocked. His dark face folded into a frown for a moment.

‘The day this man I mentioned, Mendoza, was killed, I believe you were working at the house of Rodrigo Guzman. It was March twenty-first. Now, while you were working for Mr Guzman, did you see a black BMW? A large one. This would be the afternoon of March twenty-first, I was saying, around three p.m.’

‘There were some cars there, I saw. Maybe some black ones but I no think so. And no BMW. Definitely.’ He added wistfully, ‘I always wanted one. I recognize a car like that, I would have gone to look at it.’

‘How long were you there?’

‘Oh, much of the day. I get to the job early, as early as the customers will have me. Señor Guzman, he has a lot of property. And there is always much to do. I was there at seven thirty. Took a lunch break maybe eleven thirty but only for thirty minutes. But, please, I am working for someone involved in the gangs? You are saying that?’ The frown deepened. ‘He a very nice man. Are you saying he involved in this death of... Men-...’

‘Mendoza. Hector Mendoza.’

‘Sí. Señor Guzman, he the nicest guy. Never hurt nobody.’

‘Again, Mr Serrano, we’re merely trying to get the facts.’

‘I can’t tell how he’s reacting,’ Allerton said. ‘He’s shifting in his chair, looking away, looking at her. I don’t know what it means.’

‘That’s Kathryn’s job,’ Overby said.

‘I think he’s a prick,’ Foster said. ‘I don’t care about body language. He’s sounding too innocent.’

Overby: ‘He’s just learned one of his company’s big moneymakers might be a banger and he’s not very happy about it. That’s how I’d act.’

‘Would you?’ Foster said.

Overby bristled but said nothing in response to the condescension. Allerton cast a sharp glance Foster’s way. He said, ‘I’m just saying. I don’t trust him.’

Dance: ‘Again, Mr Serrano, there are many questions, things we don’t know. We have had reports that the man who shot Mr Mendoza met with Mr Guzman just before he drove to New Monterey. But they’re just reports. You can see how we have to check it out.’

‘Sure. Yeah.’

‘So you’re telling me you’re certain there was no BMW at his house that morning?’

‘That’s right, Agent Dancer — no, Dance, right? Agent Dance. And I’m almost just as sure there were no black cars. And at that time I was in the front of the property, near the driveway. I would have seen. I was planting hydrangeas. He likes the blue ones.’

‘Well, thanks for that. Now, one more thing. If I showed you a few pictures of some men, could you tell me if any of them came to Mr Guzman’s house while you were there? Ideally on the twenty-first, but if not, some other time.’

‘I try.’

Dance opened her notebook and extracted three pictures.

‘Hard to see. They’re taken with, what, a spy camera or something?’

‘That’s right, a surveillance camera.’

The young man was sitting forward, pulling the pictures closer. He seemed to notice his dirty nails and looked embarrassed. Once he’d positioned the pictures he slipped his hands into his lap.

He studied them for a long time.

Allerton said, ‘Looks like he’s giving it a real shot. Fingers crossed.’

But then the young man sat back. ‘No, I’m sure I never seen them. Though’ — he tapped one — ‘he look like that outfielder for the As.’

Dance smiled.

‘Who is that?’ Foster asked. ‘I can’t see.’

Allerton said, ‘I think it’s Contino.’

‘Now there’s a prick and a half,’ Foster snapped.

A triggerman for one of the Oakland crews.

Dance gathered the pictures. She put them away and said, ‘I think that’s it, Mr Serrano.’

He shook his head. ‘I wish I could help you, Agent Dance. I hate the gangs as much as you do, no, probably more.’ His voice grew firm. ‘It is our teenagers and children getting killed. In our streets.’

Now Dance was leaning forward and she spoke in a soft voice: ‘If you did happen to see anything at Mr Guzman’s house and tell me, we’d make sure you’re protected. You and your family.’

Now the young man looked away once more. This time it was a moment before he spoke. ‘I no think so. I think I no be working there any longer. I’ll tell my boss to give me other jobs. Even if I make less.’

Allerton said, ‘Boy doesn’t have the cojones to snitch.’

Foster muttered, ‘She didn’t offer him anything. Why would he—’

‘You know, Mr Serrano, we have a budget for people who help us eliminate the gang threats. It’s cash, so nobody knows.’

The young man rose, smiling. ‘There only one problem with what you said. “Eliminate”. If you could eliminate the gangs, then maybe I think about it. But what you mean is, you put a few of them in jail. That leave plenty of others to come pay me and my girlfriend and her family a visit. I gotta say no.’

She held out her hand. ‘Thank you for coming in.’

‘I’m sorry. Not so clean.’ He showed his palms, though not the nails.

‘That’s all right.’

They gripped hands and he walked out of the room. Dance flipped the lights off.

Chapter 5

Dance stepped into the observation room and swung the door shut behind her. She walked to the table, set her notes down. She hit the button that shut off the recorder. Clicked her Glock back in its holster.

‘Well?’ Steve Foster asked. ‘Did something wonderful happen that I missed?’

‘What’s your assessment, Kathryn?’ Overby asked.

‘Very few variations from the baseline. I think he’s telling the truth,’ Dance announced. ‘He doesn’t know anything.’ She went on to explain that some people were masters of deception and could manipulate their behaviors — like the yoga experts who could slow their heart rate nearly to stopping — but Serrano didn’t strike her as that skilled.

‘Oh, I think he’s got a few skeletons. But nothing related to the CI or the gangs or Guzman. I’d guess he boosted a car when he was a kid or scores some weed from time to time. Got a ripple of evasion when we were talking about life on the Peninsula, never in trouble with the law. But it was small-time.’

‘You read that?’ Allerton said.

‘I inferred it. I think it’s accurate. But nothing we can use.’

‘Hell,’ Overby muttered. ‘Our one chance to nail Guzman.’

Dance corrected, ‘A chance. That didn’t pan out. That’s all. There’ll be others.’

‘Well, I don’t see a lot of others,’ Foster pointed out.

Carol Allerton said, ‘We’ve got that delivery boy. He knows something.’

Foster muttered, ‘The pizza kid? That’s a non-lead. It’s a dead lead. It’s a pushing-up-daisies lead.’ His face tightened. ‘There’s something about that asshole Serrano. I don’t like him. He was too slick. You learn anything in body-language school about slick?’

Dance didn’t answer.

Allerton: ‘It’s a pepper.’

‘What?’ Overby asked.

‘Serrano’s a pepper. Just saying.’

Foster read texts. Sent some.

Allerton thought for a moment, said, ‘I think we should try again — to turn him, I mean. Offer him more money.’

‘No interest,’ Dance said. ‘Serrano’s a dead end. I say we put better surveillance on Guzman. Get a team in place.’

‘What, Kathryn, twenty-four/seven? You know what that costs? Try the pizza boy, try the domestic staff in Guzman’s. Keep following up on the other leads.’ Overby looked at his watch. ‘I’ll leave it to you guys and gals to work it out.’ His body language suggested that he regretted using the second G-word. Political correctness, Dance reflected, could be so tedious. Overby rose and walked to the door.

And nearly got decked as TJ Scanlon pushed inside. He looked past them and into the observation room. Eyes wide. ‘Where’s Serrano?’

‘He just left,’ Dance told him.

The agent’s brow was furrowed. ‘Shit.’

‘What’s up, TJ?’ Overby asked sharply.

‘He’s gone?’ the young agent exclaimed.

Foster snapped, ‘What?’

‘Just got a call from Amy Grabe.’ FBI special agent in charge of the San Francisco office. ‘They busted this guy in Salinas for possession, major. He gave up Serrano.’

‘Gave him up?’ Foster’s brow furrowed deeply.

TJ nodded. ‘Boss, Serrano’s on Guzman’s payroll.’

‘What?’ Dance gasped.

‘He’s a shooter. He was the triggerman took out Sad Eyes. Serrano picked up the BMW at Guzman’s that afternoon, popped Sad, then went back and finished his shift planting daisies or pansies or whatever. He’s taken out four witnesses for Guzman in the last six months.’

‘Fucking hell,’ Foster raged. His eyes on Dance. ‘Outfielder for the As?’

‘Is it confirmed?’

‘They found the piece Serrano used. Ballistics check out. And it’s got Serrano’s prints all over it.’

‘No,’ Dance whispered harshly. She flung the door open and began sprinting down the hall.

He grabbed her before she got three feet into the parking lot behind CBI.

The tackle took Dance down hard and she sprawled on the concrete. She got her Glock out of her holster but, fast as a striking snake, he pulled the gun from her hand. He didn’t turn it her way, though. He saw that she was lying stunned on the ground and fled, a pounding sprint.

‘Serrano!’ she called. ‘Stop!’

He glanced at his car, realized he couldn’t get to it in time. He looked around and spotted, nearby, a slim redheaded woman in a black pantsuit — an employee of the CBI business office. She was climbing out of her Altima, which she’d just parked between two SUVs. He sprinted directly toward her, flung her to the ground. And ripped the keys from her hands. He leaped inside the SUV, started the engine and floored the accelerator.

The sounds of the squealing, smoking tires and the engine were loud. But they didn’t cover the next sound: a sickening crunch from the wheels. The woman’s screams stopped abruptly.

‘No!’ Dance muttered. ‘Oh, no.’ She rose to her feet, gripping her sore wrist, which had slammed into the concrete when he tackled her.

The others in the Guzman Connection task force ran to Dance.

‘I’ve called an ambulance and Sheriff’s Office,’ TJ Scanlon said, and raced to where the redhead was lying in the parking space.

Foster raised his Glock, aiming toward the vanishing Altima.

‘No!’ Dance said, and put a hand on his arm.

‘The fuck’re you doing, Agent?’

It was Overby who said, ‘Across the highway? There? On the other side of those trees. It’s a daycare center.’

Foster lowered the weapon reluctantly, as if insulted they’d questioned his shooting skill. He reholstered his Glock as the stolen car vanished from sight. Foster glanced toward Dance and, though he didn’t fling her words of the young man’s innocence back in her face, his body language clearly did.

Chapter 6

What would the next few hours, next few days bring?

Kathryn Dance sat in Charles Overby’s office, alone. Her eyes slipped from pictures of the man with his family to those of him in tennis whites and in an outlandish plaid golf outfit to those with local officials and business executives. Overby, rumor was, had his eye on political office. The Peninsula or possibly, at a stretch, San Francisco. Not Sacramento: he’d never set his sights very high. There was also the issue that you could get to fairway or tennis court all year round here on the coast.

Two hours had passed since the incident in the parking lot.

She wondered again: And a few hours from now?

And days and weeks?

Noise outside the doorway. Overby and Steve Foster, the senior CBI agents here, continued their conversation as they walked inside.

‘... got surveillance on the feeders to Fresno, then the One-o-one and the Five, if he’s moving fast. CHP’s got Ninety-nine covered. And we’ve got One roadblocked.’

Foster said, ‘I’d go to Salinas, the One-oh-one, I was him. Then north. He’ll get, you know, safe passage in a lettuce truck. All the way to San Jose. The G-Forty-sevens’d pick him up there and he disappears into Oakland.’

Overby seemed to be considering this. ‘More chance to get lost in LA. But harder to get to, roadblocks and all. Think you’re right, Steve. I’ll tell Alameda and San Jose. Oh, Kathryn. Didn’t see you.’

Even though he’d asked her — no, told her — to come to his office ten minutes ago.

She nodded to them both but didn’t rise. A woman in law enforcement is constantly aware of the gossamer thread she negotiates in the job with her bosses and fellow officers. Excessive deference can derail respect, as can too little. ‘Charles, Steve.’

Foster sat beside her and the chair groaned.

‘What’s the latest?’

‘Not good, looks like.’

Overby said, ‘MSCO found the Altima in a residential part of Carmel, near the Barnyard.’

An old outdoor shopping center, with a number of lots for parking cars.

And for hijacking or stealing them too.

Overby said, ‘But if he’s got new wheels, nobody’s reported anything missing.’

‘Which may mean the person who could do the reporting’s dead and in the trunk,’ Foster offered. Implicitly blaming Dance for a potential death-to-be.

‘We’re just debating, would he go north or south? What do you think, Kathryn?’

‘What we know now, he’s associated with the Jacinto crew. They’ve got stronger ties south.’

‘Like I was saying,’ Foster reminded, speaking exclusively to Overby, ‘south is three hundred miles of relatively few roads and highways, versus north, with a lot more feeders. We can’t watch ’em all. And he can be in Oakland in two hours.’

Dance said, ‘Steve, airplanes. He flies to a private strip in LA, out in the county, and he’s in South Central in no time.’

‘Airplane? He’s not cartel level, Kathryn,’ Foster fired back. ‘He’s I’m-hiding-in-a-lettuce-truck level.’

Overby put on his consideration face. Then: ‘We can’t look everywhere and I think Steve’s is the more, you know, logical assessment.’

‘All right. North, then. I’ll talk to Amy Grabe. She’ll get eyes going in Oakland, the docks, the East Bay. And—’

‘Whoa, whoa, Kathryn.’ Overby’s face registered surprise, as if she’d just said, ‘I think I’ll swim to Santa Cruz.’

She looked at him with a critical furrow of brow. There had been a lacing of condescension in his tone.

She glanced at Foster, who had lost interest in her and was studying a golden golf ball on Overby’s desk, some award. He didn’t want to be seen gloating when she heard what she knew was coming. Better to look at small-time awards made of plastic masquerading as precious metal.

Overby said, ‘I’ve just been on the phone with Sacramento. With Peter.’

The director of the CBI. The boss of bosses.

‘We talked, I explained...’

‘What’s the bottom line, Charles?’

‘I did everything I could, Kathryn. I went to bat for you.’

‘I’m suspended.’

‘Not suspended, no, no, not at all.’ He beamed, as if she’d won a Caribbean cruise in a state fair draw. ‘Not completely. You lost your weapon, Kathryn. He’s got it now. That’s... Well, you know. It is leave-of-absence-without-pay suspendable. They’re not going to go there. But they want you in Civil Division for the time being.’

Civ Div would correspond to a traffic division in the city police department. No weapon and with all the power of anybody else to make a citizen’s arrest. It was the entry level into the Bureau of Investigation and involved such tasks as compiling information on non-criminal violations by citizens and corporations, like failure to follow building or revenue-collection regulations, improper signage in the workplace and even failure to remit soda-bottle deposits promptly. Agents tended to endure the overwhelming paperwork and crushing boredom for only so long. If they weren’t promoted out into Crim Div, they usually quit cold.

‘I’m sorry, Kathryn. I didn’t have a choice. I tried. I really did.’

Going to bat for her...

Foster now regarded Overby with a neutral gaze that Dance, however, read as contempt for her boss’s backpedaling.

‘I told him body language isn’t an exact science. You did the best you could with Serrano. I saw you. We all did. It looked to me like he was telling the truth. Right, Steve? Who could tell?’

Dance could see that Foster was thinking, But it’s not our area of expertise to sit across from a perp and pick apart the entrails of his words, poses and gestures to get to the truth.

Overby continued, ‘But no one was hurt. Not badly. No weapons were discharged.’

The redhead in the parking lot had not been run over after all. She’d rolled out of the way, under an SUV, as the Altima had sped out of the parking space. Her Dell computer and her lunch had not survived; their loss was what the horrific-sounding crunch had signaled.

‘Charles, Serrano is High Mach. I missed it, I admit. But you see those one in every hundred cases.’

‘What’s that? High what?’ Foster asked.

‘A category of liars’ personalities. The most ruthless and, yeah, slick —’ she threw the word back at Foster ‘— are the “High Machiavellians”. High Machs love to lie. They lie with impunity. They see nothing wrong with it. They use deceit like a smartphone or search engine, a tool to get what they want. Whether it’s in love, business, politics — or crime.’ She added that there were other types, which included social liars, who lied to entertain, and adaptors, who were insecure people lying to make a positive impression. Another common type was the ‘actor’, someone for whom control was an important issue. ‘They don’t lie regularly, only when necessary. But Serrano, he just didn’t present like any of them. Sure not a High Mach. All I picked up was what I said, some small evasions. Social lies.’

‘Social?’

‘Everybody lies.’ The statistics were that every human being lied at least once or twice a day. Dance shot a glance to Foster. ‘When did you lie last?’

He rolled his eyes. She thought, Maybe when he said, ‘Good to see you,’ this morning.

She continued, ‘But I was getting to know him. I’m the only one here, or in any other agency, who’s spent time with him. And now we know he could be a key to the whole operation. I don’t need to lead it. Just don’t take me off the case.’

Overby ran a hand through his thinning hair. ‘Kathryn, you want to make it right. I understand. Sure you do. But I don’t know what to tell you. It’s been decided. Peter’s already signed off on the reassignment.’

‘Already.’

Foster: ‘More efficient, when you think about it. We didn’t really need two agents from this office. Jimmy Gomez is good. Don’t you agree, Kathryn?’

A junior agent at the CBI, one of the two others on the Guzman Connection task force. Yes, he was good. That wasn’t the point. She ignored Foster. She stood and, to Overby, said, ‘So?’

He looked at her with one raised eyebrow.

Her shoulders rose and fell impatiently. ‘I’m not suspended. I’m Civ Div. So, what’s on my roster?’

He looked blank for a moment. Then scoured his desk. He noted a Post-it, bright yellow, glaring as a rectangle of sun fell on it. ‘Here’s something. Got a memo on the wire from MCFD a little while ago. About that Solitude Creek incident?’

‘The fire at the roadhouse.’

‘That’s right. The county’s investigating but somebody from the state is supposed to make sure the club’s tax and insurance certificates’re up to date.’

‘Tax? Insurance?’

‘CHP didn’t want to handle it.’

Who would? Dance thought.

Foster’s absence of gloat was the biggest gloat she had ever seen.

‘Take care of that. Then I’ll see what else needs doing.’

With Dance ‘tasked’ to take on the fine print of California insurance regulations and tacitly dismissed, Overby turned to Steve Foster to discuss the manhunt for Joaquin Serrano.

Chapter 7

‘First, this is interesting — there was no fire.’

‘No fire?’ Dance asked. She was standing in front of the Solitude Creek club, which was encircled with yellow police tape. The man in front of her was stocky, forties, with an odd patch on his face; it looked like a birthmark but, she knew, was a scar from a blaze years ago that had attacked the newly commissioned firefighter before he snuffed it dead.

She’d worked with Monterey County fire marshal Robert Holly several times and found him low-key, smart, reasonable.

He continued, ‘Well, there was, technically. Only it was outside. The club itself was never on fire. There, that oil drum.’

Dance noted the rusty fifty-five-gallon vessel, the sort used to collect trash in parking lots and behind stores and restaurants. It rested near the club’s air-conditioning unit.

‘We ran a prelim. Discarded cigarette in the drum, along with some rags soaked in motor oil and gasoline. That was all it took.’

‘Accelerant, then,’ Dance said. ‘The oil and gas.’

‘That was the effect, though there’s no evidence it was intentional.’

‘So people thought there was a fire. Smelled smoke.’

‘And headed to the fire exits. And that was the problem. They were blocked.’

‘Locked? The doors were locked?’

‘No, blocked. The truck?’

He pointed to a large tractor-trailer parked against the west side of the club. It, too, was encircled with yellow tape. ‘It’s owned by that company there. Henderson Jobbing and Warehouse.’ Dance regarded the one-story sprawling structure. There were a half-dozen similar tractor-trailers sitting at the loading dock and nearby. Several men and women, in work clothes, a few in suits, stood on the dock or in front of the office and looked over at the club, as if staring at a beached whale.

‘The driver parked it there?’

‘Claims he didn’t. But what’s he going to say? There’ve been other incidents of trucks blocking the roadhouse parking lot. Never a fire exit.’

‘Is he here today?’

‘He’ll be in soon. I called him at home. He’s pretty upset. But he agreed to come in.’

‘Why would he park there, though? Anybody can see the signs: “No Parking, Fire Exit”. Tell me the scenario. What happened exactly?’

‘Come on inside.’

Dance followed the burly man into the club. The place had apparently not been straightened up after the tragedy. Chairs and tables — lowand high-tops — were scattered everywhere, broken glasses, bottles, scraps of cloth, snapped bracelets, shoes. Musical instruments lay on the stage. One acoustic guitar was in pieces. A Martin D-28, Dance observed. An old one. Two thousand dollars’ worth of former resonance.

There were many smears of old blood on the floor, brown footsteps too.

Dance had been there dozens of times. Everybody on the Peninsula knew Solitude Creek. The club was owned by a balding, earringed restaurateur and former hippie from (where else?) Haight-Ashbury named Sam Cohen, who had been to the Monterey Pop Festival in ’67 and reportedly not slept for three days. So moved by the show had the young man been that he had devoted his early life to promoting rock concerts, not so successfully, then given up and opened a steakhouse near the Presidio. He’d sold it for a profit and pocketed enough to buy an abandoned seafood restaurant on the small tributary that had become the club’s name.

Solitude Creek was a vein of gray-brown water running to the nearby Salinas River. It was navigable by any vessel with a draft no deeper than two or three feet, which left it mostly for small boats, though there wasn’t much reason to sail that way. The club squatted in a large parking lot between the creek and the trucking company, north of Monterey, off Highway One, the same route that wound through majestic Big Sur; the views were very different, there and here.

‘How many deaths?’

‘Three. Two female, one male. Compressive asphyxia in two cases — crushed to death. One had her throat closed up. Somebody stepped on it. Dozens of badly injured. Bone breaks, ribs piercing lungs. Like people were stuck in a huge vise.’

Dance couldn’t imagine the pain and panic and horror.

Holly said, ‘The club was pretty full but it was under the limit. We checked, first thing. Occupancy is two hundred, most owners pretend that means two-twenty. But Sam’s always been buttoned up about that. Doesn’t fool around. Everything looked in order, all the county documentation — that’s the safety issues. I saw the tax- and insurance-compliance certs on file in the office. They’re current too. That’s what Charles said you were here about.’

‘That’s right. I’ll need copies.’

‘Sure.’ Holly continued, ‘Fire inspector gave him a clean bill of health last month and Sam’s own insurance company inspected the place a couple of days ago and gave it an A-plus. Extinguishers, sprinklers, lights, alarms and exits.’

Except the exits hadn’t opened.

‘So, crowded but up to code.’

‘Right,’ Holly said. ‘Just after the show started — eight, little after — the fire broke out in the oil drum. The smoke got sucked into the HVAC system and spread throughout the club. Wasn’t real thick but you could smell it. Wood and oil smoke, you know, that’s particularly scary. People went for the closest doors — most, of course, for the exits along the east wall. They opened a little — you can see the truck’s about a foot away so nobody could fit through. Worse, some people reached out through the opening. Their arms or hands got stuck and... well, the crowd kept moving. Three or four arms and shoulders were shattered. Two arms had to be amputated.’ His voice grew distant. ‘Then there was this young woman, nineteen or so. It more or less got torn off. Her arm.’ He was looking down. ‘I heard later she was studying classical piano. Really talented. God.’

‘What happened when they realized the doors wouldn’t open?’

‘Everybody in the front was pressed against the doors, screaming for the people behind them to turn around. But nobody heard. Or if they did they didn’t listen. Panic. Pure panic. They should’ve gone back toward the other exits, the front, the stage door. Hell, the kitchen had a double door. But for some reason everybody ran the other way — toward the fire doors, the blocked ones. I guess they saw the exit signs and just headed for them.’

‘Not much smoke, you said. But visibility?’

‘Somebody hit the house lights and people could see everything fine.’

Sam Cohen appeared in the doorway. In his sixties, dressed in filthy jeans and a torn work shirt, blue. His remaining curly gray hair was a mess, and he had not slept that night, Dance estimated. He walked through the club slowly, picking up items from the floor, putting them into a battered cardboard box.

‘Mr Cohen.’

The owner of Solitude Creek made his way unsteadily toward Dance and Holly. His eyes were red: he’d been crying. He walked up, noting a smear of blood on the floor; cruelly, it was in the shape of a heart.

‘I’m Kathryn Dance, Bureau of Investigation.’

Cohen looked at, without seeing, the ID card. She slipped it away. He said to no one, ‘I just called the hospital again. They’ve released three. The critical ones — there were four of those — are unchanged. One’s in a coma. They’ll probably live. But the hospitals, the doctors don’t tell you much. The nurses never do. Why’s that a rule? It doesn’t make any sense.’

‘Can I ask you a few questions, Mr Cohen?’

‘Bureau of Investigation? FBI?’

‘California.’

‘Oh. You said that. Is this... I mean, is it a crime?’

Holly said, ‘We’re still doing the preliminary, Sam.’

Dance said, ‘I’m not a criminal investigator. I’m in the Civil Division.’

Cohen looked around, breathing heavily. His shoulders sagged. ‘Everything...’ he said, in a whisper.

Dance had no idea what he’d been about to say. She was looking at a face marred by indelible sorrow. ‘Could you tell me what you recall about last night, sir?’ She asked this automatically. Then, remembering the fire marshal was in charge, ‘Okay with you, Bob?’

‘You can help me out anytime you want, Kathryn.’

She wondered why she was even asking these questions. This wasn’t her job. But sometimes you just can’t leash yourself.

Cohen didn’t answer.

‘Mr Cohen?’ She repeated the question.

‘Sorry.’ Whispering. ‘I was at the front door, checking receipts. I heard the music start. I smelled smoke, pretty strong, and I freaked out. The band stopped in the middle of a tune. Just then I got a call. Somebody was in the parking lot and they said there was a fire in the kitchen. Or backstage. They weren’t sure. They must’ve seen the smoke and thought it was worse than it was. I didn’t check. I just thought, Get everybody out. So I made the announcement. Then I could hear voices. Swelling. The voices, I mean, getting louder and louder. Then a scream. And I smelled more smoke. I thought, No, no, not a fire. I was thinking of the Station in Rhode Island a few years ago. They had fireworks. Illegal ones. But in, like, six minutes the entire club was engulfed. A hundred people died.’

Choking. Tears. ‘I went into the club itself. I couldn’t believe it, I couldn’t believe what I saw. It was like they weren’t people at all — it was just one big creature, staggering around, squeezing toward the doors. But they weren’t opening. And there were no flames. Anywhere. Not even very thick smoke. Like in the fall, when I was growing up. People burning leaves. Where I grew up. New York.’

Dance had spotted a security camera. ‘Was there video? Security video?’

‘Nothing outside. Inside, yes, there’s a camera.’

‘Could I see it, please?

This was her Crim-Div mind working.

Sometimes you can’t leash yourself...

Cohen cast a last look around the room, then stepped into the lobby, clutching the box of survivors’ tokens he’d collected. He held it gingerly, as if a tight grip would mean bad luck for the hospitalized owners. She saw wallets, keys, shoes, a business card in his grasp.

Dance followed, Holly behind. Cohen’s office was decorated with posters about the appearances of obscure performers — and many from the Monterey Pop Festival — and was cluttered with the flotsam of a small entertaining venue: crates of beer, stacks of invoices, souvenirs (T-shirts, cowboy hats, boots, a stuffed rattlesnake, dozens of mugs given away by radio stations). So many items. The accumulation set Dance’s nerves vibrating.

Cohen went to the computer and sat down. He stared at the desk for a moment, a piece of paper; she couldn’t see what was written on it. She positioned herself in front of the monitor. She steeled herself. In her job as investigator with the CBI, most of her work was backroom. She talked to suspects after the deeds had been done. She was rarely in the field and never tactical. Yes, one could analyze the posture of a dead body and derive forensic insights but Dance had rarely been called on to do so. Most of her work involved the living. She wondered what her reaction to the video would be.

It wasn’t good.

The quality of the tape was so-so and a pillar obscured a portion of the image. She recalled the camera and thought it had been positioned differently but apparently not. At first she was looking at a wide-angle slice of tables and chairs and patrons, servers with trays. Then the lights dimmed, though there was still enough light to see the room.

There was no sound. Dance was grateful for that.

At 8:11:11 on the time stamp, people began to move. Standing up, looking around. Pulling out phones. At that point the majority of the patrons were concerned, that was obvious, but their facial expressions and body language revealed only that. No panic.

But at 8:11:17, everything changed. Merely six seconds later. As if they’d all been programed to act at the same instant, the patrons surged en masse toward the doors. Dance couldn’t see the exits: they were behind the camera, out of the frame. She could, however, see people slamming against each other and the wall, desperate to escape from the unspeakable fate of burning to death. Pressing against each other, harder, harder, in a twisting mass, spiraling like a slow-moving hurricane. Dance understood: those at the front were struggling to move clockwise to get away from the people behind them. But there was no place to go.

‘My,’ Bob Holly, the fire marshal, whispered.

Then, to Dance’s surprise, the frenzy ended fast. It seemed that sanity returned, as if a spell had been sloughed off. The masses broke up and patrons headed for the accessible exits — this would be the front lobby, the stage and the kitchen.

Two bodies were visible on the floor, people huddled over them. Trying pathetically ineffective revival techniques. You can hardly use CPR to save someone whose chest has been crushed, their heart and lungs pierced.

Dance noted the time stamp.

8:18:29.

Seven minutes. Start to finish. Life to death.

Then a figure stumbled back into view.

‘That’s her,’ Bob Holly whispered. ‘The music student.’

A young woman, blonde and extraordinarily beautiful, gripped her right arm, which ended at her elbow. She staggered back toward one of the partially open doors, perhaps looking for the severed limb. She got about ten feet into view, then dropped to her knees. A couple ran to her, the man pulling his belt off, and together they improvised a tourniquet.

Without a word, Sam Cohen stood and walked back to the doorway of his office. He paused there. Looked out over the debris-strewn club, realized he was holding a Hello Kitty phone and put it in his pocket. He said, to no one, ‘It’s over with, you know. My life’s over. It’s gone. Everything... You never recover from something like this. Ever.’

Chapter 8

Outside the club, Dance slipped the copies of the up-to-date tax- and insurance-compliance certificates into her purse, effectively ending her assignment there.

Time to leave. Get back to the office.

But she chose not to.

Unleashed...

Kathryn Dance decided to stick around Solitude Creek and ask some questions of her own.

She made the rounds of the three dozen people there, about half of whom had been patrons that night, she learned. They’d returned to leave flowers, to leave cards. And to get answers. Most asked her more questions than she did them.

‘How the hell did it happen?’

‘Where did the smoke come from?’

‘Was it a terrorist?’

‘Who parked the truck there?’

‘Has anybody been arrested?’

Some of those people were edgy, suspicious. Some were raggedly hostile.

As always, Dance deferred responding, saying it was an ongoing investigation. This group — the survivors and relatives, rather than the merely curious, at least — seemed aggressively dissatisfied with her words. One blonde, bandaged on the face, said her fiancé was in critical care. ‘You know where he got injured? His balls. Somebody trampled him, trying to get out. They’re saying we may never have kids now!’

Dance offered genuine sympathy and asked her few questions. The woman was in no mood to answer.

She spotted a couple of men in suits circulating, one white, one Latino, each chatting away with people from their respective language pools, handing out business cards. Nothing she could do about it. First Amendment — if that was the law that protected the right of scummy lawyers to solicit clients. A glare to the chubby white man, dusty suit, was returned with a slick smile. As if he’d given her the finger.

Everything that those who’d returned here told her echoed what she’d learned from Holly and Cohen. It was the same story from different angles, the constant being how shockingly fast a group of relaxed folks in a concert snapped and turned into wild animals, their minds possessed by panic.

She examined the oil drum where the fire had started. It was about twenty feet from the back of the roadhouse, near the air-conditioning unit. Inside, as Holly had described, were ash and bits of half-burned trash.

Dance then turned to what would be the crux of the county’s investigation: the truck blocking the doors. The cab was a red Peterbilt, an older model, battered and decorated with bug dots, white and yellow and green. The trailer it hauled was about thirty feet long and, with the tractor, it effectively blocked all three emergency-exit doors. The right front fender rested an inch from the wall of the Solitude Creek club; the rear right end of the trailer was about ten inches away. The angle allowed two exit doors to open a bit but not enough for anyone to get out. On the ground beside one door Dance could see smears of blood. Perhaps that was where the pretty girl’s arm had been sheared off.

She tried to get an idea of how the truck had ended up there. The club and the warehouse shared a parking lot, though signs clearly marked which areas were for patrons of Solitude Creek and which for the trucks and employees of Henderson Jobbing. Red signs warned about ‘towing at owner’s expense’ but seemed a lethargic threat, so faded and rusty were they.

No, it didn’t make any sense for the driver to leave the truck there. The portion of the parking space where the tractors and trailers rested was half full; there was plenty of room for the driver to park the rig anywhere in that area. Why here?

More likely the vehicle had rolled and come to rest where it had; the warehouse, to the south of the club, was a higher elevation and the lot sloped downward to here, where it leveled out. The heavy truck had got as far as the side wall and slowed to a stop.

Dance walked to the warehouse now, a hundred feet away, where the office door was marked with a handmade sign: ‘Closed’. The people she’d seen moments ago were now gone.

She gripped the knob and pulled. Locked — though lights were visible inside through a tear in a window shade, and she could see movement.

A loud rap on the glass. ‘Bureau of Investigation. Please open the door.’

Nothing.

Another rap, harder.

The shade moved aside; a middle-aged man, unruly brown hair, glared at her. His eyes scanned her ID and he let her in.

The lobby was what one would expect of a mid-size transport company squatting off a secondary highway. Scuffed, functional, filled with Sears and Office Depot furniture, black and chrome and gray. Scheduling boards, posted government regulations. Lots of paper. The smell of diesel fumes or grease was prominent.

Dance introduced herself. The man, Henderson, was the owner. A woman, who appeared to be an assistant or secretary, and two other men, in work clothing, gazed at her uneasily. Bob Holly had said the truck’s driver was coming in: was he one of these men?

She asked but was told, no, Billy hadn’t arrived yet. She then asked if the warehouse had been open at the time of the incident.

The owner said quickly, ‘We have rules. You can see them there.’

A sign on the wall nearby reminded, with the inexplicable capitalization of corporate culture:

The sign he was referring to was beneath it:

Interrogators are always alert to subjects answering questions they haven’t been asked. Nothing illustrates what’s been going on in their minds better than that.

She’d get to the matter of brakes and gears in a moment. ‘Yessir, but about the hours?’

‘We close at five. We’re open seven to five.’

‘But trucks arrive later, right? Sometimes?’

‘That rig came in at seven.’ He looked at a sheet of paper — which of course he’d found and memorized the minute he’d heard about the tragedy. ‘Seven ten. Empty from Fresno.’

‘And the driver parked in a usual space?’

‘Any space that’s free,’ the worker piped up. ‘The top of the hill.’ He bore a resemblance to Henderson. Nephew, son, Dance guessed. Noting he’d mentioned the incline. They’d already discussed scapegoating the driver and had planned his public crucifixion.

‘Would the driver have parked the truck there intentionally, beside the club?’ Dance asked.

This caught them off guard. ‘Well, no. That wouldn’t make sense.’ The hesitation told her that they wished they’d thought about this scenario. But they’d already decided to sell the driver out by implying he hadn’t set the brake.

The top of the hill...

The third man, brawny, soiled hands, realized his cue. ‘These rigs’re heavy. But they’ll roll.’

Dance asked, ‘Where was it parked before it ended up beside the club?’

‘One of the spots,’ Henderson Lite offered.

‘Gathered that. Which one?’

‘Do I need a lawyer?’ the owner asked.

‘I’m just trying to find out what happened. This isn’t a criminal investigation.’ And she added, as she knew she should: ‘At this point.’

‘Do I have to talk to you?’ Henderson asked the tax- and insurance-certification lady.

She said evenly, as if concerned for him, ‘It will be a lot better for you if you cooperate.’

Henderson gave a calculated shrug and directed her outside, then pointed to the spot that was, not surprisingly, directly uphill from the club. The truck seemed to have rolled in almost a straight line to where it rested. A slight bevel of the asphalt would have accounted for the vehicle’s angle with respect to the building: it had veered slightly to the left.

Henderson: ‘So we don’t know what happened.’

Meaning: Take the driver. Fuck him. It’s his fault, not ours. We posted the rules.

Dance looked around. ‘How does it work? A driver comes in after hours, he leaves the key somewhere here or he keeps it?’

‘Leaves it.’ Henderson pointed. A drop-box.

A white pickup pulled into the lot and approached them and squealed to a stop nearby. A slim man of about thirty-five, jeans and an AC/DC T-shirt stepped out of it. He pulled on a leather jacket, straightened his slicked-back blond hair, fringy at the ends. His face was etched with parentheses around his mouth, his brow permanently furrowed. He was white but his skin was leather-tanned.

‘Well,’ Henderson said, ‘here he is now.’

The sheepish man stepped up to his boss. ‘Mr Henderson.’

‘Billy,’ the owner said. ‘This’s...’

‘I’m Kathryn Dance, CBI.’ Her ID rose.

‘Billy Culp,’ the young man said absently, staring at her ID. Eyes wide, perhaps seeing an opening door to a jail cell.

She ushered him away from the others.

The owner sighed, hitched up his belt, gave it a moment more, then vanished inside. His blood kin joined him.

‘Could you tell me about parking the truck here last night?’

The young man’s eyes shifted to the club. ‘I came back this morning to help. I was thinking maybe I could do something. But there wasn’t anything.’ A faint smile, a hollow smile. ‘I wanted to help.’

‘Mr Culp?’

‘Sure, sure. I had a run to Fresno, came in empty about seven. Parked there. Spot ten. You can’t see clear. The paint’s gone mostly. Wrote down the mileage and diesel level on my log and slipped it through the slot in the door, put the keys in the drop-box, there. Call me “Billy”. “Mr Culp”, I start looking for my father.’

Dance smiled. ‘You parked there and set the brake and put the truck in gear.’

‘I always do, ma’am. The brake, the gears.’ Then he swallowed. ‘But, fact is, I was tired. I admit. Real tired. Bakersfield, Fresno, here.’ His voice was unsteady. He’d been debating about coming clean. ‘I’m pretty sure I took care of things. But to swear a hundred percent? I don’t know.’

‘Thanks for being honest, Billy.’

He sighed. ‘I’ll lose my job, whatever happens. Will I go to jail?’

‘We’re just investigating at this point.’ He wore a wedding band. She guessed children too. He was of that age. ‘You ever forgotten? Gears and brake?’

‘Forgotten to lock up once. Lost my CB. My radio, you know. But, no.’ A shake of his head. ‘Always set the brake. Never drive my personal car I’ve had a single beer. Don’t cruise through yellow lights. I’m not really smart and I’m not really talented at a lot of stuff. I’m a good driver, though, Officer Dance. No citations, no accidents were my fault.’ He shrugged. ‘But, truth is, yes, I was tired, ma’am. Officer.’

‘Jesus, look out!’ Henderson shouted, calling through the open office door.

Billy and Dance glanced back and ducked as something zipped over their heads. The rock bounded over the asphalt and whacked the tire of another rig.

‘You fucking son of a bitch!’ the man who’d thrown the projectile shouted.

A group of a dozen people — mostly men — were walking fast up the incline from the direction of the club. Another flung a second rock. Dance and Billy dodged. The throw was wide but if it had hit it would have cracked a skull. She was surprised to note that these were people who were well dressed. They seemed middle class. Not bikers or thugs. But their expressions were chilling: they were out for blood.

‘Get him!’

‘Fucker!’

‘You’re the fucking driver, aren’t you?’

‘Look! Over there! It’s the driver!’

‘Police,’ Dance said, holding up her ID, not bothering with specific authentication. ‘Stop right there.’

Nobody paid the least attention to her.

‘You asshole! Killer.’

‘No,’ Billy said, his voice choking. ‘I didn’t do anything.’

Suddenly the group was joined by others striding fast from the impromptu memorial site near the roadhouse. Some started running. Pointing. They numbered about twenty now. Faces red with anger, shouting. Dance had her mobile out and was dialing 911. Dispatch would have taken too long.

She heard: ‘Police and fire emergen—’

Dance gasped as a tire iron spiraled straight for her face.

Chapter 9

Billy tackled Dance as the metal rod zipped past.

They both collapsed onto the ground. Then he yanked her to her feet and together they hurried toward the company’s office door. She completed her call, officer needs assistance, and twisted back, shouting to the approaching mob, ‘This is a police investigation! Disperse now. You will be arrested!’

And was greeted with another missile — a rock again. This one connected, though obliquely, with her left forearm, not far from the watch, which had shattered in the CBI parking lot. She cried out in pain.

‘Arrest him!’ called the burly blonde woman, whose fiancé had been so badly injured.

‘Arrest him? Fuck him up!’

Now the crowd caught up with them. Several of the men pushed Dance aside and shoved Billy backward, their palms slamming into his chest.

‘You are committing a felony! There are police on their way.’

One man sprinted up and got right in their faces. Livid, he stuck a finger in Billy’s chest and raged, ‘You parked there to take a crap or something! Ran off. Fuck you, Officer! Why isn’t he under arrest?’

‘No, no, I didn’t do anything. Please!’ Billy was shaking his head and she saw tears in his eyes. He rubbed his chest from one of the blows a moment ago.

Others were swarming around them now. Dance held her shield up and this resulted in a momentary stay of the madness.

Dance whispered, ‘This’s going to blow up. We’ve got to get out of here now. Back to the office.’

She and Billy pushed around those immediately in front of them and kept walking toward the door. The crowd followed behind them, a hostile escort. She told herself: Don’t run. She knew if they did the crowd would attack once again.

And though it was impossibly hard, she kept a slow, steady pace.

Somebody else growled, ‘Give me five minutes with him. I’ll get a confession.’

‘Fuck him up, I keep saying!’

‘You killed my daughter!’

They were now thirty feet from the office door. The crowd had grown and were shouting insults. At least no more projectiles.

Then one short, stocky man in jeans and a plaid shirt ran up to his prey and slugged Billy in the side of the head. He cried out.

Dance displayed her shield. ‘You. Give me your name. Now!’

He laughed cruelly, grabbed the badge and flung it away. ‘Fuck you, bitch.’

She doubted that even a weapon brandished would have slowed them down. In any event she had no Glock to draw.

‘Fuck him up! Get him!’

‘Kill him.’

‘Her too, bitch!’

These people were insane. Animals. Mad dogs.

‘Listen to me,’ Dance shouted. ‘You’re committing a felony! You will be arrested if you—’

It was then that their control broke. ‘Get him. Now!’

She glanced back to see several picking up rocks. One gripped another tire iron.

Jesus.

She ducked as a large stone zipped past her ear. She didn’t see who’d thrown it. She stumbled and ended up on her knees. The crowd surged forward.

Billy yanked her to her feet and, hands over their heads, they sprinted for the office door. It was now closed. If Henderson had locked it, hell, they could very well be dead in a few minutes.

Dance felt the full-on panic, an antelope hearing the rhythm of the lion’s paws moving closer and closer.

The door...

Please...

Just as they arrived it swung open. Billy turned and this time a rock hit its target square. It slammed into the man’s jaw and he gave a sharp cry. Blood poured and it was obvious he’d lost a tooth or two and possibly a bone had broken.

He stumbled inside and collapsed on the floor, gripping his mouth. Dance leapt in too. The door slammed shut and Henderson locked it.

‘I called nine one one,’ the office manager said.

‘I did too,’ Dance muttered, looking at Billy’s gash. ‘They should be here soon.’

She peered out of the window, her hands shaking, heart pounding audibly.

Panic...

The crowd had ganged at the door. Their faces were possessed. She thought of the time when a crazed Doberman, off its leash, had charged her and her German shepherd, Dylan, on a walk. Only pepper spray had stopped it.

No reasoning, no escaping.

Dance grimaced, noting that Henderson was holding a revolver, a Smith & Wesson, short-barrel.38 Special. Gripped uneasily in his hand.

‘Put that away.’

‘But—’

‘Now,’ she snapped.

He set the weapon back in its drawer.

A rock smashed into the side of the office, a huge sound, thanks to the metal walls. Others. Two windows broke, though no one tried to climb in. More shouts.

Dance looked at Billy, whose eyes were closed from the pain. He held a towel, filled with ice, against his swollen face. Henderson’s relative had brought it. It appeared that the jawbone was shattered.

Looking out through a broken window Dance could see flashing blue-and-white lights.

And, just like in the Solitude Creek video of last night, the madness vanished. The mob who’d been ready to lynch Billy and break Dance’s skull turned and were walking away, making for their own cars, as if nothing had happened.

Fast, so fast. As quickly as they’d become enraged they’d calmed. The possession was over with. She noted several of them drop the rocks they held; it seemed some of them hadn’t even realized they were holding the weapons.

Squad cars from the MCSO eased to a stop in front of Henderson Jobbing. Two sheriff’s deputies from the vehicle closest to the office surveyed the scene around them and walked inside.

‘Kathryn,’ said the woman deputy, a tall, striking Latina. The other, a squat African American, nodded to her. She knew both of them well.

‘Kit, John.’

‘The hell happened?’ Kit asked.

Dance explained about the mob. She added, ‘You could probably get a few collars for assault and battery.’ A nod toward Billy and she showed her own rock-bruised arm. ‘I’ll leave that up to you. I’m not processing criminal cases.’

Kit Sanchez lifted an eyebrow.

‘Long story. I’ll witness, you need it.’

John Lanners, the other deputy, looked over Billy Culp’s shattered face and asked if he wanted to press charges against anyone in the mob. Billy’s mumbled words: ‘I didn’t see anyone.’

He was lying, Dance could see. She understood, of course, that it was simply that he didn’t want any more publicity as the man responsible for the Solitude Creek disaster. And his wife and children... They, too, would be targeted.

Dance shook her head. ‘You decide.’

‘Who’s running this? CBI or us?’ Lanners asked, nodding back to the roadhouse.

Sanchez said, ‘We don’t care. Just, you know...’

‘Bob Holly’s here, for the county, so I guess you are.’ Dance added, ‘I came to check some licenses.’ She shrugged. ‘But I decided to stay. Ask some questions.’

Lanners wiped sweat — he was quite heavy — and said to Billy, ‘We’ll call in some medical help.’

The driver didn’t seem to care, though he was in significant pain. He wiped tears.

Lanners pulled his radio off his belt and made a call for the EMS bus. The dispatcher reported they’d have one there in ten minutes. Dance asked Lanners, ‘Can you go with him?’ She added, in a whisper, ‘It’s like there’s a price on his head.’

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘And we’ll give his family a call.’ The deputy, too, had spotted the wedding band.

Dance swiped at her own injury.

Kit asked, ‘You all right, Kathryn?’

‘It’s...’

Then Dance’s eyes focused past the deputy to another sign on the wall. She pointed. ‘Is that true?’

Henderson squinted and followed her gaze. ‘That? Yeah. Saved us a lot of money over the years.’

‘All the trucks?’

‘Every single one.’

Kathryn Dance smiled.

Chapter 10

The man Ray Henderson was going to sell out, the man the crowd ten minutes ago was ready to lynch, was innocent.

It took only five minutes to learn that Billy Culp was not responsible for the tragedy at Solitude Creek.

The sign Dance’d seen on the wall of Henderson Jobbing, not far from where the driver sat, miserable in his heart and hurting in his jaw, read:

All the Henderson Jobbing trucks, it seems, were equipped with sat nav, not only to give the drivers directions but to tell the boss exactly where they were and how fast they’d been going. (Henderson explained that this was to protect them in the case of hijacking or theft; Dance suspected he was also tired of paying speeding tickets or shelling out more than he needed to for diesel fuel.)

Dance got permission from Bob Holly and the county deputies to extract the GPS device from Billy’s truck and take it into the Henderson office. Once it was hooked up via a USB cord, she and the deputies looked over the data.

At 8:10 last night the GPS unit came to life. It registered movement northward — toward the roadhouse — of about one hundred feet, then it stopped and shut off.

‘So,’ Kit Sanchez said, ‘somebody drove it into position intentionally.’

Yep,’ Dance said. ‘Somebody broke into the drop-box. Got the key. Drove the truck into position to block the club doors, shut the engine off and returned the key.’

‘I was home then!’ Billy said. ‘When it happened, eight o’clock, I was home. I’ve got witnesses!’

Henderson and his perhaps-nephew diligently avoided looking at either Dance or Billy, now knowing that the man they had wanted to throw under the... well, truck was innocent.

‘Security cameras?’ Dance asked.

‘In the warehouse. Nothing outside.’

Too bad, that.

‘And the key to the truck?’ she asked.

‘I’ve got it.’ He reached for a drawer.

‘No, don’t touch it,’ Dance said.

Fingerprints. Forensics didn’t much interest Kathryn Dance but you had to treat physical evidence with consummate reverence.

‘Shit. I’ve already picked it up.’

John Lanners, the MCSO deputy: ‘There’ll be plenty of prints on it, I’d imagine, but we’ll sort it out. Take yours for samples. Find the ones that don’t match Billy’s or the other drivers’.’

In gloved hands, Kit Sanchez collected the key fob from the offending truck and put it in an evidence bag. Dance knew in her heart, however, that there was no way there would be any prints from the man who’d intentionally blocked the club’s doors. She knew instinctively he would be meticulous.

Ironically, just after Dance had been shifted from criminal mode to civil, the administrative matter she’d come here about, taxation and insurance certificates, had just turned into a crime. A felony. Murder. Perhaps even a terrorist attack.

She said to Sanchez and Lanners, ‘Can you declare this a homicide? I can’t.’ A wry smile. ‘That’s the long-story part. And secure the scene. The drop-box, the truck, the oil drum, the club. Better go for the parking lot too.’

‘Sure,’ Lanners said. ‘I’ll call Crime Scene. Secure everything.’

With a dribble of a siren, a county ambulance pulled up and parked in front of the office. Two techs, large white men, appeared in the doorway and nodded. They spotted Billy and walked over to him to assess damage and mobility.

‘Is it broke, my jaw?’ Billy asked.

One tech lifted off the icy and bloody towel. ‘Got to take X-rays first and then only a doctor can tell you after he looks over the film. But, yah, it’s broke. Totally fucking broke. You can walk?’

‘I’ll walk. Is anybody out there?’

‘How do you mean?’

Dance glanced out of the window. ‘It’s clear.’

The four of them stepped outside and helped the scrawny driver into the ambulance. He reached out and took Dance’s hand in both of his. His eyes were moist and not, Dance believed, from the pain. ‘You saved my life, Agent Dance. More ways than just one. God bless you.’ Then he frowned. ‘But you be careful. Those people, those animals, they wanted to kill you just as much as me. And you didn’t do a lick wrong.’

‘Feel better, Billy.’

Dance found her shield, dusted it off and slipped it into her pocket. She then returned to the roadhouse. She’d tell Bob Holly what she’d discovered but keep the news from Charles Overby until she’d done some more canvassing.

She needed as much ammunition as she could garner.

As she approached the gathered press and spectators, she glanced toward a pretty woman TV reporter, in a precise suit, interviewing a Monterey County firefighter, a solid, sunburned man with a tight crew-cut and massive arms. She’d seen him at several other fire and mass-disaster scenes over the past year or so.

The reporter said to the camera, ‘I’m talking here with Brad C. Dannon, a Monterey County fireman. Brad, you were the first on the scene last night at Solitude Creek?’

‘Just happened I wasn’t too far away when we got the call, that’s right.’

‘So you saw a scene of panic? Could you describe it?’

‘Panic, yeah. Everybody. Trying to get out, just throwing themselves against the door, like animals. I’ve been a firefighter for five years and I’ve never...’

Chapter 11

‘... seen anything like this.’

‘Five years, really, Brad? Now tell me, it looks like the doors, the fire doors, were unlocked but they were all blocked by a truck that had parked there. A tractor-trailer. We can see... there.’

Antioch March lifted his eyes from his present gaze — the pillowcase of fine-weave cotton, six inches from his face — and glanced at the TV screen, across the bedroom in the sumptuous Cedar Hills Inn in Pebble Beach. The camera from the crew outside the Solitude Creek roadhouse panned to Henderson Jobbing and Warehouse, which was all of ten miles from where March now lay.

A mouth beside his ear: ‘Yes, yes!’ A moist whisper.

On TV, the anchor, blonde as toffee, came back into high-definition view. ‘Brad, a number of victims and relatives of victims are accusing the driver of the truck of negligently blocking the doors, accusing him of parking there to go to the bathroom, or maybe even sneaking in to see the show last night. Do you think that’s a possibility?’

‘It’s too early to speculate,’ the firefighter replied.

It’s never wise to speculate, March corrected Brad, early or late. The bodybuilding firefighter, not quite as buff as March, looked smug. Wouldn’t trust him to rescue me from a smoke-filled building.

Much less a stampede in a roadhouse. Brad did, however, go on to offer graphic descriptions of the ‘horror’ last night. They were quite accurate. Helped by Brad and the images he was describing, March turned his attention back to the task at hand, lowered his head back to the pillow and pulsed away.

Calista gripped his earlobe between two perfectly shaped teeth. March felt the pressure of the incisors. Felt her studded nose against his smooth cheek. Felt himself deep inside her.

She grunted rhythmically. Maybe he did too.

Calista whispered, ‘You’re so fucking handsome...’

He wished she wouldn’t talk. Besides, he didn’t know what to do with that sentence. Maybe she was hoping for this to be more than a couple-days thing. But he also knew that people said all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons at moments like this and he didn’t sweat it.

Just wished she wouldn’t talk. He wanted to hear. Wanted to see. Wanted to imagine.

Her heels banged against his tailbone, her bright crimson fingernails — the color of arterial blood — assaulted his back.

And he replayed what people often replayed at moments like now: earlier times. The Solitude Creek incident. But then, going way back: Serena, of course. He often returned to Serena, the way a top eventually spins to stillness.

Serena. She helped move him along.

Jessica he thought of too.

And, of course, Todd. Never Serena and Jessica without Todd.

He was moving more quickly now.

Again she was gasping, ‘Yes, yes, yes...’

As she lay under him Calista’s hands now eased up his spine and gripped his shoulders hard. Those GMC-finish nails pressed into his skin. He reciprocated, digging into her pale flesh. Her moaning was partly pain; the rest of the damp gusts from her lungs were from his two hundred plus pounds, little fat. Pounding.

Compressing.

Sort of like the people last night.

‘Oh...’ She stiffened.

He backed off at that. There was a balance between his pleasure and her pain. Tricky. He didn’t really need her to cry at the moment. He had all he needed.

‘Again, if you’re just joining us...’

‘Oh, yeah,’ Calista whispered, and it wasn’t an act. She was gone, lost in the moment.

His left hand slid out from under the bony spine and then was twining the strawberry mane of hair in his blunt fingers, pulling her head back. Her throat — smooth for cutting. Though that wasn’t on the agenda. Still, the image socketed itself into his thoughts. That helped him too.

March gauged rhythm and sped up slightly. Then a rich inhale and those luminous pearls of teeth went against his neck — many women were into the vampire thing, Calista too, apparently. A shudder and she hissed, ‘Yesssss,’ not as an act or a prod for him to finish: it was involuntary. Genuine. He was moderately pleased.

Now, his turn. He gripped her more tightly yet. Chest and breasts, thigh and thigh, sliding unsteadily; the room was hot, the sweat abundant.

‘I’m speaking to Brad Dannon, Monterey County firefighter and first on the scene at the Solitude Creek tragedy last night. Brad is credited with saving at least two victims, who were bleeding severely. Have you talked to them today, Brad?’

‘Yes, ma’am. They’d lost a lot of blood but I was able to keep them going till our wonderful EMS got there. They’re the true heroes. Not me.’

‘You’re very modest, Brad. Now—’

Click.

He realized that the impressive nails of one hand had vanished from his back. She’d found the remote and shut off the TV.

No matter. With a flash of Serena’s beautiful face, combined with Brad’s comment, a lot of blood, he was done.

He gasped and let his full weight sag down upon her. He was thinking: It had been good. Good enough.

It would distract for a while.

Then he was aware of her squirming slightly. Her breath labored.

He thought again: Compressive asphyxia.

And stayed where he was. Ten seconds passed.

Twenty. Then thirty. He could kill her by simply not moving.

‘Uhm,’ she gasped. ‘Could you...’

He felt her chest heaving.

March rolled off. ‘Sorry. You totally tuckered me out.’

Calista caught her breath. She sat up slightly and tugged the sheets across her body. Why, afterward, did women grow modest? He pulled off a pillow case and used it as a towel, then glanced casually at his nails. No blood. He was disappointed.

She turned back to him, faintly smiling, and put her head on the pillow.

March stretched. As always, moments like this, just after, he remained silent, since you could never trust yourself, even someone as controlled as he was. He’d learned that.

She, however, spoke. ‘Andy?’

He preferred the nickname. ‘Antioch’ drew attention. ‘Yes?’

‘That was terrible, what happened.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The stampede or crush. It was on the news. Just a minute ago.’

‘Oh, I wasn’t listening.’

Was this a test? He didn’t know. He’d provided the good answer, though. She put a hand, tipped in red, on his arm. He supposed he shouldn’t even have had the set on — not wise to be too interested in Solitude Creek. But when she’d arrived forty minutes ago, the first thing he’d done was pour some Chardonnay for her and start talking away, so she wouldn’t think to shut off the unfolding news reports.

March stretched again, the luxurious inn’s mattress not rocking a quarter-inch. He thought of the endlessly moving Pacific Ocean, which you could hear, if not see, from the cranked-open window to his left.

‘You work out a lot,’ she said.

‘I do.’ He had to. His line of work. Well, one of his lines of work. March got in at least an hour every day. Exercise was easy for him — he was twenty-nine, naturally strong and well built. And he enjoyed the effort. It was comforting. It was distracting.

With unslit throat and her non-compressed lungs, Calista eased from the sheets and, like an A-list actress, kept her back to the camera as she rose.

‘Don’t look.’

He didn’t look. March tugged off the condom, which he dropped onto the floor, the opposite side of the bed. Out of her view.

Looked at the remote. Decided not to.

He thought she was going to the bathroom but she diverted to the closet, flung it open, looking through his hanging clothes. ‘You have a robe I can borrow? You’re not looking?’

‘No. The bathroom, the hook on the door.’

She got it and returned, enwrapped. ‘Nice.’ Stroking the fine cotton.

The inn was one of the best on the Monterey Peninsula, and this area, he’d learned in the past few days, was a place with many fine inns. The establishment was happy for guests to take its robes home with them as lovely souvenirs of their stay — for the oddly random price of $232.

This, he reflected, defined Cedar Hills. Not an even $250, which would have been outrageous but logical. Not $100, which would be the actual retail price and made more sense.

Two hundred thirty-two pretentious dollars.

Something to do with human nature, he guessed.

Calista Sommers fetched her purse and rummaged, collected from it some of the contents.

He smelled wine, from the glasses nearby. But that had been for her. He sipped his pineapple juice, with ice cubes whose edges had melted to dull.

She tugged aside a curtain. ‘View’s amazing.’

True. Pebble Beach golf course not far away, contortionist pine trees, crimson bird-of-paradise flowers, sculpture, fountains. Deer wandered past, ears twitchy and legs both comical and elegant.

Her mind seemed to wander. Maybe she was thinking of her meeting. Maybe of her ill mother. Calista, a twenty-five-year-old bookkeeper, wasn’t from here. She’d taken two weeks off from work and driven to California from her small town in northern Washington State to look for areas where her mother, in assisted living because of Alzheimer’s, might relocate, a place where the weather was better. She’d tried Marin, Napa, San Francisco and was now checking out the Monterey Bay area. This seemed to be the front-runner.

She walked into the bathroom and the shower began to pulse. March lay back, listening to the water. He believed she was humming.

He thought again about the remote. No. Too eager.

Eyes closed, he replayed the incident at Solitude Creek once more.

Ten minutes later she emerged. ‘You bad boy!’ she said, with a devilish smile, but chiding too. ‘You scratched me.’

Hiking the robe up. A very, very nice ass. Red scratch marks. The image of them hit him low in the torso. ‘Sorry.’ Not a Fifty Shades of Grey girl, it seemed.

She forgot her complaint. ‘You look like somebody, an actor.’

Channing Tatum was the default. March was slimmer, about the same height, over six feet.

‘I don’t know.’

Didn’t matter, of course. Her point was to apologize for the jab about the scratches.

Accepted.

She dug into her purse for a brush and makeup, began reassembling. ‘The other night you didn’t really tell me much about your job. Some non-profit. A website? You do good things. I like that.’

‘Right. We raise awareness — and money — to benefit people in crises. Wars, natural disasters, famine, that sort of thing.’

‘You must be busy. There’s so much terrible stuff going on.’

‘I’m on the road six days a week.’

‘What’s the site?’

‘It’s called Hand to Heart.’ He rolled from the bed. Though not feeling particularly modest, he didn’t want to walk around naked. He pulled on jeans and a polo shirt. Flipped open his computer and went to the home page.

‘We don’t take money ourselves. We just make people aware of needs for humanitarian aid, then they can click on a link to, say, tsunami relief or the nuclear disaster in Japan or gas victims in Syria. Make donations. My job is I travel around and meet with non-profit groups, get press material and pictures of the disaster to put on our site. I vet the groups too. Some are scams.’

‘No!’

‘Happens, yep.’

‘People can be such shits.’ She closed the laptop. ‘Not a bad job. You do good things for a living. And you get to stay in places like this.’

‘Sometimes.’ In fact, he wasn’t comfortable in ‘places like this’. Hyatt was good enough for him or even more modest motels. But his boss liked it here; Chris liked all the best places so this was where March was put. Just like the clothes and accessories scattered about the room. The Canali suit, the Louis Vuitton shoes, the Coach briefcase, the Tiffany cufflinks weren’t his choice. His boss didn’t get that some people did this job for reasons other than money.

Calista vanished into the bathroom to dress — the modesty bump was growing — and she emerged. Her hair was still damp but she’d rented a convertible from Hertz and he supposed that, with the top down, the strands would be blow-dried by the time she got to whatever retirement home she was headed for. March’s own sculpted brown hair, thick as pelt, irritatingly took ten minutes to bring to attention.

Calista kissed him, brief but not too brief; they both knew the rules. Lunchtime delight.

‘You’ll still be around for a couple of days, Mr Humanitarian?’

‘I will,’ March said.

‘Good.’ This was delivered perky. Then she asked, genuinely curious, ‘So you having a successful trip?’

‘Real successful, yeah.’

Then, moving breezily, Calista was out of the door.

The moment it shut, March reached over and snagged the remote. Clicked the TV back on, thinking maybe national news had picked up Solitude Creek, and wondered what the big boys and girls were saying about the tragedy.

But on the screen was a commercial for fabric softener.

He put on his workout clothes, shorts and a sleeveless T, rolled to the floor and began the second batch of the five hundred push-ups for today. After, crunches. Then squats. Later he’d go for a run along Seventeen Mile Drive.

On TV: acid-reflux remedies and insurance ads.

Please...

‘And now an update on the Solitude Creek tragedy in Central California. With me is James Harcourt, our national disaster correspondent.’

Seriously? That was a job title?

‘It didn’t take much at all for the panic to set in.’

No, March reflected. A little smoke. Then a phone call to whoever was on duty in the lobby: ‘I’m outside. Your kitchen’s on fire! Back stage too! I’ve called the fire department, but evacuate. Get everybody out now.’

He’d wondered if he would have to do more to get the horror started. But, nope, that was all it took. People could erase a hundred thousand years of evolution in seconds.

Back to the workout, enjoying the occasional images of the interior of the club.

After thirty minutes, sweating, Antioch March rose, opened his locked briefcase and pulled out a map of the area. He was inspired by something the national disaster correspondent had said. He went online and did some more research. He scrawled some notes. Good. Yes, thank you, he thought to the newscaster. Then he paused, replaying Calista’s breathy voice.

‘So you having a successful trip?’

‘Real successful, yeah.’

Soon to be even more so.

Chapter 12

The politicos had started to arrive at Solitude Creek.

Always happened at incidents like this. The bigwigs appearing, those in office or those aspiring, or those, like her boss, Charles Overby, who simply wanted a few minutes in the limelight because they enjoyed a few minutes in the limelight. They’d show up and talk to the press and be seen by the mourners or the spectators.

That is, by the voters and the public.

And, yes, occasionally they really would step up and help out. Occasionally. Sometimes. Possibly. (A state government employee, Kathryn Dance struggled constantly against cynicism.)

There were more news crews than grandstanders here at the moment, so the biggest networks were targeting the most newsworthy subjects, like sportsmen on a party boat in Monterey Bay going for the fattest salmon.

Networks. Nets. Fish. Dance liked the metaphor.

The US Congressman representing the district Solitude Creek fell within was Daniel Nashima, a thirdor fourth-generation Japanese American who’d held office for several terms. In his mid-forties, he was accompanied by an aide, a tall, vigilant young man, resembling the actor Josh Brolin, in an unimpeachable if anachronistic three-piece suit.

Nashima was wealthy, family business, but he usually dressed down. Today, typical: chino slacks and a blue dress shirt, sleeves rolled up — an outfit you’d wear to a Kiwanis fundraiser pancake breakfast. Nashima, a handsome man with tempered Asian features — his mother was white — looked over the exterior of the Solitude Creek club with dismay. Dance wasn’t surprised. He had a reputation for being responsive to natural disasters, like the earthquake that had struck Santa Cruz not long ago. He’d arrived at that one at three a.m. and helped lift rubble off survivors and search for the dead.

The anchor from CNN, a striking blonde, was on Nashima in a San Francisco instant. The Congressman said, ‘My heart goes out to the victims of this terrible tragedy.’ He promised that he would work with his colleague to make sure a full investigation got to the root of it. If there had been any negligence at all on the part of the club and its owner he would make sure that criminal charges were brought.

The mayor of Monterey happened to arrive a few moments later. No limo. The tall Latino stepped from his personal vehicle — a nice one, a Range Rover — and made it ten steps toward the spectators/mourners/victims before he, too, was approached by the media. Only a few local reporters, though. He glanced toward Nashima and managed, just, to keep a don’t-care visage, downplaying that he’d been upstaged by the Congressman; the folks from Atlanta — and a woman with such perfect hair — knew their priorities.

Dance heard that the California state representative for this area — and a rumored competitor for the US Senate seat Nashima was considering next year — was out of town and not making the trip back from Vegas for a sympathy call. This would be an oops for his career.

Nashima politely but firmly ended the interview he was giving and walked away, refusing other media requests. He was studying the scene and walking up to people who were leaving flowers or praying or simply standing in mournful poses. He spoke to them with head down, embraced them. Dance believed once or twice he wiped tears from his cheek. That wasn’t for the camera. He was pointedly turned away from the media.

About thirty such grievers and spectators were present. With Bob Holly’s blessing, Dance made the rounds of them now, flashed her badge, as shiny and official in its Civ-Div mode as when she was a criminal investigator, and asked questions about the truck, about the fire in the oil drum, about anyone skulking about outside the club last night.

Negatives, all around.

She tried to identify anyone who’d been in the mob that morning but couldn’t. True, most had probably vanished. Still, she knew from her work that at harrowing times our powers of observation and retention fail us completely.

She noticed a car pulling into the lot and easing slowly to the police line, near where the impromptu memorial of flowers and stuffed animals was growing. The car was a fancy one, a new-model two-door Lexus, sleek, black.

There were two occupants, and, though Dance couldn’t see them clearly, they were having a serious discussion. Even in silhouette, the body radiates intent and mood. The driver, a man in his forties, climbed out, bent down, said a few more words through the car’s open door, then flipped the seat forward and extracted a bouquet from the back. He said something else to the other occupant, in the front passenger seat, whose response must have been negative because the man shrugged and continued on his own to the memorial.

Dance walked up to him, showed her ID. ‘I’m Kathryn Dance. CBI.’

Distracted, the handsome man nodded.

‘I assume you lost someone last night.’

‘We did, yes.’

‘I’m sorry.’

We...

A nod back to the Lexus. There was a glare... and the Japanese engineers were quite adept, it seemed, at tinting glass but Dance could see that the person occupying the passenger seat had long hair. A woman. His wife, probably. But no ring on his finger. An ex-wife, perhaps. And she realized with a shock. My God. They’d lost a child here.

His name was Frederick Martin and he explained that, yes, his ex-wife, Michelle, had brought their daughter here last night.

She’d been right. Their child, probably a teen. How sad. And, given the flowers resting on the memorial, she hadn’t been merely injured. She’d died.

Dance’s worst horror. Every mother’s.

That had been the tension in the car. Ex-spouses, forced together at a time like this. Probably on the way to a funeral home to make arrangements. Dance’s heart went out to them both.

‘We’re investigating the incident,’ she said, a version of the truth. ‘I have a few questions.’

‘Well, I don’t know anything. I wasn’t here.’ Martin was edgy. He wanted to leave.

‘No, no. I understand. But if I could have a few words with your ex-wife.’

‘What?’ he said, frowning broadly.

Then a voice behind them, a girl’s voice. Nearly a whisper. ‘She’s gone.’

Dance turned to see a teenager. Pretty, but with a face distorted and puffy from crying. Her hair had been carelessly herded into place with fingers, not a brush.

‘Mommy’s gone.’

Oh. The ex was the fatality.

‘Trish, go back to the car.’

Staring at the club. ‘She was trapped. Against the door. I saw her. I can’t — we looked at each other and then I fell. This big man, he was crying like a baby, he climbed on my back and I went down. I thought I was going to die but I got picked up by somebody. Then the people I was with went through another door, not the fire exits. The crowd she was in—’

‘Trish, honey, no. I told you this was a bad idea. Let’s go. We’ve got your grandparents to meet at the airport. We’ve got plans to make.’

Martin took his daughter’s arm. She pulled away. He grimaced.

To the girl: ‘Trish, I’m Kathryn Dance, California Bureau of Investigation. I’d like to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind.’

‘We do,’ Martin said. ‘We do mind.’

Crying now, softly, the girl stared at the roadhouse. ‘It was hell in there. They talk about hell, in movies and things, but, no, that was hell.’

‘Here’s my card.’ Dance offered it to Frederick Martin.

He shook his head. ‘We don’t want it. There’s nothing she can tell you. Leave us alone.’

‘I’m sorry for your loss.’

He got a firmer grip on his daughter and, though she stiffened, maneuvered her back to the Lexus. When they were seated inside, he reached over and clicked on her belt. Then they sped from the lot before Dance could note the license plate.

Not that it mattered, she supposed. If the girl and her mother had been inside during the panic, they wouldn’t have seen what really interested Dance: the person who’d parked the truck in front of the doors and lit the fire.

Besides, she could hardly blame the man for being protective. Dance supposed that the father had now been catapulted into a tough, alien role; she imagined that the mother had had a higher percentage of custody, maybe full.

The Solitude Creek incident had changed many lives in many different ways.

A gull strafed and Dance instinctively lifted her arm. The big bird landed clumsily near a scrap of cardboard, thinking it was food. It seemed angry the prize held aroma only and catapulted off into the sky once more, heading toward the bay.

Dance returned to the club and had a second difficult conversation with Sam Cohen, still bordering on comatose, then spoke with other employees. No one could come up with any patrons or former club workers who might have had gripes with Cohen or anyone there. Nor did competitors seem behind the incident — anyone who might want to drive the man out of business or get revenge for something Cohen had done professionally in the past.

Heading back outside, Dance pulled her iPhone from her pocket and phoned Jon Boling, asking if he could pick up the children at school.

‘Sure,’ he replied. She enjoyed hearing his calm voice. ‘How’s your Civ Div going?’

He knew about the Serrano situation.

‘Awkward,’ she said, eyes on Bob Holly, interviewing some of the same people she just had. ‘I’m at Solitude Creek.’

A pause.

‘Aren’t you handling soda-bottle deposits?’

‘Supposed to be.’

Boling said, ‘It’s terrible, on the news. They’re saying a truck driver parked behind the club to smoke some dope. Then he panicked when the fire started and left the truck beside the doors. Nobody could get out.’

Reporters...

She looked at her iPhone for the time, now that her watch was out of commission. It was two thirty. ‘I’ll be another three, four hours, I’d guess. Mom and Dad are coming over tonight. Martine, Stephen...’

‘The kids and I’ll take care of dinner.’

‘Would you? Oh, thanks.’

‘See you soon.’

She disconnected. Her eyes did a sweep of the club, the jobbing company, then the parking lot.

Finally the bordering vegetation. At the eastern end of the lot was what seemed to be a tramped-down area leading through a line of scrub oak, Australian willow, pine, magnolia. She wandered that way and found herself beside Solitude Creek itself. The small dark tributary — thirty feet wide there — was framed by salt and dune grass, thistle and other sandy-soil plants whose identity she couldn’t guess at.

She followed the path away from the parking lot, through a head-high tangle of brush and grass. Here, overgrown with vegetation and dusted with sand, were the remnants of old structures: concrete foundations, portions of rusting chain-link fences and a few columns. They had to be seventy-five years old, a hundred. Quite extensive. Maybe back then Solitude Creek was deeper and this was part of the seafood industry. The site was fifteen miles north of Cannery Row but back then fishing was big business all along this area of the coast.

Or possibly developers had started to build a project here — apartments or a hotel or restaurant. Still would be a good spot for an inn, she reflected: near the ocean, situated amid rolling, grassy hills. The creek itself was calming and the grayish water didn’t necessarily mean bad fishing.

Continuing past the ruins, Dance looked around. She wondered if the killer had parked his car here — there were residences and surfaced roads nearby — and walked this same path. He could have gotten to the parking lot without being seen, then circled around to the jobbing company to get to the drop-box and trucks.

When she got to the pocket of homes — a half-dozen bungalows, one trailer — she realized that someone would be very visible parking there: basically the only place would be directly in front of a house. She doubted that the perp would have been that careless.

Still, you did what you could.

Three of the homes were dark and Dance left a card in the doorframes of each.

Two women, however, were home. Both white, large and toting infants, they reported they hadn’t seen anyone and, as Dance had surmised, ‘Anybody parking here, well, we would’ve noticed, and at night, Ernie would’ve been out to talk to him in a hare-lick.’

Dance moved on to the last place, the trailer, which was the only residence actually overlooking Solitude Creek.

Hmm. Had he used a boat to cruise up to the roadhouse and jobbing company?

She knocked on the door frame. A curtain shifted and Dance held up her ID for the woman to peruse. Three locks or deadbolts got snapped. A chain too. The person lives alone, Dance thought. Or she’s a meth cooker.

Dance’s hand dipped to where her gun used to be. She grimaced and tugged her jacket closed.

The woman who opened the door was slimmer than the others, about forty-five, long gray-brown hair. A thin braid, purple, ended in a feather at her shoulder. From what she wore and what was scattered around the cluttered living area, Dance saw that the woman’s fashion choices favored macramé, tie-dye and fringe. She immediately thought of her associate TJ Scanlon, at the CBI, whose one regret in life was that he wasn’t living in the late sixties.

‘Help you?’

Dance identified herself and flashed her ID once more for a closer examination The woman, Annette, didn’t seem uneasy to be talking to a law enforcer. Dance detected only cigarette smoke and its residue, bitter and stale. Nothing illegal.

‘Have you heard about the incident at Solitude Creek roadhouse?’

‘Terrible. Are you here about that?’

‘Just a couple of questions, you don’t mind.’

‘Not at all. You want to come in?’

‘Thanks.’ Dance joined her. Thousands of CDs and vinyl records sat on the shelves and were stacked against the walls. A lapsed musician and co-founder of a website devoted to music, Dance was impressed. ‘You go to the roadhouse often?’

‘Sometimes. Little pricey for me. Sam’s got a pretty dear cover charge.’

‘So you weren’t there last night?’

‘No, I’m talking once a year I go and only if it’s somebody I really, really like.’

‘Now, Annette, I’m wondering if people boat down Solitude Creek.’

‘Boat? You can. I’ve seen a few kayakers and canoes. Some powerboats. Real small. It gets pretty shallow you go further east.’ Her fingers, quite ruddy, played with her feathered rope of purple hair.

‘Is there a place where anyone could park and kayak down to the club?’

A nod toward the road. ‘No, this is the only place anybody could leave a car and Ernie—’

‘Across the street?’

‘Yeah, that Ernie. He’s not going to let anybody park here he doesn’t know.’

‘Ernie’s a big guy?’

‘Not big. Just, you know.’

Hare-lick. Whatever that meant.

Dance noticed state-government envelopes, ripped open like picked-over road kill. Welfare. The woman lit a cigarette and blew the smoke away from Dance.

‘So, last night, you didn’t see anybody on the creek in a boat?’

‘No one. And I could’ve seen. Look at the window. It looks over the water. Right there. That one.’

It did indeed, though it was so grimy with smoke residue that at dusk it would’ve been impossible to spot much through it.

Dance removed the small notebook she kept with her and flipped it open. Jotted a few notes. ‘Are you married? Anyone else live here?’

‘Nope. Just me. Solo. Not even a cat.’ A smile. ‘This,’ Annette said, ‘what you’re asking, makes it sound like there was something going on. I mean, like you think somebody did something at the club on purpose.’

‘Just routine investigation. We always do this.’

‘Like NCIS.’

Now Dance smiled. ‘Just like that. You can’t see the club from here but would you have by any chance taken a walk last night, ended up near there?’

‘No. You gotta be careful. We’ve had mountain lions.’

True. A woman had been killed not long ago, a jogger, banker from San Francisco.

‘You were in all night?’ Dance asked.

‘Absolutely. Right here.’

‘And anyone you didn’t recognize in the neighborhood recently? Not just last night.’

‘No, ma’am. I’d tell you if I did.’

Another note.

Dance reached into her purse and exchanged her pink-framed glasses for a pair that had black-metal frames.

Predator specs.

‘Annette?’

‘Yes, ma’am?’

‘Could you tell me why you’re lying?’

She expected denial, expected resistance. Expected anger.

She didn’t expect the woman to drop to her knees, overcome with sobbing.

Chapter 13

‘Kathryn, no. You can’t be Civil half the time, Criminal the rest. It doesn’t work that way. We’ve been through this.’

Charles Overby seemed just pissy. She was in his office, close to five p.m. She was surprised he was still there: there was still an hour of tennis light left.

She knew he was right but the fast dismissal — It doesn’t work that way — was irritating. She asked, ‘Who else is going to handle it? We’re short-staffed.’ The CBI had been hit with budget cutbacks, like every other agency in California, whose new nickname among government workers was the ‘Bare State’, a play on the grizzly on the flag.

‘TJ. Rey. I’ll assign one of them.’

They were two very competent agents but young. Neither they nor anyone else in the Bureau had Dance’s skill at interrogation. And this case, she felt, had instances aplenty to get people into interview rooms. There were nearly a hundred victims, any one of whom might have a lead. Any one of whom might also be the perp. Stationed by the club door last night, where he could escape safely if it became too dangerous — maybe to enjoy his revenge for a real or imagined slight.

Or just because he wanted to watch people die.

‘You shouldn’t even be in the office. You should be home planting flowers or baking or something... All right, I’m just saying.’

Dance forwent the grimace. She said, ‘How’s this? Michael O’Neil.’

Chief of detectives of the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office.

‘What about him?’

‘He’ll run it.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Charles. It’s not a Fire Department matter. The burn in the oil drum was secondary. Makes sense the MCSO would handle it.’

His eyes slipped away. ‘You’ll brief O’Neil, that’s all.’

‘Sure. I’d advise.’

Advising wasn’t the same as briefing. Overby didn’t protest but she sensed he might not have noted her verb.

‘Nothing changes, Kathryn. No weapon. You’re still Civ Div.’

‘Sure,’ Kathryn Dance said brightly. She was winning.

‘You think he’ll agree?’ Overby said.

‘We’ll see. I think so.’

She knew this because she’d already texted him. And he had agreed.

But now Overby was troubled once more. ‘Of course, if it becomes a county operation...’

Meaning he’d miss out on the credit — and press conferences — that went with closing a case.

‘Tell you what. You can’t do more than brief.’

Advise.

‘But we can still get our oar in.’

She’d never understood that expression. ‘How do you mean, Charles?’

‘Let’s involve the CBI folks we’ve got here, on the task force. Jimmy Gomez and Steve Foster.’

‘What? Charles, no. They’re on Serrano and Guzman... I need them focused on that.’

‘No, no, this’ll be good. Just to kick around some ideas with them.’

‘With Foster? Kick ideas around with Steve Foster? He doesn’t kick around ideas. He shoots them in the head.’

Overby was looking away. Perhaps her glare seared. ‘Now that I think about it, makes sense to run it by them. Good on all counts. We have... considerations. Under the circumstances.’

‘Charles, please, no.’

‘Let’s just go talk to them, that’s all. Get Foster’s thoughts. Jimmy’s too. He’s one of us.’

Whatever the consequences, he’d decided his office couldn’t take a complete back seat to the Sheriff’s.

Avoiding her eyes, he rose, slipped his jacket over his immaculate white shirt and strode out of the office. ‘I think it’s a brilliant idea. Come along, Kathryn. Let’s have a chat with our friends.’

Chapter 14

The Guzman Connection task force was up to full strength.

In addition to blustery Steve Foster and staunch Carol Allerton, two others were present in the conference room dedicated to the operation.

‘Kathryn, Charles.’ This was from Steve Lu, the chief of detectives at the Salinas Police Department, a.k.a. Steve Two, since another, Foster, was on the team. Lu, an excessively skinny man — Dance’s opinion — was a specialist in gangs. His younger brother had been in a crew and been busted on a few minor counts — though he was now out of the system and clean. Lu was persistent and no-nonsense, maybe trying harder to make up for his sibling’s stumble. He was humorless, Dance had learned over several years of working with him, but he was not, as the other Steve was, bluntly contrary.

The fourth task-force member was Jimmy Gomez, the young CBI agent whose name had come up earlier. Dark-complexioned and sporting a moustache as brown as Foster’s was light and elaborate, he stayed in shape by playing football — that is, soccer — every minute when he wasn’t at work or attending to his family. He was assigned to this division of the CBI and his office was two doors down from Dance’s. They were both co-workers and friends. (Just two weeks ago Dance, her children, Gomez, his wife and their three youngsters had done the Del Monte Cineplex thing, then gone to Lala’s after, to discuss over dessert and coffee the brilliance of Pixar and which animated character they each would want to be; Dance had selected the hero from Brave, mostly because she envied the hair.)

The two Steves were at one table, Jimmy Gomez at another. Carol Allerton, in the corner, waved to the newcomers and returned to a serious mobile-phone conversation.

Overby announced, ‘Some help, s’il vous plaît?’

Dance felt her jaw tighten and knew exactly what she was radiating kinesically. She wondered if anyone else in the room did. Her displeasure had to be obvious.

‘You’ve probably heard about the incident at the roadhouse, Solitude Creek,’ Overby said. ‘I know you have, Jimmy.’

‘That fire?’ Foster asked. He seemed perpetually distracted.

‘No, it was more than that.’ Overby glanced at Dance.

She said, ‘The club itself didn’t burn. The perp started a fire outside near the HVAC system to get the smell of smoke into the club. He’d blocked the exit doors. Three dead, dozens injured. A stampede. It was pretty bad.’

‘Intentional? People crushed to death,’ Allerton whispered. ‘Terrible.’

‘Jesus,’ Steve Lu muttered. ‘So it’s homicide.’

Homicide embraces everything from suicide to vehicular manslaughter to premeditated murder. It was into the last of those categories that the Solitude Creek incident probably fell.

Foster took the news less emotionally. ‘Can’t be insurance. Otherwise the owner would’ve torched the place empty. Wouldn’t want any fatalities. Disgruntled workers, pissed-off customers got kicked out drunk?’

‘Preliminary interviews don’t turn up any obvious suspects but it’s a possibility,’ Dance said. ‘We’ll keep looking.’

Overby then said, ‘Now. Kathryn’s got a lead.’

‘I was canvassing the area. I found a woman who lives about two hundred yards from the end of the club’s parking lot. She told me she didn’t see anything odd around the time of the incident, she wasn’t near the club, but I knew she was lying.’

Foster continued to gaze at her, his eyes neutral but still managing to radiate criticism for her missing the clues during the interview earlier.

‘How?’ Steve Lu asked.

‘I had a feeling she had a connection with the club. She’s on welfare and poor but she loves music. I suspected she’d hike to the club and listen to the shows from the outside. I asked if she was there last night. She said no. But she was clearly lying.’

Foster looked over a pad containing his precise notes.

Dance continued, ‘Generally, it’s hard to tell if somebody’s being deceptive without establishing their baseline behavior.’

‘Charles was telling us,’ Allerton said.

‘But there’re a few things that signal deception on their own. One is beginning to speak more slowly, since your mind is trying to craft the lie and make sure it’ll be consistent with everything you’ve said before. The second is a slight increase in pitch — deception creates stress and stress tightens muscles, including the vocal cords. Those both registered deception when she was talking to me. I called her on it. She broke down and confessed she’d lied and she had been outside the club, from about seven thirty until the incident.’

‘What’d she see?’ Lu asked.

‘White male, over six feet, in a dark green jacket with a logo, like a construction or other worker, black cap, yellow aviator sunglasses. Medium build. Brown hair. Probably under forty. Nobody at Henderson Jobbing wears that kind of outfit. This guy parked the truck beside the club, started a fire in the oil drum and walked back to the warehouse — to drop the keys off. That was it. She stayed until the stampede happened and she took off.’

‘Afraid to come forward.’

‘She said anybody who’d do that, if he found out about her, would come back and kill her in a minute.’

‘Bring her in, grill her,’ Foster said, still looking over his notes.

‘She’s told us everything she knows.’

His look said, Has she? He said, ‘If she’s afraid, maybe she was withholding.’

‘She got unafraid when I told her we’d relocate her temporarily, get her into one of our safe houses.’

She saw Overby stiffen. She hadn’t shared this with him. Keeping witnesses alive was expensive.

Budget issues...

Foster shrugged. ‘Get the descrip out on the wire. ASAP.’

‘It is,’ Dance said. Every cop and government official on the Peninsula and in neighboring counties had the information the witness, Annette, had relayed. ‘She had no facial description — the light was too dim and she was too far away.’

‘Get it to the news too,’ Foster said.

‘No,’ Dance said.

He looked up from beneath impressive brows.

Carol Allerton lifted an eyebrow, inquiring about the topic of conversation. Dance briefed her.

Foster reiterated, ‘On the news. Go broad.’

Overby said, ‘We were debating that.’

‘What’s to debate?’ Foster asked.

Allerton said, ‘He hears, he vanishes.’

Gomez offered, ‘Yeah, what I’d do. He rabbits. He dyes his hair. Tosses the jacket, switches to pink Ray-Bans.’

Foster to Dance: ‘Did the witness think he tipped to her?’

‘No. The wit’s positive he didn’t see her.’

‘So he’s still walking around and probably still wearing the same clothes. The green jacket and all that. A thousand people could’ve seen him. Maybe the clerk in his hotel, or his dry cleaner, if he’s local. It’s standard operating procedure in my cases.’

Overby trod the tightrope. ‘Pluses and minuses on both sides.’

‘I’d vote no,’ Gomez said. Allerton nodded her agreement.

Dance turned to Overby. Her gaze lasered him briefly.

After a moment, eyes on the well-examined linoleum floor, he said, ‘We’ll keep it private for the time being. No releasing the details to the media.’

Well, score one for us, Dance thought, and made an effort not to reveal her surprise.

Chapter 15

‘Mom, Donnie’s got a, you know, a question.’

Dance, thinking: You know. But she rarely corrected the children in front of anyone. She’d chide them gently later. She cocked her head to her son, lean and fair-haired. Nearly as tall as she. ‘Sure. What?’

Donnie Verso, a dark-haired thirteen-year-old in Wes’s class, looked her in the eye. ‘Well, I’m not sure what to call you.’

Dusk was around the three of them as they stood on the expansive porch — known to friends and family as the ‘Deck’ — behind Dance’s Victorian-style house, which was dark green with weathered gray railings, shutters and trim, in the north-western Pacific Grove. You could, if you chose to risk a tumble off the porch, catch a glimpse of ocean, about a half-mile away.

Wes filled in: ‘He doesn’t know whether he should call you Mrs Dance or Agent Dance.’

‘Well, that’s very polite of you to ask, Donnie. But since you’re a friend of Wes’s, you can call me Kathryn.’

‘Oh, I’m not supposed to call people that. I mean adults. By their first name. My dad likes me to be respectful.’

‘I can talk to him.’

‘No, he just wouldn’t like it.’

‘Then call me Mrs Dance.’ Wes readily shared with his friends that his father had died but Dance had learned that children rarely registered the niceties of Mrs versus Miss versus Ms.

‘Cool.’ His face brightened. ‘Mrs Dance.’

With his curly hair and cherubic face, Donnie would be a girl magnet soon. Well, he probably already was, she thought. (And Wes? Handsome... and nice. A dangerous combination: already girls were starting to flutter. She was inclined to put the brakes on her own children’s growing up but knew it’d be easier to stop the surf crashing on the sand at Spanish Bay.) Donnie lived not far away, biking distance, which Dance was grateful for — as a single mother, even with a good support net like hers, anything that reduced the task of chauffeuring was a blessing. She thought Donnie’d look better not wearing hoodies and baggy jeans... but valedictorians of middle-school classes and Christian pop singers all dressed like gangstas nowadays, so who was she to judge?

Arriving from work just now, Dance had not come through the front door but through the side yard and gate — to make sure it was locked — then ascended the steps to the Deck. Which meant she hadn’t said hello to the four-legged residents of the household. They now came bounding forward for head rubs and, with any luck, a treat (alas, none today). Dylan, a German shepherd, named for the legendary singer-songwriter, and Patsy, a flat-coated retriever, in honor of Ms Cline, Dance’s favorite C&W singer.

‘Can Donnie stay for dinner?’ Wes asked.

‘If it’s okay, Mrs Dance.’

‘I’ll call your mother.’ Protocol.

‘Sure. Thanks.’

The boys returned to a board game and dropped to the redwood decking, crunching some chips and drinking Honest Tea. Soda was not to be found in the Dance household.

Dance found the boy’s home number and called. His mother said it was fine for him to stay for dinner but he should be home by nine.

She disconnected, then returned to the living room where her father, Stuart, and ten-year-old, Maggie, sat in front of the TV.

‘Mom! You came in the back door!’

She didn’t, of course, tell her that she’d been checking the perimeter and double-locking the gate. Two active cases, with a number of bad actors, who could, if they really wanted to, find her.

‘Give me a hug, honey.’

Maggie complied happily. ‘Wes and Donnie won’t let me play their game.’

‘It’s a boys’ game, I’m sure.’

A frown crossed Maggie’s heart-shaped face. ‘I don’t know what that is. I don’t think there should be boy games and girl games.’

Good point. If and when Dance ever remarried, Maggie had announced she was going to be ‘best woman’ — whatever her age. She had also learned of feminism in school and, returning home after social studies, had declared, to Dance’s delight, that she wasn’t a feminist. She was an equalist.

‘Hi, Dad,’ Dance said.

Stuart rose and hugged his daughter. He was seventy, and though his time outdoors as a marine biologist had taken a toll on the flesh, he looked younger than his years. He was tall, six two, wide-shouldered, with unruly, thick white hair. Dermatologists’ scalpels and lasers had left their mark too and he now rarely went outside without a floppy hat. He was retired, yes, but when not babysitting the grandkids or puttering around the house in Carmel, he worked at the famed Monterey Bay Aquarium several days a week.

‘Where’s Mom?’

Staunch Edie Dance was a cardiac nurse at the Monterey Bay Hospital.

‘Took the late shift, filling in. Just me tonight.’

Dance headed into the bedroom, washed and changed into black jeans, a silk T-shirt and burgundy wool sweater. The central coast, after sunset, could get downright cold and dinner tonight would be on the Deck.

As she walked down the stairs and into the hallway a man stepped through the front door. Jon Boling, forties, wasn’t tall. A few inches above Dance but lean — thanks mostly to biking and occasional free weights (twenty-five-pounders at his place and a pair of twelves at hers). His straight hair, thinning, was a shade similar to Dance’s, though a little darker than chestnut, and with none of her occasional gray strands (which coincidentally disappeared after a trip to Rite-Aid or Save Mart).

‘Look, I’m bearing Greek gifts.’ He held up two large bags from a Mediterranean restaurant in Pacific Grove.

They kissed and he followed her into the kitchen.

Boling was a professor at a college nearby, teaching the Literature of Science Fiction, as well as a class called Computers and Society. In the graduate school, Boling taught what he described as some boring technical courses. ‘Sort of math, sort of engineering.’ He also consulted for Silicon Valley firms. He was apparently a minor genius in the world of boxes — computers. She’d had to learn about this from the press and Wes’s assessment of his skill in programming: modesty was hardwired into Boling’s genes. He wrote code the way Richard Wilbur or Jim Tilley wrote poetry. Fluid, brilliant and captivating.

They’d been going out for a while now, ever since she’d hired him to assist on a case involving computers.

As he offloaded containers of moussaka, octopus, taramasalata and the rest, he noted her arm. ‘What happened there?’

She frowned and followed his gaze. ‘Oh.’ Her watch, crystal shattered. ‘The Serrano thing.’ She explained about the run-in at CBI, when the young man had fled after the interview.

‘You all right?’ His gentle eyes narrowed.

‘No danger. I just didn’t fall as elegantly as I should have.’

She grimaced as she examined the broken glass. The watch had been a Christmas present from friends in New York, the famed criminalist Lincoln Rhyme and his partner, Amelia Sachs. She’d helped them out on a case a few years ago, involving a brilliant for-hire criminal known as the Watchmaker. She undid the dark-green leather strap and set the damaged watch on the mantel. She’d look into getting it repaired soon.

Boling called, ‘Mags?’

Dance saw her daughter leap up and run to the doorway. The child wrinkled her brow. Then called, ‘Geia!’

Boling nodded. ‘Kalos!’

Dance laughed.

He said, ‘Thought we should learn a little Greek in honor of dinner. Where’s Wes?’

‘Outside with Donnie.’

Boling did a fair amount of baby-sitting too; his teaching load was light, and as a consultant he could work here, there, anywhere. He knew as much about the children’s schedule and friends as Dance did. ‘Seems like a nice boy, Donnie. Year older, right?’

‘Thirteen, yes.’

‘His parents picked him up once. Mother’s sweet. Dad doesn’t say much.’ Boling frowned. ‘Was wondering. Whatever happened to Rashiv? He and Wes seemed pretty tight for a while. He was brilliant. Math, phew.’

‘Don’t know. Kids move on.’ Wes, whom Dance had always thought mature for his age, had recently gravitated to Donnie and an older crowd. Rashiv, she recalled, was a year younger than her son. Maggie, who’d always been a bit of a loner, had started hanging out with a group of four girls in her grade school (to Dance’s further surprise, the popular ones, two contestants in National American Miss pageants, one a would-be cheerleader).

Boling opened some wine and passed out glasses to the adults.

The doorbell.

‘I’ll get it!’ Maggie charged forward.

‘Hold on, Mags.’ Boling knew that Dance was involved in several potentially dangerous cases and quickly walked there with the child. He peeked out, then let Maggie unlock the door.

The guests were dear family friends. Steven Cahill, about Boling’s age, was wearing a poncho. His salt-and-pepper ponytail dangled and he’d recently grown a David Crosby droopy moustache. Beside him was Martine Christensen. Despite the name she had no Scandinavian blood. She was dark-complexioned and voluptuous, descended in part from the original inhabitants of the area: Ohlone Indian, the loose affiliation of tribelets hunting and gathering from Big Sur to San Francisco Bay.

Steve and Martine’s children, twin boys a year younger than Maggie, followed them up the front steps, one toting his mother’s guitar case, the other a batch of brownies. Maggie shepherded the twins and the two dogs down to the backyard, below the Deck. Dance smiled, noting she had shot a fast aside to her brother, undoubtedly about how wrong male-exclusive games were. The older boys ignored her.

The younger children and the canines struck up an impromptu and chaotic game of Frisbee football.

The adults congregated around the large picnic table on the Deck.

This was the social center of the house — indeed, of the lives of many people Dance knew, family and friends. The twenty-by-thirty-foot expanse, extending from the kitchen into the backyard, was populated by mismatched lawn chairs, loungers and tables. Christmas lights, some amber globes, up-lights, a sink and a large refrigerator were the main decorations. Some planters, too, though the flowers struggled. Beneath, in the backyard, you could find scrub oak and maple trees, grasses, monkey flowers, asters, lupins, potato vines and clover. Some veggies tried to survive but the slugs were merciless.

The Deck had been the site of hundreds of parties, big ones and small ones, and quiet family meals or cocoa nights, just the four of them. Then, more recently, the three. Her husband had proposed to her there, and Dance had eulogized him in virtually the same spot.

The evening was dank so Dance cranked up the propane heater, which exhaled cozy air. The adults sat around the table and had wine, juice or water and talked about... well, everything. That was one enduring quality of the Deck. Any topic was fair game. And it was here that all of the town’s, state’s, country’s and world’s problems were solved, over and over.

Martine asked, lowering her voice, ‘You heard about Solitude Creek?’

‘I’m working it,’ Dance said.

‘No!’

‘Katie,’ her father said, ‘be careful.’ As parents would do.

Steve said, ‘The company’ll be out of business, the trucking company. And the driver, he should get jail time, don’t you think?’

Dance said, ‘It’s not for public consumption yet. Please don’t say anything.’ She didn’t bother to wait for nods of agreement. ‘It wasn’t the truck driver. And it wasn’t an accident.’

‘How do you mean?’ Martine asked.

‘We’re still looking into it, but somebody got into the truck and drove it against the doors to block them, then started a fire nearby to send everybody into a panic.’ A glance to make sure the children were out of hearing. ‘And everybody sure did. The injured and dead were trampled and crushed or suffocated. There was blood everywhere.’

‘What’s the motive?’ Boling asked.

‘That’s a mystery. We find that out and we can track suspects. But so far, nothing.’

‘Revenge?’ Steven speculated.

‘Always a good one. But no patrons, employees or competitors stand out.’

Martine said, ‘I’m claustrophobic. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be trapped in a crowd like that.’

Stuart Dance brushed a hand through his tempestuous hair. ‘I don’t think I ever told you, Katie, but I saw a stampede once. Human, I mean. It was terrible.’

‘What?’

‘You may have heard about it. Hillsborough, in Sheffield, England? Twenty-five years ago. I still have nightmares. Do you want to hear about it?’

Dance noted the children were out of earshot. ‘Go ahead, Dad.’

Chapter 16

He was sure they’d die.

Some of them, at least.

Antioch March was on the turbulent shoreline in Pacific Grove, near Asilomar, the conference center. Off Sunset Drive.

He had been doing reconnaissance for tomorrow’s ‘event’ and was driving back to his room at the Cedar Hills Inn when he’d spotted them.

Ah, yes...

He’d pulled over.

And then wandered to an outcropping of rock, from which he would have a good view of the unfolding tragedy.

Now he was eyeing the cluster of people nearby, surrounded by spray flying over the rocks from the impact of the roiling water. The sun was low. That ‘special time’, he’d heard it called by photographers. When light became your friend, something to help out with the pictures, not fight against. March had studied photography, in addition to more esoteric intellectual topics, and he was good. Many of the pictures on the Hand to Heart website were his.

They’re dead, he reflected again.

The family he was watching was Asian. Chinese or Korean, probably. He knew the difference in facial structure — he’d been to both of those countries (Korea had been far more productive for his work). But here he was too far away to tell. And he certainly wasn’t going to get much closer.

A wife and husband, two pre-teen children, and a mother-in-law: a bundled-up matriarch. Armed with a point-and-shoot, the husband was directing the kids as they posed on dark brown, red and dun rocks.

Spanish Bay, a tourist ‘twofer’, with beach and rugged shoreline, is a beautiful coastal preserve featuring everything one would want in scenic California. A mile of sand, surfers immune to the icy water, dolphins, pelicans, dunes, deer, rocks on which seals perch, busy tidal pools.

And sea otters, of course. Cute little fuzzy-faced critters that float easily on the turbulent surface, smashing shellfish open on rocks perched on their chests.

The area was idyllic.

And deadly.

In researching his plans for the Monterey Bay area, March had learned that every few months tourists wandered too far out onto these craggy rocks and, crash, a muscular arm of the Pacific Ocean lapped them indifferently out to sea. Those who didn’t break their heads open on the rocks and drown died of hypothermia before the Coast Guard found them or breathed their last while tangled in the pernicious kelp. It was near here that the singer John Denver had died, his experimental plane falling from the sky.

The Asian family was now prowling the rocks, getting closer and closer to the end of the bulwark that stretched forty feet into the ocean, two yards above the agitated water. The rosy light from the low sun hit them full on.

Beautiful.

He slipped the Galaxy S5 mobile phone from his pocket and began shooting video of the scene around him. Just another tourist. Nothing odd about him, catching the beautiful, rugged scenery in high-def pixels.

A huge crash of water, and the spray must have tickled the children. They seemed to giggle. The father gestured them to go some feet closer to the end. He aimed his Nikon and shot.

Grandmother remained on the trail, some distance. Mother was about twenty feet behind her husband and children. March noticed she was calling. But the roar of the ocean on this windy evening was loud. The man probably couldn’t hear.

Another huge wave, exploding on the gray-and-brown rocks. For a moment the children weren’t visible. He glanced at the screen and saw a rainbow in the angled sunlight.

Then there were the children once more, oblivious, looking down at the water, as their father directed them closer yet to the terminus point of the rocks.

March now noted that out to sea a large wave was gaining strength.

The lens of his camera app was pointed their way but his concentration wasn’t on the video he was taking. He was looking at the swelling wave.

Fifty yards, forty.

Water travels fast even though it is, of course, the largest moving thing on earth. And this behemoth began to race.

Closer, closer, come on...

March’s palms sweated. His gut thudded, as he thought: Please, I want this...

Thirty yards.

The wave beginning to sharpen into a peak at the crest, God’s palm to slap the family to their deaths.

Twenty-five yards.

Twenty...

It was then that the mother had had enough. She charged forward, unsteady on the slippery rocks, and stepped in front of her husband, who gestured angrily with his hands.

Would he ignore her? Stand up to the bitch, March thought. Please.

Fifteen yards away, that huge swell of water.

His breathing was coming fast. Just thirty more seconds. That’s all I need.

But the woman stepped stridently past her husband, her face dark, and strode up to her children.

Ten...

She took them by the hands and, raging at them too, dragged the bewildered youngsters back toward the trail. The husband followed, his face blank.

The wave struck the rocks and inundated the spot where the children had been standing seconds before. It had had plenty of energy to sweep father and children into the water. Even more frustrating, March judged from the angle, they would have been slammed into the rocks just in front of him, then sucked into a churning mass of ocean nearby.

He lowered the phone.

The parents and children, their backs turned to the rocks, hadn’t seen the dramatic detonation of fiery water. Only the grandmother had. She said nothing but swiveled arthritically and followed her brood along the path.

March sighed. He was angry. One last glance at the foolish, oblivious family. He found his teeth jammed together.

The hollowness within him spread, like water melting salt.

Somebody’s not happy...

He climbed into the car and started the engine. He’d return to the Cedar Hills Inn and continue his plans for the next event in the Monterey area. It would be even better than Solitude Creek. He had another task, too, of course. In this business you had to be beyond cautious. Part of that was learning who was hunting for you.

And figuring out how best to avoid them.

Or, even better, stop them before they grew into a full-blown threat. Whatever it took.

Chapter 17

None of those on Kathryn Dance’s Deck had heard of the disaster in Sheffield, England.

Stuart Dance was now explaining: ‘I was in London as a research fellow.’

Dance said, ‘I remember. Mom and I came over to see you. I was seven or eight.’

‘That’s right. But this was before you got there. I was in Nottingham, lecturing, and the post-doc I was working with suggested we go to Sheffield to see a game at Hillsborough Stadium. You know football — soccer — fans can be pretty intense in Europe so they would host the association semi-finals in neutral venues to avoid fights. It was Nottingham — my associate’s team, of course — versus Liverpool. We took the train up. My friend had some money — I think his father was a Sir Somebody or Another — and got good seats. What happened wasn’t near us. But we could see it. Oh, my, we could see.’

Dance became alarmed as her father’s face grew pale and his eyes darted toward the children, to confirm they weren’t close. He seemed edgy, reflecting the horror he was experiencing at the memories.

‘It seems that just as the game was about to start, Liverpool fans were clustering at the turnstiles and were agitated, afraid they wouldn’t get in. Pushing forward. Someone opened an exit gate to relieve the pressure and fans surged inside and made their way to a standing-room pen. The crush was terrible. Ninety-five, ninety-six people died there.’

‘God,’ Steve muttered.

‘Worst sports disaster in UK history.’ Nearly whispering now. ‘Horrible. Fans trying to climb on top of everyone else, people jumping over the wall. One minute alive, then snuffed out. I don’t know how they died. I guess suffocation.’

‘Compressive asphyxia, they call it,’ Dance said.

Stuart nodded. ‘It all happened so fast. Ridiculously fast. Kick-off was at three. At three-oh-six they stopped the game but almost everybody who died was dead at that point.’

Dance recalled that the deaths at the Solitude Creek roadhouse, though fewer, had taken about the same amount of time.

Stuart added, ‘And you know what was the scariest? Together, all those people became something else. Not human.’

It was like they weren’t people at all — it was just one big creature, staggering around, squeezing toward the doors...

Stuart continued, ‘It reminded me of something else I saw. When I was on a job in Australia. I—’

‘We’re hungry!’ Wes called, and he and Donnie charged to the table. Several of the adults jumped at the sudden intrusion, coming in the midst of the terrible story.

‘Then let’s eat,’ Dance said, secretly relieved to change the subject. ‘Get your sister and the twins.’

‘Maggie!’ Wes shouted.

‘Wes. Go get your sister.’

‘She heard. She’s coming.’

A moment later the other youngsters arrived, accompanied by the dogs, ever optimistic at the possibility a klutzy human would drop a bit of dinner.

As Dance, Maggie and Boling set the table, she told those assembled that her friend, country crossover singer, Kayleigh Towne, who lived in Fresno, had sent her and the children tickets to the Neil Hartman concert taking place next weekend.

‘No!’ Martine hit her playfully on the arm. ‘The new Dylan? It’s been sold out for months.’

Probably not the new Dylan but a brilliant singer-songwriter, and ace musician too, with a talented backup band. The gig here in town had been scheduled before the young man’s Grammy nomination. The small Monterey Performing Arts Center had sold out instantly after that.

Dance and Martine had a long history and music informed it. They’d met at a concert that was a direct descendant of the famed Monterey Folk Festival, where the ‘original Dylan’ — Bob — had made his west coast debut in ’65. The women had become friends and formed a non-profit website to promote indigenous musical talent. Dance, a folklorist by hobby — song-catcher — would travel around the state, occasionally farther afield, with an expensive portable recorder, collect songs and tunes, sell them on the site, keeping only enough money to maintain the server and pay expenses, and remitting the profits to the performers.

The site was called American Tunes, a homage to the great Paul Simon song from the seventies.

Boling brought the food out, opened more wine. The kids sat at a table of their own, though right next to the adults’ picnic bench. None of them asked to watch TV during the meal, which pleased Dance. Donnie was a natural comedian. He told joke after joke — all appropriate — keeping the younger kids in stitches.

Conversation reeled throughout dinner. When the meal wound down and Boling was serving Keurig coffee, decaf and cocoa, Martine cracked open her guitar and took out the beautiful old Martin 00–18. She and Dance sang a few songs — Richard Thompson, Kayleigh Towne, Rosanne Cash, Pete Seeger, Mary Chapin Carpenter and, of course, Dylan.

Martine called, ‘Hey, Maggie, your mom told me you’re singing “Let It Go” at your talent show.’

‘Yeah.’

‘You liked Frozen?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘The twins loved it. Actually, we loved it too. Come on, sing it. I’ll back you up.’

‘Oh. No, that’s okay.’

‘Love to hear it, honey,’ Stuart Dance encouraged his granddaughter.

Martine told everyone, ‘She has a beautiful voice.’

But Maggie said, ‘Yeah, it’s that I don’t remember the words yet.’

Boling said, ‘Mags, you sang it all the way through today. A dozen times. I heard you in your room. And the lyric book was in the living room with me.’

A hesitation. ‘Oh, I remember. The DVD was on and they had the, you know, the words at the bottom of the screen.’

She was lying, Dance could easily see. If she knew anything, it was her own children’s kinesic baseline. What was this about? Dance recalled that Maggie had seemed more shy and moody in the past day or two. That morning, as she’d tipped her mother’s braid with the colorful elastic tie, Dance had tried to draw her out. Her husband’s death had seemed to hit Wes hardest at first but he seemed better, much better, about the loss; perhaps now Maggie was feeling the impact. But her daughter had denied it — denied, in fact, that anything was bothering her.

‘Well, that’s okay,’ Martine said. ‘Next time.’ And she sang a few more folk tunes, then packed up the guitar.

Martine and Steven took some leftovers that Boling had bagged up for them. Everyone said goodbye, hugs and kisses, and headed out of the door, leaving Boling alone with Dance and the older boys. Wes and Donnie were now texting friends as they sat around their complicated board game, gazing at it intensely. At their phone screens too.

Ah, the enthusiasm of youth...

‘Thanks for the food, everything,’ Dance told him.

‘You look tired,’ Boling said. He was infinitely supportive but he lived in a very different world from hers and she was reluctant to share too much about her impossible line of work. Still, she owed him honesty. ‘I am. It’s a mess. Not Serrano so much as Solitude Creek. That somebody’d do that on purpose. It just doesn’t make sense. It’s not like any case I’ve ever worked. It’s already exhausting.’

She hadn’t told him about the run-in with the mob outside Henderson Jobbing. And chose not to now. She was still spooked — and sore — from the encounter. And, to be honest to herself, she just didn’t want to relive it. She could still hear the rock shattering Billy Culp’s jaw. And still see the animal eyes of the mob as it bore down on them.

Fuck you, bitch...

The doorbell rang.

Boling frowned.

Dance hesitated. Then: ‘Oh, that’d be Michael. He’s running Solitude Creek with me. Didn’t I tell you he was coming over?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Been a crazy day, sorry.’

‘No worries.’

She opened the door and Michael O’Neil walked in.

‘Hey, Michael.’

‘Jon.’ The men shook hands.

‘Have some food. Greek. Got plenty left.’

‘No, thanks.’

‘Come on,’ Boling persisted. ‘Kathryn can’t eat moussaka for a week.’

She noted that he didn’t say, ‘We can’t eat moussaka,’ though he might have. But Boling wasn’t a chest-thumping territory-staker.

O’Neil said, ‘Sure, it’s not too much trouble.’

‘Wine?’

‘Beer.’

‘Done.’

Boling prepared a plate and passed him a Corona. O’Neil lifted the bottle in thanks, then hung his sports jacket on a hook. He rarely wore a uniform and tonight was in khaki slacks and a light gray shirt. He sat on a kitchen chair, adjusting his Glock.

Dance had known and worked with O’Neil for years. The chief deputy and senior detective for the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office had been a mentor when Dance had joined the Bureau. Her background wasn’t law enforcement: she’d been a for-hire kinesics expert, helping attorneys and prosecutors pick juries and providing expert testimony. After her husband’s death — Bill Swenson had been an FBI agent — she’d decided to become a cop.

O’Neil had been with the MCSO for years and, with his intelligence and dogged nature (not to mention enviable arrest and conviction record), he could have gone anywhere but had chosen to stay local. O’Neil’s home was the Monterey Peninsula and he had no desire to be anywhere else. Family kept him close and so did the Bay. He loved boats and fishing. He could easily have been a protagonist in a John Steinbeck novel: quiet, solid of build, strong arms, brown eyes beneath dipping lids. His hair was thick and cut short, brown with abundant gray.

He waved to Wes.

‘Hey, Michael!’

Donnie, too, turned. The boy exhibited the fascination youngsters always did with the armament on the hip of a law officer. He whispered something to Wes, who nodded with a smile, and they turned their attention to the game.

O’Neil took the plate, ate some. ‘Thanks. Okay, this is excellent.’

They tapped bottle and glasses. Dance wasn’t hungry but gave in to a few bits of pita with tzatziki.

She said, ‘I didn’t know if you could make it tonight. With the kids.’ O’Neil had two children from a prior marriage, Amanda and Tyler, nine and ten. They were good friends with Dance’s youngsters — though Maggie more, because of the age proximity.

‘Somebody’s watching them,’ he said.

‘New sitter?’

‘Sort of.’

Footsteps approached. It was Donnie. He nodded to O’Neil and said to Dance, ‘Um, I really better be getting home. I didn’t know it was this late.’

Boling said, ‘I’ll drive you.’

‘The thing is I’ve got my bike. I can’t leave it, you know.’

‘I’ve got a rack on the back.’

‘Excellent!’ He looked relieved. Dance believed the bike was new, probably a present for his birthday a few weeks ago. ‘Thanks, Mr Boling. Night, Mrs Dance.’

‘Anytime, Donnie.’

Boling got his jacket and kissed Dance. She leaned into him, ever so slightly.

The boys bumped fists. ‘Later,’ Wes called, and headed for his room.

Boling shook O’Neil’s hand. ‘Night.’

‘Take care.’

The door closed. Dance watched Boling and Donnie walk to the car. She believed Jon Boling looked back to see her wave but she couldn’t tell for certain.

Chapter 18

After checking on the kids (‘Teeth! No texting!’), Dance joined O’Neil on the Deck. He was finishing up the food. He glanced at her and said, ‘All right. Solitude Creek. You’re sure you want to handle it this way?’

She sat beside him. ‘How do you mean?’

‘You’re Civ Div?’

‘Right.’

‘No weapon?’

‘Nope. Busted down to rookie. I’d be, quote, “briefing” on the roadhouse case. I boosted that up to “advising”, then I did an end run and—’

‘And blustered your way into running it.’

She’d been smiling at her joke but, at his interruption, the smile faded. ‘Well, with you.’

‘Look, I’m happy to handle it solo.’

‘No, I want it.’

A pause. O’Neil said, ‘This unsub. I profile he’s armed. Or could be. You think?’

It was fairly easy to do a preliminary profiling of an unknown subject. One of the easiest determinations was an affinity to commit a crime with a weapon.

‘Probably. He’s not going into a situation like this clean.’

He shrugged.

She said, ‘You’ll look out for me.’

O’Neil grimaced. He almost said something, which she suspected was, ‘I can’t babysit.’

Her level gaze told him, though, she wasn’t going to be a spectator. She was going to run the case shoulder to shoulder with him. He nodded. ‘Okay, then, that’s the way it is.’

Dance asked, ‘What do you have going on? Busy now?’

‘A couple of cases is all. You hear about Otto Grant?’

‘Sounds familiar.’

‘Sixty-year-old farmer, Salinas Valley. The state took a big chunk of his property, eminent domain. The farm had been in his family for years and he had to sell off the rest for taxes. He was furious about it. He’s gone missing.’

‘That’s right.’ Dance recalled the ‘Have You Seen This Man?’ posters around town. There were two images. One of a man, smiling at the camera, sitting beside his Labrador retriever. The other showed him with hair askew, looking a bit of a crank. He resembled the great actor Bruce Dern in Nebraska. ‘It’s sad,’ she said.

‘Is, yes. He was writing these blogs trashing the state for what it did. But they stopped a few days ago and he’s disappeared. His family thinks he’s killed himself. I suppose that’s it. No point in kidnapping a man who doesn’t have any money. I’ve got a team out trying to find him. Or his body.’

O’Neil offered another grimace. ‘Then there’re the hate crimes. That’s on my plate too.’

Dance knew this story. Everybody in town did. Over the past few weeks, vandals had defaced buildings associated with minorities. They’d tagged an African-American church with graffiti of the KKK and a burning cross. Then a gay couple’s house had been tagged with ‘Get Aids and Die’. Latinos had been targeted too.

‘Who do you think? Neo-Nazis?’

Such groups were rare in the Monterey area. But not unheard of.

‘Closest are some biker and redneck white social clubs in Salinas and Seaside. Fits their worldview but graffiti’s not their MO. They tend to bust heads in bars. I’ve talked to a few of them. They were actually insulted I was accusing them.’

‘Guess there are degrees of bigotry.’

‘Amy Grabe’s considering sending a team down. But for now it’s mine.’

FBI. Sure. The crimes he was referring to would probably fall into the category of civil-rights violations, which meant the feds would be involved.

He continued, ‘But no physical violence so it’s not a top priority. I can work Solitude Creek okay.’

‘I’m glad,’ Dance said.

O’Neil let out a sigh and stretched. She was standing close enough to smell his aftershave or soap. A pleasant, complicated scent. Spicy. She eased away.

He explained, ‘Crime Scene should have their report tomorrow from around the roadhouse and the jobbing company.’

She told him in detail exactly what had happened that day from the moment of her arrival at Solitude Creek. He took notes. Then she handed him the printouts of the interviews she’d conducted. He flipped through them.

‘I’ll read these tonight.’

She summarized: ‘You might find something I didn’t see. But there’re no employees, former ones, or patrons who might have been motivated to organize the attack. No competitor wanting to take Sam out of commission.’

‘Was wondering. Any pissed-off husband wanted to get even with somebody on a date at the club that night?’

‘Or wife,’ Dance pointed out. The second-most-popular motive for arson — after insurance fraud — was a woman burning down the house, apartment or hotel room with a cheating lover inside. ‘That was in the battery of questions. No hints, though.’

He riffled the many pages. ‘Been busy.’

‘Wish I’d been productive.’ She shook her head.

O’Neil finished his beer. Looked through the pictures again. ‘One thing I don’t get, though.’

‘Why didn’t he just burn the place?’

He gave a smile. ‘Yep.’

‘That’s the key.’

O’Neil’s phone hummed once. He looked at the text. ‘Better be getting home.’

‘Sure.’

They walked to the door.

‘Night.’

Then he was going down the front steps of the porch, which creaked under his weight. He turned back and waved.

Dance checked the house, securing it, as always. She’d made enemies in her job over the years, and now, in particular, she could be in the sights of any of the gangs being targeted by Operation Pipeline. From Oakland to LA.

And by the Solitude Creek unsub too. A man who had used panic as a weapon to murder in a horrific way.

Then into and out of the bathroom quickly, change to PJs, then lugging her gun safe from floor to bedside table. A true Civ-Div officer, she couldn’t pack on the job but in her own home nothing was going to stop her triple-tapping an intruder with her Glock 26.

She lay back in bed, lights out. Refusing to let the images of the crime scene affect her, though that was difficult. They returned on their own. The bloodstain in the shape of a heart. The brown pool outside the exit door where, perhaps, the girl had lost her arm.

Really talented...

Tough images reeling through her mind. Dance called this ‘assault by memory’.

She listened to the wind and could just hear a whisper of the ocean.

Alone, tonight, Dance was thinking of the name of the rivulet near the roadhouse. Solitude Creek. She wondered why the name. Did it have a meaning other than the obvious, that the stream ran through an out-of-the-way part of the county, edged with secluding weeds and rushes and hidden by hills?

Solitude...

The word, its sound and meaning, spoke to her now. And yet how absurd was that? Solitude was not an aspect of her life. Hardly. She had the children, she had her parents, her friends, the Deck.

She had Jon Boling.

How could she be experiencing solitude?

Maybe, she thought wryly, because...

Because...

But then she told herself: Enough. Your mood’s just churned up by these terrible deaths and injuries. That’s all. Nothing more.

Solitude, solitude...

Finally, strength of will, she managed to fling the word away, just as the children would do with snowballs on those rare, rare occasions when the hills of Carmel Valley were blanketed white.