Solitude Creek

Chapter 73

Dance awoke early and surveyed the aftermath of the Secrets Club pajama party, which she’d hosted after the show.

The living room was not bad for a gaggle of ten- and eleven-year-old girls. Pizza crusts on most of the tables, popcorn on the floor, glitter from who knew what makeup experiment, some nail polish where it shouldn’t be, clothes scattered everywhere from an impromptu fashion show.

Could’ve been a lot worse.

Arriving at the house last night, Maggie had been pure celeb, red-carpet celeb. Whatever other clubs were part of the social structure of Pacific Hills, the Secrets Sisters ruled.

And, Dance had been pleased to learn (one of the reasons for the pizza and pajama party at her place), the girls were all quite nice. Yes, Bethany would probably someday be an inside-the-Beltway force whom no one would want to argue with from across the aisle. Heaven help Leigh’s husband. And Carrie could write code that impressed even Jon Boling. But the girls were uniformly polite, generous, funny.

Edie Dance had stayed the night too and would cater the breakfast — making her daughter’s signature hybrids: panfles or wafcakes — then get the girls ready for pickup by their parents. Because of the show last night, the school had a delayed opening today.

Now, dressed for work, Dance said, ‘Thanks, Mom.’ She hugged her. ‘Don’t you dare clean up. I’ll do that when I’m home.’

‘Bye, dear.’

As Dance was heading for the door, Bethany appeared, wearing Hello Kitty PJs. There was definitely an insidious aspect to the cartoon feline, Dance had decided long ago.

‘Yes, Bethany?’

‘Mrs Dance, I have something to talk to you about.’ Dead serious.

Dance turned to her and nodded, concentrating. ‘What is it?’

‘We all talked about it last night and we decided that you can be in the Secrets Club.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, we like you. You’re actually pretty cool. But you have to tell us a secret to get in. That’s what, you know —’

‘— makes it the Secrets Club.’

‘Uh-huh.’

Dance played along. ‘An important secret?’

‘Any secret.’

Dance happened to be looking at a picture of her and Jon Boling, taken by the waiter at a wine tasting on a weekend away in Napa not long ago.

No.

A glance into the kitchen. ‘Okay, I’ve got one.’

‘What is it?’ The freckled girl’s eyes went wide.

‘When I was your age, at dinner, I’d put butter on the broccoli and feed it to our dog when my mother wasn’t looking.’

‘Her?’ Bethany glanced at Edie Dance, in the other room.

‘Her. Now, I’m trusting you. You won’t tell.’

‘No. I won’t tell. I don’t like broccoli either.’

Dance said, ‘Pretty much sucks, doesn’t it?’

Bethany nodded as if considering a litigant’s petition. Then passed judgment. ‘That’s a good secret. We’ll vote you in.’ She turned and trotted back to the den, where the other girls were waking.

The official, and presumably only, adult member of the Pacific Hills Secrets Club now left the house. She nodded at the MCSO deputy keeping guard and smiled. He waved back. Then Dance jumped into her SUV and drove to headquarters. She’d no sooner walked into the lobby than Rey Carreneo spotted her and said, ‘Looked into it, the situation you asked me about.’ He handed her a folder. ‘All in there.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Anything else, Kathryn?’

‘Not yet. But stay close.’

‘Sure.’

Dance flipped through the folder, skimmed. She closed it and walked through the corridors to Overby’s office. Her boss gestured her inside, dropping his landline phone into its cradle. ‘Sacramento.’ He said this with a grimace. An explanation would logically follow that but none was forthcoming and she didn’t press it. She supposed he’d been dinged because of the latest incident on the Peninsula — the hospital attack — and the corollary: the tardiness of finding the Solitude Creek killer. Or the Oakland warehouse fire, which had damaged Operation Pipeline. Or the Serrano operation.

Or just because bureaucracy was bureaucracy.

As she sat down in one of the office chairs, Michael O’Neil stepped into the office too.

‘Michael, greetings,’ Overby said.

‘Charles.’ Then to Dance a nod. She thought he looked tired, as he sat heavily beside her.

‘What do you have?’

The deputy answered, ‘The preliminary report from the hospital. Not much, sorry to say. But not surprising. Given how smart this guy is.’

‘How did he do it, the elevator?’

‘There’s not a lot of security video but it seems he dressed in scrubs — cap and booties too — and stole a key from the maintenance room. He got into the elevator motor room on the top floor, cut the wires feeding both cars. Primary and backup. CSU took tool marks but you know how helpful those are.’

‘There was some power,’ Dance said, recalling the blinding glare from the lights attached to the security camera. She explained this.

O’Neil said, ‘Probably battery backup for that in the car itself. But it must not’ve been connected to the intercom.’ He glanced at his notes. ‘There was a fire in the elevator shaft but it was from ether. Hot burn but no smoke. What people smelled was from the burning Honda. We think he did that to make sure the fire alarms didn’t go off. That would send an automatic notice to the fire department. They’d be there in five, ten minutes. He wanted to keep the carnage going for as long as he could.’

‘Well,’ Overby said.

Dance added, ‘And we have no idea what he’s driving now. There’s no security video in the garage at the hospital. If that’s, in fact, where he parked. Or, for all we know, he hiked a mile to where he left his new wheels.’

She explained that while she believed the unsub was a pro, hired by somebody else, their one suspect — Frederick Martin — had not panned out. The other victims at Solitude Creek seemed unlikely targets for a pro. ‘We’re back to thinking somebody may have been targeting the venues themselves. The roadhouse, the Bay View Center or the hospital. But why? We just don’t know.’

She noted that Overby wasn’t fully attentive. He was staring at his computer screen, which showed a streaming newscast from a local TV station. The Hero Fireman was giving another interview — this time about his efforts at the hospital incident.

Overby muted the set. ‘I read an article one time. It was pretty interesting. About a fireman in Buffalo, New York. You ever hear about it?’

There were presumably a lot of firemen in Buffalo, Dance reflected. But you usually let Charles Overby run with whatever it was he was running with. ‘No, Charles.’

‘Nup.’

‘He was pretty good at his job. Brave. There’d be a fire in an apartment. He’d race in, make his way around the flames, save a family or the pet dog. Happened three or four times. He knew just where the fire’d started, how best to fight it. Amazing how he saved people. His truck was usually first on the scene and he could read a fire like nobody else. That’s what they say: reading a fire. Firemen say that, I mean.

‘Well, guess what, boys and girls? The fireman set the fires himself. Not because he was a pyromaniac, if that’s what they call those people. No, he didn’t care about the fires. He cared about the prestige. The glory. He basked in it. Went away for attempted murder, in addition to the arson, burglary and assault charges. I think they dropped the vandalism. Didn’t need it, really.’

He stabbed a finger at the TV. ‘Have you noticed that Brad Dannon has been on the scene of the disasters pretty damn fast? And that he was real eager to talk to the media about what he did? “Hero”. That’s what they’re calling him. So. You think he might be the perp, your unsub?’ A faint smile of triumph.

‘I—’ Dance began.

‘Wonder why we didn’t think of that before?’

Dance wished he hadn’t added that last sentence. Throughout his monologue she’d been trying to figure out some way to sideline him before he tossed out a line like that.

Well, nothing to do.

She set the folder she’d just received on his desk. ‘Actually, Charles, I did wonder if Brad might be a suspect. So I had Rey Carreneo check him out.’ She tapped the file. ‘He correlated his whereabouts and checked phone records. After Bay View, we’ve got the unsub’s prepaid number. There was no connection. He’s innocent. His boss at MCFD says he’s usually on the scene in the first ten minutes of a call. He cruises around the county with a scanner, even when he’s off duty. Oh, and he’s known for being a real pain in the ass.’

A pause.

‘Oh. Good. Great minds think alike.’ And the look on his face wasn’t sheepishness for having been out-thought, Dance believed: it was pure relief that he hadn’t offered up the theory at a press conference only to recant a few hours later based on the findings of his suspended underling.

Dance’s mobile hummed. It was TJ Scanlon.

‘Hey.’

‘Boss, I’ve been plundering various and sundry records. Real estate, deeds, construction permits. Per your request.’

She knew he had. ‘Yes?’

‘Dusty. You’d think everything would be online but, un-uh. I’ve been prowling through shelves, back rooms. Caverns. Where are you?’

‘Charles’s office.’

‘I’ll be there in one. You’re going to want to see this.’

He arrived in less time than that. And his flecked Jefferson Airplane T-shirt and, yes, dusty jeans attested to his old-fashioned detective work.

Caverns...

He held a folder similar to the one she’d just passed to Overby.

‘Michael, Charles. Hey, boss. Okay. Check this out. Nobody got back to me from that Nevada company, the one planning the construction near Solitude Creek? So I thought I’d do some digging. Try to find shareholders, whatever. Well, the company’s owned by an anonymous trust. I tried to get a look at the trust but it’s not public. I could, though, find out who represents it. Barrett Stone, a lawyer in San Francisco. How’s that for a lawyer’s name? I’d want him representing me, I’ll tell you. Okay, I’ll get to the point. The phone company coughed up his call log for me, and I looked them over. Guess who the lawyer’s been calling? Three calls in the past two days.’

Overby lifted his palms.

‘Sam Cohen. So I called him. And found out that Stone, on behalf of the trust, made a cash offer to buy the roadhouse and the property it sits on.’

‘So, there’s a motive,’ Dance said. ‘Ruin the business, then buy up the land cheap. Build a new development on it. Maybe buy Henderson Jobbing too, now that they’re going out of business.’

O’Neil asked, ‘How do we find out who’s behind the trust?... I don’t know if we’ve got enough for a warrant.’

‘I did the next best thing. I pulled together some of Stone’s more prominent clients. Recognize anyone?’ He set a sheet of paper in front of them.

One name was highlighted in yellow. He’d also drawn an exclamation point next to it.

Neither was necessary.

Dance blinked. ‘Hm.’

‘Well,’ Overby said. ‘This’s going to be... I don’t know what this is going to be.’

‘Awkward’ came first to Dance’s mind. Then: ‘explosive’.

Overby looked from her to O’Neil. ‘You’d better get on it right now. Good luck.’

Meaning he was already thinking about how to extricate himself from the train wreck about to occur.

Chapter 74

En route to Salinas.

Kathryn Dance was piecing together a portrait of the man now suspected of hiring the Solitude Creek Unsub. She was online. Michael O’Neil, driving.

Forty-one-year-old Congressman Daniel Nashima had represented what was now the Twentieth Congressional District of California for eight terms. He was a Democrat but a moderate one, advocating socially liberal positions, like gay marriage and a woman’s right to choose, but pushing for lower taxes on the wealthy (‘Most of the one percent got that way by working hard, not by inheriting their money’).

Nashima himself was a living example of that philosophy. He’d made a lot of money through Internet start-ups and real-estate deals. His goal of financial success, however, didn’t vitiate his do-good attitude, of course. If anything, the altruism deflected attention from his capitalistic side. You tend not to think of a man’s net worth when he’s hauling forty-pound blocks of concrete off victims trapped in earthquake rubble.

Nashima’s performance in Congress was stellar. He showed up for the majority of votes, he reached across the aisle, he served on the hardworking committees, Ethics and Homeland Security, without complaint. His term in office had never been tainted with the least scandal: he’d gotten divorced before commencing a romantic liaison with a lobbyist (who had no connection with him professionally), and in his closest brush with crime, it had been discovered that his housekeeper had herself forged visas — he had been duped like everyone else. Dance and O’Neil were accompanied by Albert Stemple and a Monterey County Sheriff’s Office deputy. Dance had learned that Nashima was a hunter and had a conceal-carry permit.

They now arrived at his office in Santa Cruz. In a strip mall, next to a surfboard rental and sales shop, whose posters suggested you could walk to Maverick, site of the most righteous surfing on the west coast (it was fifty miles north).

With Stemple remaining outside, lookout, the other three stepped inside. The Congressman’s assistant, a pretty, diminutive Japanese-American woman, looked them over, hostile, then walked to the back of the suite. She returned a moment later and ushered them inside.

After introductions, Nashima calmly surveyed them all. ‘And what can I do for you?’

Shields were displayed, identifications offered.

Nashima was still examining hers when Dance took the lead. ‘Congressman, we’d like to ask about your connection with Solitude Creek.’

‘I don’t understand.’ The man sat back, relaxed though stony-faced. His movement and gestures were precise.

‘Please. It’ll be easier for everybody if you cooperate.’

‘Cooperate? About what? You walk in here, accusation all over your face. Obviously you think I did something wrong. I don’t have any idea what. Give me a clue.’

His indignation was credible. But that was common among the High Machiavellians — expert deceivers — when they were called on lies they’d just told.

Calmly she persisted, ‘Are you trying to purchase property on Solitude Creek north off Highway One, the building and the land the roadhouse is located on?’

He blinked. Was this the point where he would demand a lawyer?

‘As a matter of fact, I’m not, no.’

The first phrase was often a deception flag. Like: ‘I swear’. Or ‘I’m not going to lie to you’.

‘Well, your attorney made an offer for the property.’

A pause. It could mean a lie was coming and he was trying to figure out what they knew. Or that he was furious.

‘Is that right? I wasn’t aware of it.’

‘You’re denying that Barrett Stone, your lawyer, talked to Sam Cohen and made an offer to buy the property?’

The Congressman sighed. And lowered his head. ‘You are, of course, investigating the terrible incident at the roadhouse.’ He nodded. ‘I remember you, Agent Dance. You were there the next day.’

O’Neil said, ‘And you came back a few days later to look over the property you wanted to buy.’

He nodded. ‘You’re thinking I orchestrated the attack to drive the property value down. Ah, and presumably the second attack at Cannery Row was to cover up the motive for the first attack. Make it look like some kind of psycho was involved. Oh, and the hospital too, sure.’

He was sounding oddly confident. Still, what else was he going to say?

‘I have alibis for one or all of the incidents... Oh, but that’s not what you’re thinking, I’m sure. No. You’re thinking I hired this psycho.’

Dance remained silent. In the art of interrogation and interviewing, all too often the officer responds to comments or questions posed by the subject. Keep mum and let them talk. (Dance had once gotten a full confession by asking a suspected murderer, ‘So, you come to Monterey often?’)

Daniel Nashima now rose. He looked both law enforcers over carefully. Then set his hands, palms down, on the desk. His face revealed no emotion whatsoever as he said, ‘All right. I’ll confess. I’ll confess to everything. But on one condition.’

Chapter 75

Donnie and Wes were hanging on Mrs Dance’s back porch, huddling in the back, along with Nathan (Neo, from the Matrix) and Vince (Vulcan — no, not the race of the dudes from Star Trek but the X-Man).

Fritos and orange juice and a little smuggled Red Bull were the hors d’oeuvres and cocktails of the hour.

‘So, what’re you? Like grounded?’ slim, pimply Vince asked.

Wes sighed. ‘My mother’s running that case, that thing at Solitude Creek, where the people got killed. And the Bay View Center?’

Nathan: ‘No shit. Where people jumped into the water and drowned. She’s doing that?’

‘And she’s like all paranoid he’s going to come around and mess with us.’

‘Get a piece, dude. Really. Waste him, the fucker shows up.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Wes said.

Vince asked, ‘How’re you gonna play the game, man? Jesus.’

Wes shrugged. ‘I gotta have rides to school and home. But I can still get away. Just have to be careful about it. Not when my mom’s here. But Jon? I can tell him I’ve got a headache or need to take a nap. Get out through my window. I don’t know. I’ll figure it out.’

Donnie waved to Mrs Dance’s boyfriend, Jon, who, Donnie thought, was spying on them, though maybe not. The guy actually seemed friendly enough and sure as shit knew machines: he hacked epic code and showed Donnie how to write script for games. Donnie had this fantasy about taking the Defend and Respond Expedition Service game onto the net, making millions. Where you’d fuck with people in the virtual world.

Yeah, it could be a good game. Mucho more interesting than wasting zombies with machine-guns.

Donnie shifted on the bench and he must’ve winced. Wes noticed. ‘Yo, what’s wrong?’

‘Nothing, bitch. I’m fine.’

Except he wasn’t fine. His father’d noticed the missing bike and, even though he seemed to believe the lie that Donnie had lent it to a friend, he’d whacked him a half-dozen times with the branch for not asking permission to lend out a present. (‘And you know how much it cost?’) He was under orders to produce the bike tomorrow, or face even worse punishment.

And, with Donnie’s father, worse always meant worse.

Big Nathan, who didn’t take as many showers as he ought to, moved his hair out of his eyes. ‘So here.’ He flashed a picture on his Galaxy of a stop sign, uprooted and sitting in Vince’s garage. His mother never used the place. His father might have killed himself in there — that was the rumor — so nobody in the family ever went inside or did anything with it. So it had sort of become their clubhouse.

‘Can I get an amen?’ Nathan asked. ‘Team Two scores.’

Fist bumps.

‘Cool,’ said Wes. ‘How much did it weigh?’

‘Tons,’ Vince said. ‘We both had to carry it.’

‘I could have,’ Nathan said fast. ‘Just, it was long, you know. Hard to get a handle on.’

If anybody could muscle it, Neo could. He was a big fucker.

‘Nobody saw you?’ Donnie asked.

‘Naw. Maybe one kid but we looked at him, like, you say anything and you’re frigging dead.’

Nathan said ‘frig’ instead of ‘fuck’. He’d come around, Donnie thought. Wes had.

We’ll totally fuck you up...

Donnie pulled out the official Defend and Respond game score sheet, illustrated by him personally. Titans, X-Men, Fantastic Four, zombies everywhere. A couple of the hot girls from True Blood.

He wrote on the Nathan/Vince side: Challenge 5, completed.

Donnie had come up with the idea of challenging the team to steal a stop sign, not just any sign. No ‘Yield’, no ‘School X-ing’, no ‘No Parking’. But a real fucking stop sign at a four-way intersection. Copping that would mean they’d have to be at an intersection, where it’d be riskier to get caught. And then, too, a missing stop sign would mean that a car might fuck up another in a crash.

Vince grimaced. ‘Only, like a half-hour later, not even, there was another one up.’

‘That’s fucked up,’ Donnie said, disappointed.

Wes gave a sour laugh. ‘Who drives around with signs to put up?’

‘Dunno. Just was like all that work was wasted,’ Vince said.

Nathan slapped his arm. ‘Shit, dude. We got the point.’ A stab at the score sheet. ‘Am I right, ladies?’

Donnie would’ve liked a big fucking car crash but the challenge hadn’t been to keep stealing stop signs until there was a big fucking car crash; it was steal a fucking stop sign. Period.

‘Dude,’ Wes was talking to him. ‘Show ’em.’

Donnie pulled his iPhone out and displayed the Die Jew picture.

Nathan didn’t seem happy. He and Vince were down two points.

Vince said, ‘That thing, that’s Indian.’

Impatiently, Donnie said, ‘What thing? And what Indian? Like Raj?’

‘What’s Raj?’ Wes said.

His mother didn’t let Wes and his sister, Maggie, watch much TV.

Donnie scoffed. ‘Raj, man, the brainiac on Big Bang Theory. Jesus.’

‘Oh. Sure.’ Nathan seemed to have no clue.

Vince said, ‘No, what I’m saying, Indian like bows and arrows and tepees.’

‘It’s called a swastika,’ Wes said. ‘The Nazis used it.’

Donnie added, ‘The Indians did too. I saw a special. I don’t know.’

Nathan asked, ‘Is a swasti-whatever, is it like a blade you throw? I mean, are those knives on the end?’

Wes said, ‘It’s just a symbol. On their flag.’

‘The Indians?’

Wes cocked his head. ‘No, dude. The Nazis.’

‘Who were they again?’ Nathan asked.

Donnie muttered, ‘They and the Jews had a big war.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Game of Thrones. Like that.’

Donnie’s shoulders rose and fell.‘I guess. I don’t know. Couple hundred years ago, I think.’ Then he was tired of history. He added their point to the score sheet.

Nathan said, ‘Okay. Our turn. We’re challenging Darth and Wolverine to the following dare. You know Sally Caruthers, the cheerleader? We challenge you to get some Visine in her drink at school. It gives you the runs.’

‘That’s way gross,’ Wes said.

Donnie liked the idea of the challenge and knew it wasn’t a bad idea to stop dissing Jews and blacks for a while. But he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, but the game’s on hold for a couple days.’

‘Yeah?’ asked Nathan, frowning.

Wes sighed. ‘The asshole, the house we tagged, perped our bikes.’

‘Put ’em in his garage. Me and Wes were talking about it, what to do.’

Wes said, ‘To get ’em back.’

Donnie nodded for Wes to continue.

‘And we need some help. Backup, you know. You up for that?’

Vince considered it. ‘We’ll help you but we get a point.’ Tapping the score sheet.

Nathan said, ‘Dude, that’s mad brilliant.’

Donnie furrowed his brow. He was, though, only pretending to debate. He didn’t care about the point. The fact was that for the plan he had in mind, which he hadn’t told Wes about, he definitely needed the others.

Finally he said, ‘All right, you ladies get a point.’ And popped the Red Bulls and passed the cans around.

Chapter 76

They were driving along Highway One, O’Neil behind the wheel of his patrol car, Dance in the front passenger seat. In the back were Al Stemple and their confessing suspect, Congressman Daniel Nashima.

This was the condition to his confession: a drive to the scene of the crime, where he’d tell her everything she wanted to know.

He wasn’t under arrest, so no cuffs, but he had been searched for weapons. Which had amused him.

The compact man was silent, staring out of the window at the passing sights — agricultural fields of Brussels sprouts and artichokes on the right; to the west, the water side, were small businesses (souvenir shacks and restaurants) and marinas, increasingly downscale as they moved north.

Finally they turned off the highway and took the driveway to the parking lot; the roadhouse was boarded up. The trucking business was operating but Dance wondered for how long: she remembered the story on the news about the company’s probable bankruptcy.

O’Neil was about to stop but Nashima directed him to the end of the lot, not far from where Dance had discovered the path that led to where she’d found the witness in the trailer, Annette, addicted to cigarettes and music.

‘Let’s take a walk,’ Nashima said.

Dance and O’Neil exchanged glances as together they climbed from the car and followed Nashima as he started along the path. Stemple plodded behind, boot falls noisy on the gritty asphalt. Both he and O’Neil kept their hands near their weapons. The unsub, armed with at least one nine-millimeter pistol, was still at large, of course.

Was he headed for the cluster of residential houses? And why did he seem to have no interest in the roadhouse itself?

I’ll confess...

He didn’t get far along the path, however, before he turned left and walked toward Solitude Creek, through the grass and around the ruins she’d seen earlier, the remnants of concrete floors, fences, walls and posts. As they got closer to the water, she found a barrier of rusting chain-link separating them from the glistening creek.

He turned to them. ‘When I said I didn’t know if the lawyer made an offer, that’s because of a blind trust.’

‘We know about it,’ Dance said.

‘I put all my assets in it when I took office. Barrett controls everything as trustee. But he knows my general investment and planning strategies. And when he heard about the roadhouse, I imagine he made the offer because he knew I was interested in all the property here.

‘But the trust sets out the guidelines he has to follow in purchasing property and he’ll stick to those. He’ll buy it if the conditions are right; he won’t if they’re not. I can’t tell him to do anything about it.’

Dance was beginning to feel her A-to-B-to-Z thinking might end up short of the twenty-sixth letter.

The Congressman said, ‘If you know about the trust then you know about the company it owns. The LLC in Nevada.’

‘Yes, planning to do some construction here.’

‘That company also owns all of this.’ He waved his hand. He seemed to indicate everything from the parking lot, along the shore of Solitude Creek almost to the development where Dance had discovered Annette.

Nashima continued, ‘The company I’m referring to is Kodoku Ogawa Limited. The Japanese words mean “Solitude Creek”.’ He fell silent momentarily. ‘Curious about the word for “solitude”, though. In Japanese, it also means isolation, desolation, detachment. “Solitude” in English suggests something healthy, regenerative.’ He turned to them with a searing gaze. ‘Have you figured out the purpose of Kodoku Ogawa Limited yet?’

No one responded. Stemple was gazing out over the grassy expanse, arms crossed.

Nashima walked to an ancient fencepost topped with rusted barbed wire. He touched it gingerly. ‘In nineteen forty-two, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order Ninety Sixty-six, which gave military officers the right to exclude any person they saw fit from quote “designated military areas”. You know what those military areas were? All of the state of California and much of Oregon, Washington and Arizona. And who got excluded? People of Japanese ancestry.’

‘The internment,’ Dance said.

Nashima muttered, ‘A nice word for pogrom.’ He continued, ‘Nearly one hundred and twenty thousand people were forced out of their homes and into camps. Over sixty percent were US citizens. Children, the elderly, the mentally handicapped among them.’ He laughed harshly. ‘Spies? Saboteurs? They were as loyal as German Americans or Italian Americans. Or any Americans, for that matter. If there was such a risk, then why in Hawaii, where only a small minority of Japanese were rounded up, was there no espionage or sabotage among the tens of thousands who remained free?’

‘And this was one of those camps?’

‘The Solitude Creek Relocation Center. It extended from that crest there all the way to the highway. It was a charming place,’ he said bitterly. ‘People lived in large barracks, divided into twenty-foot apartments, with walls that didn’t go up all the way to the ceiling. There were only communal latrines, not separated by gender. There was virtually no privacy at all. The camp was surrounded by barbed wire, five strand, and there were machine-gun towers every few hundred feet.

‘There was never enough food — diet was rice and vegetables, and if the prisoners wanted anything more than that, they had to grow it themselves. But, of course, they couldn’t just stroll down the road and buy a couple of chickens, could they? And they couldn’t fish in the creek because they might swim away and slit the throats of Americans nearby or radio the longitude and latitude of Fort Ord to the hundreds of Japanese submarines in Monterey Bay just waiting for that information,’ he scoffed.

He strode to a reedy plot of sand. ‘I’ve reconstructed about where my relatives were incarcerated.’ He looked the spot over. ‘It was here that my grandfather died. He had a heart attack. The doctor wasn’t in the camp that day. They had to call one from Fort Ord. But it took a while because, of course, the yellow menace would feign a heart attack to escape, so they had to find some armed soldiers to guard the medical workers. He was dead before help arrived.’

‘I’m sorry,’ O’Neil muttered.

‘He, like my grandmother, was a nisei — second generation, born here. My father was a sansei, third generation. They were citizens of the United States.’ He looked at them with still, cool eyes. ‘We need to keep the memory of what happened here alive. I’ve always planned to build a museum to do that. On this very site, where my relatives were so badly treated.

‘The sign at the entrance will read “Solitude Creek Kyōseishūyōsho Museum and Memorial”. That means “concentration camp”. Not “relocation center”. That’s not what it was.’

Almost as an afterthought he said, ‘Before you go to a judge to get warrants to arrest me, look up the corporate documents for Kodoku. It’s a non-profit. I won’t make a penny on it. Oh, and about murdering people to buy some property cheap? You’ll see from the plans we’ll be filing for permits, I don’t need the roadhouse. If Sam Cohen sells we’d just doze the club down for an extension of the parking lot. If not, we’ll buy some of the property closer to Highway One. Or, if Sam would like to keep the land, he could tear down the building and put up a restaurant.’ The Congressman cocked his head. ‘I can guarantee him a good supply of clientele if he puts sushi and sashimi on the menu.’ His eyes strayed to the waving grasses, the ripples on gray Solitude Creek.

‘I know what you’re thinking: I could have told you this in my office, yes. But I don’t think we can ever miss an opportunity to remind ourselves that hate persists. What happened here happened only seventy years ago.’ A nod at the concrete borders along Solitude Creek. ‘That’s a drop in the bucket of time. And look now, on the Peninsula. Those terrible hate crimes over the past month. Synagogues, black churches.’

He shook his head and turned back toward the parking lot. ‘We haven’t learned a thing. I sometimes doubt we ever will.’

Chapter 77

‘That didn’t go well,’ Dance muttered.

She and O’Neil were in her office.

‘Better than it could have gone. I don’t think there’ll be any lawsuits for... Well, I don’t know what Nashima would sue for.’

‘Wrongful accusation?’ she suggested, only half joking. She looked over the case material spread out on her desk and pinned to the whiteboard nearby. Evidence, reference to statements, details of the crimes. And photos, those terrible photos.

Dance’s phone rang. But it wasn’t Barrett Stone, Esq., asking where he could serve the papers. TJ sounded sheepish as he said, ‘Well, okay, boss, I guess I will admit that I didn’t exactly look over all those facts and figures. I mean, longitude and latitude of the deeds and the plots or plats, whatever they are, and—’

‘Is Nashima innocent, TJ? That’s all I want to know.’

‘As the driven snow. Which is an expression I don’t get any more than “When it rains, it pours.” The Nevada company’s construction plans have nothing to do with the roadhouse; it’s all the site of the old relocation camp and an area toward Highway One. And he was telling the truth: all the companies involved are non-profits. Any earnings have to be spent on education and support of the museum and other human-rights organizations.’

Nail in the coffin, Dance thought. Reflecting that that was one expression leaving little doubt as to meaning.

Another: back to the drawing board.

O’Neil’s phone buzzed. He glanced at caller ID. ‘My boss.’ The Monterey County sheriff. ‘Brother. Wonder what’s up.’ He answered. ‘Ted. Did Nashima call to complain? The Congressman?... No. Well, he might. I thought that’s what you were calling about.’

Then she noticed O’Neil stiffen. Shoulders up, head down. ‘Really?... Are they sure? I’m here with Kathryn now. We can be there in twenty minutes. What’s the internet address?’

He jotted something down.

‘We’ll check it out on the way.’ He disconnected. He looked at her with an expression she rarely saw on his face.

Dance lifted her eyebrows. ‘We?’

‘The case I was working on, about the man who went missing, Otto Grant.’

She recalled: the farmer who had gone bankrupt after his property was taken by the state. ‘You thought he might be a suicide?’

‘That’s what happened, right. Hanged himself. A shack out in Salinas Valley.’ He rose. ‘Let’s go.’

She asked, ‘Me? It’s your case. You want me along?’

‘Actually, turns out, it’s our case now.’

Chapter 78

Michael O’Neil piloted his unmarked Dodge into the countryside, east of Salinas, a huge swathe of farm country, flat and, thanks to the precious water, green with young plants. Dance skimmed the blog entry Otto Grant had posted just before he’d taken his life, several hours ago. ‘Explains a lot,’ she said. ‘Explains everything.’

The reason the Otto Grant case was now both of theirs was simple: Grant was the man who’d hired the Solitude Creek unsub to wreak havoc on Monterey County. In revenge for the eminent-domain action that had led to his bankruptcy.

‘As much of an oddball as we thought?’

She scanned more. Didn’t answer.

‘Read it to me.’

‘Over the past few months readers of this BLOG have followed the chronicle of the Destruction of my life by the state of California. For those of you just “tuning in” I owned a farm off San Juan Grade Road, 239 acres of very fine land which I inherited from my Father, who inherited it from his Father.

‘Last year the state decided to steal two thirds of that property — the most valuable — under the totalitarian “law” known as eminent domain. And WHY did they want to take it from me? Because a nearby landfill, filled with garbage and trash, was nearly full to capacity and so they turned their sights on my land to turn it into a dump.

‘The Founding Fathers approved laws that let the government take citizens’ land provided they give “JUST COMPENSATION” for it. I’m an American and a patriot and this is the best country on earth but do you think Thomas Jefferson would allow taking all this property and then arguing about the value? Of course he wouldn’t. Because HE was a gentleman and a scholar.

‘I was given compensation equal to land used for grazing not farming. Even though it was a working vegetable farm and there are no livestock for miles around. I had to sell the remaining land because there wasn’t enough to cover expenses.

‘After paying off the mortgages I was left with $150,000. Which may seem like a princely sum except I then got a tax bill for $70,000!! It was only a matter of time until I ended up homeless.

‘Well, by now you know what I did. I did NOT pay the taxes. I took every last penny and gave it to a man I had met a few years ago. A soldier of fortune, you could say. If you wonder who’s at fault for what happened at Solitude Creek and Bay View Center and the hospital, look into a mirror. YOU! Maybe next time you’ll think twice about stealing a man’s soul, his heart, his livelihood, his immortality and discover within you a conscience.’

Dance said, ‘That’s it.’

‘Phew. That’s enough.’

‘One hundred fifty thousand for the job. No wonder our unsub can afford Vuitton shoes.’

They drove in silence for a few moments.

‘You can’t sympathize but you almost want to,’ O’Neil said.

This was true, Dance reflected. Bizarre though it was, the letter revealed how the man had been so sadly derailed.

In fifteen minutes, O’Neil pulled onto a dirt road, where an MCSO cruiser was parked. The officer gestured them on. About a hundred yards farther on they came to an abandoned house. Two more cruisers were there, along with the medical examiner’s bus. The officers waved to O’Neil and Dance as they climbed out of the car and made their way to the front door of the shack.

‘Door was unlocked when we got here, Detective, but he had quite a fortress inside. He was ready for battle if we came for him before his hired gun finished with the revenge.’

Dance noted the thick wooden boards bolted over the windows of the one-story structure. The back door, the officer explained, was sealed too, similarly, and the front was reinforced with metal panels and multiple locks. It would have taken a battering ram to get inside.

She spotted a rifle, some scatterguns. Plenty of ammo.

Crime Scene had arrived too, dolled up in their Tyvek jumpsuits, booties and hoods.

‘You can look around,’ one officer said, ‘just mind the routine. Nothing’s bagged or logged yet.’

Meaning: keep your hands to yourselves and wear booties.

They donned the light blue footwear and stepped inside. It was largely what she’d expected: the filthy cabin, latticed with beams overhead, was dingy and sad. Minimal furniture, second-hand. Jugs of water, cans of Chef Boyardee entrees and vegetables and peaches. Thousands of legal papers and several books of California statutes, well thumbed, with portions highlighted in yellow marker. The air was fetid. He’d used a bucket for his toilet. The mattress was covered with a gray sheet. The blanket was an incongruous pink.

‘Where’s the body?’ O’Neil asked one of the officers.

‘In there, sir.’

They walked into the back bedroom, which was barren of furniture. Otto Grant, disheveled and dusty, lay on his back in front of an open window. He’d hanged himself from a ceiling beam. The medical team had untied the nylon rope and lowered him to the floor, presumably to try to save him, though the lividity of the face and the extended neck told her that Grant had died well before they had arrived.

The window, wide open. She supposed he’d chosen this as the site of his death so he could look out over the pleasant hills in the distance, some magnolia and oak nearby, a field of budding vegetables. Better to gaze at as your vision went to black and your heart shut down than a wall of scuffed, stained sheetrock.

‘Michael? Kathryn?’

With a last look at the man who’d caused so much pain to so many, O’Neil and Dance stepped back into the living room to meet the head of the CSU examination team, dressed in overalls and a hood.

‘Hey, Carlos,’ Dance said.

The lean Latino CSU officer, Carlos Batillo, nodded a greeting. He walked to the card table that Grant had been using for his desk. The man’s computer and a portable router sat on it. It was open to his blog, the entry that Dance had read to O’Neil on the drive there.

‘Find anything else on it?’ O’Neil asked.

‘Bare bones. News stories about the stampedes. Some articles on eminent domain.’

Dance nodded at a Nokia mobile. ‘We know he hired somebody to handle the attacks. He’s the one we want now — the “soldier of fortune” he referred to. Our unsub. Any text or call-log data that could be helpful? Or is it pass coded?’

‘No code.’ Batillo picked it up with a gloved hand. ‘It’s a California exchange, prepaid.’

When he told her the number Dance nodded. ‘The unsub called it from his burner, the one he dropped in Orange County. Can I see the log?’

She and O’Neil moved closer together and looked down, as the CSU officer scrolled.

‘Hold it,’ Dance said. ‘Okay, that’s the number of the phone the unsub dropped. And the others are the ones he bought at the same time, in Chicago.’

Batillo gave a brief laugh. Perhaps that she’d memorized the numbers. He continued, ‘No voice mail. Fair number of texts back and forth.’ He scrolled through them. ‘Here’s one. Grant says he has, quote, “the last of your” money. “I know you wanted more and I wish I could have paid you more.”’ The officer read on. ‘“I know the risks you took. I’m For Ever in your debt.” “For Ever” capitalized. He does that a lot. Then, going back... Grant tells him the targets were perfect: the roadhouse, the Bay View Center, the Monterey Bay Hospital, “probably better the church didn’t work out”.’

‘He was going to attack a church?’ Dance asked, shaking her head.

Batillo read one more. ‘“Thanks for the ammo.”’

Soldier of fortune...

The officer slipped the phone into a bag with a chain-of-custody card attached. He signed it and put the sealed bag into a large plastic container resembling a laundry basket.

She glanced down at a treatise on the law of eminent domain.

‘How’d he meet the doer?’ Dance wondered aloud. ‘He said a few years ago.’

Batillo said, ‘I saw some texts about “the gun show”. “Enjoyed talking weapons with you.”’

‘And I found the ammo I think he was talking about. Brick of twelve gauge and two twenty-three. “Arlington Heights Guns and Sporting Goods” on the label.’

‘Chicago,’ Dance said.

O’Neil said wryly, ‘Tough manhunt. Six million people.’

‘We’ve got the gun-show reference. The ammo. The phones.’ She shrugged and offered a smile. ‘Needle in a haystack, I know. Right up there with “When it rains it pours.” But that doesn’t mean the needle isn’t there.’

Forty minutes later she was back in her office, scrolling through the crime-scene pictures of the Otto Grant suicide — the rest of the report wouldn’t be ready for a day or two — and considering how to narrow down the task of finding their unsub in the Windy City, or wherever he might be. Page after page... Dance found herself staring at the pictures of Prescott and the woman he’d killed, positioned under the lights to get pictures for proof of death. If only she could let her eyes be theirs for a brief moment before they had glazed over, and darkness embraced them.

To catch a fleeting glimpse of the man who’d done this.

Who are you? Are you headed back to your home in Chicago, or somewhere else?

And are you working for someone else now, a new job? Nearby? Or in a different part of the world?

Questions she would answer, whether it took a week, a month, a year.

Chapter 79

Maggie’s eyes were wide and even Dance’s adolescent, seen-it-all son was impressed.

They were backstage at the Monterey Performing Arts Center with Neil Hartman himself. The lanky man in his early thirties, dark curly hair and a lean face, looked every inch the country-western star, though that genre was only part of his repertoire. His songs and performance style were very similar to Kayleigh Towne’s — she was Dance’s performer friend, based in Fresno.

When Dance and the kids had been ushered into the green room, the musician had smiled and introduced everyone to the band members present. ‘Kayleigh sends her best,’ he told her.

‘Where’s her show tonight?’

‘Denver. Big house, five thousand plus.’

Dance said, ‘She’s doing well.’

‘I’ll head out there after tomorrow’s show. Maybe we’ll get to Aspen.’ He was grinning shyly.

That answered one of Dance’s questions. The beautiful singer-songwriter hadn’t been dating anyone seriously for a time. There were worse romantic options than a Portland troubadour with dreamy eyes and a lifestyle that seemed more mom-and-pop than Rolling Stones.

‘Uhm...’ Maggie began.

‘Yes, young lady?’ Hartman asked, smiling.

‘Ask him, Mags.’

‘Can I have your autograph?’

He laughed. ‘Do you one better.’ He walked to a box, found a T-shirt in Maggie’s size. It featured a photo from one of his recent CDs — Hartman and his golden retriever sitting on a front porch. He signed it to her with a glittery marker.

‘Oh, wow.’

‘Mags?’

‘Thank you!’

For Wes, the gift was age-appropriate: a black T-shirt with ‘NHB’.

‘Cool. Thanks.’

‘Hey, you guys want to noodle around on a git-fiddle or keyboard?’

‘Yeah? Can we?’ Wes asked.

‘Sure.’

‘Wooee!’ Maggie sat down at the keyboard — Dance cranked the volume down — and Hartman handed Wes an old Martin. You couldn’t live in the Dance household without knowing something about musical instruments, and though Maggie was the real talent, Wes could chord and play a few flat-pick licks.

When he started ‘Stairway To Heaven’, Hartman and Dance glanced at each other and laughed. The song that will never die.

They talked about the show tonight. Hartman was growing in popularity but not at the Kayleigh Towne level yet, though his Grammy win had guaranteed a sold-out house at the performing arts center — nearly a thousand people were coming to see him.

With the children occupied in the corner, the adults spoke in low voices.

‘I heard you got him. The guy behind the attacks.’

‘Well, the one who hired him.’

‘Grant, right? He lost his farm.’

‘That’s him. But we still don’t have the hit man he hired. But we will. We’ll get him.’

‘Kayleigh said something about you being... persistent.’

Dance laughed. ‘That’s what she said, hm?’ Her kinesic skills told her that Hartman was translating. Maybe ‘obstinate’ or ‘pig-headed’ had been the young woman’s choice. She and Kayleigh were a lot alike in that regard.

‘I thought we were going to have to cancel the show.’

Dance had been fully prepared to do just that — if they hadn’t closed the case before the concert.

‘You hear about Sam Cohen?’

‘No, what?’

‘He’s going to rebuild the roadhouse. A dozen or so of us are doing some benefit concerts, donating the money to him. He’s going to tear down the old building and put up a new one. He didn’t want to at first but we were...’ he laughed ‘... persistent.’

‘Great news. I’m really happy.’

Maybe you can recover from some things, Sam. Maybe you can.

Hartman’s drummer appeared in the doorway, smiled at the kids, then said, ‘Let’s play.’

Hartman gave the children a thumbs-up. ‘You got your chops down, both of you. Next time I’m in town, we’ll work up some tunes, I’ll get you out on stage with me.’

‘No way!’ Wes said.

‘Sure.’

‘Excellent!’

Maggie frowned, considering something. ‘Can I cover a Patsy Cline song?’

Dance said, ‘Mags, why don’t you sing a Neil Hartman?’

Hartman laughed. ‘I think Ms Cline would be honored. We’ll make it happen.’

‘Hey, gang, let’s head to our seats.’

‘Bye, Mr Hartman. Thanks.’

Wes handed over the guitar and, looking at his phone, headed toward the door.

‘Young man.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Say hi to Kayleigh for us.’ Dance gave him a smile.

They left the green room and walked into the theater, which was filling up. There were about eight hundred people, Dance estimated.

Year ago, she had dreamed of being a musician, appearing in halls like this. She had tried and tried, but however hard she worked, there came the point when her skill just didn’t make the final bump into the professional world. There came advanced degrees, a stint as a jury consultant, offering her kinesic skills commercially, then law enforcement. A wonderful job, a challenging job... And yet, what she wouldn’t have given to have the talent to make places like this her home.

But then the nostalgia faded as the cop within her resurfaced. Dance was, of course, aware that she was in a crowded venue that would be a perfect target for their unsub at-large. He was surely a hundred miles away by now. But just because Otto Grant had said he’d gotten sufficient revenge didn’t mean he hadn’t had his man set up a whopper of a finale. On the way back from Grant’s shack, she’d arranged for a full sweep of the concert hall and for police to be stationed at each exit door.

Even now she remained vigilant. She noted the location of the exits, fire hoses and extinguishers. She could see no potential sniper nests. And checked that the red lights on the security cameras glowed healthily and, because those models didn’t sport lights, unlike the one in the hospital elevator, she checked for emergency lighting: there were a dozen halogens that would turn the place to bright noon in the event of trouble.

Finally, confident of their security, Kathryn Dance sat back, crossed her legs and enjoyed the exhilaration that always accompanies dimming lights in a concert hall.

Chapter 80

Antioch March was enjoying another pineapple juice and studying the TV screen in the Cedar Hills Inn.

The hotel was so posh that it featured a very special television — one with 4K resolution. This was known as ultra-high-definition video. It was nearly double the current standard: 1920 wide by 1080 high.

It was ethereal, the depth of the imagery.

He was presently watching an underwater video, shot in 4K, flowing from his computer, via HDMI cable, onto the fifty-four-inch screen.

Astonishing. The kelp was real. The sunfish. The eels. The coral. All real. The sharks especially, with their supple gray skin, their singular eyes, their choreography of motion, like elegant fencers.

So beautiful. So rich. You were there, you were part of the ocean. Part of the chain of nature.

There was not, as yet, much content in 4K — you needed special cameras to shoot it — but it was coming. If only the family on the rocks at Asilomar had lingered but a minute longer he might have given the Get their ultra-high-definition deaths: his Samsung Galaxy featured such a camera.

Somebody’s not happy...

The landline phone rang and he snagged it, eyes still on the waving kelp, so real it might have been floating in the room around him.

The receptionist announced that a Fred Johnson had arrived.

‘Thank you. Send him over.’ Wondering why that pseudonym.

A few minutes later Christopher Jenkins was at the door.

March let his boss into the entryway. A handshake and then into the luxurious suite. Once the door was closed, a hug too.

Mildly reciprocated.

Jenkins, who, yes, resembled March somewhat, was in his fifties, broad-shouldered, compact — a good foot shorter than his employee — and tanned. His hair was blond, close-cropped and flat against his skull. A military bearing because he had been military. He glanced up at March’s shaved head.

‘Hmm.’

‘Had to.’

‘Looks good.’

Jenkins didn’t really think so, March could see, but he’d never say a word against his favorite employee’s appearance. To March, Jenkins seemed no older than when the two men had met six years ago. He was a bit heavier, more solid. Jenkins had his own Get, but it wasn’t March’s. Amassing money was what numbed Jenkins’s demon. Whether buying a Ferrari for himself or taking a boy out for a thousand-dollar dinner or finding a Cartier bauble... that was what kept Jenkins’s Get at bay.

Odd, how their respective compulsions worked. Symbiotic.

‘Carole says hello.’

‘And to her too.’

One of the girls Jenkins had dated on and off. March wasn’t sure why he kept the façade. Who cared nowadays? Besides, you can’t cheat the Get, which knows what you want and when you want it, so why complicate things? Life’s too short.

‘Your drive good?’

‘Fine.’ Jenkins had a faint Bostonian drawl. He’d lived in a suburb of Bean Town before the army.

March had ordered the best — well, the most expensive — wine on the list, a Château Who Knew from France. A 1995. Had to be good: it was six hundred dollars. It was already open. He’d had a taste. It was okay. Not as good as Dole.

‘Well. Excellent!’ Jenkins said, looking over the label — all Greek to him, a private joke, considering March’s heritage.

He allowed Jenkins to pour him some of the sludgy wine and they tapped glasses, toasting their success. Over the past few days they’d made several hundred thousand dollars.

‘Always loved it here, the Cedar Hills.’

Chris Jenkins reminded March of the people in those infomercials: the handsome man, next to the beautiful woman, on a Florida or Hawaiian porch, boats in the background, palms nearby, talking about how they’d made millions with hardly any effort in the real-estate market or by inventing things. In Jenkins’s case, selling something very, very rare and valuable.

The men sat on the couch. They regarded the crystal TV screen, on which fish swam and kelp waved, hypnotic.

‘Good picture. Four K. Man, that’s beautiful. We’ll keep that in mind.’ Jenkins set the glass down. ‘Now where are we?’

‘All good.’

‘What about Otto Grant? I heard the news. They seemed to buy it.’

‘They did.’

March paused the shark video and called up another video file on his computer. The video, a high-definition (only 2K), showed Otto Grant, kicking in the last moments of his life, trying to get leverage to pull himself up and somehow unhook the rope from where March had tied it to stage the suicide. He struggled for a time, then shivered and went limp.

‘Did he come?’

There was a rumor that upon being hanged, men sometimes ejaculated. Neither had been able to confirm this.

‘Just peed.’

‘Ah.’

‘I left evidence in the shack that the man he hired is from Chicago and has already left to go back there, left right after the incident in the hospital. Solid leads. Phone calls, proxies, emails. They’ll sniff up that tree for a while.’

‘Good.’

‘Now, you were mentioning a new job.’ March knew Jenkins had come to Carmel for another reason, but he wouldn’t’ve made up the part about a new job entirely.

‘Client’s in Lausanne, so he wants it to happen anywhere but Europe. He mentioned Latin America.’

‘Any preferences as to how?’

‘He was thinking a fall, maybe a cable car.’

March laughed. He could hotwire an ignition, he could disable an elevator. That was the extent of his mechanical engineering skills. ‘I don’t think so. A bus?’

‘A bus would work, I’d think.’

‘Send me the details.’

Glasses clinked again. March had sipped the wine once. He’d also eyed the pineapple juice.

Jenkins laughed and handed the juice glass to March, making sure their fingers brushed once more. ‘Just don’t mix it with Saint Estèphe.’

March let his boss’s hand linger on his for a moment.

‘Dinner?’ Jenkins asked.

‘Not hungry.’

March never was, not at times like this. All the work, hoping it would pay off. The way he planned out the jobs, well, it was fragile. There was a lot that could go wrong. Wasting all that time and money, the risk. Anyway, what it came down to: when the Get was hungry, March was not.

‘Oh, here. I brought you something.’ Jenkins dug in his Vuitton backpack. He handed over a small box. March opened it. ‘Well.’

‘Victoria Beckham.’

They were sunglasses, blue lenses.

Jenkins said, ‘Italian. And the lenses change color in the sun. Or get darker. I don’t know. I think there are instructions. You’ll love them.’

‘Thanks. They’re really something.’

Though March’s first thought was: wearing bright blue sunglasses on a job, where you would want to be as inconspicuous as possible?

Maybe I’ll go to the beach sometime. On vacation.

Would you let me do that, Get? Just relax?

He tried them on.

‘They’re you,’ Jenkins whispered, squeezing March’s biceps.

March put the glasses away and picked up the remote.

Click. The hypnotic ballet of sea creatures resumed on the TV. ‘Extraordinary. Four K,’ he said reverently. ‘Who shot this?’

‘Teenager, believe it or not.’

‘Four K. Hmm. Wave of the future.’

Jenkins asked, ‘What’s the plan?’

‘We need to stop her.’

‘That investigator? Dance?’

‘That’s right.’ He explained that the attempt to injure her boyfriend, somebody named Boling, hadn’t worked out. Now they needed to do something more efficient.

‘We’re leaving tomorrow. Why do anything? We’ll be a thousand miles away by noon.’

‘No. We have to stop her. She won’t rest until she gets us.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes,’ March said, staring at the sharks.

‘What do you have in mind?’

Dance, he’d seen when he’d slipped into her Pathfinder at the Bay View crime scene, was presently attending a concert at the Performing Arts Center in Monterey. He’d thought momentarily about staging a final attack there, with the chance that she’d be severely injured or killed. But coming after Grant’s suicide that would be suspicious.

Besides, there was another reason he didn’t want her dead.

He looked over the notes he’d jotted after getting the information on the man’s license plate. ‘There’s a close associate. Named TJ Scanlon. Lives in Carmel Valley. We’ll kill him, make it look gang-related. It’ll deflect her. She’ll drop everything and go after them.’

‘Why not just kill her?’

March could think of no answer. Just: ‘It’s better this way.’

Another reason...

He jabbed a finger at the TV screen. ‘Ah, watch. This is it.’

On the screen a hammerhead shark, awkward yet elegant, swam toward the camera, then veered upward and, as casually as a human swatting a mosquito, opened its mouth and neatly removed the leg of a surfer treading water overhead. The shark and limb vanished as the massive cloud of red streamed like smoke into the scene, eventually obscuring the mutilated young man, writhing as he died.

‘Well,’ Jenkins said. ‘Four K. Excellent.’ He lifted a glass of wine.

March nodded. He stared at the imagery for a moment longer and shut the set off. He picked up the Louis Vuitton bag, checked that the hunting knife and gun were still inside, and gestured his boss toward the door. ‘After you.’

Chapter 81

This was an era he knew nothing about, didn’t care for, didn’t appreciate.

The sixties in the US. At least this part of the sixties.

Antioch March believed it was called the counterculture and, for some reason, CBI agent TJ Scanlon loved it.

As they stood in the living room of the three-bedroom ranch-style house in Carmel Valley, March and Jenkins surveyed the place. Orange and brown dominated. Carpet, furniture, tablecloths. On the wall were posters — nice ones, framed — of Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock, the Mamas and the Papas, Jefferson Airplane. The doors were strings of colorful beads that clicked when you pushed them, gun in hand, to make sure you were alone. And, yes, a lava lamp.

‘Sets you on edge, doesn’t it?’ Jenkins asked.

It did.

In his gloved hand March clicked on a black light. The ultraviolet rays spectacularly lit up what had been a dull poster of a ship improbably sailing through the sky.

He shut the light off again.

A glance at a large peace symbol, reminiscent of the Mercedes Benz emblem on his car back home. The sixties’ icon was made out of shells.

On edge...

He told the Get to relax; it was, he suspected, still angry that the Asian family on the rocks had missed the opportunity to die spectacular deaths in the icy bay.

Somebody’s not happy...

You will be soon.

They had parked two blocks away and made their way to Scanlon’s house through woods, out of sight of any of the neighbors. March, the technician of the two, had examined the man’s place carefully from the distance. Then, convinced it was unoccupied, he’d slipped up and peered through the windows. No alarms, no security cameras. The lock had been easily jimmied. Then, prepared to flee in case they’d missed an alarm, they’d waited before preparing the room for the events tonight.

March now turned from the bizarre décor and looked over the cot they’d set up. TJ Scanlon’s final resting place. The young man would be tied down and tortured. You didn’t need much. March had his knife and he’d found a pair of pliers. Pain was simple. You didn’t need to get elaborate.

He’d staged the scene rather well also, he thought. They’d bought a bottle of rubbing alcohol, to enhance the agent’s agony, from a convenience store in the barrio of Salinas, a place known for gangs, and they’d picked up some trash and discarded rags in the area too. A little research had revealed the colors and signs of the K-101s, which was a crew that the CBI had had some run-ins with, arresting a few lieutenant-level bangers. March had tagged the signs on Scanlon’s wall, right above the spot where he would die. Presumably after giving up all sorts of helpful information about ongoing investigations into the gang.

March wondered what ‘TJ’ stood for. He didn’t bother to prowl through paperwork to find out.

Thomas Jefferson?

Jenkins was asking, ‘What if he’s not coming home tonight. Maybe—’

And just then there came the sound of a car on the long gravel drive, approaching.

‘That’s him?’

March eased up to the window to look out.

Which gave Jenkins a chance to put his hand on March’s spine.

It’s all right.

‘Yep.’

Scanlon was alone in the car. And there were no other vehicles with him.

Suddenly the Get slipped a regret into March’s head that it wasn’t Kathryn Dance whom he was about to work on after all.

March vetoed the idea. No. This was the way to handle it.

Which irritated the Get, and for a moment March felt inflamed and edgy.

Fuck you, he thought. I’ve got some say in this.

Silently the two men stepped behind the front door. March looked out of the peephole, gripping the hammer he’d break Scanlon’s arm with as soon as he walked inside, grab his gun.

He saw the young man walking, head down, to the gate in the picket fence in front of his house. He opened it and started up the winding walk, minding where he put his feet. If Scanlon had front lights he hadn’t turned them on.

Scanlon walked onto the low porch, then stepped to the side. They heard the mailbox open. A brief laugh, faint, at something he’d received — or hadn’t received. Then gritty footsteps on the redwood planks, moving toward the front door.

The sound of a key in the lock.

Then... nothing.

Jenkins turned, frowning. March took a firmer grip on the hammer. He peeked outside through a curtained window. He was staring at the empty porch.

‘Leave!’ March whispered harshly. ‘Now!’

Jenkins frowned but he followed March instinctively. They got only three feet back into the living room when a half-dozen Monterey County Sheriff’s deputies, in tactical gear, flooded into the room from behind the beads covering the doorway to the kitchen. ‘Hands where we can see them! On the ground, on the ground! Now!’

And the front door exploded inward. Two other tactical officers charged in too. Scanlon, his own weapon drawn, followed.

‘Christ!’ Jenkins cried. ‘No, no, no...’

March backed up, hands raised, and eased to his knees. Jenkins started to, as well, but his hand dropped to his side, as if to steady himself as he sank down.

March looked at his eyes. He’d seen the expression before. The gaze wasn’t defiance. It was resignation. And he knew what was coming next.

Calmly he said to Jenkins, ‘No, Chris.’

But what was about to happen was inevitable.

The small pistol was in the man’s tanned hand, drawn leisurely from his hip pocket. He swung it forward but it got no farther than four o’clock before two officers fired simultaneously. Head and chest. Huge explosions that deafened March. Jenkins crumpled, eyes nearly closed, and landed in a pile on the floor.

‘Shots fired. Suspect down. Medic, medic, medic!’ One officer who’d fired dropped his radio and hurried forward, pistol still pointed toward Jenkins, though from the spatter it was clear he was no threat. Another two cuffed March.

The policeman removed the small gun from Jenkins’s hand, unloaded it and locked the slide back.

The others hurried through the place, opening doors. Shouts of ‘Clear!’ echoed.

March continued to gaze down at his boss.

Maybe Jenkins had actually believed he could shoot his way out of the situation. But that was unlikely. He’d chosen to take his own life. It wasn’t uncommon; suicide by cop, it was called. For those who lacked the courage to put a gun to their head and pull the trigger.

He stared at Jenkins’s body on the floor, the blood spreading in the shag carpet, a twitch of a finger.

Other officers streamed inside, accompanying two emergency medical technicians. They bent to the fallen man. But a fast check of vitals confirmed what was obvious.

‘He’s gone. I’ll tell the ME.’

Another man, in a body-armor vest, walked inside and looked down at his captives. He recognized him from outside the movie theater the other morning and from the Bay View Center. Kathryn Dance’s colleague.

‘Detective O’Neil,’ one of the deputies called. ‘We’re clear of threat.’ The officer handed O’Neil March’s wallet. Jenkins’s too. O’Neil flipped through them.

He walked to the door and said, ‘It’s clear, Kathryn.’

She walked inside, glancing at the corpse matter-of-factly. Then her green eyes fixed on March’s. He felt an odd sensation, looking at her. Was it a comfort? He believed so. Outrageous, under the circumstances. But there it was. He nearly smiled. She was even more beautiful than he’d believed. And how much she resembled Jessica!

O’Neil handed her the men’s IDs. ‘The deceased’s Chris Jenkins.’ Then a nod. ‘And you got it right, Kathryn. He’s Antioch March.’

Got it right?

He wasn’t the least surprised his beautiful Kathryn had out-thought him.

‘Read him his rights and let’s get him to CBI.’

Chapter 82

‘It was the lights, Antioch.’

‘Andy, please. Lights?’

‘The lights in the security cameras of the venues where you staged the attacks.’

Dance scooted her chair closer, here in the larger of the interview rooms, the one, in fact, where the Serrano incident had begun. She was already wearing her dark-framed predator specs. Examining March carefully. A trim-fitting light blue dress shirt, dark slacks. Both seemed expensive. She couldn’t see his shoes from where she sat: were they the five-grand pair?

He still seemed a bit mystified at the officers’ sudden appearance at TJ’s, though the explanation was rather simple.

Just after the Neil Hartman concert had started Dance had found herself thinking once more of her observation a few moments earlier: about the security lights at the hospital, and at the venues the unsub had attacked. They’d all been been equipped with lights, while most security cameras — like the ones she’d just noted at the Performing Arts Center — were not. She recalled the witnesses telling her that bright lights had come on around the time of the panic at the roadhouse and the author’s signing; she herself had seen them blazing from the camera in the elevator.

She’d ducked into the lobby of the concert hall and, from her phone, checked the photos of the three crime scenes. The cameras were all the same.

She told March this and added, ‘All the venues had just been inspected by an insurance or fire inspector, I remembered. Except it wasn’t an official. It was you, mounting the cameras when the manager wasn’t looking. Fire Inspector Dunn.’

Dance continued, ‘You moved lamps over two of your other victims: Calista Sommers and Stan Prescott. Oh, I see your expression. Yes, we know about Calista. She’s not Jane Doe any more. We finally got her ID. Missing-person memo from Washington State.

‘Calista... Stan Prescott. And Otto Grant. He was hanged in front of an open window. Lots of light there, as well. Every time somebody died because of you, you wanted lights. Why? For Calista and Prescott, we thought it was to take pictures of the bodies. Were you filming at the venues too?’

Just after she’d had this thought, at the concert hall earlier, she’d called O’Neil and had a crime-scene team seize and dismantle the security camera in the elevator. They found a cellular module in it.

She had remembered that at Solitude Creek she’d wondered why the security video that Sam Cohen had shown them seemed to come from a different angle than that of the camera she’d seen in the club. That was, she realized, because there were two cameras — with March’s pointed, as Trish Martin had said, at the blocked exit doors. To see the tragedy most clearly.

‘The cameras were streaming the stampedes, full high-def, brightly lit. But why? So Grant could gloat over his revenge? Maybe. But if he planned to kill himself he wouldn’t be around very long to enjoy the show.’ Through the lenses of the steely glances Dance probed his face. ‘And then I remembered the bucket.’

‘Bucket?’

‘Why did Grant have a bucket for a toilet? If he’d vanished on his own, well, wouldn’t he just go outside for the bathroom? Kidnappers have buckets for the victims to use because they’re handcuffed or taped.’

He squinted slightly. A kinesic tell that meant she’d struck a nerve. He’d made a mistake there.

‘And the venues that were attacked, Solitude Creek and the Bay View Center? Grant’s complaint was with the government. He would’ve hired somebody to attack state buildings, not private ones, if he’d really wanted revenge.

‘Which meant maybe Otto Grant had been set up as a fall guy. You went online and found somebody who’d been posting anti-government statements. A perfect choice. You made contact, pretended you were sympathetic, then kidnapped him and stuck him in that cabin until it was time to finish up here. Made his death look like a suicide. All the texts and the call-log records we found? About payments and what a good job his supposed hitman had done? They were both your phones; you just called and texted yourself, then planted one on Grant.’

She now placed her hands flat on the table. ‘So. Grant was a set-up. But then who was the real client who’d hired you?’

She’d eliminated Michelle Cooper’s husband — Frederick Martin. Brad, the fireman. And Daniel Nashima.

Another suspect had arisen briefly. Upon learning that it was Mexican Commissioner Ramón Santos’s mercenaries who’d orchestrated the arson of the warehouse in Oakland, Dance had wondered if he’d been behind the entire plot, suspecting Henderson Jobbing and Warehouse, at Solitude Creek, to be one of the hubs for illegal-weapons traffic in Central California, and Santos of taking his own measures to shut them down and cover up the crime as the work of a psycho.

She remembered the sign she’d seen the day after the attack at Solitude Creek:

She’d assigned Rey Carreneo to look into the matter. But he’d learned that Henderson did serve international routes, yes — but only to Canada. The owner didn’t want to risk hijacking or robberies south of the border. No reason for Commissioner Santos to send a mercenary to destroy the company.

So who, she’d struggled to understand, was the unsub working for? Why was he killing people and filming it?

And then, finally.

A to B to Z...

Now another sweep of the so-very-handsome face.

‘The violent websites on Stan Prescott’s computer. That’s your job, Andy. Yours and Chris Jenkins’s. This wasn’t about revenge or insurance or a psychotic serial killer. It was about you and your partner selling ultra-violent images of death to clients around the world. Custom ordered.’

Dance shook her head. ‘I honestly wouldn’t think there’d be that big a market for this sort of thing.’

Antioch March gave her an amused look. He remained silent but his eyes chastised, as if she was bluntly naïve. They said, Oh, Agent Dance. You’d be surprised.

Chapter 83

‘You didn’t kill Prescott because he drew attention to the murders in Monterey. It was because your website, Hand to Heart, was on his computer. He downloaded graphic images of corpses from it and re-posted them. You didn’t have any pictures of Solitude Creek on your site, of course, but Prescott did on his. That made a connection between Heart to Hand and the roadhouse.’

Hand to Heart was the key to the men’s operation. It seemed to be about humanitarian aid — and visitors could click through to tsunami relief or ending hunger sites. But most of Hand to Heart was pictures and videos of disasters, atrocities, death, dismemberment.

She speculated that the men noted who downloaded the most pictures and discreetly contacted them to see if they might be interested in something more... graphically violent. She was sure that, after sufficient vetting of both parties, and for the payment of a huge fee, clients could order specific types of videos or images. It answered the question they’d wondered about at the beginning of the case: why not just burn down Solitude Creek? Why not just shoot people at the Bay View? Because this particular client — whoever he was — wanted pictures of stampedes.

March tilted his head, brows dipping, and she had an idea what he was wondering. ‘Oh, how we found you at TJ’s? You used prepaid cells in the cameras and routed through proxies, but the video ended up at the Cedar Hills Inn server.’

Jon Boling had explained how the signals could be traced. She hadn’t understood a word but kissed him in thanks.

‘That just sent us to the hotel, not your room. But I correlated all the guests’ names with anyone who’d rented a car in Los Angeles just after the panic at the theme park. Yours popped up. We hit the room at the inn and found a note with TJ’s address.’

The same technology that was so integral to their perverse career had betrayed him.

He sat back, a clink of chain.

She was struck again by how handsome he was, resembling an actor whose name she couldn’t summon. He had no physical appeal to her but objectively he was striking — dipping lids, careful lips that weren’t too thick or too thin, noble cheekbones. And a cut, muscular physique. Even the shaved head worked.

‘I want your cooperation, Andy. I want the names of your clients. Those in America, at least. And any of your — what would you call them? — competitors.’

The cases would be tough to put together, though she, Michael O’Neil and the FBI’s Amy Grabe would try. But, in fact, what Dance wanted most was to understand this man’s workings. He was unlike any other criminal she’d ever come up against; and, experience had taught her, if there was one with his proclivities toward the dark edge there’d be others.

‘Before you answer, let me say one thing.’

‘Yes?’

‘Texas.’

His face gave a minuscule twitch. He knew what was coming.

‘If you agree, I’ve spoken to the prosecutor here, and he’ll accept a death penalty waiver.’ She gazed at him steadily. ‘And will guarantee no extradition to Texas. We subpoenaed your credit-card statements, Andy. You were in Fort Worth six months ago, finding clients for your website. The same time of the stampede at the Prairie Valley Club. You used that homeless man for your fall-guy there. But there’ll be some forensics tying you to that incident, I’m sure. They’ll go for capital murder. And they’ll get it. The daughter of a state politician was killed in that stampede.’

The tip of his tongue eased against a lip and retreated. ‘And here? I’ll get life.’

‘Maybe a little shorter. Depends.’

He said nothing.

‘Or call your lawyer.’

March’s eyes scanned her, from the top of her head to her waist, leaving a chill repulsion in the wake of his gaze. ‘You’ll guarantee that?’

‘Yes,’ she told him.

‘Personally.’ He dragged the word out, almost seductively.

‘Yes.’

‘I have one condition.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I can call you “Kathryn”.’

‘That’s fine. Now, what’s the condition?’

‘That’s it. You let me use your first name.’

He can call me whatever he wants. But he’s asking my permission to use the name? The sensation of ice brushed the back of her neck.

She forced herself not to react. ‘You can use my name, yes.’

‘Thank you, Kathryn.’

She opened her notebook and uncapped a pen. ‘Now. Tell me, Andy. How did you meet Chris Jenkins?’

Chapter 84

The two men had become acquainted in one of the snuff forums online.

Dance recalled the websites that Jon Boling had found: they featured not only pictures that could be downloaded but forums where members could post messages and chat in real time.

Jenkins was former military. While on tour overseas, he’d taken a lot of pictures of battlefields, bodies, torture victims. He himself had had no interest in the images but he’d learned he could make good money selling them to news media or, even more lucrative, private collectors.

March explained, ‘Every night I was online looking at this stuff. It was the only thing that kept the...’

‘The what?’ Dance asked.

A pause. ‘Only thing that kept me calm,’ he said. ‘He had good-quality pictures and I bought a number of them. We got to know each other that way. Then he started running low on original material — he’d been out of the army for years. I asked if he’d be interesting in buying some from me — pictures he could resell. I didn’t have much but I sent him a video I’d done of an accident during a bungee jump. I was the only one who’d gotten the actual death. It was... pretty graphic.

‘Chris told me it was very good and he knew a collector who’d pay a lot for it as an exclusive. It would have to be private — if it was posted, a video lost its value. I got to work and started to send him material. After a few months we met in person and decided to start our business. He came up with the idea of a humanitarian website, with pictures of disasters. Sure, some people went online to give money. Mostly people downloaded the pictures. I took a lot of them myself, traveling overseas or to disaster areas. They were good, the video and the pictures. People liked them. I’m good at what I do.’

‘Where did you get this material?’

A smile crossed his face. His eyes stroked her skin and she forced the cold away. He said, ‘Next time you find yourself at any tragedy, a train or car crash, a race-car accident, a fire, a stampede.’ His voice had fallen.

‘Could you speak up, please?’

‘Of course, Kathryn. Next time you’re someplace like that, look around you.

‘At the people who are staring at the bodies and the injured. The spectators. You’ll see people helping the victims, praying for them, standing around numb. But you’ll also see some people with their cameras, working hard to get the best shot. Maybe they’re curious... but maybe they’re collectors. Or maybe they’re just like me — suppliers. “Farming”, we call it. You can spot us. We’ll be the ones angry at police lines keeping us back, disappointed there’s not more blood, grimacing when we learn that no one died.’

Farming...

‘You’ve always had this interest?’

‘Well, since I was eleven.’ His tongue wet his lip. ‘And I killed my first victim. Serena. Her name was Serena. And I still picture her every day. Every single day.’

Kathryn Dance masked her shock — both at the idea of someone committing murder at that young age and at his wistful expression when he told her.

Eleven. One year older than Maggie, one younger than Wes.

‘I was living with my parents, outside Minneapolis. A small town, suburban. Perfectly fine, nice. My father was a salesman, my mother worked in the hospital. Both busy. I had a lot of time to myself. Latch-key but that was fine. I didn’t want too much involvement from them. I was a loner. I preferred that life. Oh, the weapon I used on Serena was an SMG.’

Lord, thought Dance. ‘That’s a machine-gun, isn’t it? Where did you get it?’

Gazing off. ‘I shot her five times and I can’t describe the comfort I felt.’ Another scan of her face. Down her arm. He focused on her hands. She was glad they were polish-free. She felt as if he’d touched her. ‘Serena. Dark hair. Latina in appearance. I’d guess she was twenty-five. At eleven, I didn’t know much about sex. But I felt something when I was watching Serena.’

Watching, Dance noted. That was what he liked.

Nostalgia had blossomed into pleasure at recalling the incident. Had he been caught? Done juvie time? Nothing had shown up on the NCIC crime database. But youthful offender records were often sealed.

‘Oh, I felt guilty. Terribly guilty. I’d never do it again, I swore.’ A faint laugh. ‘But the next day I was back. And I killed her again.’

‘I’m sorry? You killed...’

‘Her, Serena. This time it was less of a whim. I wanted to kill her. I used twenty-shots. Reloaded and shot her twenty more times.’

Dance understood. ‘It was a video game.’

He nodded. ‘It was a first-person shooter game. You know those?’

‘Yes.’ You see the game from the point of view of a character, walking through the sets, usually with a gun or other weapon and killing opponents or creatures.

‘Next day I was back again in the game world. And I kept coming back. I killed her over and over. And Troy and Gary, hundreds of others, hour after hour, stalking them and killing them. What started as just an impulse became a compulsion. It was the only way to keep the Get at bay.’

‘The...?’

He looked at her, a long moment. Debating. ‘Since we’re close now, you and me, I want to share. I started to say something before. I changed my mind.’

‘I remember.’

It’s the only thing that kept the... kept me calm...

‘The Get,’ he said. And explained. His expression for the irresistible urge to get something that satisfied you, stopped the itch, fed the hunger. In his case, that was watching death, injury, blood. He continued, ‘The games... They took the edge off of what I was feeling. Gave me a high.’

Traditional cycle of addiction, Dance noted.

‘More,’ he whispered. ‘More and more. I needed more. The games became my life. I got every one I could, all the platforms. PlayStation, Nintendo, Xbox, everything.’ He looked at her, his eyes damp; he was now gripped by emotion. He whispered, ‘And there were so many of them. I’d ask for games for Christmas and my parents bought them all. They never paid any attention to the contents.’

His laundry list: Doom, Dead or Alive, Mortal Kombat, Call of Duty, Hitman, Gears of War. ‘I learned all the blood codes — to make them as violent as possible. My favorite recently is Grand Theft Auto. You could fulfill missions or you could just walk around and kill people. Tase them and then, when they fell to the ground, shoot them or blow them up or burn them to death. Walk around Los Santos shooting prostitutes. Or go into a strip club and just start killing people.’

Recently Dance had been involved in a case in which a young man had lost himself in massive multiplayer online role-playing games, like World of Warcraft. She’d studied video games and had kept up with them, since she was the mother of two children raised in the online era.

A controversy existed in law enforcement, psychology and education as to whether violent games led to violent behavior.

‘I think I always had the Get inside me. But it was the games that turned up the heat, you know. If it hadn’t been for them, I might’ve... gone in a different direction. Found other ways to numb the Get. Anyway, you can’t dispute the way my life went. As I got older, though, the games weren’t enough.’ He smiled. ‘Gateway drug, you could say. I wanted more. I found movies — spatter films, gore, slasher, torture porn. Cannibal Ferox, Last House on the Left, Wizard of Gore. Then more sophisticated ones later. Saw, Human Centipede, I Spit on Your Grave, Hostel.. hundreds of others.

‘Then the websites, the one you found on Stan Prescott’s computer, where you could see crime-scene pictures. And could buy fifteen-minute clips of actresses getting shot or stabbed.’

She said, ‘And pretty soon even they weren’t enough.’

He nodded, and there was some desperation in his voice as he said, ‘Then something happened that changed everything.’

‘What happened?’

‘Jessica,’ he whispered. And his eyes stroked her face and neck once more. ‘Jessica.’

Chapter 85

‘I was in my early teens. There was an accident. It was Route Thirty-five and Mockingbird Road. Minnesota countryside. I called the incident the Intersection. Upper case. It was that significant to me.

‘I was driving with my parents, home from a family funeral.’ He smiled. ‘That was ironic. A funeral. Well, we were driving along and turned this corner in a hilly area and there was a truck in the Intersection right in front of us. My father hit the brakes...’ He shrugged.

‘An accident. Your family was killed?’

‘What? Oh, no. They were fine. They’re living in Florida now. Dad’s still a salesman. Mom manages a bakery. I see them some.’ A pallid chuckle. ‘They’re proud of the humanitarian work I do.’

‘The Intersection,’ Dance prompted.

‘What happened was a pickup truck had run a stop sign and slammed into a sports car, a convertible. The car had been knocked off the road and down the hill a little ways. The driver of the BMW was dead, that was obvious. My parents told me to stay in the car and they ran to the man in the truck — he was the only one alive — to see what they could do.

‘I stayed where I was, for a minute, but I’d seen something that intrigued me. I got out and walked down the hill, past the sports car and into the brush. There was a girl, about sixteen, seventeen, lying on her back. She’d been thrown free from the car and had tumbled down the hill.

‘She — I found out later her name was Jessica — was bleeding real badly. Her neck had been cut, deep, her chest too — her blouse was open and there was a huge gash across her left breast. Her arm was shattered. She was so pretty. Green eyes. Intense green eyes.

‘She kept saying, “Help me. Call the police, call somebody. Stop the bleeding, please.”’ He looked at Dance levelly. ‘But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I pulled out my cell phone and I took pictures of her for the next five minutes. While she died.’

‘You needed to take the next step. To a real death. Seeing it in real time. Not a game or a movie.’

‘That’s right. That’s what I needed. When I did, with Jessica, the Get went away for a long time.’

‘But then you took another step, didn’t you? You had to. Because how often could you happen to stumble on a scene like Jessica’s death?’

‘Todd,’ he said.

‘Todd?’

‘It was about four, five years ago. I wasn’t doing well. The college failures, the boring job... And, no, the video games and movies weren’t doing it for me any longer. I needed more. I was in upstate New York. Took a walk in the woods. I saw this bungee-jumping thing. It was illegal, not like it was a tourist attraction or anything. These people, kids mostly, just put on helmets and Go Pro cameras and jumped.’

‘What you mentioned earlier? The tape you sold to Chris Jenkins.’

He nodded. ‘I got talking to this one kid. His name was Todd.’ March fell silent for a moment. ‘Todd. Anyway, I just couldn’t stop myself. He’d hooked his rope to the top of the rock and walked away to the edge to look over the jump. There was nobody around.’

‘You detached it?’

‘No. That would’ve been suspicious. I just lengthened it by about five feet. Then I went down to the ground. He jumped and hit the rocks below. I got it all on tape.’ March shook his head. ‘I can’t tell you... the feeling.’

‘The Get went away?’

‘Uh-huh. From there, I knew where my life was going. I met Chris and I was the luckiest person in the world. I could make a living doing what I had to do. We started small. A single death here or there. A homeless man — poisoning him. A girl on a scooter, no helmet. I’d pour oil on a curve. But soon one or two deaths weren’t enough. I needed more. The customers wanted more too. They were addicts, just like me.’

‘So, you came up with the idea of stampedes.’

‘The blood of all.’

He told her about a poem from ancient Rome, praising a gladiator for not retiring even though the emperor had granted him his freedom and the right to leave the games.

March’s eyes actually sparkled as he recited:

‘That was two thousand years ago, Kathryn. And we’re no different. Not a bit. Car races, downhill skiing, rugby, boxing, bungee-jumping, football, hockey, air shows — we’re all secretly, or not so secretly, hoping for death or destruction. NASCAR? Hours of cars making left turns? Would anybody watch if there wasn’t the chance of a spectacular fiery death? The Colosseum back then, Madison Square Garden last week. Not a lick of difference.’

She noted something else. ‘The poem, the line about hand and heart... The name of your website. Sword in the hand piercing the heart. Little different from humanitarian aid.’

A shrug, and his eyes sparkled again.

‘I’d like to know more about your clients. Are they mostly in the US?’

‘No, overseas. Asia a lot. Russia too. And South America, though the clientele there isn’t as rich. They couldn’t pay for the big set-pieces.’

It would be a tricky case against many of these people — men, nearly all of them, Dance supposed. (She guessed the sexual component of the Get was high.) Intent would be an issue.

‘The man who hired you for this job, in Monterey?’

‘Japanese. He’s been a good customer for some years.’

‘Any particular grudge with this area?’

She was thinking of Nashima and the relocation center at Solitude Creek.

‘No. He said pick anywhere. Chris Jenkins liked the inn in Carmel. So he sent me there. It has a good wine list. And comfortable beds. Nice TV too.’

She began to ask another question. But he was shaking his head.

‘I’m tired now,’ he said. ‘Can we resume tomorrow? Or the next day?’

‘Yes.’

She rose.

March said to her, ‘Oh, Kathryn?’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s so good to have a kindred soul to spend some time with.’

She didn’t understand for a moment. Then realized he was speaking about her. The chill pinched once more.

He looked her up and down. ‘Your Get and mine... So very similar. I’m glad we’re in each other’s lives now.’ March whispered, ‘Good night, Kathryn. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Good night.’