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‘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.

THE GET

THURSDAY, APRIL 6

CHAPTER 19

No. Oh, no. …

Having deposited the children at school and nursed a coffee in the car while having a good-morning chat with Jon Boling, Kathryn Dance was halfway to CBI headquarters when she heard the news.

‘… authorities in Sacramento are now saying that the Solitude Creek roadhouse tragedy may have been carried out intentionally. They’re searching for an unknown subject – that is, in police parlance, an unsub – who is a white male, under forty years of age, with brown hair. Medium build. Over six feet tall. He was last seen wearing a green jacket with a logo of some type.’

‘Jesus, my Lord,’ she muttered.

She grabbed her iPhone, fumbled it, lunged, but then decided against trying to retrieve the unit. This angry, she’d be endangering both her career and her life to text what she wanted to.

In ten minutes she was parking in the CBI lot – actually left skid marks, albeit modest ones, on the asphalt. A deep breath, thinking, thinking – there were a number of land mines to negotiate here – but then the anger lifted its head and she was out of the door and storming inside.

Past her own office.

‘Hi, Kathryn. Something wrong?’ This from Dance’s administrative assistant, Maryellen Kresbach. The short, bustling woman, mother of three, wore complex, precarious high-heels, black and white, on her feet and impressive coifs on her head, a mass of curly brown hair, sprayed carefully into submission.

Dance smiled, just to let the world know that nobody in this portion of the building was in danger. Then onward. She strode to Overby’s office, walked in without knocking and found him on a Skype call.

‘Charles.’

‘Ah. Well. Kathryn.’

She swallowed the planned invective and sat down.

On the screen was a swarthy, broad man in a dark suit and white shirt, striped tie, red and blue. He was looking slightly away from the webcam as he regarded his own computer screen.

Overby said, ‘Kathryn. You remember Commissioner Ramón Santos, with the Federal Police in Chihuahua?’

‘Commissioner.’

‘Agent Dance, yes, hello.’ The man was not smiling. Overby, too, was sitting stiffly in his chair. Apparently the conversation had not been felicitous thus far. The commissioner was one of the senior people in Mexico working on Operation Pipeline. Not everyone south of the border was in favor of the effort, of course: drugs and guns meant big money, even – especially – for the police down there.

‘Now, I was telling Charles. It is a most unfortunate thing that has just happened. A big shipment. A load of one hundred M-Four machine-guns, some fifty eighteen-caliber H & Ks. Two thousand rounds.’

Overby asked, ‘They were delivered through the—’

‘Yes. Through the Salinas hub. They came from Oakland.’

‘We didn’t hear,’ Overby said.

‘No. No, you didn’t. An informant down here told us. He had first-hand knowledge, obviously, to be that accurate.’ Santos sighed. ‘We found the truck but it was empty. Those weapons are on our streets now. And responsible for several deaths. This is very bad.’

She recalled that the commissioner was, of course, adamant to stop the cartels from shipping their heroin and cocaine north. But what upset him more was the flood of weapons into Mexico, a country where owning a gun was illegal under most circumstances although it had one of the highest death-by-gunshot rates in the world.

And virtually all those guns were smuggled in from the US.

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Overby said.

‘I’m not convinced we’re doing all we can.’

Except that the ‘we’ was not accurate. His meaning: ‘You aren’t doing all you can.’

‘Commissioner,’ Overby said, ‘we have forty officers from five agencies working on Operation Pipeline. We’re making progress. Slow, yes, but it still is progress.’

‘Slow,’ the man said. Dance looked over the streaming video. His office was very similar to Overby’s, though without the golf and tennis trophies. The pictures on his wall were of him standing beside Mexican politicians and, perhaps, celebs. The same category of poses as her boss’s pix.

The commissioner asked, ‘Agent Dance, what is your assessment?’

‘I—’

‘Agent Dance is temporarily assigned to another case.’

‘Another case? I see.’

He had not been informed about the Serrano situation.

‘Commissioner,’ Dance pressed on, even under these circumstances not one to be shushed, ‘we’ve interdicted four shipments in the past month—’

‘And eleven got through, according to our intelligence officers. Including this particularly deadly one, the one I was mentioning.’

She said, ‘Yes, I know about the others. They were small. Very little ammo.’

‘Ah, but, Agent Dance, the size of the shipment probably is of no consequence to the family killed by a single machine-gun.’

‘Of course,’ she said. Nothing to argue about there.

‘Yes, yes,’ said Overby. ‘Well, we’ll look at the statistics, year end. See the trend.’

The commissioner stared at the webcam for a moment, perhaps wondering what on earth Overby was talking about. He said, ‘I have a meeting now. I will look into the situation. And I will look forward to hearing next month about a dozen interdictions. At least. Adios.’

The screen went blank.

‘Testy,’ she said.

‘Who can blame him? Over fifteen hundred people were murdered last year in his state alone.’

Then Dance’s anger returned. ‘You heard?’

‘About what?’

‘It was on the radio. The Solitude Creek unsub’s description went out, after all. It’s all over the press. Now he knows we’re on to him.’

Overby was looking at the blank computer screen. ‘Ah, well. Yes. I heard too.’

‘How did it happen? I mean, did you release it?’

Overby loved any chance to chat with the press. But she doubted he’d directly undermine her, especially after he’d agreed to back her position – besides, if he’d done it, the story would have featured his name prominently.

‘Me? Of course not. It was … I’m not sure but I think it was Steve Foster. It came from Sacramento. His turf.’ He did seem genuinely upset, though hardly as livid as she.

But she understood he was troubled for a different reason. She was concerned about spooking the unsub. Overby had been out-politicked. He’d brought Foster in to make sure the CBI got some credit for running the case, since Dance had been sidelined. But Foster had taken it one step further and made sure the kudos would go to Headquarters, Sacramento. Not the West Central Division of CBI.

Why didn’t that surprise her? ‘Whose case is it?’

‘Well, technically, Kathryn, it’s not ours.’

‘Oh, come on. We can play this fiction only so far. Foster’s here on the Guzman Connection thing. He has nothing to do with my case.’

‘O’Neil’s case. MCSO’s case. I—’

‘Charles! Never mind. I’ll go talk to him.’

‘Do you think that’s a good—’

But she was already walking down the hall. And into the Guzman Connection task-force room. Overby appeared a moment later.

‘Hey,’ Jimmy Gomez said.

‘Steve.’ Both men with that name turned but Dance’s eyes were squarely on Foster.

‘It was a misunderstanding,’ the bulky man said, and looked back to his computer. Not even trying to deny it.

‘We agreed we weren’t going to release the description. We weren’t even going to say it was a murder investigation.’

He grumbled, ‘I should’ve been more specific when I was talking to my people in Sacramento. Should’ve told them not to speak to the press.’

‘Who was it?’ Dance asked.

‘Oh, hard to say. I don’t know what happened. It’s a mystery. I’m sorry.’

Though he was no more perplexed by it than he was contrite.

‘What’s this all about?’ asked stolid Carol Allerton, the DEA star. Dance reminded her of the debate about releasing the description of their perp. As she spoke, she kept her eyes on Foster.

‘It made the news?’ Carol Allerton asked. ‘Ouch.’ Indicating which way she would have voted.

‘It made the news,’ Overby said, with a wrinkly mouth.

To Foster, Dance said, ‘Why would you even discuss it? With anybody in Sacramento? It’s a West Central Division investigation. Our investigation.’

He wasn’t used to being cross-examined.

‘You mean a Monterey Sheriff’s investigation.’

‘I mean not Sacramento’s.’ Her lips tautened.

‘Well, sorry about that. I told somebody, they talked to the press. I should’ve told ’em to keep the lid on. It was a fuck-up. But, bright side, I’ll bet somebody’s already spotted some could-bes. And’ll call it in. Anytime now. You may have your boy before sundown, Kathryn.’

‘This morning Michael and I had every mobile unit on the Peninsula to start making sweeps of venues that might make good locations for other attacks. All day long. Shopping mall, churches, movie theaters. I don’t know what they’re going to be looking for now. If our perp heard the same news show I did, there’s not going to be any brown-haired man in a green jacket to spot.’

Foster wouldn’t back down. ‘That presupposes your unsub’s going to try this again. Is there any evidence to that effect?’

‘Not specifically. But my assessment is it’s a strong possibility.’ And she certainly wasn’t going to take the chance that there’d be no other attack.

Foster didn’t need to reiterate his opinion of Dance’s ability to make assessment.