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‘Deal, then?’

‘Deal.’

Dance’s eyes swiveled to Stemple.

‘You asking me? I’m just backup. Do whatcha want.’

They walked to the car, Stemple easing into the driver’s seat. The big Dodge bobbed under the weight. The women, too, got in. He fired up the growly engine and they squealed out of the lot toward the highway.

A half-hour later Stemple turned onto surface streets in Seaside and eased the cruiser along a crumbling asphalt road, bordered by grasses, dusty brush, rusting wire fences. A hundred yards along they came to a development, probably fifty years old, bungalows and Cape-style houses, tiny, all of them.

‘That’s it,’ Allerton said, pointing to the scabbiest house there, a lopsided one-story structure that had last been painted a long, long time ago. White originally. Now, gray. The yard was half sand, half yellowing grass. Thirsty, Stemple thought. Everything was thirsty. This drought. Worst he could remember.

He shut the engine off. Everyone climbed out.

Stemple scanned the perimeter while the agents, looking around, headed toward the front door. Allerton knocked. No response. Dance pointed to the side, where there was a patio. They disappeared that way.

Stemple walked around the property, looked at the houses nearby, wondered why somebody had taped a massive poster of a daisy in a window. Was it a sunscreen? Wouldn’t a sunflower’ve made more sense?

Mostly, though, he was looking for threats.

This wasn’t a cul-de-sac but it wasn’t highly traveled. He counted four cars pass by, all seeming to contain families or individuals on their way to or from school, work or errands. That didn’t mean there weren’t gang-bangers inside, of course, with MAC-10s, Uzis or M4s. Gone were the days when crews conveniently piled into gang-mobiles, pimped-out low-rider Buicks with jacked-up suspensions. Now they tooled around in Acuras, Nissans and the occasional Beemer or Cayenne, depending on how the drug and arms trade had been lately.

But no one in any vehicle paid him any mind.

He walked back to the cracked sidewalk and was looking down at some vibrant purple plant, when there was from inside the bungalow a crash of something containing glass, a lot of glass.

Followed by a woman’s scream.

CHAPTER 24

An hour later, back at CBI headquarters, Al Stemple was leaning back in a Guzman Connection task-force conference-room chair. It groaned under his weight.

The others were here too, the whole crew. The two Steves – Lu and Foster – along with Jimmy Gomez. Allerton, as well, was back from the Seaside bungalow mission.

‘What happened to you?’ Gomez asked her. She had a bandage on her arm.

‘That lead to Serrano? He had a big-ass Doberman in the back bedroom. Sleeping dog, and all that. He woke up. Didn’t like visitors.’

‘You get bit?’

‘Just scratched getting out of the way. Knocked over a table of crappy glass and china. Serves him right.’

‘Al, you didn’t shoot any dogs, did you?’ Gomez feigned horror.

‘Reasoned with it.’

Foster was on the phone, saying to a CHP trooper, ‘Those’re your procedures, not my procedures, and it’s my procedures you’re going to be following. Are we transparent on that? … I asked you a question … Are we transparent? … Good. No more of this shit.’

He hung up with nothing more.

What a dick, Stemple thought, and wondered if he’d have an excuse to dice the man verbally into little pieces. That’d be a challenge. Foster seemed like a good dicer too. It’d be fun.

Now that Foster had finished transparenting the Highway Patrol trooper, Allerton took the floor. ‘The lead didn’t quite pan out like we hoped. The Serrano Seaside connection.’

Gomez asked, ‘Who was it?’

‘A painter – a contractor, you know, a house painter. Not an artist. Tomas Allende. Serrano used to work with him. Uh-huh, he actually did day labor for a while before he got into turning people into skeletons.’

Foster grumbled, ‘Whatta you mean didn’t pan out?’

‘I said didn’t quite pan out. I’ll tell you what we found.’

We.

Nobody noticed. Probably thinking she meant her and Stemple.

Surprise, surprise, surprise.

The stocky woman rose and walked to the door, looked out, then closed it.

Gomez frowned. The two Steves simply watched her.

‘I have to tell you, I didn’t go alone. Kathryn came with me.’

‘Kathryn Dance?’ Gomez asked.

‘How’d she do that?’ Foster seemed both perplexed and put out by this information. Not an easy combo, Stemple thought. ‘She’s suspended. Or did something change that I haven’t heard about?’

‘Nothing’s changed,’ Allerton said.

‘Then what do you mean she was there? I don’t need her to fuck up another operation in this case.’

Stemple stuck his legs out and brought his boot heel down on the linoleum hard. Foster didn’t notice the sound. Or didn’t care if he did.

Gomez said, ‘Steve, come on. We don’t need that.’

‘Need what? I’m saying it’s because of her we’re in this situation.’

Allerton: ‘She asked and I said yes. She knows she made a mistake and she wants to make it right. Look, she was good, though, at the house in Seaside, Steve. She was. You should’ve seen her.’

‘I did. With Serrano. I wasn’t impressed. Who was?’

Stemple scratched a scar on his thigh, not new, but a

.40 round leaves a thick streak and humidity could really kick off the itch.

‘You can’t bat a thousand every time,’ Gomez said. Normally soft-spoken, he sounded brittle.

Thanks, Jimmy, Stemple thought.

Steve Lu, the chief of detectives from Salinas, said, ‘Okay. She went. I don’t see the harm. What happened?’

Allerton continued, ‘The subject, our painter, used to work with Serrano? He was cooperating and telling us all kinds of things but swore he hadn’t heard from Serrano for six months. He’d lost all contact. He was going legitimate. I mean, I believed him. Everything he was saying, completely credible. And Kathryn was all, “Sure, sure, I understand, interesting, thanks for your help.” Then, bang, she pulled the rug out from underneath him. Just like that. Caught him in a dozen lies, went to work and in the end he talked.’

‘What about the non-panning lead?’ Foster grumbled.

‘He didn’t have Serrano’s present location. Not surprising, considering Serrano’s warranted and on the run. But the painter said the word is that he’s still in the area. He didn’t head out of state.’ Allerton continued, ‘But more important he gave up another name.’

‘Who?’

‘A woman was recently a girlfriend of Serrano’s. Tia Alonzo. No warrants on her but she’s keeping low. TJ Scanlon’s on it, getting her whereabouts.’

‘You really think Picasso’s telling the truth?’

‘Who?’ Lu asked.

‘The painter.’ Foster sighed.

‘Kathryn does. I do.’

‘When’ll we have a location to go with Señorita Alonzo?’

Allerton said, ‘Soon, TJ said. He’s convinced within a day or two.’

‘Convinced.’

Allerton said, ‘Now. With Kathryn. It was off the books.’

‘Which means?’ From Foster.

Sub-rosa …

‘She didn’t tell Overby.’

Foster: ‘She snuck in to interview this dingo in Seaside?’

‘Pretty much.’

‘Jesus.’

Allerton said, ‘I understand Charles is doing what he has to but she’s too valuable to sit this out. What I want—’

Foster said, impatient, ‘Yeah, yeah, she wants to go around Overby’s back and stay on the team. On the sly.’

Sub-rosa …

Allerton snapped, ‘Yes, Steve, that’s exactly what she wants to do. And I say yes. She knows the area, knows these people. After all, she wasn’t the only one who got taken in by Serrano. We watched the whole thing ourselves. Did anybody here suspect anything? I didn’t.’

Finally the asshole fell quiet.

‘I say yes,’ said loyal Jimmy Gomez, nodding his crew-cut head.

‘Can’t hurt,’ Lu agreed.

Foster looked Stemple up and down. The urge to dice returned. Foster said, ‘What about you? How do you vote?’

Stemple replied, ‘I’m just muscle. I don’t get a vote.’

Foster turned and regarded the others. ‘You’ve thought this through, all of you?’

‘Thought it through?’ From Gomez.

‘Have you? Have you really? Well. Alternative A: Dance sits on the sidelines per orders and we handle it, the Guzman Connection, the hunt for Serrano, everything. She does that and, say Serrano nails a banger or, worse, an innocent. Even then she might just survive. She can claim she didn’t have the chance to fix what got broke. Or Alternative B: she’s back on the case, unofficial, and there’s a screw-up, hers or anybody else’s, that’s it. Her career is over.’

Well, that was transparent enough.

Silence.

A second vote. The result was the same.

‘You?’ Allerton asked.

Foster muttered something.

Gomez: ‘What?’

‘Yeah, yeah. I’m on board. I got work to do.’ He swung back to his keyboard and started typing.

CHAPTER 25

After the Serrano mission, which had been somewhat successful, Kathryn Dance returned to the hunt for the Solitude Creek unsub.

She logged on to the National Crime Information Center to look for any similar incidents. The unsub was clearly a repetitive actor. Had he done this before?

NCIC revealed only one crime that echoed Solitude Creek, six months ago in Fort Worth, Texas. A man had wired shut the doors of the Prairie Valley Club, a small country-western venue, and set a fire just outside the back door. Two people were killed and dozens injured in the stampede. There was no connection to her case, though, since the perp, a paranoid schizophrenic homeless man, had died after accidentally setting himself alight too.

A search of the general media sent her to similar incidents, but nothing recent. She read about the Happy Land social-club fire in New York City in the eighties. Hundreds of people were packed into an illegal social club when a man who’d been ejected returned with a dollar’s worth of gas and set the place on fire. Nearly ninety people died. In that case, there wasn’t much of a stampede: people died so quickly in the smoke and flames that bodies were found still clutching their drinks or sitting upright on barstools.

The classic case of a deadly stampede, she found, was the Italian Hall disaster in Calumet, Michigan, in 1913. More than seventy striking mine workers and their families were killed in a crush at a Christmas party when someone yelled, ‘Fire,’ though there was none. It was believed that a thug connected with the mining company subject to the strike started the panic.

She found a number of accidental stampedes. Particularly dangerous were sporting events – the Hillsborough disaster in Sheffield, England, which her father had witnessed, for instance. Soccer seemed to be the most dangerous of organized sports. Three hundred people had died in Chile, at Estadio Nacional, when an angered fan attacked a referee, resulting in police action that panicked the attendees. Before the 1985 European Cup final at Heysel Stadium in Belgium had begun, nearly forty people had died when Liverpool fans surged toward rival Juventus supporters. The tragedy led to a multi-year ban of English soccer teams playing on the Continent.

Even more deadly were stampedes during religious events.

During the Hajj, the Islamic religious pilgrimage, thousands had died over the years when crowds panicked and surged from one event to the next. Stoning the Devil, a station of the Hajj, had taken the most lives. Hundreds of similar occurrences.

Dance flipped through the documents cluttering her desk. Reports had come in of scores of tall, brown-haired men seen lurking suspiciously in the area. None of these sightings panned out. And the continued canvass of people who’d been at Solitude Creek Tuesday night had yielded nothing.

By six that evening she realized she was reading the same reports over and over.

She grabbed her purse and walked to the parking lot to head home. She was there in a half-hour. Jon Boling met her at the door, kissed her and handed her a glass of Chardonnay. ‘You need it.’

‘Oh, you bet I do.’

Dance went into the bedroom to de-cop herself. There was no gun to lockbox away tonight but she needed a shower and a change of clothes. She set the case files on her desk, stripped off the suit and stepped into steaming water. She’d been to no crime scenes other than the theater that day – at which there’d been no actual crime, no bodies, nothing graphic to witness; still, something about the Solitude Creek unsub made her feel unclean.

Then a fluffy towel to dry off. A fast collapse on the bed, eyes shut for three minutes. Then bounding up again. Dressing in jeans and a black T, a Kelly green sweater. Shoes? Hm. She needed something fun. Aldo’s, in loud stripes. Silly. Good.

Downstairs, heading into the kitchen. ‘Hey, hons,’ Dance called.

Maggie, in jeans with Phineas and Ferb T-shirt, gave a nod. She seemed subdued again.

‘All okay?’

‘Yep.’

‘What did you do today?’

‘Stuff.’ She disappeared into the den.

What was going on? Was it really nerves about the talent show? ‘Let It Go’ was a challenging tune, yes, but within Maggie’s range. Lord knew she’d rehearsed plenty despite the deception the other night about not knowing the lyrics.

Was it something else? It was approaching that time in her life when hormones would soon be working their difficult changes in her body. Maybe they already were.

Adolescence. Wes was already going through it.

Heaven help us …

Or was it what she’d discussed with O’Neil? Her father’s death.

But Maggie had seemed uninterested in talking about the subject. Dance had noted no unusual emotional affect patterns or kinesic messages when the subject of Bill came up. Still, kinesics is an imperfect science and, while Dance was talented when conversing with those she didn’t know, witnesses and suspects, her skills sometimes failed her when it came to family and friends.

She now trailed her daughter into the den and sat down on the couch. ‘Hey, babes. How’s it going?’

‘Yeah. Okay.’ Maggie was instantly suspicious.

‘You’ve been kind of moody lately. Anything you want to talk about?’

‘I’m not moody.’ She flipped through one of the Harry Potter books.

‘How’s “distracted”?’ Dance smiled.

‘Everything’s fine.’

Thinking of the other children’s movie song, ‘Everything Is Awesome’, which Michael O’Neil had threatened playfully to sing. Just like in that movie, where everything wasn’t so awesome, Maggie wasn’t fine.

She tried once or twice more to get her daughter to engage but she’d learned that it was impossible to do so if the children refused. The best solution was to wait for a different time.

Dance concluded with the standard, ‘If there’s anything you want to talk about, anything at all, let me know. Or I’ll turn into a monster. You know what kind of monster I can be. Mom Monster. And how scary is that?’

Her smile was not reciprocated but Maggie tolerated the kiss on the head. Then Dance rose and stepped out onto the Deck, where Boling sat beneath the propane heater.