Solitude Creek

by Jeffery Deaver

  Solitude Creek was a vein of gray-brown water running to the nearby Salinas River. It was navigable by any vessel with a draft no deeper than two or three feet, which left it mostly for small boats, though there wasn't much reason to sail this way. The club squatted in a large parking lot between the creek and the trucking company, north of Monterey, off Highway 1, the same route that wound through majestic Big Sur; the views were very different, there and here.

  "How many deaths?"

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

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

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

  "That's right. I'll need copies."

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

  Except the exits didn't open.

  "So, crowded but up to code."

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

  "What happened when they realized the doors wouldn't open?"

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

  "Not much smoke, you said. But visibility?"

  "Somebody hit the houselights and people could see everything fine."

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

  "Mr. Cohen."

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

  "I'm Kathryn Dance, Bureau of Investigation."

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

  "Can I ask you a few questions, Mr. Cohen?"

  "Bureau of Investigation? FBI?"

  "California."

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

  Holly said, "We're still doing the preliminary, Sam."

  Dance said, "I'm not a criminal investigator. I'm in the Civil Division."

  Cohen looked around, breathing heavily. His shoulders sagged. "Everything," he said in a whisper. Dance had no idea what he'd been about to say. She was looking at a face marred by indelible sorrow.

  "Could you tell me what you recall about last night, sir?" Dance asked this automatically. Then remembering the fire marshal was in charge. "Okay with you, Bob?"

  "You can help me out anytime you want, Kathryn."

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

  Cohen didn't answer.

  "Mr. Cohen?"

  She repeated the question.

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

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

  Dance had noted a security camera. "Was there video? Security video?"

  "Nothing outside. Inside, yes, there's a camera."

  "Could I see it please?"

  This was her Crim-Div mind working.

  Sometimes you can't leash yourself...

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

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

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

  It wasn't good.

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

  There was no sound. Dance was grateful for that.

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

  But at 8:11:17, everything changed. Merely six seconds later. As if they'd all been programmed to act at the same instant, the patrons surged en masse toward the doors. Dance couldn't see the exits themselves. They were behind the camera, out of the frame. She could, however, see people slamming against each other and the wall, desperate to escape from the unspeakable fate of burning to death.

  Pressing against each other, harder, harder, in a twisting mass, spiraling like a slow-moving hurricane. Dance understood: Those at the front were struggling to move clockwise to get away from the people behind them. But there was no place to go.

  "My," Bob Holly, the fire marshal, whispered. A man who had surely witnessed plenty.

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

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

  Dance noted the time stamp.

  8:18:29.

  Seven minutes. Start to finish. Life to death.

  Then a figure stumbled back into view.

  "That's her," Bob Holly whispered. "The music student."

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

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

  Chapter 8

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

  Time to leave. Get back to the office.

  But she chose not to.

  Unleashed...

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

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

  "How the hell did it happen? Where did the smoke come from? Was it a terrorist? Who parked the truck there? Has anybody been arrested?" Some of these people were edgy, suspicious. Some were raggedly hostile.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  She tried to get an idea of how the truck had ended up here. The club and the warehouse shared a parking lot, though signs clearly marked which areas were for patrons of Solitude Creek and which were for the trucks and employees of Henderson Jobbing. Red signs warned about TOWING AT OWNER'S EXPENSE but seemed a lethargic threat so faded and rusty were they.

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

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

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

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

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

  Nothing.

  Another rap, harder.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Remember your Passports for International trips!

  The sign he was referring to was beneath it:

  Set your Brake and leave your Rig in gear!

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

  She'd get to the matter of brakes and gears in a moment. "Yessir but about the hours?"

  "We close at five. We're open seven to five."

  "But trucks arrive later, right? Sometimes?"

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

  "And the driver parked in a usual
space?"

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

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

  This caught them off guard. "Well, no. That wouldn't make sense." The hesitation told her that they wished they'd thought about this scenario themselves. But they'd already decided to sell the driver out for not setting the brake.

  The top of the hill...

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

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

  "One of the spots," Henderson Lite offered.

  "Gathered that. Which one?"

  "Do I need a lawyer?" the owner asked.

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

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

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

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

  Henderson: "So we don't know what happened."

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

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

  "Leaves it." Henderson pointed. A drop-box.

  A white pickup pulled into the lot and approached them. From the truck stepped a gaunt man of about thirty-five, jeans and a black, dusty AC/DC T-shirt. He must've weighed no more than 130 pounds. His cheekbones, darkened with stubble, were sharp as a ship's prow. He pulled on a leather jacket, straightened his slicked-back blond hair, fringy in the back. His face was etched with parentheses around his mouth, his brow permanently furrowed. He was white but his skin was leather-tanned.