Solitude Creek

by Jeffery Deaver

  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 no employees, former ones or patrons who might have been motivated to organize the attack. No competitor wanting to take Sam Cohen out of commission."

  "Was wondering. Any pissed-off husbands 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 a 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?" She finished his thought.

  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 walking 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 L.A.

  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 from 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 this 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 head, high-def. 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 portion of the county, edged with secluding weeds and rushes and hidden by hills?

  Solitude...

  The word, its sound and meaning both, 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.

  THURSDAY, APRIL 6

  The Get

  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 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 on her feet and impressive coifs on her head: a mass of frosted brown curls, sprayed into totalitarian submission.

  Dance smiled, just to let the world know that nobody in the immediate vicinity was in danger. Then onward. She strode to Overby's office and 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 Ramon 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 a felicitous one 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 firsthand 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, despite having one of the highest death-by-gunshot rates in the world.

  And virtually all those guns were smuggled in from the U.S.

  "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, indeed slowly. Dance regarded the computer screen. 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 pols 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. 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. I didn't know that's what you meant."

  "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 had his name featured 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 was sidelined. But Foster had taken it one step further and made sure the kudos would go to the main 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 of the 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 responded with a demurring tone, "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 in a brittle voice.

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

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

  "What's this all about?" asked stolid Carol Allerton of the DEA.

  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."

  "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 Office investigation."

  "I mean not Sacramento's." Her lips grew taut.

  "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 fuckup. But, bright side: I'll bet somebody's already spotted some could-be's. 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 start sweeps of venues that might make good locations for other attacks. All day long. Shopping malls, churches, movie theaters. I don't know what they're going to be looking for now. If our perp hears 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 that 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.

  He said, "It's probably moot. He's a thousand miles away by now."

  Chapter 20

  Antioch March had changed majors four times in three years at two schools.

  Distraction, boredom and, truth be told, the Get kept him jumping from department to department (and finally drove him out of both Northwestern and Chicago altogether, without any degree, despite his nearly perfect academic record).

  Still, he'd picked up some insights in various classes. He was thinking of one now, recalling the neo-Gothic classroom overlooking the north shore of Lake Michigan. Psychology. March had been fascinated to learn that there are only five basic fears.

  For instance, take the fear of sharks, one that particularly interested him. That's merely a subcategory of the fear of mutilation: having part of our body damaged or excised. More broadly, fear of injury.

  The four other basic fears: of physical death, of ego death (embarrassment and shame), of separation (from Mommy, from the drugs we inhale so desperately, from our lover) and of loss of autonomy (from claustrophobia on a physical level to being abused by a parent or spouse, for instance).

  March remembered the cold November day when he'd heard about these in a lecture. Truly mesmerizing.

  And now he was about to put several of them to good use. Fear of physical death, of mutilation and of loss of autonomy, all rolled into one. A movie theater would be his next target.

  He had parked his car in a strip mall about a hundred yards from the Marina Hills Cineplex, just off Highway 1 in Marina. He was walking toward the theaters now.

  Don't we love the comfort of the lights going down, the trailers coming to an end, the film starting? Waiting to be exhilarated, amused, thrilled--laughing or crying. Why is a theater so much better than Netflix or cable? Because the real world is gone.

  Until the real world comes crashing in.

  In the form of smoke or gunshots.

  And then comfort becomes constriction.

  Fear of physical death, fear of mutilation and, most deliciously, fear of loss of autonomy--when the crowd takes over. You become a helpless cell in a creature whose sole goal is to survive, yet in attempting to do that it will sacrifice some of itself: those cells trampled or suffocated or changed forever thanks to snapped spines or piercing ribs.

  He now examined the cineplex, regarding the parking lot, the entrance, the service doors. This was on
e of the older multiplexes in the area, dating to the seventies--it featured only four theaters, ranging from three hundred seats to six hundred. It showed first-run movies, along with an occasional art film, and competed with the big boy up at Del Monte Center by discounting tickets (if you were fifty-nine, you were a senior. How 'bout that?) and offering free cheese powder with the popcorn (which was still overpriced).

  March knew this because after meeting with an Indonesian tsunami relief charity for the Hand to Heart website he'd been to see a film here: When She's Alone, a slasher flick, which wasn't bad--like a lot of such films nowadays, in this age of inexpensive technology, the effects were good and the acting passable. Some clever motifs (stained glass, for instance; the colored shards turned out to be the killer's weapon of choice).

  He'd also carefully examined the exits. Each theater had only two ways by which patrons could leave: the entrance, which led to a narrow hallway off the lobby, and the emergency exit in the back. The latter was a double door, wide enough to accommodate a crowd intent on escaping...if they weren't too unruly.

  But tonight the back doors would not be in play.

  Six hundred people speeding through the single door to the lobby.

  Perfect.

  He looked over the parking lot keenly, noting trash cans, light posts and, more important, the feeble landscaping--excellent camouflage.

  Okay, time to get to work.

  He hiked his gym bag on his shoulder and started toward the theater. The hour was early and the place was largely deserted at this time. A few employees' cars, parked, as ordered, in the back of the lot.

  Another car happened to turn into the lot and make its way to the back of the theater, not far from March. A tall, balding man got out and started toward the back service door, fishing keys from his pocket. He glanced at March and froze.

  His eyes took in the green jacket, the dark slacks, the hat, sunglasses.

  And those eyes explained everything.

  Someone had seen him at Solitude Creek. He guessed his description had been on the news.

  Hell. Antioch March had been positive that he hadn't been seen Tuesday night, circling the parking lot, stealing the truck and maneuvering it in front of the doors. Starting the fire near the club's HVAC system. He'd changed his clothes just afterward but there was a twenty-minute window during which somebody could have spotted him in his worker's garb, which he wore now.