They spoke about the case – to the extent she felt comfortable – then about some of his projects, new code he was writing, the reasons why his college-level students hadn’t finished their assignments.
‘I wish I could give them a grade for the best excuse. I mean, there were A-pluses there.’
Dance glanced down at the end of the Deck, where Wes and two friends were intensely involved in a game. She recognized Donnie. She’d seen the other boy but couldn’t come up with the name.
She whispered to Boling, ‘And that’s …’
‘Nathan.’
‘Right.’
He was taller than the others, stocky. The first time he’d been there he’d walked in with a stocking cap. Dance had started to say something, when Donnie noticed and, eyes wide, said, ‘Dude? Seriously? Respect.’
‘Oh, sorry.’ The hat had vanished and he’d never worn it again.
The boys were now on the back deck playing the game they’d made up themselves. Its name was, she believed, Defend and Respond Expedition Service, or something similar. She supposed there was some shoot-’em side to it but that didn’t bother her. Since it was played with paper and pen, a variation of a board game, she didn’t mind a little military action. Dance kept her eye on video games and movies. TV shows now too. Cable opened the door to anything-goes. Wes had asked if he and Donnie could watch Breaking Bad. Dance had screened it first and loved the show but after the acid-dissolved body fell through a ceiling, she’d decided: No. Not for a few years.
But a game you played with paper and pen? How harmful could that be?
‘You boys want to stay for dinner? Call your parents?’
Donnie said, ‘Thanks, Mrs Dance, but I have to go home.’
‘Yeah, me too,’ Nathan said, looking embarrassed and guilty at the same time – the essential expressions of adolescence.
‘Start packing up. We’re going to eat soon.’
‘Okay,’ Donnie said.
She looked at her son and, when she spoke, she quashed ‘honey’, given that his peers were present. ‘Wes, Jon and I were talking. You ever see Rashiv any more?’
Silence for a moment. ‘Rashiv?’
‘He was nice. I haven’t seen him for a while.’
‘I don’t know. He’s kind of … He’s got a different bunch he hangs with.’
Dance thought this was too bad. The Indian American was, as Jon Boling had observed, funny and smart and polite. Which meant not only was he good company but he was a good influence too. Her son was getting to the point where, in the middle school he attended, there would be increasing temptations to steer toward the dark side. ‘Well, if you see him, say hi for me.’
‘Sure.’
After Wes’s friends had left, Dance herded Maggie from the den and the two ladies prepared dinner. Whole Foods had been instrumental – sushi, a roast chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans and a complicated salad, which included cranberries, some kind of mystery seed, bits of cheese and impressive croûtons.
Boling set the table.
As she watched him her thoughts segued to the two of them, Dance and Boling.
The hours he spent with her and the children were pure comfort. The times she and he got away alone for a rare night at an inn were so very fine too. (He never stayed the night when the children were here.) All was good.
But Kathryn Dance wasn’t long a widow. She monitored the pulse of her figurative heart, on the lookout for subconscious blips that might sabotage the relationship – the first since Bill’s death. She was not going to make fast decisions, for her own peace of mind, and the children: they were the north star by which she and Boling navigated their relationship. And it was Dance’s job to be in control. To keep the speed brakes on.
Then her hand, holding a large spoon, paused as it scooped mashed potatoes from carton to bowl. And she asked herself: Or is there another reason I’m keeping things with Jon Boling slow?
He looked up from the table and caught her eye. He smiled. She sent one his way too.
‘Dinner’s ready!’ she called.
Wes joined them, pulling a juice from the fridge.
‘Put the phone away. No texting.’
‘Mom, just—’
‘Now. And how can you text and open a Tropicana?’
He mumbled but his eyes grew wide when he saw the potatoes. ‘Awesome.’
As they sat down, Maggie said, ‘Are we going to say grace?’
This was new. The Dance household was not particularly religious.
‘We can if you’d like to. What do you want to say thanks for?’
‘Thanks?’
‘Grace is where you say thanks to God for something.’
‘Oh,’ Maggie said. ‘I thought it was where you asked for something.’
‘Not grace,’ Boling explained. ‘You can pray for things but grace is where you thank somebody else.’
‘What did you want to ask for?’ Dance looked at her daughter’s face, which revealed no emotion.
‘Nothing. I was just wondering. Can have I the butter, please?’
CHAPTER 26
Antioch March walked into a restaurant on Fisherman’s Wharf and got a table near the window.
Tourism on steroids. Nothing like the days of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, he guessed.
He ordered a pineapple juice and looked at his prepaid once again. Nothing on the information he was expecting.
March ordered a calamari steak with steamed vegetables.
‘Sorry, they’re only sautéed. I don’t think the chef—’
‘That’s okay. I’ll take them that way.’
Another sip of juice. He opened his gym bag and began looking over maps and notes – what was planned for tomorrow. The theater had been denied him, set him back a day, but this would be just as good. Even better, he now reflected.
He glanced around the restaurant. He wasn’t worried about being recognized. His appearance was very different from what had been reported. What a stroke of luck that the police had released his description to the public and not kept it to themselves. If the theater employee hadn’t given that away, he might be in jail now.
Or dead.
He was studying a family nearby. Parents and two teenagers, all looking like they should be enjoying the pier more. In fact, it was a little anemic. Shopping mostly. No rides, except fifty cents bought little kids a turn on a space ship, up and down, in front of a shell shop.
Family …
Antioch March’s father had been a salesman – yes, a real, honest-to-God traveling salesman. Industrial parts, American made (though maybe some components, tiny ones, had been teamed together in China. Dad, politically conservative, had been less than forthcoming about that).
The food came and he ate. He was hungry. It had been a long time since McBreakfast.
March’s father was never home, his mother either, though she hadn’t traveled much. She worked a lot, though young Andy could do the math. Shift over at five but not home till seven thirty or eight, for a shower, then downstairs to ask about her boy’s day as she made him supper.
Not every day. But often enough. Andy didn’t care. Mom could do what she wanted. He had what he needed. He had his video games.
‘How’s your calamari, sir?’ the young waitress asked, as if she really, really cared.
‘Good.’
She tipped him with a smile.
March used to think that was the reason he was drawn to, well, less healthy interests than his classmates: Dad never around, Mom tackling her own Get in her own special way. Plenty of free time as a boy. The solitary games.
Come on, Serena.
A little closer, Serena.
Look what I have for you, Serena …
Was he angry at their absence? March honestly couldn’t say if he would have turned out different if he’d spent his evenings curled up in jammies as Mom or Dad read Lord of the Rings to him.
No, not much anger. Sure, Markiatikakis became March but that just made
sense. He kept Antioch, didn’t he?
Though I prefer Andy.
And he’d followed in his father’s shoes. Life on the road. Life in business. And he was a salesman in a way.
In the employ of the website.
And working for his main boss.
The Get.
He could recall the exact moment of coining the term. In college. Hyde Park, U of C, the week of exams. He’d aced a few of them already and was prepared, completely prepared, for the rest. But he’d lain in bed, sweating and chewing on the inside of his cheek with compulsive molars. He’d tried video games, TV to calm down. No go. He’d finally given up and picked up a textbook for his Myths in the Classical World as Bases for Psychological Archetypes. He’d read the book several times and was prepared for the test but, as he flipped through the pages, he came across something he hadn’t paid attention to. In the Oedipus story, where a son kills his father and sleeps with his mother, there was this line that referred to Oedipus as ‘the get of Jocasta and Laius’.
The get …
What did that mean?
He’d looked it up. The word, as a noun, meant ‘offspring’.
Despite his anxiety that night he’d laughed. Because in this context the word was perfect. Something within him, a creation in his own body, something he’d given birth to was turning on him. The way Oedipus would destroy father and mother both.
And – he couldn’t help but think of the pun – whatever this feeling was, it forced young Antioch March to do whatever he could to ‘get’ peace of mind, comfort.
And so the hunger, the lack, the edge was named.
The Get.
He’d felt it all his life, sometimes quiescent, sometimes voracious. But he knew it would never go away. The Get could unspool within you anytime it wanted.
It wanted, not you. You didn’t have a say.
And if you didn’t satisfy the Get, well, there were consequences.
Somebody wasn’t happy …
He’d talked to doctors about it, of course – well, shrinks. They understood; they called it something else but it was the same. They wanted him to talk about his issues, which meant he’d have to be open about Serena, the Intersection, about Todd. Which wasn’t going to happen. Or they wanted to give him meds (and that made the Get mad, which was something you never, ever wanted to happen).
March tried to be temperate on his jobs. But the Asian family’s death had been denied him, the theater disaster too.
What the hell?
‘Miss? A Johnnie Walker Black. Neat.’
‘Sure. Are you finished?’
‘I am, yes.’
‘A box?’
‘What?’
‘To take home with you?’
‘No.’ The Get made you rude sometimes. He smiled. ‘It was very good. I’m just full. Thanks.’
The drink came. He sipped. He looked around him. A businesswoman eating dinner accompanied by an iPad and a glass of grapefruit-yellow wine glanced his way. She was around thirty-five, round but pretty. Sensuous enough, probably Calista-level sexy, to judge from her approach to eating the artichoke on her plate (food and sex, forever linked).
But his gaze angled away, avoiding her eyes.
No, not tonight.
Would he have a family some day with someone like her? He wondered what her name might be. Sandra. Joanne. Yes, she would be Joanne. Would he settle down with a Joanne after he got tired of the nights of Calistas and Tiffs?
March – yeah, yeah, so fucking handsome – could have asked Joanne, sitting over there with her artichoke and wine, a bit of butter on her cheek, to dinner tomorrow, and, in a month, a weekend getaway, and in a year to marry him. It would work. He could get it to work.
Except for one thing.
The Get wouldn’t approve.
The Get didn’t want him to have a social life, romantic life, family life.
He thought of the attack, at Solitude Creek.
How was that for a sign? Though Antioch March thought this in a droll way: he didn’t believe in signs.
Solitude …
The family was preparing to leave, collecting phones, bags of chocolate sea otters, leftovers to be discarded in the morning. The father had the keys of his car out. Keys didn’t jangle any more. They were quiet plastic fobs.
And, in this damn reflective mood, he couldn’t help but think about the intersection. Well, upper case: the Intersection.
Serena had changed his life in one way but the Intersection had changed it most of all. Everything that came after was explained by what had happened where Route 36 met Mockingbird Road. Reeking of Midwest America.
After Uncle Jim’s funeral, driving back.
‘Nearer My God To Thee’.
‘In Christ There Is No East Or West’.
The insipid, noncommittal Protestant hymns. They had no passion. Give me Bach or Mozart any day for gut-piercing Christian guilt. March had thought this even then, a boy.
It had been quiet in the Ford, the company car. His father, home for a change. His mother, being a wife for a change. Driving on the bleak November highway, winding, winding, pine turned gray by the mist, everything still.
Then around a bend, rocks and pines with stark black trunks.
Then: his mother gasping a brief inhaled scream.
The skid flinging him against the door, the brakes locking, then—
‘Sir?’
March blinked.
‘Here you go, sir.’ The waitress set the bill in front of him. ‘And at the bottom you can take a brief survey and maybe win a free dinner for the family.’
March laughed to himself.
For the family.
He doled out bills and didn’t tell her that after his business was concluded here he wouldn’t be coming back to the area again for quite a long time, if ever.
When March looked up, the couple and their children were gone.
It would be a busy day tomorrow. Time to get back to the inn.
His phone hummed with an email.
At last.
It was from a commercial service that ran DMV checks. The answer he’d been waiting for.
That morning as he’d enjoyed the Egg McMuffin and coffee, parked near the multiplex that would have been his next target, March had noted an assortment of police cars and – this was curious – a gray Nissan Pathfinder.
He couldn’t learn anything from the other vehicles or the uniformed or sport-coated men who climbed out of them. But the occupant of the Pathfinder, that was a different story. It wasn’t an official car. Not a government plate. And no bumper stickers bragging about children, no Jesus fish. A private car.
But the driver was official. He could tell that from the way she strode up to the officers. The way they answered her questions, sometimes looking away. March was at a distance but he supposed she had a fierce gaze. Intense, at least.
Her posture, upright. March had sensed instinctively that this woman was one of the main investigators against him.
The search had revealed that the Pathfinder belonged to one Kathryn Dance.
A lovely name. Compelling.
He pictured her again and felt a stirring low in his belly. The Get was unspooling. It, too, was growing interested in Ms Dance. They both wanted to know more about her. They wanted to know all about her.
PRECAUTIONS
FRIDAY, APRIL 7
CHAPTER 27
‘Never rains but it pours,’ Michael O’Neil offered, walking into Dance’s office.
TJ Scanlon glanced at the solid detective, who was sitting down across from her desk. ‘I never quite got that. Does it mean, “We’re in a desert area, so it doesn’t rain but sometimes there’s a downpour and we get flooded because, you know, there’s no ground cover?”’
‘I don’t know. All I mean is, my plate’s filling up.’
‘With rain?’ TJ asked.
‘A homicide.’
‘Oh. Sorry.’ TJ often walked a fine line between jovial and flippa
nt.
Dance asked, ‘The missing farmer? Otto Grant?’ She was thinking of the possible suicide, the man distraught about losing his land to the eminent domain action by the state. She couldn’t imagine what he had gone through, losing the farm that had been in his family for so many years. She and the children had been at Safeway recently and she’d noticed yet more 8.5-by-11 sheets of paper, attention-getting yellow, with Grant’s picture on them.
Have you seen this man? …
O’Neil shook his head. ‘No, no, I mean another case altogether.’ He handed Dance a half-dozen crime-scene photos. ‘Jane Doe. Found this morning at the Cabrillo Beach Inn.’
A dive of a place, Dance knew. North of Monterey.
‘Prints come back negative.’
The photo was of a young woman who’d been dead seven or eight hours, to guess from the lividity. She was pretty. She had been pretty.
‘COD?’
‘Asphyx. Plastic bag, rubber band.’
‘Rape?’
‘No. But maybe erotic asphyxia.’
Dance shook her head. Really? Risking death? How much better could an orgasm be?
‘I’ll get it on our internal wire,’ TJ said. This would send the picture to every one of the CBI offices, where a facial-recognition scan would be run and compared with faces in the database.
‘Thanks.’
TJ took the pictures off to scan them.
O’Neil continued, to Dance: ‘The boyfriend’s probably married. Panicked and took off with her purse. We’re checking video nearby for tags and makes. Might find something.’
‘Why wasn’t she on the bed? I don’t care how kinky I was, sex on the floor of that motel is just plain ick.’
O’Neil said, ‘That’s why I said maybe about the erotic asphyx. There were marks on her wrists. Somebody might’ve held her down while she died. Or it could have been part of their game. I’m keeping an open mind.’
‘So,’ she said slowly, ‘you still with us on the Solitude Creek unsub?’ She was afraid that the death – accidental or intentional – would derail him.
Solitude Creek: Kathryn Dance Book 4 Page 14