Jeffery Deaver: Solitude Creek

There! Yes, there was her daughter! Trish was still on her feet, though she too was pinned in a mass of bodies. ‘Trish, Trish!’

But no sound at all came from her now.

Mother and daughter were moving in opposite directions.

Michelle blinked tears and sweat from her eyes. Her group was only feet away from the exits. She’d be out in a few seconds. Trish was still near the kitchen — where somebody had just said the fire was raging.

‘Trish! This way!’

Pointless.

And then she saw a man beside her daughter lose control completely — he began pounding the face of the man next to him and started to climb on top of the crowd, as if, in his madness, he believed he could claw his way through the ceiling. He was large and one of the people he used as a launching pad was Trish, who weighed a hundred pounds less than he did. Michelle saw her daughter open her mouth to scream and then, under the man’s massive weight, vanish beneath the sea of madness.

The two people sitting at the long conference table looked her over with varying degrees of curiosity.

Anything else? she wondered. Suspicion, dislike, jealousy?

Kathryn Dance, a kinesics (body language) expert, got paid to read people but law enforcers were typically hard to parse so at the moment she wasn’t sure what was flitting through their minds.

Also present was her boss, Charles Overby, though he wasn’t at the table but hovering in the doorway, engrossed in his Droid. He’d just arrived.

The four were in an interrogation-observation room on the ground floor of the California Bureau of Investigation’s West Central Division, off Route 68 in Monterey, near the airport. One of those dim, pungent chambers separated from the interrogation room by a see-through mirror that nobody, even the most naïve or stoned perps, believed was for straightening your tie or coiffing.

A no-nonsense crowd, fashion-wise. The man at the table — he’d commandeered the head spot — was Steve Foster, wearing a draping black suit and white shirt. He was the head of special investigations with the California Bureau of Investigation’s Criminal Division. He was based in Sacramento. Dance, five six and about a hundred twenty pounds, didn’t know exactly when to describe somebody as ‘hulking’ but Foster had to figure close. Broad, an impressive silver mane, and a droopy moustache that could have been waxed into a handlebar, had it been horizontal and not staple-shaped, he looked like an Old West marshal.

Perpendicular to Foster was Carol Allerton, in a bulky gray pants suit. Short hair frosted silver, black and gray, Carol Allerton was a senior DEA agent operating out of Oakland. The stocky woman had a dozen serious collars to her credit. Not legend, but respectable. She’d had the opportunity to be fast-tracked to Sacramento or even Washington but she’d declined.

Kathryn Dance was in a black skirt and white blouse of thick cotton, under a dark brown jacket, cut to obscure if not wholly hide her Glock. The only color in her ensemble was a blue band that secured the end of her dark blonde French braid. Her daughter had bound it this morning on the way to school.

‘That’s done.’ Hovering around fifty, Charles Overby looked up from his phone, on which he might’ve been arranging a tennis date or reading an email from the governor, though, given their meeting now, it was probably halfway between. The athletic if pear-shaped man said, ‘Okay, all task-forced up? Let’s get this thing done.’ He sat and opened a manila folder.

His ingratiating words were greeted with the same non-negotiable stares that had surveilled Dance a moment ago. It was pretty well known in law-enforcement circles that Overby’s main skill was, and had always been, administration, while those present were hard-core line investigators. None of whom would use the verb he just had.

Mumbles and nods of greeting.

The ‘thing’ he was referring to was an operation that was part of a statewide push to address a recent trend in gang activity. You could find organized crime everywhere in California but the main centers for gang activity were two: north and south. Oakland was the headquarters of the former, LA the latter. But rather than being rivals, the polar crews had decided to start working together, guns moving south from the Bay Area and drugs moving north. At any given moment, there would be dozens of illicit shipments coursing along Interstate-5, the 101 and the dusty, slow-moving 99.

To make it harder to track and stop these shipments, the senior bangers had hit on an idea: they’d taken to using break-bulk and way stations, where the cargo was transferred from the original tractor-trailers to dozens of smaller trucks and vans. Two hours south of Oakland and five north of LA, Salinas, with its active gang population, was perfect as a hub. Hundreds of warehouses, thousands of vehicles and produce trucks. Police interdiction nearly ground to a halt and illicit business surged. This year alone the statistics cops reported that revenue in the gun/drug operation had risen nearly a half-billion dollars.

Six months ago the CBI, FBI, DEA and local law-enforcement agencies had formed Operation Pipeline to try to stop the transportation network but had had paltry success. The bangers were so connected, smart and brazen that they constantly remained one step ahead of the good guys, who managed to bust only low-level dealers or mules with mere ounces taped to their crotches, hardly worth the bytes to process into the system. Worse, informants were ID’d, tortured and killed before any leads could be developed.

As part of Pipeline, Kathryn Dance was running what she’d dubbed the Guzman Connection and had put together a task force that included Foster, Allerton and two other officers, presently in the field. The eponymous Guzman was a massive, borderline psychotic gang-banger, who reportedly knew at least half of the transfer points in and around Salinas. As near a perfect prize as you could find in the crazy business of law enforcement.

After a lot of preliminary work, just last night Dance had texted the task force that they had their first lead to Guzman and to assemble here, now, for a briefing.

‘So, tell us about this asshole you’re going to be talking to today, the one you think’s going to give up Guzman. What’s his name? Serrano?’ From Steve Foster.

Dance replied, ‘Okay. Joaquin Serrano. He’s an innocent — what all the intel shows. No record. Thirty-two. We heard about him from a CI we’ve been running—’

‘Who’s been running?’ Foster asked bluntly. The man was adept at interruption, Dance had learned. Also, it was true that law enforcers were quite sensitive about their colleague’s attempts to poach confidential informants.

‘Our office.’

Foster grunted. Maybe he was irritated he hadn’t been informed. His flick of a finger said, Go on.

‘Serrano can link Guzman to the killing of Sad Eyes.’

The victim, actually Hector Mendoza (droopy lids had led to the nic), was a banger who knew higher-ups in both the north and south operations. That is, a perfect witness — had he remained alive.

Even cynical, sour Foster seemed content at the possibility of hanging the Sad Eyes killing on Guzman.

Overby, often good at stating the obvious, said, ‘Guzman falls, the other Pipeline crews could go like dominos.’ Then he didn’t seem to like his metaphor.

‘This witness, Serrano. Tell us more about him.’ Allerton fiddled with a yellow pad of foolscap, then seemed to realize she was doing so. She aligned the edges and set it free.

‘He’s a landscaper, works for one of the big companies in Monterey. Documented. Probably trustworthy.’