Jeffery Deaver - Solitude Creek

Then she was dressed — black blouse, fancy jeans and navy jacket. Gold Aldos with exotic heels. A look in the mirror. She let her hair hang loose, better to conceal the banged-up jaw and cheek.

Downstairs she called, ‘Donnie. Did you bike over? I didn’t see it.’

The boy stared at her for a moment.

Wes said, ‘No, we left them at his house.’

‘You want a ride home? It’s on the way to Maggie’s school.’

Donnie glanced at Wes, then turned back. ‘No, thanks, Mrs Dance. I’ll walk. I feel like it.’

‘Okay. Come on, Wes, we have to go.’

He and Donnie bumped fists and her son joined her in the front entryway.

‘Maggie!’ Dance called.

Her daughter appeared.

Boling said, ‘Well, look at you.’

She gave a shy smile.

Dance said, ‘Beautiful, Mags.’

‘Thank you.’ In a stilted tone. Formality is a form of deflection.

‘Really.’

Maggie was looking pretty. Her outfit was a white sequined dress that Dance had snagged at Macy’s. It was the perfect outfit for singing a song by an ice queen or princess or whatever Elsa was. Light blue leggings too and white shoes.

They walked to the car, Boling slightly limpier than Dance, climbed in and belted up. Dance was behind the wheel. Into the street. She honked and Donnie Verso turned and waved. Then Dance hit the CD player and they listened to the infectious ‘Happy’ by Pharrell Williams. Boling tried to sing along. ‘Hopeless,’ he said.

It was.

‘I’ll work on it.’

‘I wouldn’t really worry about it,’ Wes said. Everyone laughed. Dance changed the song to a Broken Bells tune.

In ten minutes they were at Maggie’s grade school. The lot was full. Dance parked near the gym and they got out. She locked the vehicle. ‘Let’s go to the green room.’

‘What’s that?’ Maggie asked.

‘It’s the place backstage where they have the snacks.’

‘Let’s go!’ Wes said.

Dance put her arm around Maggie. ‘Come on, Elsa. Time to wow the audience.’

Her daughter said nothing.

‘Working late, sir? And on Sunday.’

O’Neil looked up at Gabriel Rivera. The junior deputy, in uniform as always, stood in the doorway of O’Neil’s small workspace in the Sheriff’s Office building in Salinas. He discouraged the ‘sir’ but the young man was unshakeable in his respect. ‘Looks like you are too.’

‘Well, we get triple time, right?’

O’Neil smiled. ‘What’s up?’

‘They got an ID on the body in Santa Cruz. You were right. Homeless guy living off and on in a shelter. Blood work-up, he was way drunk.’ The big man shook his head. ‘As for Grant? Nothing, sir. Just no sign at all. Any other ideas? I’m at a loss.’

With the Solitude Creek unsub on the loose, O’Neil had had to delegate much of the Otto Grant disappearance to others. There’d been no sightings of the farmer who’d lost his property.

‘You’ve expanded to surrounding counties?’

‘All through the Central Valley. Zip.’

‘And nothing online since his last post?’

‘Nothing after five days ago.’

That was when the farmer had written another diatribe against the state.

You STOLE my property thru the travasty called eminent domain!

‘You run his posts by Dr Shepherd?’

‘I did,’ Rivera said. ‘He agrees that the comments could support a suicide but there weren’t any other indications I could find. He didn’t put his affairs in order. Didn’t take out any life insurance. No goodbye calls to neighbors or army buddies or relatives.’

‘And any place he’d run to?’

‘Checked the lakes he likes to fish at, where he’s rented cabins. A casino in Nevada he went to some. Nothing.’

O’Neil didn’t bother to ask about credit-card or mobile-phone tracing. Rivera had checked all that first.

‘Probably not much else to do until some campers find the body. Or fishermen.’

Worse ways to die than going to sleep in the Bay...

‘And on our Jane Doe?’

O’Neil looked at the picture of the woman who’d died of asphyxiation, possibly another victim of the unsub. Lying on her back, face up, under the light in the cheap motel room.

‘I’ve heard back from Nevada, Oregon, Arizona, Colorado. No matches in driver’s-license-photo databases. But facial recognition equipment...’ He shrugged. ‘You know. Can be hit or miss. The pix’re on the missing-persons wires, state and fed. She’s young, has to have family’re worried about her.’

‘Not much more we can do.’

‘You staying?’ Rivera asked.

‘A while.’

‘Night, then.’

‘You too, Gabe.’

O’Neil stretched. He glanced down at a pink phone-message slip, a call he’d returned earlier that day.

Anne called.

He thought about his ex. Then about Maggie’s recital, soon to get under way. He was sorry to be absent. He hoped she wouldn’t be disappointed.

Jon will be there...

Though her boyfriend’s presence wasn’t the reason he couldn’t go. Not at all. He did have plans this evening. Just curious that Dance would mention Boling. O’Neil had assumed that he’d be in attendance.

Jon will be there...

Enough. Let it go.

Back to work.

The preliminary crime-scene report from the hospital was open on his desk and Michael O’Neil was reading through it. Eighty percent of a cop’s job is paper or bytes.

He took notes from the new report, then opened some of the earlier ones to compare data: from the Solitude Creek incident, the Bay View Center and Orange County.

... footprint seventeen inches from driver’s door of suspect’s vehicle revealed one partial three-quarter-inch front tread mark, not identifiable...

Reading, reading, reading.

And thinking: There probably was a time when it might’ve worked between us, Kathryn and me. But that’s over. Circumstances have changed.

Wait. No. That wasn’t right.

There’d been a time when it would have worked out. Not ‘might’.

But he was accurate when he’d said circumstances had changed. So what would have been — and what would have been good, really good — wasn’t going to happen now.

Circumstances. Changed.

That was life. Look at Anne, his ex. She’d definitely changed. He’d been surprised, nearly shocked, to get that phone call from her last week. She’d sounded like the person he remembered from when they’d met, years ago. She’d been reasonable and funny and generous.

He then reminded himself sternly he was not thinking about Kathryn Dance any more.

Get. Back. To. It.

... accelerant was diethyl ether, approximately 600 ml, ignited by a Diamond Strike Anywhere match, recovered from the site of the burn. Not traceable. Generic...

Kathryn was with Jon Boling.

So O’Neil would go in a different direction too.

Best for everybody. For his children, for Dance, for Boling. He was convinced this was the right thing to do.

... Statement by witness 43 at Bay View Center crime scene, James Kellogg: ‘I was, what it was I was standing near the street, the one that goes through Cannery Row. I’m not from here, so I don’t remember what it was. And I’m like what’s all this, all the police stuff going on? Was it terrorists? I’d heard shots or firecrackers earlier, like five minutes earlier but I didn’t know. I didn’t see anything — I looked around — but I didn’t see anything weird, you know. I mean, I did. But I thought it was a normal crime, not like the attack at the club.

‘This guy, he was tall, over six feet, wearing shorts, sunglasses and a hat — I think he was blond though, you could see that. He was looking around and he went to a car, this SUV, and looked in and opened the door. And I could see he was looking through a woman’s purse. I thought he was going to steal something. But he just put it back. So he wasn’t a thief.’