Jeffery Deaver - Solitude Creek

‘Hey, TJ.’

‘Boss. Good takedown. How’s the blood?’ He glanced at his legs, spattered red. ‘I tried a new formula. Hershey’s syrup and food coloring.’

‘Big improvement,’ she said, nodding at the tiles.

Foster gasped, ‘A sting. The whole thing.’

Dance pulled out her cell phone. Hit speed-dial five as she glanced down and noticed her Aldo pumps had a scuff. Have to fix that. They were her favorite shoes for field work.

She heard, from the phone, Charles Overby’s voice: ‘Kathryn? And the verdict is?’

‘Foster’s our boy. It’s all on tape. He’s the only one.’

‘Ah.’

‘We’ll be back in a half-hour. You want to be there, at the interrogation?’

‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world.’

Disgust overflowed in Foster’s face as he looked from Al Stemple to Dance to Overby. They were in the same CBI interrogation rooms where Dance had held the phony interview of the phony Serrano last week.

TJ was elsewhere; the faux blood was good, yes, but it stained far more than he’d thought it would. He was presently scrubbing hands and ankles in one of the nearby men’s rooms.

Foster snapped, ‘Jesus, you wanted Kathryn unarmed and demoted to Civ Div but still talking her way onto the interviews with the suspect to track down Serrano. So I wouldn’t feel threatened by her.’

Yep. Exactly.

Overby added, ‘So you’d be free to cut a deal with Serrano when he pulled a gun on you.’

Dance told him: ‘We made the case against the real Serrano ten days ago. Handed it over to the FBI, Amy Grabe in San Francisco. So you wouldn’t get wind of it. She busted him. He rolled over on Guzman. They’re both in isolation. The “Serrano” you saw was Bakersfield PD. José works undercover. He’s good, don’t you think?’

Not acting very professional. But she was in a mood.

‘We got him because he looks like the real Serrano.’

Anger joined Foster’s revulsion: ‘Jesus. We were all suspects. And you faked the “leads” to Serrano — with Carol, the bungalow in Seaside. With Gomez, the houseboat. At the motel just now. You ran the same set, the same play at every one of them. TJ played the dead snitch. All I saw was the legs and torso. Not his face.’

Overby filled in, ‘Except at the houseboat. That was Connie Ramirez, playing... What was her name again?’

Dance answered, ‘Tia Alonzo.’ She continued, ‘It was a test we put together. The real traitor’d save himself. Those on the task force who were innocent? Well, I’m afraid they had a few bad moments when José turned his gun on them. But it had to be done. We needed to find who’d sold us out.’

In the first set, Carol Allerton had suicidally lunged at the fake Serrano, knocking a table of ceramic keepsakes to the floor. Gomez had sighed, resigned himself to death and said a prayer.

And Foster had played the OG card, invoking the name of Lamont Howard to save himself.

‘If you’d passed the test, it would have meant Steve Lu was the one. Since you said you’d told Kathryn you were the only connection, he’s clean.’

‘You fucking set me up.’

Finally, quiet Al Stemple spoke: ‘I think “set up” means more wrongly implicating an innocent person, ’stead of trapping a guilty asshole. Am I being transparent enough, Steve?’ He gave a loud grunt, then sat back and crossed his arms, wide as tree trunks.

The Guzman Connection sting had been Dance’s idea and she’d fought hard for it. All the way up to Sacramento.

She’d decided to put together the operation after a horrific drive-by shooting in Seaside, a mother killed and a child wounded. The woman had been a witness to one of the Pipeline hubs. But no one could have known about her — except for a leak inside the operation itself.

‘I went through the files a hundred times and looked for any other instance of operations that could’ve been compromised. TJ and I spent weeks correlating the personnel. We narrowed it down to four people involved in all of them — and who knew that Maria Ioaconna was a witness. You, Carol, Steve Lu and Jimmy. We brought you here. And set up the operation.’

There’d been risks, of course. That the guilty party might wonder why Dance was apparently working on the Solitude Creek case but was officially barred from the Serrano pursuit.

(Overby had said, ‘Can’t you forget about Solitude Creek, stay home and, I don’t know, plant flowers? You can still show up at the Serrano sets.’

‘I’m working Solitude,’ she’d answered bluntly.)

Risks to her physically too — as O’Neil had pointed out so vehemently: it was possible that their traitor would call someone like Lamont Howard, who’d show up at one of the sets with his crew and waste everybody present.

But there was nothing else to do: Dance was determined to find their betrayer.

Foster stared at the room’s ugly gray floors, and the muscles in his face flickered.

Dance added, ‘We never hoped for him directly. But getting Howard on the tape, ordering my hit?’

‘Ah, that’s righteous.’ Overby beamed.

A word she didn’t believe she’d ever heard Overby say. He seemed to mull the line over and was embarrassed.

But Dance smiled his way. He was right. It was righteous. And a lot more.

Overby looked at his watch. Golf? Or maybe he was considering with some dismay the call to Sacramento, the CBI chief, to tell them the traitor came from the hallowed halls of their own agency. ‘Keep going, Kathryn. Convince him of the futility of his silence. Convince him of the shining path of confession. Whatever he says or doesn’t, the media’ll be here soon. You’ll be at the podium with me, I hope?’

Charles Overby sharing a press conference?

‘You’ve earned the limelight, Kathryn.’

‘Think I’d rather pass, Charles. It’s been a long day.’ She nodded toward Foster. ‘And this may take a while.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘I am. Yes.’ Dance turned to her prey.

A shadow in her office doorway.

Michael O’Neil stood there. Somber. His dark eyes locked on hers. Brown, green. Then he looked away.

‘Hey,’ she said.

He nodded and sat down.

‘You heard?’

‘Foster. Yeah. Complete confession. Good job.’

‘Gave up a dozen names. People we never would’ve found. Bangers in LA and Oakland. Bakersfield, Fresno too.’ Dance looked away from her computer, on which she was typing notes from the Antioch March case. The promise of paperwork stretched out, long as the Golden Gate Bridge.

Documenting the Guzman Connection sting, part of Operation Pipeline, would be next, the arrest of Steve Foster.

She’d actually thought he was the least likely suspect, given his obnoxious nature. Kathryn Dance was accustomed to the apparent being the opposite of the real. Dance had suspected mostly Carol Allerton. What state cop didn’t love bashing a fed? But now she felt guilty about that. The DEA agent had been a good ally after the first sting operation. And she was very pleased too that Jimmy Gomez, a friend, had not been the betrayer.

She now told Michael O’Neil about the finale of the sting. She, of course, didn’t add that she believed she’d been right — that had she gone in armed, had she not maintained the sham of her suspension, Foster wouldn’t have bought the scam.

Then she noted: O’Neil was listening but not listening. He regarded the photographs on her desk — the one of her with the children and the dog. The eight-by-ten of her with her husband, Bill. Whatever happened in her personal life, she was never going to put those pictures in an attic box. Displayed, always.