Jeffery Deaver: Solitude Creek

Dance had spotted a security camera. ‘Was there video? Security video?’

‘Nothing outside. Inside, yes, there’s a camera.’

‘Could I see it, please?

This was her Crim-Div mind working.

Sometimes you can’t leash yourself...

Cohen cast a last look around the room, then stepped into the lobby, clutching the box of survivors’ tokens he’d collected. He held it gingerly, as if a tight grip would mean bad luck for the hospitalized owners. She saw wallets, keys, shoes, a business card in his grasp.

Dance followed, Holly behind. Cohen’s office was decorated with posters about the appearances of obscure performers — and many from the Monterey Pop Festival — and was cluttered with the flotsam of a small entertaining venue: crates of beer, stacks of invoices, souvenirs (T-shirts, cowboy hats, boots, a stuffed rattlesnake, dozens of mugs given away by radio stations). So many items. The accumulation set Dance’s nerves vibrating.

Cohen went to the computer and sat down. He stared at the desk for a moment, a piece of paper; she couldn’t see what was written on it. She positioned herself in front of the monitor. She steeled herself. In her job as investigator with the CBI, most of her work was backroom. She talked to suspects after the deeds had been done. She was rarely in the field and never tactical. Yes, one could analyze the posture of a dead body and derive forensic insights but Dance had rarely been called on to do so. Most of her work involved the living. She wondered what her reaction to the video would be.

It wasn’t good.

The quality of the tape was so-so and a pillar obscured a portion of the image. She recalled the camera and thought it had been positioned differently but apparently not. At first she was looking at a wide-angle slice of tables and chairs and patrons, servers with trays. Then the lights dimmed, though there was still enough light to see the room.

There was no sound. Dance was grateful for that.

At 8:11:11 on the time stamp, people began to move. Standing up, looking around. Pulling out phones. At that point the majority of the patrons were concerned, that was obvious, but their facial expressions and body language revealed only that. No panic.

But at 8:11:17, everything changed. Merely six seconds later. As if they’d all been programed to act at the same instant, the patrons surged en masse toward the doors. Dance couldn’t see the exits: they were behind the camera, out of the frame. She could, however, see people slamming against each other and the wall, desperate to escape from the unspeakable fate of burning to death. Pressing against each other, harder, harder, in a twisting mass, spiraling like a slow-moving hurricane. Dance understood: those at the front were struggling to move clockwise to get away from the people behind them. But there was no place to go.

‘My,’ Bob Holly, the fire marshal, whispered.

Then, to Dance’s surprise, the frenzy ended fast. It seemed that sanity returned, as if a spell had been sloughed off. The masses broke up and patrons headed for the accessible exits — this would be the front lobby, the stage and the kitchen.

Two bodies were visible on the floor, people huddled over them. Trying pathetically ineffective revival techniques. You can hardly use CPR to save someone whose chest has been crushed, their heart and lungs pierced.

Dance noted the time stamp.

8:18:29.

Seven minutes. Start to finish. Life to death.

Then a figure stumbled back into view.

‘That’s her,’ Bob Holly whispered. ‘The music student.’

A young woman, blonde and extraordinarily beautiful, gripped her right arm, which ended at her elbow. She staggered back toward one of the partially open doors, perhaps looking for the severed limb. She got about ten feet into view, then dropped to her knees. A couple ran to her, the man pulling his belt off, and together they improvised a tourniquet.

Without a word, Sam Cohen stood and walked back to the doorway of his office. He paused there. Looked out over the debris-strewn club, realized he was holding a Hello Kitty phone and put it in his pocket. He said, to no one, ‘It’s over with, you know. My life’s over. It’s gone. Everything... You never recover from something like this. Ever.’

Outside the club, Dance slipped the copies of the up-to-date tax- and insurance-compliance certificates into her purse, effectively ending her assignment there.

Time to leave. Get back to the office.

But she chose not to.

Unleashed...

Kathryn Dance decided to stick around Solitude Creek and ask some questions of her own.

She made the rounds of the three dozen people there, about half of whom had been patrons that night, she learned. They’d returned to leave flowers, to leave cards. And to get answers. Most asked her more questions than she did them.

‘How the hell did it happen?’

‘Where did the smoke come from?’

‘Was it a terrorist?’

‘Who parked the truck there?’

‘Has anybody been arrested?’

Some of those people were edgy, suspicious. Some were raggedly hostile.

As always, Dance deferred responding, saying it was an ongoing investigation. This group — the survivors and relatives, rather than the merely curious, at least — seemed aggressively dissatisfied with her words. One blonde, bandaged on the face, said her fiancé was in critical care. ‘You know where he got injured? His balls. Somebody trampled him, trying to get out. They’re saying we may never have kids now!’

Dance offered genuine sympathy and asked her few questions. The woman was in no mood to answer.

She spotted a couple of men in suits circulating, one white, one Latino, each chatting away with people from their respective language pools, handing out business cards. Nothing she could do about it. First Amendment — if that was the law that protected the right of scummy lawyers to solicit clients. A glare to the chubby white man, dusty suit, was returned with a slick smile. As if he’d given her the finger.

Everything that those who’d returned here told her echoed what she’d learned from Holly and Cohen. It was the same story from different angles, the constant being how shockingly fast a group of relaxed folks in a concert snapped and turned into wild animals, their minds possessed by panic.

She examined the oil drum where the fire had started. It was about twenty feet from the back of the roadhouse, near the air-conditioning unit. Inside, as Holly had described, were ash and bits of half-burned trash.

Dance then turned to what would be the crux of the county’s investigation: the truck blocking the doors. The cab was a red Peterbilt, an older model, battered and decorated with bug dots, white and yellow and green. The trailer it hauled was about thirty feet long and, with the tractor, it effectively blocked all three emergency-exit doors. The right front fender rested an inch from the wall of the Solitude Creek club; the rear right end of the trailer was about ten inches away. The angle allowed two exit doors to open a bit but not enough for anyone to get out. On the ground beside one door Dance could see smears of blood. Perhaps that was where the pretty girl’s arm had been sheared off.

She tried to get an idea of how the truck had ended up there. The club and the warehouse shared a parking lot, though signs clearly marked which areas were for patrons of Solitude Creek and which for the trucks and employees of Henderson Jobbing. Red signs warned about ‘towing at owner’s expense’ but seemed a lethargic threat, so faded and rusty were they.

No, it didn’t make any sense for the driver to leave the truck there. The portion of the parking space where the tractors and trailers rested was half full; there was plenty of room for the driver to park the rig anywhere in that area. Why here?