Jeffery Deaver: XO

“They’re good,” the singer reassured her, nodding at the iPad.

“Sure. I’ll just run it by him. You know.”

Now Kayleigh paused. Then: “Okay.”

“Acoustics good here?” asked Alicia, who had been a performer herself; she had quite a voice and a love of music, which was undoubtedly why she’d taken a job for someone like Kayleigh Towne, when the efficient, no-nonsense woman could have earned twice as much as a personal assistant for a corporate executive. She’d signed on last spring and had never heard the band perform here.

“Oh, the sound is great,” Kayleigh said enthusiastically, glancing at the ugly concrete walls. “You wouldn’t think it.” She explained how the designers of the venue, back in the 1960s, had done their homework; too many concert halls-even sophisticated ones intended for classical music-had been built by people without confidence in the natural ability of musical instruments and voices to reach the farthest seats with “direct volume,” that is, the sound emanating from the stage. Architects would add angular surfaces and free-standing shapes to boost the volume of the music, which did that but also sent the vibrations in a hundred different directions. This resulted in every performer’s acoustic nightmare, reverberation: in effect, echoes upon echoes that yielded muddy, sometimes even off-key, sounds.

Here, in modest Fresno, Kayleigh explained to Alicia, as her father had to her, the designers had trusted in the power and purity of the voice and drum skin and sounding board and reed and string. She was about to ask the assistant to join her in a chorus of one of her songs to prove her point-Alicia did great harmonies-when she noticed her looking toward the back of the hall. She assumed the woman was bored with the scientific discussion. But the frowning gaze suggested something else was on her mind.

“What?” Kayleigh asked.

“Isn’t it just us and Bobby?”

“What do you mean?”

“I thought I saw somebody.” She lifted a finger tipped in a black-painted nail. “That doorway. There.”

Just where Kayleigh herself had thought she’d seen the shadow ten minutes before.

Palms sweating, absently touching her phone, Kayleigh stared at the changing shapes in the back of the hall.

Yes… no. She just couldn’t tell.

Then shrugging her broad shoulders, one of them sporting a tattoo of a snake in red and green, Alicia said, “Hm. Guess not. Whatever it was it’s gone now… Okay, see you later. The restaurant at one?”

“Yeah, sure.”

Kayleigh listened absently to the thumping of boots as she left and continued to stare at the black doorways.

Angrily, she suddenly whispered, “Edwin Sharp.”

There I’ve said his name.

“Edwin, Edwin, Edwin.”

Now that I’ve conjured you up, listen here: Get the hell out of my concert hall! I’ve got work to do.

And she turned away from the shadowy, gaping doorway from which, of course, no one was leering at her at all. She stepped to center stage, looking over the masking tape on the dusty wood, blocking out where she would stand at different points during the concert.

It was then that she heard a man’s voice crying from the back of the hall, “Kayleigh!” It was Bobby, now rising from behind the mixing console, knocking his chair over and ripping off his hard-shell earphones. He waved to her with one hand and pointed to a spot over her head with another. “Look out!… No, Kayleigh!”

She glanced up fast and saw one of the strip lights-a seven-foot Colortran unit-falling free of its mounting and swinging toward the stage by its thick electric cable.

Stepping back instinctively, she tripped over a guitar stand she hadn’t remembered was behind her.

Tumbling, arms flailing, gasping…

The young woman hit the stage hard, on her tailbone. The massive light plummeted toward her, a deadly pendulum, growing bigger and bigger. She tried desperately to rise but fell back, blinded as the searing beams from the thousand-watt bulbs turned her way.

Then everything went black.

KATHRYN DANCE HAD several lives.

Widowed mother of two children approaching their teen years.

Agent with the California Bureau of Investigation, her specialty interrogation and kinesics-body language analysis.

Dutiful, if sometimes irreverent and exasperated, daughter to parents who lived nearby.

That was the order in which she placed these aspects of her life.

Then there was number four, which was nearly as vital to her psychic well-being as the first three: music. Like Alan Lomax in the middle of the last century, Dance was a folklorist, a song catcher. Occasionally she’d take time off, climb into her SUV, sometimes with kids and dogs, sometimes, like now, solo, and go in search of music, the way hunters take to the fields for deer or turkey.

Dance was now piloting her Pathfinder along Highway 152 from the Monterey Peninsula through a largely barren stretch of California to Fresno in the San Joaquin Valley, three hours away. This was the agricultural heart of the country and open double-trailer trucks, piled high with garlic, tomatoes, and other fruits and vegetables, rolled endlessly toward the massive food-processing plants in the hazy distance. The working fields were verdant or, if harvested already, rich black, but everything else was dry and dun as forgotten toast.

Dust swirled in the Nissan’s wake and insects died splatty deaths on the windshield.

Dance’s mission over the next few days was to record the homemade tunes of a local group of Mexican musicians, all of whom lived in or near Fresno. Most of them picked in the fields so they’d adopted the name Los Trabajadores, the Workers. Dance would record them on her digital TASCAM HD-P2, a bit more expensive than she could afford but superb, then edit and post the songs on her website, “American Tunes.”

People could download them for a small fee, of which she would send most to the musicians, and would keep enough to cover the cost of the site and to take herself and the kids out to dinner occasionally. No one got rich from the downloads but some of the groups that she and her business partner in the venture, Martine Christensen, had discovered had come to regional and even national attention.

She’d just come off a tough case in Monterey, the CBI office she was assigned to, and decided to take some time off. The children were at their music and sports camps, spending the nights with their grandparents. Dance was free to roam Fresno, Yosemite, and environs, record Los Trabajadores and look for other talent in this musically rich area. Not only Latino but a unique strain of country could be found here (there’s a reason, of course, the genre is often called country- western ). In fact the Bakersfield sound, originating in that city a few hours south of Fresno, had been a major country music movement; it had arisen in reaction to what some people thought was the overly slick productions of Nashville in the fifties. Performers like Buck Owens and Merle Haggard began the movement and it had enjoyed a recent resurgence, in the music of such artists as Dwight Yoakam and Gary Allan.

Dance sipped a Sprite and juggled radio stations. She’d considered making this trip a romantic getaway and inviting Jon Boling to come with her. But he’d just gotten a consulting assignment for a computer start-up and would be tied up for several days. And for some reason, Dance had decided she preferred to make the trip solo. The kidnapping case she’d just closed had been tough; two days ago she’d attended the funeral of the one victim they couldn’t save, in the company of the two they had.

She turned up the AC. This time of year the Monterey Peninsula was comfortable, even chilly occasionally, and she’d dressed according to her port of embarkation. In a long-sleeved gray cotton shirt and blue jeans, she was hot. She slipped off her pink-rimmed glasses and wiped them on a napkin, steering with her knees. Somehow sweat had managed to crawl down one lens. The Pathfinder’s thermometer reported 96 degrees outside.