Solitude Creek (Kathryn Dance 4)

Foster: "More efficient, when you think about it. We didn't really need two agents from this office. Jimmy Gomez is good. Don't you agree, Kathryn?"

A junior agent at the CBI, one of the two others on the Guzman Connection task force. Yes, he was good. That wasn't the point. She ignored Foster. She stood and to Overby said, "So?"

He looked at her with one raised eyebrow.

Her shoulders rose and fell impatiently. "I'm Civ-Div. So, what's on my roster?"

He looked blank for a moment. Then scoured his desk. He noted a Post-it, bright yellow, glaring as a rectangle of sun fell on it. "Here's something. Got a memo on the wire from MCFD a little while ago. About that Solitude Creek incident?"

"The fire at the roadhouse."

"That's right. The county's investigating but somebody from the state is supposed to make sure the club's tax and insurance certificates're up-to-date."

"Tax? Insurance?"

"CHP didn't want to handle it."

Who would? Dance thought.

Foster's absence of gloat was the biggest gloat she had ever seen.

"Take care of that. Then I'll see what else needs doing."

With Dance "tasked" to take on the fine print of California insurance regulations, and tacitly dismissed, Overby turned to Steve Foster to discuss the manhunt for Joaquin Serrano.

Chapter 7

First, this is interesting--there was no fire."

"No fire?" Dance asked. She was standing in front of the Solitude Creek club, which was encircled with yellow police tape. The man before her was stocky, forties, with an odd patch on his face; it looked like a birthmark but, she knew, was a scar from a blaze years ago that attacked the newly commissioned firefighter before he snuffed it dead.

She'd worked with Monterey County fire marshal Robert Holly several times and found him low-key, smart, reasonable.

He continued, "Well, there was, technically. Only it was outside. The club itself was never on fire. There, that oil drum."

Dance noted the rusty fi

fty-five-gallon vessel, the sort used for trash in parking lots and behind stores and restaurants. It rested near the club's air-conditioning unit.

"We ran a prelim. Discarded cigarette in the drum, along with some rags soaked in motor oil and gasoline. That's all it took."

"Accelerant, then," Dance said. "The oil and gas."

"That was the effect, though there's no evidence it was intentional."

"So people thought there was a fire. Smelled smoke."

"And headed to the fire exits. And that was the problem. They were blocked."

"Locked? The doors were locked?"

"No, blocked. The truck?"

He pointed to a large tractor trailer parked against the west side of the club. It too was encircled with yellow tape. "It's owned by that company there. Henderson Jobbing and Warehouse." Dance regarded the one-story sprawling structure. There were a half-dozen similar tractors and trailers sitting at the loading dock and nearby. Several men and women, in work clothes, a few in suits, stood on the dock or in front of the office and looked over at the club, as if staring at a beached whale. They were both grim and curious.

"The driver parked it there?"

"Claims he didn't. But what's he going to say? There've been other incidents of trucks blocking the roadhouse parking lot. Never a fire exit."