Solitude Creek (Kathryn Dance 4)

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, blond 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 into 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."

Chapter 8

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

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 here, about half of whom had been patrons there that night, she learned. They'd returned to leave flowers, to leave cards. And to get answers themselves. 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 these 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 fiance 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 white, chubby 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 or twleve 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 here. The club and the warehouse shared a parking lot, though signs clearly marked which areas were for patrons of Solitude Creek and which were 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 here. 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?

More likely the vehicle had rolled and come to rest where it did; the warehouse, to the south of the club, was a higher elevation and the lot sloped downward to here, where it leveled out. The heavy truck had gotten as far as the side wall and slowed to a stop, she supposed.

Dance walked to the warehouse now, a hundred feet away, where the office door was marked with a handmade sign: CLOSED. The people she'd seen moments ago were now gone.

She gripped the knob and pulled. Locked--though lights were visible inside through a tear in a window shade, and she could see movement.

A loud rap on the glass. "Bureau of Investigation. Please open the door."

Nothing.

Another rap, harder.

The shade moved aside, a middle-aged man, unruly brown hair, glared. His eyes scanned her ID and he let her in.

The lobby was what one would expect of a midsize transport company squatting off a secondary highway. Scuffed, functional, filled with Sears and Office Depot furniture, black and chrome and gray. Scheduling boards, posted government regulations. Lots of paper. The smell of diesel fumes or grease was prominent.