Solitude Creek (Kathryn Dance 4)

"Sure."

They walked to the door.

"'Night."

Then he was walking down the front steps of the porch, which creaked under his weight. He turned back and waved.

Dance checked the house, securing it, as always. She'd made enemies in her job over the years, and now, in particular, she could be in the sights of any of the gangs being targeted by Operation Pipeline. From Oakland to L.A.

And by the Solitude Creek unsub too. A man who had used panic as a weapon to murder in a horrific way.

Then into and out of the bathroom quickly, change to PJs, then lugging her gun safe from floor to bedside table. A true Civ-Div officer, she couldn't pack on the job but in her own home nothing was going to stop her from triple-tapping an intruder with her Glock 26.

She lay back in bed, lights out. Refusing to let the images of the crime scene affect her, though this was difficult. They returned on their own. The bloodstain in the shape of a heart. The brown pool outside the exit door, where, perhaps, the girl had lost her arm.

Really talented...

Tough images reeling through her head, high-def. Dance called this "assault by memory."

She listened to the wind and could just hear a whisper of the ocean.

Alone, tonight Dance was thinking of the name of the rivulet near the roadhouse. Solitude Creek. She wondered why the name. Did it have a meaning other than the obvious, that the stream ran through an out-of-the-way portion of the county, edged with secluding weeds and rushes and hidden by hills?

Solitude...

The word, its sound and meaning both, spoke to her now. And yet how absurd was that? Solitude was not an aspect of her life. Hardly. She had the children, she had her parents, her friends, the Deck.

She had Jon Boling.

How could she be experiencing solitude?

Maybe, she thought wryly, because...

Because...

But then she told herself: Enough. Your mood's just churned up by these terrible deaths and injuries. That's all. Nothing more.

Solitude, solitude...

Finally, strength of will, she managed to fling the word away, just as the children would do with snowballs on those rare, rare occasions when the hills of Carmel Valley were blanketed white.

THURSDAY, APRIL 6

The Get

Chapter 19

No. Oh, no...

Having deposited the children at school and nursed a coffee in the car while having a good-morning chat with Jon Boling, Kathryn Dance was halfway to CBI headquarters when she heard the news.

"...authorities in Sacramento are now saying that the Solitude Creek roadhouse tragedy may have been carried out intentionally. They're searching for an unknown subject--that is, in police parlance, an unsub--who is a white male, under forty years of age, with brown hair. Medium build. Over six feet tall. He was last seen wearing a green jacket with a logo of some type."

"Jesus my Lord," she muttered.

She grabbed her iPhone, fumbled it, lunged but then decided against trying to retrieve the unit. This angry, she'd be endangering both her career and her life to text what she wanted to.

In ten minutes she was parking in the CBI lot--actually left skid marks, albeit modest ones, on the asphalt. A deep breath, thinking, thinking--there were a number of land mines to negotiate here--but then the anger lifted its head and she was out the door and storming inside.