Solitude Creek (Kathryn Dance 4)

Finally the asshole fell quiet.

"I say yes," said loyal Jimmy Gomez, nodding his crew-cut head.

"Can't hurt," Lu agreed.

Foster looked Stemple up and down. The urge to dice returned. Foster said, "What about you? How do you vote?"

Stemple replied, "I'm just muscle. I don't get a vote."

Foster turned and regarded the others. "You've thought this through, all of you?"

"Thought it through?" From Gomez.

"Have you? Have you really? Well. Alternative A: Dance sits on the sidelines per orders and we handle it, the Guzman Connection, the hunt for Serrano, everything. She does that and, say Serrano nails a banger or, worse, an innocent. Even then she might just survive. She can claim she didn't have the chance to fix what got broke. Or: Alternative B: She's back on the case, unofficial, and there's a screwup, hers or anybody else's, that's it. Her career is over."

Well, that was transparent enough.

> Silence.

A second vote. The results were the same.

"You?" Allerton asked.

Foster muttered something.

Gomez: "What?"

"Yeah, yeah. I'm on board. I got work to do." He swung back to his keyboard and started typing.

Chapter 25

After the Serrano mission, which had been somewhat successful, Kathryn Dance returned to the hunt for the Solitude Creek unsub.

She logged on to the National Crime Information Center to see if there were any similar incidents. The unsub was probably a repetitive actor. Had he done this before?

NCIC revealed only one crime that echoed Solitude Creek, six months ago in Fort Worth, Texas. A man had wired shut the doors of the Prairie Valley Club, a small country-western venue, and set a fire just outside the back door. Two people were killed and dozens injured in the stampede. There was no connection to her case, though, since the perp, a paranoid schizophrenic homeless man, had died after accidentally setting himself alight too.

A search of the general media sent her to similar incidents, but nothing recent. She read about the Happy Land social club fire in New York City in the nineties. Hundreds of people were packed into an illegal social club when a man who'd been ejected returned with a dollar's worth of gas and set the place on fire. Nearly ninety people died. In that case, there wasn't much of a stampede; people died so quickly in the smoke and flames that bodies were found still clutching their drinks or sitting upright on barstools.

The classic case of a deadly stampede, she found, was the Italian Hall disaster in Calumet, Michigan, in 1913. More than seventy striking mine workers and their families were killed in a crush at a Christmas party when someone yelled "Fire," though there was none. It was believed that somebody connected with the mining company that was the target of the strike started the panic.

She found a number of accidental stampedes. Particularly dangerous were sporting events--the Hillsborough Disaster in Sheffield, England, which her father had witnessed, for instance. Soccer seemed to be the most dangerous of organized sports. Three hundred people died in Chile, at Estadio Nacional, when an angered fan attacked a referee, prompting police action that panicked the attendees. Before the 1985 European Cup final at Heysel Stadium in Belgium had even begun, nearly forty fans died when Liverpool fans surged toward rival Juventus supporters. The tragedy led to a multiyear ban of English soccer teams playing on the Continent.

Even more deadly were stampedes during religious events.

During the hajj, the Islamic religious pilgrimage, thousands had died over the years when crowds panicked and surged from one event to the next. Stoning the Devil, a station of the hajj, had taken the most lives. Scores of other similar occurrences.

Dance flipped through the documents cluttering her desk. Foster's indiscretion had led to a flood of reports. Hundreds of tall, brown-haired men were also seen lurking suspiciously in the area. None of these sightings panned out. And the continued canvass of people who'd been at Solitude Creek Tuesday night yielded nothing.

By six that evening she realized she was reading the same reports over and over.

Dance grabbed her purse and walked to the parking lot to head home. She was there in a half hour. Jon Boling met her at the door, kissed her and handed her a glass of Chardonnay.

"You need it."

"Oh, you bet I do."

Dance went into the bedroom to de-cop herself. There was no gun to lockbox away tonight but she needed a shower and a change of clothes. She set the case files on her desk, stripped off the suit and stepped into steaming water. She'd been to no crime scenes other than the cineplex that day--at which there'd been no actual crime, no bodies, nothing graphic to witness; still, something about the Solitude Creek unsub made her feel unclean.