Solitude Creek (Kathryn Dance 4)

For the family.

He doled out bills and didn't tell her that after his business was concluded here he wouldn't be coming back to the area again for quite a long time, if ever.

When March looked up, the couple and their children were gone.

It would be a busy day tomorrow. Time to get back to the inn.

His phone hummed with an e-mail.

At last.

It was from a commercial service that ran DMV checks. The answer he'd been waiting for.

That morning as he'd enjoyed the Egg McMuffin and coffee parked near the multiplex that would have been his next target, March had noted an assortment of police cars and--this was curious--a gray Nissan Pathfinder.

He couldn't learn anything from the other vehicles or the uniformed or sports-coated men who climbed out of them. But the occupant of the Pathfinder, that was a different story. It wasn't an official car. Not a government plate. And no bumper stickers bragging about children, no Jesus fish. A private car.

But the driver was official. He could tell that, from the way she strode up to the officers. The way they answered her questions, sometimes looking away. March was at a distance but he supposed she had a fierce gaze. Intense, at least.

Her posture, upright. March had sensed instinctively that this woman was one of the main investigators trying to find him.

The search had revealed that the Pathfinder belonged to one Kathryn Dance.

A lovely name. Compelling.

He pictured her again and felt a stirring low in his belly. The Get was unspooling. It too was growing interested in Ms. Dance. They both wanted to know more about her. They wanted to know all about her.

FRIDAY, APRIL 7

Precautions

Chapter 27

Never rains but it pours," Michael O'Neil offered, walking into Dance's office.

TJ Scanlon, who was sitting down across from her desk, glanced at the solid detective. "I never quite got that. Does it mean, 'We're in a desert area, so it doesn't rain but sometimes there's a downpour, so we get flooded. Because, you know, there's no ground cover'?"

"I don't know. All I mean is: My plate's filling up."

"With rain?" TJ asked.

"A homicide."

"Oh. Sorry." TJ often walked a fine line between jovial and flippant.

Dance asked, "The missing farmer? Otto Grant?" She was thinking of the possible suicide, the man distraught about losing his land to the eminent domain action by the state. She couldn't imagine what the man had gone through--losing a farm that had been in his family for so many years. She and the children had been at Safeway recently and she'd noticed yet more eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheets of paper, attention-getting yellow, with Grant's picture on them.

Have you seen this man?...

O'Neil shook his head. "No, no, I mean another case altogether." He handed Dance a half-dozen crime scene photos. "Jane Doe. Found this morning at the Cabrillo Beach Inn."

A dive of a place, Dance knew. North of Monterey.

"Prints came back negative."

The photos were of a young woman who'd been dead about seven or eight hours, to guess from the lividity. She was pretty. She had been pretty.

"COD?"