Текст книги "Solitude Creek"
Автор книги: Jeffery Daeaver
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Contents
Also by Jeffery Deaver
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Frenzy: Tuesday, April 4
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Baseline: Wednesday, April 5
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
The Get: Thursday, April 6
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Precautions: Friday, April 7
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Flash Mob: Saturday, April 8
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
The Secrets Club: Sunday, April 9
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
The Blood of All: Monday, April 10
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
The Last Dare: Tuesday, April 11
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Jeffery Deaver
Mistress of Justice
The Lesson of Her Death
Praying for Sleep
Speaking in Tongues
A Maiden’s Grave
The Devil’s Teardrop
The Blue Nowhere
Garden of Beasts
The Bodies Left Behind
Edge
The October List
THE RUNE SERIES
Manhattan is My Beat
Death of a Blue Movie Star
Hard News
THE LOCATION SCOUT SERIES
Shallow Graves
Bloody River Blues
Hell’s Kitchen
THE LINCOLN RHYME THRILLERS
The Bone Collector
The Coffin Dancer
The Empty Chair
The Stone Monkey
The Vanished Man
The Twelfth Card
The Cold Moon
The Broken Window
The Burning Wire
The Kill Room
The Skin Collector
THE KATHRYN DANCE THRILLERS
The Sleeping Doll
Roadside Crosses
XO
A JAMES BOND NOVEL
Carte Blanche
SHORT STORIES
Twisted
More Twisted
Trouble in Mind
www.hodder.co.uk
First published in the United States of America in 2015 by Grand Central Publishing
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
1
Copyright © Gunner Publications, LLC 2015
The right of Jeffery Deaver to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
Hardback ISBN 978 1 444 75739 2
Trade paperback ISBN 9 781 444 75740 8
Ebook ISBN 978 1 444 75741 5
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
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www.hodder.co.uk
To Libraries and Librarians everywhere …
Fear is the mind-killer.
– Frank Herbert, Dune
FRENZY
TUESDAY, APRIL 4
CHAPTER 1
The roadhouse was comfortable, friendly, inexpensive. All good.
Safe, too. Better.
You always thought about that when you took your teenage daughter out for a night of music.
Michelle Cooper did, in any event. Safe when it came to the band and their music, the customers, the wait staff.
The club itself, too, the parking lot – well lit – and the fire doors and sprinklers.
Michelle always checked these. The teenage-daughter part again.
Solitude Creek attracted a varied clientele, young and old, male and female, white and Latino and Asian, a few African Americans, a mirror of the Monterey Bay area. Now, just after seven thirty, she looked around, noting the hundreds of patrons who’d come from this and surrounding counties, all in buoyant mood, looking forward to seeing a band on the rise. If they brought with them any cares, those troubles were tucked tightly away at the prospect of beer, whimsical cocktails, chicken wings and music.
The group had flown in from LA, a garage band turned backup turned roadhouse headliner, thanks to Twitter and YouTube and Vidster. Word of mouth, and talent, sold groups nowadays, and the six boys in Lizard Annie worked as hard on their phones as onstage. They weren’t O.A.R. or Linkin Park but were soon to be, with a bit of luck.
They certainly had Michelle and Trish’s support. In fact, the cute boy band had a pretty solid mom-daughter fan base, judging by a look around the room tonight: other parents and their teenagers – the lyrics were rated PG at the raunchiest. For this evening’s show the ages of those in the audience ranged from sixteen to forty, give or take. Okay, Michelle admitted, maybe mid-forties.
She noted the Samsung in her daughter’s grip and said, ‘Text later. Not now.’
‘Mom.’
‘Who is it?’
‘Cho.’
A nice girl from Trish’s music class.
‘Two minutes.’
The club was filling up. Solitude Creek was a forty-year-old, single-story building featuring a small, rectangular dance floor of scuffed oak, ringed with high-top tables and stools. The stage, three feet high, was at the north end; the bar was opposite. A kitchen, east, served full menus, which eliminated the age barrier of attendance: only liquor-serving venues that offered food were permitted to seat children. Three fire-exit doors were against the west wall.
On the dark-wood paneling there were posters and during-the-show photos, complete with real and fake autographs, of many of the groups that had appeared at the legendary Monterey Pop Festival in June of 1967: Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Ravi Shankar, Al Kooper, Country Joe. Dozens of others. In a grimy Plexiglas case there was a fragment of an electric guitar, reportedly one destroyed by Pete Townshend of The Who after the group’s performance at the event.
The tables at Solitude Creek were first come, first claimed, and all were filled – the show was only twenty minutes away now. Presently servers circulated with last-minute orders, plates of hefty burgers and wings and drinks on trays hovering atop their stable, splayed palms. From behind the stage, a miaow of tuning guitar strings and an arpeggio chord from a sax, a chunky A from a bass. Anticipation now. Those exciting moments before the music begins to seize and seduce.
The voices were loud, words indistinct, as the untabled patrons jockeyed for the best position in the standing-room area. Since the stage wasn’t high and the floor was flat, it was sometimes hard to get a good view of the acts. A bit of jostling but few hard words.
That was the Solitude Creek club. No hostility.
Safe …
However, there was one thing that Michelle Cooper didn’t care for. The claustrophobia. The ceilings in the club were low and that accentuated the closeness. The dim room was not particularly spacious, the ventilation not the best; a mix of body scent, aftershave and perfume clung, stronger even than grill and fry-tank aromas, adding to the sense of confinement. The sense that you were packed in tight as canned fish. No, that never sat well with Michelle Cooper.
She brushed absently at her frosted blonde hair, looked again at the exit doors – not far away – and felt reassured.
Another sip of wine.
She noted Trish checking out a boy at a table nearby. Floppy hair, narrow face, skinny hips. Good looks to kill for. He was drinking a beer so Mother vetoed Trish’s inclination instantly, if silently. Not the alcohol, the age: the drink meant he was over twenty-one and therefore completely out of bounds for her seventeen-year-old.
Then she thought wryly: At least I can try.
A glance at her diamond Rolex. Five minutes.
Michelle asked, ‘Was it “Escape”, the one that was nominated for the Grammy?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Focus on me, child.’
The girl grimaced. ‘Mom.’ She looked away from the Boy with the Beer.
Michelle hoped Lizard Annie would do the song tonight. ‘Escape’ was not only catchy but brought back good memories. She’d been listening to it after a recent first date with a lawyer from Salinas. In the six years since a vicious divorce, Michelle had had plenty of awkward dinners and movies, but the evening with Ross had been fun. They’d laughed. They’d dueled about the best Veep and Homeland episodes. And there’d been no pressure – for anything. So very rare for a first date.
Mother and daughter ate a bit more artichoke dip and Michelle had a little more wine. Driving, she allowed herself two glasses before getting behind the wheel, no more.
The girl adjusted her pink floral headband and sipped a Diet Coke. She was in black jeans, not too tight – yay! – and a white sweater. Michelle was in blue jeans, tighter than her daughter’s, though that was a symptom of exercise failure, and a red silk blouse.
‘Mom. San Francisco this weekend? Please. I need that jacket.’
‘We’ll go to Carmel.’ Michelle spent plenty of her real-estate commissions shopping in the classy stores of the picturesque and excessively cute village.
‘Jeez, Mom, I’m not thirty.’ Meaning ancient. Trish was simply stating the more or less accurate fact that shopping for cool teen clothes wasn’t easy on the Peninsula, which had been called, with only some exaggeration, a place for the newly wed and nearly dead.
‘Okay. We’ll work it out.’
Trish hugged her and Michelle’s world glowed.
She and her daughter had had their hard times. A seemingly good marriage had crashed, thanks to cheating. Everything torn apart. Frederick (never Fred) moving out when the girl was eleven – what a tough time for a break-up to happen. But Michelle had worked hard to create a good life for her daughter, to give her what had been yanked away by betrayal and the subsequent divorce.
And now it was working. Now the girl seemed happy. She looked at her daughter with moon eyes and the girl noticed.
‘Mom, like what?’
‘Nothing.’
Lights down.
PA announcements about shutting off phones, fire exits and so on were made by the owner of the club himself, the venerable Sam Cohen, an icon in the Monterey Bay area. Everybody knew Sam. Everybody loved Sam.
Cohen’s voice continued, ‘And now, ladies and gentlemen, Solitude Creek, the premier roadhouse on the west coast …’
Applause.
‘… is pleased to welcome, direct from the City of Angels … Lizard Annie!’
Frantic clapping now. Hooting.
Out came the boys. Guitars were plugged in. The seat behind the drum set occupied. Ditto the keyboard.
The lead singer tossed his mass of hair aside and lifted an outstretched palm to the audience. The group’s trademark gesture. ‘Are we ready to get down?’
Howling.
‘Well, are we?’
The guitar riffs started. Yes! The song was ‘Escape’. Michelle and her daughter began to clap, along with the hundreds of others in the small space. The heat had increased, the humidity, the embracing scent of bodies. Claustrophobia notched up a bit. Still, Michelle smiled and laughed.
The pounding beat continued, bass, drum and the flesh of palms.
But then Michelle stopped clapping. Frowning, she looked around, cocking her head. What was that? The club, like everywhere in California, was supposed to be non-smoking. But somebody, she was sure, had lit up. She definitely smelled smoke.
She looked around but saw no one with a cigarette in their mouth.
‘What?’ Trish called, seeing her mother’s troubled expression.
‘Nothing,’ the woman replied, and began clapping out the rhythm once again.
CHAPTER 2
At the third word into the second song – it happened to be ‘love’ – Michelle Cooper knew something was wrong.
She smelled the smoke more strongly. And it wasn’t cigarette smoke. Smoke from burning wood or paper.
Or the old, dry walls or flooring of a very congested roadhouse.
‘Mom?’ Trish was frowning, looking around too. Her pert nose twitched. ‘Is that …’
‘I smell it too,’ Michelle whispered. She couldn’t see any fumes but the smell was unmistakable and growing stronger. ‘We’re leaving. Now.’ Michelle stood fast.
‘Hey, lady,’ a man called, catching the stool and righting it. ‘You okay?’ Then he frowned. ‘Jesus. Is that smoke?’
Others were looking around, smelling the same.
No one else in the venue, none of the two hundred or so others – employees or patrons or musicians – existed. Michelle Cooper was getting her daughter out of there. She steered Trish toward the nearest fire-exit door.
‘My purse,’ Trish said over the music. The Brighton bag, a present from Michelle, was hidden on the floor beneath the table – just to be safe. The girl broke away to retrieve the heart-embossed bag.
‘Forget it, let’s go!’ her mother commanded.
‘I’ll just be …’ the girl began and bent down.
‘Trish! No! Leave it.’
By now, a dozen people nearby, who’d seen Michelle’s abrupt rise and lurch toward the exit, had stopped paying attention to the music and were looking around. One by one they were also rising. Curious and troubled expressions on their faces. Smiles becoming frowns. Eyes narrowing. Something predatory, feral about the gazes.
Five or six oozed between Michelle and her daughter, who was still rummaging for the purse. Michelle stepped forward fast and went for the girl’s shoulder to pull her up. Hand gripped sweater. It stretched.
‘Mom!’ Trish pulled away.
It was then that a brilliant light came on, focused on the exit doors.
The music stopped abruptly. The lead singer called into the microphone, ‘Hey, uhm, guys, I don’t know … Look, don’t panic.’
‘Jesus, what’s—’ somebody beside Michelle shouted.
The screams began. Wails filled the venue, loud, nearly loud enough to shatter eardrums.
Michelle struggled to get to Trish but more patrons surged between them. The two were pushed in different directions.
An announcement on the PA: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, there’s a fire. Evacuate! Evacuate now! Do not use the kitchen or stage exit – that’s where the fire is! Use the emergency doors.’
Howling screams now.
Patrons rose and stools fell, drinks scattered. Two high-top tables tipped over and crashed to the floor. People began moving toward the exit doors – their glowing red signs were still obvious; the smell of smoke was strong but visibility was good.
‘Trish! Over here!’ Michelle screamed. Now two dozen people were between them. Why the hell had she gone back for the damn purse? ‘Let’s get out!’
Her daughter started toward her through the crowd. But the tide of people surging for the exit doors lifted Michelle off her feet and tugged her away, while Trish was enveloped in another group.
‘Honey!’
‘Mom!’
Michelle, being dragged toward the doors, used every muscle in her body to turn toward her daughter but she was helpless, crushed between two patrons: a heavy-set man in a T-shirt, which was already savagely torn, his skin red, bearing scratch marks from fingernails, and a woman, whose fake breasts pressed painfully into Michelle’s side.
‘Trish, Trish, Trish!’
She might have been mute. The patrons’ screams and wailing – from fear and from pain – were numbing. All she could see was the head of the man in front of her and the exit sign they surged toward. Michelle pounded her fists on shoulders, on arms, on necks, on faces, just as she, too, was pounded by other patrons.
‘I have to get my daughter! Go back, go back, go back!’
But there was no stopping the tide streaming for the exits. Michelle Cooper could breathe only an ounce or two of air at a time. And the pain – in her chest, her side, her gut. Terrible! Her arms were pinned, feet suspended above the floor.
The house lights were on, bright. Michelle turned slightly – not her doing – and saw the faces of the patrons near her: eyes coin-wide in panic, crimson streaks from mouths. Had people bitten their tongues out of fear? Or was the crush snapping ribs and piercing lungs? One man, in his forties, was unconscious, skin gray. Had he fainted? Or died of a heart attack? He was still upright, though, wedged into the moving crowd.
The smell of smoke was stronger now and it was hard to breathe – maybe the fire was sucking the oxygen from the room, though she could still see no flames. Perhaps the patrons, in their panic, were depleting the air. The pressure of bodies against her chest, too.
‘Trish! Honey!’ she called, but the words were whispers. No air in, no air out.
Where was her baby? Was someone helping her escape? Not likely. Nobody, not a single soul, seemed to be helping anyone else. This was an animal frenzy. Every person was out for himself. It was pure survival.
Please …
The group of patrons she was welded to stumbled over something.
Oh, God …
Glancing down, Michelle could just make out a slim young Latina in a red-and-black dress, lying on her side, her face registering pure terror and agony. Her right arm was broken, bent backward. Her other hand was reaching up, fingers gripping a man’s pants pocket.
Helpless. She couldn’t rise; no one paid the least attention to her even as she cried out with every shuffled foot that trampled her body.
Michelle was looking right into the woman’s eyes when a booted foot stepped onto her throat. The man tried to avoid it, crying, ‘No, move back, move back,’ to those around him. But, like everyone else, he had no control of his direction, his motion, his footfalls.
Under the pressure of the weight on her throat, the woman’s head twisted even farther sideways and she began to shake fiercely. By the time Michelle had moved on, the Latina’s eyes were glazed and her tongue protruded slightly from her bright red lips.
Michelle Cooper had just seen someone die.
More PA announcements. Michelle couldn’t hear them. Not that it mattered. She had absolutely no control over anything.
Trish, she prayed, stay on your feet. Don’t fall. Please …
As the mass surrounding her stumbled closer to the fire doors, the crowd began to shift to the right and soon Michelle could see the rest of the club.
There! Yes, there was her daughter! Trish was still on her feet, though she too was pinned in a mass of bodies. ‘Trish, Trish!’
But no sound at all came from her now.
Mother and daughter were moving in opposite directions.
Michelle blinked tears and sweat from her eyes. Her group was only feet away from the exits. She’d be out in a few seconds. Trish was still near the kitchen – where somebody had just said the fire was raging.
‘Trish! This way!’
Pointless.
And then she saw a man beside her daughter lose control completely – he began pounding the face of the man next to him and started to climb on top of the crowd, as if, in his madness, he believed he could claw his way through the ceiling. He was large and one of the people he used as a launching pad was Trish, who weighed a hundred pounds less than he did. Michelle saw her daughter open her mouth to scream and then, under the man’s massive weight, vanish beneath the sea of madness.
BASELINE
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 5
CHAPTER 3
The two people sitting at the long conference table looked her over with varying degrees of curiosity.
Anything else? she wondered. Suspicion, dislike, jealousy?
Kathryn Dance, a kinesics (body language) expert, got paid to read people but law enforcers were typically hard to parse so at the moment she wasn’t sure what was flitting through their minds.
Also present was her boss, Charles Overby, though he wasn’t at the table but hovering in the doorway, engrossed in his Droid. He’d just arrived.
The four were in an interrogation-observation room on the ground floor of the California Bureau of Investigation’s West Central Division, off Route 68 in Monterey, near the airport. One of those dim, pungent chambers separated from the interrogation room by a see-through mirror that nobody, even the most naïve or stoned perps, believed was for straightening your tie or coiffing.
A no-nonsense crowd, fashion-wise. The man at the table – he’d commandeered the head spot – was Steve Foster, wearing a draping black suit and white shirt. He was the head of special investigations with the California Bureau of Investigation’s Criminal Division. He was based in Sacramento. Dance, five six and about a hundred twenty pounds, didn’t know exactly when to describe somebody as ‘hulking’ but Foster had to figure close. Broad, an impressive silver mane, and a droopy moustache that could have been waxed into a handlebar, had it been horizontal and not staple-shaped, he looked like an Old West marshal.
Perpendicular to Foster was Carol Allerton, in a bulky gray pants suit. Short hair frosted silver, black and gray, Carol Allerton was a senior DEA agent operating out of Oakland. The stocky woman had a dozen serious collars to her credit. Not legend, but respectable. She’d had the opportunity to be fast-tracked to Sacramento or even Washington but she’d declined.
Kathryn Dance was in a black skirt and white blouse of thick cotton, under a dark brown jacket, cut to obscure if not wholly hide her Glock. The only color in her ensemble was a blue band that secured the end of her dark blonde French braid. Her daughter had bound it this morning on the way to school.
‘That’s done.’ Hovering around fifty, Charles Overby looked up from his phone, on which he might’ve been arranging a tennis date or reading an email from the governor, though, given their meeting now, it was probably halfway between. The athletic if pear-shaped man said, ‘Okay, all task-forced up? Let’s get this thing done.’ He sat and opened a manila folder.
His ingratiating words were greeted with the same non-negotiable stares that had surveilled Dance a moment ago. It was pretty well known in law-enforcement circles that Overby’s main skill was, and had always been, administration, while those present were hard-core line investigators. None of whom would use the verb he just had.
Mumbles and nods of greeting.
The ‘thing’ he was referring to was an operation that was part of a statewide push to address a recent trend in gang activity. You could find organized crime everywhere in California but the main centers for gang activity were two: north and south. Oakland was the headquarters of the former, LA the latter. But rather than being rivals, the polar crews had decided to start working together, guns moving south from the Bay Area and drugs moving north. At any given moment, there would be dozens of illicit shipments coursing along Interstate-5, the 101 and the dusty, slow-moving 99.
To make it harder to track and stop these shipments, the senior bangers had hit on an idea: they’d taken to using break-bulk and way stations, where the cargo was transferred from the original tractor-trailers to dozens of smaller trucks and vans. Two hours south of Oakland and five north of LA, Salinas, with its active gang population, was perfect as a hub. Hundreds of warehouses, thousands of vehicles and produce trucks. Police interdiction nearly ground to a halt and illicit business surged. This year alone the statistics cops reported that revenue in the gun/drug operation had risen nearly a half-billion dollars.
Six months ago the CBI, FBI, DEA and local law-enforcement agencies had formed Operation Pipeline to try to stop the transportation network but had had paltry success. The bangers were so connected, smart and brazen that they constantly remained one step ahead of the good guys, who managed to bust only low-level dealers or mules with mere ounces taped to their crotches, hardly worth the bytes to process into the system. Worse, informants were ID’d, tortured and killed before any leads could be developed.
As part of Pipeline, Kathryn Dance was running what she’d dubbed the Guzman Connection and had put together a task force that included Foster, Allerton and two other officers, presently in the field. The eponymous Guzman was a massive, borderline psychotic gang-banger, who reportedly knew at least half of the transfer points in and around Salinas. As near a perfect prize as you could find in the crazy business of law enforcement.
After a lot of preliminary work, just last night Dance had texted the task force that they had their first lead to Guzman and to assemble here, now, for a briefing.
‘So, tell us about this asshole you’re going to be talking to today, the one you think’s going to give up Guzman. What’s his name? Serrano?’ From Steve Foster.
Dance replied, ‘Okay. Joaquin Serrano. He’s an innocent – what all the intel shows. No record. Thirty-two. We heard about him from a CI we’ve been running—’
‘Who’s been running?’ Foster asked bluntly. The man was adept at interruption, Dance had learned. Also, it was true that law enforcers were quite sensitive about their colleague’s attempts to poach confidential informants.
‘Our office.’
Foster grunted. Maybe he was irritated he hadn’t been informed. His flick of a finger said, Go on.
‘Serrano can link Guzman to the killing of Sad Eyes.’
The victim, actually Hector Mendoza (droopy lids had led to the nic), was a banger who knew higher-ups in both the north and south operations. That is, a perfect witness – had he remained alive.
Even cynical, sour Foster seemed content at the possibility of hanging the Sad Eyes killing on Guzman.
Overby, often good at stating the obvious, said, ‘Guzman falls, the other Pipeline crews could go like dominos.’ Then he didn’t seem to like his metaphor.
‘This witness, Serrano. Tell us more about him.’ Allerton fiddled with a yellow pad of foolscap, then seemed to realize she was doing so. She aligned the edges and set it free.
‘He’s a landscaper, works for one of the big companies in Monterey. Documented. Probably trustworthy.’
‘Probably,’ Foster said.
‘He’s here now?’ Allerton asked.
‘Outside,’ Overby replied.
Foster said, ‘Why’s he going to want to talk to us? I mean, let’s be transparent. He knows what Guzman’ll do, he finds out.’
Allerton: ‘Maybe he wants money – maybe he’s got somebody in the system he wants us to help.’
Dance said, ‘Or maybe he wants to do the right thing.’ Drawing a laugh from Foster. She, too, gave a faint grin. ‘I’m told it happens occasionally.’
‘He came in voluntarily?’ Allerton wondered aloud.
‘He did. I just called him up. He said yes.’
‘So,’ Overby inquired, ‘we’re relying on his good graces to help us?’
‘More or less.’ The phone against the wall hummed. Dance rose and answered it. ‘Yes?’
‘Hey, boss.’
The caller was a thirtyish CBI agent in the West Central Division. He was Dance’s junior associate, though that was not an official job description. TJ Scanlon, a dependable, hardworking agent and, best put, atypical for the conservative CBI.
TJ said, ‘He’s here. Ready to go.’
‘Okay, bring him up.’ Dance dropped the phone into the cradle and said to the room. ‘Serrano’s coming in now.’
Through the mirror window, they watched the door to the interview room open. In walked TJ, slim, his curly hair more unruly than usual. He was in a plaid sports coat and red pants, which approached bell-bottoms. His T-shirt was tie-dyed, yellow and orange.
Atypical …
Following him was a tall Latino with thick, short-cut dark hair. He walked in and looked around. His jeans were slim-cut and dark blue. New. He wore a gray hoodie with ‘UCSC’ on the front.
‘Yeah,’ Foster grumbled. ‘He graduated from Santa Cruz. Right.’
Dance said stiffly, ‘Not graduated. Took courses.’
‘Hmm.’
The Latino’s right hand was inked, though it didn’t seem to be a gang sign, and on his left forearm, near the sweat jacket, you could just make out the start of a tat. His face was untroubled.
Over the speaker, they heard the young agent say, ‘There you go. There. Take a seat. You want some water?’
The somber man said, ‘No.’
‘Somebody’ll be in in a minute.’
The man nodded. He sat down in a chair facing the one-way mirror. He glanced at it once, then pulled out his cell phone and read the screen.
Foster shifted slightly. Dance didn’t need any body-language skills to understand his thoughts. She said, ‘He’s just a witness, remember. We don’t have a warrant to intercept. He hasn’t done anything wrong.’
‘Oh, he’s done something wrong,’ Foster said. ‘We just don’t know what yet.’
She glanced at him.
‘I can smell it.’
Dance rose, slipped her Glock out of its holster and set it on the table. She picked up her pen and a pad of yellow paper.
Time to go to work and uncover the truth.
