Solitude Creek: Kathryn Dance Book 4

by Jeffery Deaver

  ‘No!’

  ‘He tried to kill himself. He couldn’t take the panic.’

  Edie Dance looked around. ‘Is Michael here?’

  ‘He’s meeting with his crime-scene people. They’re running scenes in the basement and next door, at the inn.’

  ‘Ah.’ Edie’s eyes remained down the hall. ‘How’s he doing? Haven’t seen him for a while.’

  ‘Michael? Fine.’

  Body-language skill is such a blessing … and a curse. Her mother had something to say, and Dance wondered if she was supposed to pry it out of her. That was often the case with Edie Dance.

  But she didn’t have to.

  Her mother said, ‘I saw Anne O’Neil the other day.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘She was with the kids. At Whole Foods. Or does she go by her maiden name now?’

  Dance touched her sore face. ‘No, she kept O’Neil.’

  ‘Thought she was living in San Francisco.’

  ‘Last I heard she was.’

  ‘So Michael hasn’t mentioned anything about it?’

  ‘No. But we haven’t had much of chance for personal conversation.’ She nodded at the elevator. ‘The case and all.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  Dance sometimes wondered where her mother’s loyalties lay. Recently Edie had been fast to tell her that Boling appeared to be moving away – without having mentioned anything to Dance. As it turned out, he only had a business trip and was planning to take Dance and the children with him for part of it – a mini-vacation in Southern California. True, Edie had her daughter’s and grandchildren’s interests at heart but Dance thought she’d been a bit too fast to relay what turned out to be a misunderstanding.

  Now she was telling Dance that the man who’d once been a potential partner might not be as divorced as he seemed to be. But Edie was not a gossip or a sniper. So, Dance speculated, this would have to do with protecting her daughter’s heart, as any good parent would do. Though the information was irrelevant, of course. She was Jon Boling’s partner now.

  Edie expected her to say something more on the topic, she sensed. But Dance chose to deflect: ‘Maggie’s going to sing in the show after all.’

  ‘Really? Wonderful. What changed her mind?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Children were mysteries and you could go nuts trying to figure out patterns.

  ‘Your dad and I’ll be there. What time is it again?’

  ‘Seven.’

  ‘Dinner after?’

  ‘I think that should work.’

  Her mother was looking at her critically. ‘And, Katie, I’d really get that face taken care of.’

  ‘A lift?’ Dance asked.

  Mother and daughter smiled.

  Her phone buzzed. Ah, at last.

  ‘Jon, where’ve you been? We—’

  ‘Is this Kathryn?’ A man’s voice. Not Boling’s.

  Her heart went cold. ‘Yes. Who’s this?’

  ‘I’m Officer Taylor, Carmel Police. I found you on Mr Boling’s speed-dial list. You’re a friend, a co-worker?’

  ‘Yes. Friend. I’m Kathryn Dance. Special agent with the CBI.’

  A pause. Then: ‘Oh. Agent Dance.’

  ‘What’s happened?’ Dance whispered. She was deluged with an ice-cold memory – of the trooper calling her after her husband had been killed.

  ‘I’m afraid I have to tell you that Mr Boling’s been in an accident.’

  CHAPTER 66

  Antioch March was back in his suite at the Cedar Hills Inn.

  He’d finished the workout at the inn’s luxurious health club and was enjoying a pineapple juice in his room, watching the news reports of the event at the hospital.

  Not a single fatality.

  Antioch March was mildly disappointed but the Get was satisfied. For the time being. Always for the time being.

  Somebody’s not happy …

  His phone rang. Both caller and callee were on new burner phones. But he knew who it was: his boss. Christopher Jenkins ran the Hand to Heart website. He gave March his assignments to travel to non-profit humanitarian groups, who would then sign up for the site. Jenkins also arranged for March’s other jobs, which were the real moneymakers for the company.

  ‘Hi,’ he said.

  No names, of course.

  ‘Just wanted to tell you, the client’s extremely satisfied.’

  ‘Good.’ What else was there to say? March had done what he’d been contracted to do in the Monterey area. He’d also eliminated evidence and witnesses and cut all ties that could potentially link the incident to the client, who was paying Jenkins a great deal of money for March’s services. The client wasn’t the nicest guy in the world – in fact, he could be quite a prick – but one thing about him: he paid well and on time.

  ‘He’s sent eighty percent. It’s gone through proper channels.’

  Bitcoin and the other weird new payment systems were clever in theory as a mechanism to pay anonymously for the sort of work that March performed but they were coming under increasing scrutiny. So Jenkins – the businessman in the operation – had decided to resort to good old-fashioned cash. ‘Channels’ meant he’d received a FedEx box containing ‘documents’, which in a way it did, though each document would have a picture of Benjamin Franklin on it.

  Antioch March had eight safe-deposit boxes around the country, each with about a million inside it.

  Jenkins continued, ‘Wanted to tell you. Found a restaurant we have to try. Foie gras is the best. I mean, the best. And they serve the Château d’Yquem in Waterford. Oh, and the red wine? Pétrus.’ A chuckle. ‘We had two bottles.’

  March didn’t know the wines but he assumed they were expensive. Maybe Jenkins had even poured some for him in the past. The two men had worked together for about six years, and from day one, Jenkins had treated March to fancy dinners, like the one he was describing now. They were okay. But the elaborate meals didn’t really move March, in the same way the Vuitton and the Coach and the Italian suits didn’t. He accepted the gifts but was forever surprised that Jenkins didn’t notice his indifference. Or maybe he did but didn’t care. Just like March’s lethargy at certain other times, in his connection with Jenkins.

  His boss now added, ‘Just had a proposal. I’ll tell you about it when I’m out.’

  They were always vague when they were on the phone. Yes, these were prepaid mobiles but listenable to if one were inclined to listen, and traceable if one were inclined to trace.

  And people like Kathryn Dance would be more than happy to do both.

  ‘I’ll be in tomorrow night,’ Jenkins said.

  ‘Good.’ March tried to be enthusiastic. There was another reason Jenkins was coming to the inn, of course. Which March could have done without. But he could live with it: anything for the Get.

  ‘Thanks again for all your work. This is a good one. This’s a winner. And it’ll open up a lot of doors for us. Well, think we’ve been talking long enough. Night.’

  They hung up.

  March checked the news, but there was nothing yet about Jon Boling’s death due to a bicycle malfunction. He supposed that with both brakes out the bike would have been doing fifty or sixty when Dance’s boyfriend had slammed into the traffic or rocks at Carmel Beach. March wasn’t sure exactly how close Dance was to Boling but he knew he was more than a casual date; in her Pathfinder, at the Bay View Center, he’d found a card he’d sent her. A silly thing, funny. Signed, Love, J. March had noted the return address and driven there straight from the scene of the attack.

  Motivated by both a need to distract the huntress and a bit of jealousy (he found he desired Kathryn even more than Calista), he’d waited outside Boling’s house, planning to beat him to death, a robbery gone wrong. Or coma him, at the least. But the man still hadn’t returned when March got the text about foolish Stan Prescott down in Orange County and he’d had to leave.

  He’d followed Boling later and decided he liked the idea of a
bike accident better than an obvious attack.

  March looked at his shaved scalp in the mirror. He didn’t like it. He looked a bit like Chris Jenkins, now he thought about it. And reflected that it was ironic that Jenkins – former military, crack shot, familiar with all sorts of weapons, with friends among the security and mercenary crowd – was the businessman who never got out into the field to run the assignments.

  And Antioch March, who was essentially a misplaced academic, was the one fulfilling them.

  But it worked to everybody’s advantage. Jenkins lacked the finesse to set up the deaths the way March did, the intellect to foresee what the police and witnesses would do.

  March, on the other hand, had no talent for dealing with clients. Negotiating, vetting to make sure they were not law, structuring payment terms, maintaining the Hand to Heart website.

  March finished his juice.

  The client is extremely satisfied …

  Which, March thought, was the ultimate goal of his father, the salesman, as well.

  He flopped down in the sumptuous bed. He had many plans to make. But at the moment he preferred his thoughts to dwell upon … who else? The captivating Kathryn Dance.

  CHAPTER 67

  At CBI headquarters once more.

  Dance had hit the restroom to scrub the face wound but she assessed it as minor. A little sting. There’d be a bruise. Nothing more.

  She turned the corner to the Gals’ Wing. It being the weekend, the office wasn’t staffed with assistants. She walked past Maryellen Kresbach’s station and into her own office.

  ‘Hey.’ Jon Boling, sitting in the chair across the desk, smiled.

  ‘Jon!’ She strode to him fast and started to throw her arms around his shoulders, then saw him wince in anticipation. She stopped. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Fine. Relatively speaking. But sore. Really sore.’ His face was bruised and he had two bandages, on his cheek and neck. His wrist was wrapped in beige elastic.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Lost the brakes on Ocean.’

  The main street leading down to the beach in Carmel. Very steep.

  ‘No!’

  ‘They felt funny, when I started off, so I got about a half-block from the store … the store I was at and I pulled over. That’s when they popped. Both of the brake shoes.’

  ‘Jon!’

  ‘I steered into bushes, and that slowed me down. Went through them and hit the curb and a car at the stop sign.’

  ‘The brakes?’ she asked. ‘You think they were tampered with?

  ‘Tampered with? Why would … Oh. Your unsub, you’re thinking?’

  ‘Maybe. To slow me down, distract me.’

  ‘But how did he put us together?’

  ‘Nothing about this guy would surprise me. You notice anybody near your bike?’

  ‘No. I had an errand. Left the bike outside. Only five minutes. I wasn’t paying any attention.’ Then Boling was looking her over. ‘But … what happened to you?’

  ‘Nothing critical. I got banged up getting into an elevator.’

  ‘Well, that must have been quite an entrance.’

  She told him of the latest attack. ‘Nobody hurt badly.’

  Then her eyes strayed to what was on her desk in front of him: Stan Prescott’s Asus computer. Beside it was a portable hard drive. ‘You cracked it?’

  ‘Well, my partner did.’

  ‘Partner?’

  ‘Lily.’

  Dance glanced at him with a playful frown. ‘Lily. Is this where I start to be jealous?’

  ‘Ah, Lily … My main squeeze. She’s a second-generation Blue Gene/P four-way symmetric multiprocessor supercomputer with node-to-node logic communication. But as sexy as that is, you’ve got a better body.’

  At that moment O’Neil walked through the door. He blinked. That wasn’t – it seemed – a reaction to Boling’s comment about Dance. He was staring at the bandages and bruises. ‘Jon, Jesus. What happened?’

  ‘The dangers of going green. Bike accident. Banged up a little. I was lucky.’

  Dance said, ‘Maybe intentional.’

  ‘So he knows who’s out to stop him,’ O’Neil said to Dance. ‘I’ll order a protective detail to keep an eye on your place.’

  Not a bad idea. She’d also make sure the children didn’t go anywhere alone. Certainly Wes couldn’t take any more bike rides with Donnie. Not until the unsub was caught.

  O’Neil had his mobile out. He said to Boling, ‘I’ll order one for you too, if you want.’

  There was a pause. Dance said, ‘Just one. For my house is fine.’

  ‘Sure.’ And O’Neil phoned the request in. After a brief conversation he hung up. ‘There’ll be an undercover out front in the evenings. Random drive-bys too. During the day.’ He had ordered protection for her parents too.

  She thanked him. Then glanced toward Boling. ‘Jon got into Stan Prescott’s computer. And phone.’

  ‘Great.’

  Boling handed her the small USB-powered hard drive. The computer forensic protocol was that you backed up the suspect’s drive onto an external because there were often software booby traps in the computer itself.

  She plugged it in and nodded at her keyboard. He took over.

  ‘I’ve got access to Prescott’s emails and the websites he visited. You should review it yourself but I didn’t see any connection to the Solitude Creek incident or Bay View. No personal connection, I mean. He didn’t correspond with anybody about them – and he didn’t delete anything about them either. I reconstructed the deleted files. All of them. Looks like he downloaded the pictures of Solitude Creek from a pay site.’

  ‘Pay site? What’s that? I thought they were from a TV newscast.’

  ‘They were originally. But somebody uploaded them to a commercial site where members can see graphic violence – stills and movies. Do you know about them?’

  Neither Dance nor O’Neil did.

  ‘Oh, well, here, take a look.’ He hesitated a moment. ‘You’d better brace yourself.’

  ‘Brace?’

  He typed and a page loaded.

  Dance’s eyes widened. ‘Oh, my. What’s this?’

  O’Neil walked around and stood on Dance’s other side. The three of them stared at the website. It was called Cyber-Necro.com and the opening graphic revealed a computer-generated image of a man plunging a knife into the belly of a buxom woman strapped down to a medieval table.

  Boling said, ‘It’s a pay site devoted to graphic images of murder and rape victims, disasters, crimes scenes, accidents, medical procedures. The Solitude Creek pictures were in the section on “Theater and Sporting Events Deaths”.’

  ‘That’s actually a category?’

  ‘Yep. People pay a lot of money to see those pictures and videos. I couldn’t tell you why. Maybe a shrink could. Voyeurism, sexual, sadistic. Who knows? I’ve gotten quite an education in the past few hours. There’re hundreds of sites like this. I might write a paper on it. Some sites are like this one.’ He nodded at the screen. ‘Real deaths and injuries. But you can also get custom-made videos. Actresses – usually actresses – being shot or stabbed or hit by arrows. Strangulation and asphyxia’re popular too. Sexual assaults. Some hard-core. And the weapons? The special effects’re good. Shockingly good. You’d almost think the women were actually being killed but they keep appearing in other clips. It seems some men have favorite actresses they want to see killed. Over and over.’

  O’Neil whispered, ‘I’ve never heard of this.’

  ‘A whole underground, I found.’ Boling typed. ‘Here’re the pictures of Solitude Creek.’

  The page on Cyber-Necro.com showing pictures of the disaster had about fifteen pictures. Most were from the media, shot afterward, depicting blood. Some were bad phone videos, low resolution, taken inside during the crush.

  Dance and O’Neil glanced at each other. They’d both be thinking the same thing: was there anything in the videos or pictures that might help the case?


  ‘How can we watch the videos?’ Dance asked.

  ‘You join. A hundred a month and you can download whatever you want.’

  Dance went to the home page and signed up.

  Boling added, ‘If you want, you can get a discount if you join Cyber-Necro’s sister site at the same time.’

  ‘What’s that?’ she asked.

  Boling smiled. ‘I think it’s called Sluts-On-Demand.’

  Dance nodded. ‘Probably just the one. It’s going to be hard enough to get Charles to sign off on my expense account as it is.’

  In a half-hour they’d downloaded all of the clips and images of Solitude Creek. She wondered who’d taken the videos. During the canvassing she’d asked if anyone had done so; no one admitted it, perhaps not wishing to seem heartless.

  But they found nothing helpful. The images, video and still, were low resolution and murky. No clues.

  One picture Dance stared at for a long moment. It was a still image similar to the one Prescott had used for his phony jihad rant on Vidster. It showed the interior of the club, taken several days after the event, according to the time stamp.

  ‘What?’ O’Neil asked, seeing her face.

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t place that face.’ She pointed. Although the focus of the pictures was the bloodstains, in the mirror behind the bar you could see several faces. They were indistinct but the one she indicated was fairly visible.

  ‘It’s the US Congressman.’

  ‘Congressman?’

  ‘Nashima. Daniel Nashima. He must’ve come back to examine the club after the police released the scene.’

  Boling said, ‘If it’s an election year, he’ll be talking about reforms in fire codes and all that. Not to be cynical.’

  Dance said, ‘Really appreciate all this. Thanks, Jon.’

  ‘Wish I’d been more helpful.’

  ‘That’s the thing about policing,’ O’Neil said. ‘Even when it doesn’t pan out, you’ve got to do the work anyway.’

  So Prescott’s computer was a bust. But then Dance asked, ‘What about the unsub’s phone?’

  The burner he’d dropped during the pursuit in Orange County.

  ‘It’s a prepaid from a Chicago exchange.’