XO (8 page)

Bobby was a guitarist as well (there weren’t many roadies, techs or personal assistants in the music world who couldn’t sit in at a show if they absolutely had to). He himself thought the richness of tubes was noticeable but only when playing blues.

He now unlocked the stage door at the convention center and wheeled the big unit inside. He also had a box of light mounts and safety cables.

Thinking again of the strip light falling that morning.

Jesus …

Performing could be a dangerous business. His father had been a recording engineer in London in the sixties and seventies. Back then, the serious-minded professionals Robert Senior worked with—the Beatles and Stones, for instance—were outnumbered by crazy, self-destructive musicians who managed to kill themselves pretty frequently with drugs, liquor, cars and aggressively poor judgment. But even taking bad behavior out of the picture, performing could be dangerous. Electricity was the biggest risk—he’d known of three performers electrocuted onstage and two singers and a guitarist hit by lightning. One roadie had fallen from a high stage and broken his neck. A half dozen had died in traffic accidents, often because they fell asleep, and several had been crushed to death when gear trucks’ brakes failed and the vehicles jumped the chocks.

But a light coming unfixed? That was weird and had never happened in his years as a roadie.

And endangering Kayleigh?

He actually shivered, thinking about that.

Tonight the cavernous hall was filled with shadows cast by the exit lights. But rather than the ill ease Kayleigh had described that morning, Bobby felt a low twist of pleasure being here. He and Kayleigh had always been in near-total harmony, except for one thing. To her music was a business, a task, a profession. And concert halls were about acoustics only. For Bobby, the romantic, these places were special, almost sacred. He believed that halls like this continued to echo with the sounds of all the musicians who’d performed there. And this ugly, concrete venue in Fresno had one hell of a history. A local boy himself, Bobby had seen Dylan here and Paul Simon and U2 and Vince Gill and Union Station and Arlo Guthrie and Richard Thompson and Rosanne Cash and Sting and Garth Brooks and James Taylor and Shania and, well, the list was endless…. And their voices and the ringing sound of their guitars and horn sections and reeds and drums changed the very fiber of the place, he believed.

As he approached the strip light that had fallen he noticed that someone had moved it. He had left instructions that the heavy black light fixture shouldn’t be touched, after he’d lowered it to the stage. But now it sat on the very edge, above the orchestra pit, a good thirty feet from where it had stopped swinging after it fell.

He’d ream somebody for that. He’d wanted to see exactly what had
happened. Crouching down, Bobby examined the unit. What the hell had gone wrong?

Could it be that asshole, Edwin Sharp?

Maybe—

Bobby Prescott never heard the footsteps of whoever came up behind him. He simply felt the hands slam into his back and he went forward, barking a brief scream as the concrete floor of the orchestra pit, twenty feet below, raced up to break his jaw and arm.

Oh, Jesus, Jesus …

He lay on his belly, staring at the bone, starkly white and flecked with blood, that poked through his forearm skin.

Bobby moaned and screamed and cried out for help.

Who? Who did it?

Edwin? … He might’ve heard me tell Kayleigh in the café that I was going to be here late.

“Help me!”

Silence.

Bobby tried to reach into his pocket for his mobile. The pain was too great. He nearly fainted. Well, try again! You’re going to bleed to death!

Then, over his gasping breath, he heard a faint sound above him, a scraping. He twisted his head and looked up.

No … God no!

He watched the strip light, directly above him, easing toward the edge of the stage.

“No! Who is that? No!”

Bobby struggled to crawl away, clawing at the concrete floor with the fingers of his unbroken arm. But his legs weren’t working either.

One inch, two …

Move, roll aside!

But too late.

The light slammed into his back, going a hundred miles an hour. He felt another snap high in his body and all the pain went away.

My back … my back …

His vision crinkled.

Bobby Prescott came to sometime later—seconds, minutes, hours … he didn’t know. All he knew was that the room was bathed in astonishing light; the spotlight sitting on his back had been turned on.

All thousand watts, pouring from the massive lamps.

He then saw on the wall the flicker of shadows, cast by flames. At first he didn’t know what was on fire—he felt no heat whatsoever. But then the repulsive scent of burning hair, burning flesh filled the small space.

And he understood.

AT THE BRAYING
of the phone Kathryn Dance awoke, her first thought: the children.

Then her parents.

Then Michael O’Neil, maybe on assignment, one of the gang- or terrorist-related cases he’d been working on lately.

As she fumbled for her mobile, dropped it, then fumbled some more, she ran through a number of scenarios as to why anyone would call at the crack of dawn when she was on vacation.

And Jon Boling … was he all right?

She righted the phone but without her glasses she couldn’t see the number. She hit the green button. “Yes?”

“Woke you up, Boss.”

“What?”

“Sorry.”

“Sorry what do you mean sorry is everyone all right there?” One sentence made of many. Dance was remembering, as she did all too often, the call from the state trooper about Bill—a brief, sympathetic but emotionless call explaining to her that the life she’d planned on with her husband, the life she’d believed would forever be her rock, would not happen.

“Not here, there.”

Was it just that she was exhausted? She blinked. What time was it? Five
A.M.
? Four?

TJ Scanlon said, “I didn’t know if you needed me.”

Struggling upright, tugging down the T-shirt that had become a noose during an apparently restless night. “Start at the beginning.”

“Oh, you didn’t hear?”

“No, I didn’t hear.”

Sorry what do you mean …

“Okay. Got a notice on the wire about a homicide in Fresno. Happened late last night, early this morning.”

More awake now. Or less unawake.

“Tell me.”

“Somebody connected with Kayleigh Towne’s band.”

Lord … “Who?” Brushing her dark blond hair from her face. The worse the news, the calmer Kathryn Dance became. Partly training, partly nature, partly mother. Though as a kinesics expert she was quite aware of her own bobbing foot. She stalled it.

“Somebody named Robert Prescott.”

She wondered: Bobby? Yes, that was his last name, Prescott. This was bad. She’d noted from their interaction yesterday that he and Kayleigh were close friends, in addition to being work associates.

“Details?”

“Nothing yet.”

Dance also thought back to Edwin’s unnatural smile, his leering eyes, his icily calm demeanor, which she believed might conceal bundled rage.

TJ said, “It was just a one-paragraph notice on the wire. Information only, not a request for assistance.”

The CBI was available to help out local California public safety offices with major crime investigations, but with a few exceptions the Bureau agents waited until they were contacted. The CBI had a limited number of bodies to go around. California was a big state and a lot of bad things happened there.

The younger agent continued, “The vic died at the convention center.”

Where the concert was going to be held on Friday.

“Go on.”

“It’s being handled by the Fresno-Madera Consolidated Sheriff’s Office. The sheriff is Anita Gonzalez. The head detective is P. K. Madigan. Been on the force a long time, forever. Don’t know anything else about him.”

“I’ll get over there now. You have anything on Sharp yet? The stalker?”

“No warrants or court orders came up here. Nothing in California at all. Still waiting for the locals from Washington and Oregon. The phone number you gave me? That somebody called Kayleigh on? It was a prepaid, bought with cash, from a drugstore in Burlingame.”

South of San Francisco, where the airport was located.

“No video and no other record of the transaction. The clerks have no idea who it was. It was three days ago. No other details yet.”

“Keep on it. Email Sharp’s full bio. Anything you can get.”

“Your command is what I wish for, Boss.”

They disconnected.

What time
was
it? The room was still dark but light showed behind the drapes.

Glasses on. Oh, eight-thirty. The crack of midmorning.

She walked into the bathroom for a brief, hot shower. In twenty minutes she was dressed in black jeans, a black T-shirt and a silk business jacket, navy blue, conservative, matter-of-fact. The heat would be challenging with these clothes but the possibility of duty loomed. She’d learned long ago that a woman officer had to be a length ahead of men when it came to appearing professional. Sad but the way of the world.

She took her laptop with her, just in case the intruder returned, if in fact she
had
been intruded upon yesterday.

Then she was out the door, slipping the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign onto the L-shaped knob of the hotel room.

Wondering briefly if the prohibition would have any effect.

Outside, under an uncompromising sun, her temples, face and armpits bristled as sweat flowed. Dance fished for the Pathfinder key in her Coach purse and absently slapped her hip, where her Glock normally resided.

A weapon that was, today, conspicuously absent.

HAD THERE REALLY
been just one victim?

Pulling into the convention center lot, aiming for the stage door, Dance noted more emergency and public safety personnel than seemed necessary. Two dozen, easily, walking slowly, speaking on phones or radios, carrying battered equipment, green and red and yellow—the colors of stoplights, colors of children’s toys.

Four fire trucks, two ambulances, eight police cruisers and several unmarked.

She wondered again if TJ’s information was flawed. Had others died?

She drove forward to a Dodge, unmarked but obvious, parked and climbed out. A woman in a deputy’s uniform glanced Dance’s way,
C. STANNING
stamped on a plate above her taut breast. Her hair was equally tight and it ended in pert, incongruous pigtails, tipped in blue rubber bands.

“Help you?”

Dance displayed her CBI card and the woman didn’t seem to know what to make of it. “You … is Sacramento involved?”

Dance nearly said she was just here on vacation and believed she knew the victim. But law enforcement is a world in which instinct counts—when dealing both with suspects and with allies. She said, “Not yet. I happened to be nearby.”

Stanning juggled these words, perhaps factoring in her own instructions from on high, and said, “Okay.”

Dance continued on toward the bland concrete convention center. A slash of glaring light hit her in the face brutally as she approached. She slipped into the shade but this route was just as unpleasant; the air between two tall walls leading to the front doors was dead and stifling.

She stepped inside and in a half second the relief of the air-conditioning was utterly negated by the stench.

Kathryn Dance had been a law enforcer for some years and had attended hundreds of crime scenes. Being an investigator with CBI, she was rarely a first responder and didn’t do forensics; much of the horror had been tamed by the time she arrived. Blood staunched, bodies covered with washable tarps, body parts recovered and cataloged.