The Cold Moon

Mom, love you, see you soon.
    Click.
    The millisecond of spontaneous “love you” made the whole negotiation worth it.
    She hung up and glanced at Rhyme. “Kids?”
    “Me? No. I don’t know that they’d be my strong suit.”
    “They’re nobody’s strong suit until you have them.”
    He was looking at her ubiquitous iPod earphones, which dangled around her neck like a stethoscope on a doctor. “You like music, I gather. . . . How’s that for a clever deduction?”
    Dance said, “It’s my hobby.”
    “Really? You play?”
    “I sing some. I used to be a folkie. But now, if I take time off, I throw the kids and the dogs into the back of a camper and go track down songs.”
    Rhyme frowned. “I’ve heard of that. It’s called—”
    “Song catching is the popular phrase.”
    “Sure. That’s it.”
    This was a passion for Kathryn Dance. She was part of a long tradition of folklorists, people who would travel to out-of-the-way places to field-record traditional music. Alan Lomax was perhaps the most famous of these, hikingthroughout the U.S. and Europe to capture old-time songs. Dance went to the East Coast from time to time but those tunes had been well documented, so most of her recent trips were to inner cities, Nova Scotia, Western Canada, the bayou and places with large Latino populations, like Southern and Central California. She’d record and catalog the songs.
    She told this to Rhyme and explained too about a website she and a friend maintained with information on the musicians, the songs and the music itself. They helped the musicians copyright their original songs and distributed to them any fees listeners paid for downloads of the music. Several musicians had been contacted by record companies, which had bought their music for sound tracks of independent films.
    Kathryn Dance didn’t tell Rhyme, though, that there was more to her relationship with music.
    Dance often found herself overloaded. To do her job well, she needed to hard-wire herself to the witnesses and criminals she interviewed. Sitting three feet from a psychotic killer, jousting with him for hours or days or weeks, was an exhilarating process, but exhausting and debilitating too. Dance was so empathic and so closely connected to her subjects that she felt their emotions long after the sessions ended. She heard their voices in her mind, endlessly looping through her thoughts.
    Sí, sí, okay, sí, I kill her. I cut her throat. . . . Well, her son too, that boy. He there. He see me. I have to kill him, I mean, who wouldn’t? But she deserve it, the way she look at me. It no my fault. Can I have that cigarette you talking about?
    The music was a miracle cure. If Kathryn Dance was listening to Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee or U2 or Dylan or David Byrne, she wasn’t replaying the memory of an indignant Carlos Allende complaining that the victim’s engagement ring cut his palm while he was slitting her throat.
    It hurt, what I’m saying. Bad. That bitch . . .
    Lincoln Rhyme asked, “You ever perform professionally?”
    She had, some. But those years, in Boston and then Berkeley and North Beach in San Francisco, had left her empty. Performance seems personal but she’d found that it’s really about you and the music, not you and the listener. Kathryn Dance was much more curious about what other people had to say—and to sing—about themselves, about life and love. She realized that with music, as with her job, she preferred the role of professional audience.
    She told Rhyme, “Tried it. But in the end I just thought it was better to keep music as a friend.”
    “So you became a cop instead. About a hundred-and-eighty-degree change.”
    “Go figure.”
    “How’d that happen?”
    Dance debated. Normally reluctant to talk about herself (listen first, talk last), she nonetheless felt a connection to Rhyme. They were rivals, in a way—forensics versus kinesics—yet ones who shared a common purpose. Also, his drive and his stubbornness reminded her of herself. His clear love of the hunt, as well.
    So she said, “Jonny Ray Hanson . . . Jonny without an h. ”
    “A perp?”
    She nodded and told him the story. Six years ago Dance had been hired by prosecutors as a consultant to help pick jurors in the case of the State of California v. Hanson.
    A thirty-five-year-old insurance agent, Hanson lived in Contra Costa County, north of Oakland, a half hour from the home of his ex-wife, who had a restraining order