Xo

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.

 
     
     

 
     

Chapter 8
    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