Xo

message. He’d send Crystal back in an hour or two, spring the gal from her automotive jail. Oh, sorry Kathryn; I didn’t know you’d be stuck between a rock and hard place—ha!
    But he’d simply had it with people using Kayleigh like Dance was.
    If Kayleigh hadn’t been involved, the likes of Kathryn Dance would never have come to Fresno, never have taken the time to even say howdy-do to a soul here. Where was Ms. Agent Dance and the CBI when some MS-13 wannabes took an Uzi and sprayed it into the pizza place on Herndon, killing two children and missing the rival drug dealer altogether?
    Sorry, they weren’t celebrities.
    He expected better from the CBI, thought they’d be above that publicity-grabbing shit. But Madigan had done his homework. He’d checked out Dance’s boss, Charlie Overby, on YouTube and the archives. Man was faster with a press conference than Wild Bill Hickok with a six-gun.
    Dance worked for him, which meant she’d surely be just the same.
    Just happened to be in the area and a friend of Kayleigh’s? My ass.
    You don’t mind if I take over your investigation, do you, P.K.?
    Yeah, she’d come up with a few helpful things. But she was in thecase for the wrong reasons and that just wasn’t acceptable to P. K. Madigan. Besides, he didn’t believe much in that fishy mumbo jumbo of hers. Kinesics? Crap. That’d be like learning about a trout from books and the Discovery Channel—as opposed to catching, cleaning and cooking one up in Crisco.
    No, his approach was different. Cases were made nowadays on forensics, not voodoo. They’d have evidence from the convention center, they’d have forensics from Bobby’s trailer—that cement dust, about as unique as trace could be—was a godsend.
    Armed with that, Madigan would wear down the son of a bitch and get a confession in an hour or two.
    He and Crystal walked into the CSU lab. He enjoyed the smell of the chemicals and the after-effects of the gas chromatograph, which reminded him of the Bunsen burner smell from high school, a good time in his life—football, his brother healthy, a girlfriend who ran the yearbook.
    “Charlie,” he called.
    The pudgy, rosy-cheeked director of the CSU, Charlie Shean, looked up from a computer in his office—the only four-walled space in the large room. The rest of the place had cubicles and workstations and the up-to-date forensic stuff that Madigan had fought hard to get for his people.
    “Hey, Chief.” Shean’s accent grounded him somewhere along the Massachusetts coast, just north or south of Bean Town.
    Madigan thought Shean was the best forensic tech his budget could afford and he was one of the few employees on the force the detective was deferential to, though, of course, he’d get in a few good ones about the CSU man’s name from time to time despite the different spelling.
    “Need you to push everything through on this Towne case.”
    The round man shook his head. “Poor thing. She’s got to be shook up. And that big concert this weekend. I got tickets, the wife and me. You going?”
    “I am,” Stanning said.
    Madigan wasn’t. He liked music but he liked music you could shut off with a switch when you wanted to. “What’ve we got?”
    Shean nodded toward several techs in goggles, gloves and white jackets, working with quiet intensity at several stations not far away.
    “Nothing yet. Three scenes. Convention center, Bobby’s trailer and Sharp’s rental. We’re processing about two hundred unknown prints. We have what we think are Sharp’s from his rental but he’s not in AIFIS.”
    The FBI’s Automated Integrated Fingerprint Identification System was, in Madigan’s opinion, one of the few things the federal government was good for.
    “But we aren’t sure they’re his.”
    “I’m going to talk to Sharp. I’ll get ’em with the water bottle trick.”
    “Who’s Agent Dance, CBI?”
    Madigan snapped, “Why you asking?”
    “She called—”
    “Called you ? Here? Direct?”
    “Yeah. She talked to Kayleigh’s assistant, Alicia Sessions, and found out where she thought somebody was spying on Kayleigh yesterday at the convention center. We dusted the area. Didn’t find anything. CBI’s involved?”
    “No. CBI is not involved.”
    “Oh.” When Madigan explained no further Shean continued, “You were right, that’s the cement dust at Bobby’s trailer, same stuff with the Baniero convictions. It’s unique to that area.”
    “Have you got a match from