Chapter 39

This’s it,” Michael O’Neil said, pulling the rental car into the parking lot of Stan Prescott’s apartment complex in Tustin, Cali­fornia.

They parked several units down from Prescott’s to wait for an Orange County deputy to join them.

In the time it took the state jet to whisk Dance and O’Neil from Monterey Regional Airport to John Wayne, Orange County, O’Neil’s computer people had the identity of the man who’d posted that clip of the Solitude Creek deaths.

Stanley Prescott, aka Ahmed, was a forty-one-year-old bartender. Single. The information gathered also revealed that he had been working in his club’s Long Beach location at the time of the Solitude Creek and Bay View disasters, so he wasn’t the unsub.

His Facebook and blog profiles revealed he was essentially a rabid bigot. It was obvious that he was claiming Solitude Creek and the other incidents were the work of Muslims to incite anti-Islamic sentiment.

People could be such idiots.

This news was discouraging, since he’d probably had no connection whatsoever to either of the attacks and had simply pulled violent pictures and videos randomly from the Web to repost. Still, as long as they were here, they would talk to him. Maybe the unsub had e-mailed or posted something on this man’s blog.

As they waited for the Orange County deputy to arrive, O’Neil took a call. He nodded and Dance noted he lifted an eyebrow. He had a brief conversation, then hung up,

“Otto Grant. Remember?”

Of course she did. The farmer whose land had been confiscated under eminent domain. The possible suicide.

“Santa Cruz police found a body in the water by the pier. Male. Same age and build. They’ll run the scene and get me the report.”

How sad, she reflected. “Did he have family?”

“He was a widower. Grown children. Farming must’ve been his whole life, maybe all he had left.”

“A hard way to go. Drowning.”

“I don’t know,” O’Neil mused. “In that water? You’d be numb after three, four minutes. Then…nothing. Worse ways to die than going to sleep in the bay.”

Dance and O’Neil had to wait only a few minutes for the Orange County deputy. They waved him over. The stocky uniformed man’s name was Rick Martinez.

“We’ve been following the wire, about your perp. The Solitude Creek thing. The other one too. The author signing. Last night. Man, that’s terrible. I’ve never heard anything like this. This terror thing?” A nod toward the apartment. “Is Prescott your doer?”

Dance said, “We know he’s not. But we’re hoping there’s a chance of some connection between him and our unsub.”

“Sure. How do you want to handle it?” He was speaking to O’Neil.

“Agent Dance’ll wait here. I’ll go to the front door, you go around back, if you would. If everything’s clear, Agent Dance’ll do the interrogation.”

Wait here. Her lips tightened.

“No warrants. He had a drunk and disorderly a few years ago, assault too, and he owns weapons, so we’ll handle it cautiously.”