They walked to the car, Boling slightly limpier than Dance, climbed in and belted up. Dance was behind the wheel. Into the street. She honked and Donnie Verso turned and waved. Then Dance hit the CD player and they listened to the infectious “Happy,” by Pharrell Williams. Boling tried to sing along.

“Hopeless,” he said.

It was.

“I’ll work on it.”

“I wouldn’t really worry about it,” Wes said. Everyone laughed. Dance changed the song to a Broken Bells tune.

In ten minutes they were at Maggie’s grade school. The lot was full. Dance parked near the gym and they got out. She locked the vehicle. “Let’s go to the green room.”

“What’s that?” Maggie asked.

“It’s the place backstage where they have the snacks.”

“Let’s go!” Wes said.

Dance put her arm around Maggie. “Come on, Elsa. Time to wow the audience.”

The girl said nothing.

Chapter 70

Working late, sir? And on Sunday.”

O’Neil looked up at Gabriel Rivera. The junior deputy, in uniform as always, stood in the doorway of O’Neil’s small office in the Sheriff’s Office building in Salinas. The senior deputy discouraged the “sir” but the young man was unshakable in his respect. “Looks like you are too?”

“Well, we get triple time, right?”

O’Neil smiled. “What’s up?”

“They got an ID on the body in Santa Cruz. You were right. Homeless guy living off and on in a shelter. Blood workup, he was way drunk.” The big man shook his head. “As for Grant? Nothing, sir. Just no sign at all. Any other ideas? I’m at a loss.”

With the Solitude Creek unsub on the loose, O’Neil had had to delegate much of the Otto Grant disappearance to others. There’d been no sightings of the farmer who’d lost his property.

“You’ve expanded to surrounding counties?”

“All through the Central Valley. Zip.”

“And nothing online since his last post?”

“Nothing after five days ago.”

That was when the farmer had written another diatribe against the state.

You STOLE my property thru the travasty called eminent domain!

“You run his posts by Dr. Shepherd?”

“I did,” Rivera said. “He agrees that the comments could support a suicidal act but there weren’t any other indications I could find. He didn’t put his affairs in order. Didn’t take out any life insurance. No good-bye calls to neighbors or army buddies or relatives.”

“And any place he’d run to?”

“Checked the lakes he likes to fish at, where he’s rented cabins. A casino in Nevada he went to some. Nothing.”

O’Neil didn’t bother to ask about credit card or mobile phone tracing. Rivera had checked all that first.

“Probably not much else to do until some campers find the body. Or fishermen.”

Worse ways to die than going to sleep in the bay…

“And on our Jane Doe?”

O’Neil looked at the picture of the woman who was possibly a victim of the Solitude Creek unsub. Lying on her back, face up under the light in the cheap motel room.