She’d worked with Monterey County fire marshal Robert Holly several times and found him low-key, smart, reasonable.

He continued, “Well, there was, technically. Only it was outside. The club itself was never on fire. There, that oil drum.”

Dance noted the rusty fifty-five-gallon vessel, the sort used for trash in parking lots and behind stores and restaurants. It rested near the club’s air-conditioning unit.

“We ran a prelim. Discarded cigarette in the drum, along with some rags soaked in motor oil and gasoline. That’s all it took.”

“Accelerant, then,” Dance said. “The oil and gas.”

“That was the effect, though there’s no evidence it was intentional.”

“So people thought there was a fire. Smelled smoke.”

“And headed to the fire exits. And that was the problem. They were blocked.”

“Locked? The doors were locked?”

“No, blocked. The truck?”

He pointed to a large tractor trailer parked against the west side of the club. It too was encircled with yellow tape. “It’s owned by that company there. Henderson Jobbing and Warehouse.” Dance regarded the one-story sprawling structure. There were a half-dozen similar tractors and trailers sitting at the loading dock and nearby. Several men and women, in work clothes, a few in suits, stood on the dock or in front of the office and looked over at the club, as if staring at a beached whale. They were both grim and curious.

“The driver parked it there?”

“Claims he didn’t. But what’s he going to say? There’ve been other incidents of trucks blocking the roadhouse parking lot. Never a fire exit.”

“Is he here today?”

“He’ll be in soon. I called him at home. He’s pretty upset. But he agreed to come in.”

“Why would he park there, though? Anybody can see the signs: NO PARKING, FIRE EXIT. Tell me the scenario. What happened exactly?”

“Come on inside.”

Dance followed the burly man into the club. The place had apparently not been straightened up after the tragedy. Chairs and tables—low- and high-tops—were scattered everywhere, broken glasses, bottles, scraps of cloth, snapped bracelets, shoes. Musical instruments lay on the stage. One acoustic guitar was in pieces. A Martin D-28, Dance noted. An old one. Two thousand dollars’ worth of former resonance.

There were many smears of old blood on the floor, brown footsteps too.

Dance had been here dozens of times. Everybody on the Peninsula knew Solitude Creek. The club was owned by a balding, earringed restaurateur and former hippie from (where else?) Haight-Ashbury named Sam Cohen, who had been to the Monterey Pop show in ’67 and reportedly not slept for three days. So moved by the show had the young man been that he devoted his early life to promoting rock concerts, not so successfully, then gave up and opened a steakhouse near the Presidio. He sold it for a profit and pocketed enough to buy an abandoned seafood restaurant on the small tributary that became the club’s name.

Solitude Creek was a vein of gray-brown water running to the nearby Salinas River. It was navigable by any vessel with a draft no deeper than two or three feet, which left it mostly for small boats, though there wasn’t much reason to sail this way. The club squatted in a large parking lot between the creek and the trucking company, north of Monterey, off Highway 1, the same route that wound through majestic Big Sur; the views were very different, there and here.