She and O’Neil moved closer together and looked down as the CSU officer scrolled.

“Hold it,” Dance said, pointing. “Okay, that’s the phone the unsub dropped. And the others are the ones he bought at the same time, in Chicago.”

Batillo gave a brief laugh. Perhaps that she’d memorized the numbers.

He continued, “No voice mail. Fair number of texts back and forth.” He scrolled through them. “Here’s one. Grant says he has, quote, ‘the last of your’ money. ‘I know you wanted more and I wish I could have paid you more.’” The officer read on. “‘I know the risks you took. I’m Forever in your debt.’ Forever capitalized. He does that a lot. Then, going back… Grant tells him the targets were perfect: the roadhouse, the Bay View Center, the Monterey Bay Hospital. ‘Probably better the church didn’t work out.’”

“He was going to attack a church?” Dance asked, shaking her head.

Batillo read one more. “‘Thanks for the ammo.’”

Soldier of fortune…

The officer slipped the phone into a bag with a chain-of-custody card attached. He signed it and put the sealed bag in a large plastic container resembling a laundry basket.

She glanced down at a treatise on the law of eminent domain.

“How’d he meet the doer?” Dance wondered aloud. “He said a few years ago.”

Batillo said, “I saw some texts about ‘the gun show.’ ‘Enjoyed talking weapons with you.’

“And I found the ammo I think he was talking about. Brick of twelve gauge and two twenty-three. Arlington Heights Guns and Sporting Goods on the label.”

“Chicago,” Dance said.

O’Neil said wryly, “Tough manhunt. Six million people.”

“We’ve got the gun show reference. The ammo. The phones.” She shrugged and offered a smile. ‘Needle in a haystack,’ I know. Right up there with ‘When it rains, it pours.’ But that doesn’t mean the needle isn’t there.”

Forty minutes later she was back in her office, scrolling through the crime scene pictures of the Otto Grant suicide—the rest of the report wouldn’t be ready for a day or two—and considering how to narrow down the task of finding their unsub in the Windy City, or wherever he might be. Page after page…Dance found herself staring at the pictures of Stanley Prescott and the woman they suspected the unsub had killed, positioned under the lights to get pictures for proof of death. If only she could for a brief moment let her eyes be theirs, before they glazed over, and darkness enveloped them.

To catch a fleeting glimpse of the man who’d done this.

Who are you? Are you headed back to your home in Chicago, or somewhere else?

And are you working for someone else now, a new job? Nearby? Or in a different part of the world?

Questions she would answer, whether it took a week, a month, a year.

Chapter 79

Maggie’s eyes were wide and even Dance’s adolescent, seen-it-all son was impressed.

They were backstage at the Monterey Performing Arts Center with Neil Hartman himself. The lanky man in his early thirties, dark curly hair and a lean face, looked every inch the country-western star, though that genre was only part of his repertoire. His songs and performance style were very similar to Kayleigh Towne’s, Dance’s performer friend based in Fresno. Crossover/eclectic best described the sound.