Then a figure stumbled back into view.

“That’s her,” Bob Holly whispered. “The music student.”

A young woman, blond and extraordinarily beautiful, gripped her right arm, which ended at her elbow. She staggered back toward one of the partially open doors, perhaps looking for the severed limb. She got about ten feet into view, then dropped to her knees. A couple ran to her, the man pulling his belt off, and together they improvised a tourniquet.

Without a word, Sam Cohen stood and walked back to the doorway of his office. He paused there. Looked out over the debris-strewn club, realized he was holding a Hello Kitty phone and put it into his pocket. He said, to no one, “It’s over with, you know. My life’s over. It’s gone. Everything… You never recover from something like this. Ever.”

Chapter 8

Outside the club, Dance slipped the copies of the up-to-date tax- and insurance-compliance certificates into her purse, effectively ending her assignment here.

Time to leave. Get back to the office.

But she chose not to.

Unleashed…

Kathryn Dance decided to stick around Solitude Creek and ask some questions of her own.

She made the rounds of the three dozen people here, about half of whom had been patrons there that night, she learned. They’d returned to leave flowers, to leave cards. And to get answers themselves. Most asked her more questions than she did them.

“How the hell did it happen? Where did the smoke come from? Was it a terrorist? Who parked the truck there? Has anybody been arrested?” Some of these people were edgy, suspicious. Some were raggedly hostile.

As always, Dance deferred responding, saying it was an ongoing investigation. This group—the survivors and relatives, rather than the merely curious, at least—seemed aggressively dissatisfied with her words. One blonde, bandaged on the face, said her fiancé was in critical care. “You know where he got injured? His balls. Somebody trampled him, trying to get out. They’re saying we may never have kids now!”

Dance offered genuine sympathy and asked her few questions. The woman was in no mood to answer.

She spotted a couple of men in suits circulating, one white, one Latino, each chatting away with people from their respective language pools, handing out business cards. Nothing she could do about it. First Amendment—if that was the law that protected the right of scummy lawyers to solicit clients. A glare to the white, chubby man, dusty suit, was returned with a slick smile. As if he’d given her the finger.

Everything that those who’d returned here told her echoed what she’d learned from Holly and Cohen. It was the same story from different angles, the constant being how shockingly fast a group of relaxed folks in a concert snapped and turned into wild animals, their minds possessed by panic.

She examined the oil drum where the fire had started. It was about twenty feet from the back of the roadhouse, near the air-conditioning unit. Inside, as Holly had described, were ash and bits of half-burned trash.