A skitter of multiple feet behind her, claws that needed clipping. Some enthusiastic couch jumping and a few good-to-see-you rolls on the back. Dance did the obligatory, but forever comforting to all involved, canine head rubs.

“Wine?”

Good diagnosis.

A smile, a nod. She sloughed off her jacket and hooked it. Too tired even to search for a hanger.

He returned with the glasses. White for both of them. It’d be an unoaked Chardonnay that they’d discovered recently. Michael liked red. It was all he drank.

“The kids?”

“In their rooms. Wes came home about an hour ago. Didn’t want to look at a program I’d hacked together. And that’s a little weird. He’s in his bedroom now. Seemed kind of moody.”

Wonder why.

“Mags is in her room too. Been singing up a storm. Violin may be a thing of the past.”

“Not bad outside, the temperature. Shall we?”

They wandered out to the Deck, brushed curly yellow leaves off the cushions of a couple of uneven wooden chairs. The Monterey Peninsula wasn’t like the Midwest, no seasons really. Leaves fell at their leisure.

Dance eased down and sat back. Fog wafted past, bringing with it the smell of damp mulch, like tobacco, and the spice of eucalyptus. She remembered the time Maggie made an argument for getting a koala bear cub, citing the fact that there were plenty of leaves for it to eat in the neighborhood. “Won’t cost us a thing!”

Dance hadn’t bothered to marshal arguments. “No,” she’d said.

Boling zipped up his sweater. “News did a story on March.”

Dance had heard about it; she’d declined comment.

“Antioch March,” Boling mused. “That’s his real name?”

“Yep. Went by Andy mostly.”

“Are March’s clients, the ones who bought his videos, guilty of crimes?”

“I’m not sure where it falls. Conspiracy probably, if they actually ordered a killing. That’s a wide net. According to March, though, a lot of the clients are overseas. Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia. We can’t reach them and this isn’t an extradition situation. TJ’s going through the website’s records now. I think we’ll have some U.S. citizens the Bureau’ll come and talk to. March is cooperating. It was part of the deal.”

Another shiver.

I’m glad we’re in each other’s lives now…

Boling was saying, “I’ve always worried about video games, the desensitizing. Kids, at least. They lose all filtering.”

In 2006 a young man arrested on suspicion of stealing a car wrested a gun away from an officer and shot his way out of the police station, killing three cops. He was a huge fan of the very game that March had mentioned, Grand Theft Auto.

Other youthful shooters—the Sandy Hook killer and the two Columbine students—were avid players of violent shooting games, she believed.

One side of the debate said there was no causal effect between games and the act of violence, asserting that youngsters naturally prone to bully, injure or kill were drawn to video games of that sort and would go on to commit crimes even without gaming. Others held that given the developmental process of children, exposure to such games did tend to shape behavior, far more than TV or movies, since they were immersive and took you into a different world, operating by different rules, far more than passive entertainment.