“Or wife,” Dance pointed out. The second-most-popular motive for arson—after insurance fraud—was a woman burning down a house, apartment or hotel room with a cheating lover inside. “That was in the battery of questions. No hints, though.”

He riffled the many pages. “Been busy.”

“Wish I’d been productive.” She shook her head.

O’Neil finished his beer. Looked through the pictures again. “One thing I don’t get, though.”

“Why didn’t he just burn the place?” She finished his thought.

He gave a smile. “Yep.”

“That’s the key.”

O’Neil’s phone hummed once. He looked at the text.

“Better be getting home.”

“Sure.”

They walked to the door.

“’Night.”

Then he was walking down the front steps of the porch, which creaked under his weight. He turned back and waved.

Dance checked the house, securing it, as always. She’d made enemies in her job over the years, and now, in particular, she could be in the sights of any of the gangs being targeted by Operation Pipeline. From Oakland to L.A.

And by the Solitude Creek unsub too. A man who had used panic as a weapon to murder in a horrific way.

Then into and out of the bathroom quickly, change to PJs, then lugging her gun safe from floor to bedside table. A true Civ-Div officer, she couldn’t pack on the job but in her own home nothing was going to stop her from triple-tapping an intruder with her Glock 26.

She lay back in bed, lights out. Refusing to let the images of the crime scene affect her, though this was difficult. They returned on their own. The bloodstain in the shape of a heart. The brown pool outside the exit door, where, perhaps, the girl had lost her arm.

Really talented…

Tough images reeling through her head, high-def. Dance called this “assault by memory.”

She listened to the wind and could just hear a whisper of the ocean.

Alone, tonight Dance was thinking of the name of the rivulet near the roadhouse. Solitude Creek. She wondered why the name. Did it have a meaning other than the obvious, that the stream ran through an out-of-the-way portion of the county, edged with secluding weeds and rushes and hidden by hills?

Solitude…

The word, its sound and meaning both, spoke to her now. And yet how absurd was that? Solitude was not an aspect of her life. Hardly. She had the children, she had her parents, her friends, the Deck.

She had Jon Boling.

How could she be experiencing solitude?

Maybe, she thought wryly, because…

Because…

But then she told herself: Enough. Your mood’s just churned up by these terrible deaths and injuries. That’s all. Nothing more.

Solitude, solitude…

Finally, strength of will, she managed to fling the word away, just as the children would do with snowballs on those rare, rare occasions when the hills of Carmel Valley were blanketed white.

THURSDAY, APRIL 6

The Get

Chapter 19

No. Oh, no…

Having deposited the children at school and nursed a coffee in the car while having a good-morning chat with Jon Boling, Kathryn Dance was halfway to CBI headquarters when she heard the news.