“…authorities in Sacramento are now saying that the Solitude Creek roadhouse tragedy may have been carried out intentionally. They’re searching for an unknown subject—that is, in police parlance, an unsub—who is a white male, under forty years of age, with brown hair. Medium build. Over six feet tall. He was last seen wearing a green jacket with a logo of some type.”

“Jesus my Lord,” she muttered.

She grabbed her iPhone, fumbled it, lunged but then decided against trying to retrieve the unit. This angry, she’d be endangering both her career and her life to text what she wanted to.

In ten minutes she was parking in the CBI lot—actually left skid marks, albeit modest ones, on the asphalt. A deep breath, thinking, thinking—there were a number of land mines to negotiate here—but then the anger lifted its head and she was out the door and storming inside.

Past her own office.

“Hi, Kathryn. Something wrong?” This from Dance’s administrative assistant, Maryellen Kresbach. The short, bustling woman, mother of three, wore complex, precarious high heels on her feet and impressive coifs on her head: a mass of frosted brown curls, sprayed into totalitarian submission.

Dance smiled, just to let the world know that nobody in the immediate vicinity was in danger. Then onward. She strode to Overby’s office and walked in without knocking and found him on a Skype call.

“Charles.”

“Ah. Well. Kathryn.”

She swallowed the planned invective and sat down.

On the screen was a swarthy, broad man in a dark suit and white shirt, striped tie, red and blue. He was looking slightly away from the webcam as he regarded his own computer screen.

Overby said, “Kathryn. You remember Commissioner Ramon Santos, with the Federal Police in Chihuahua?”

“Commissioner.”

“Agent Dance, yes, hello.” The man was not smiling. Overby too was sitting stiffly in his chair. Apparently the conversation had not been a felicitous one thus far. The commissioner was one of the senior people in Mexico working on Operation Pipeline. Not everyone south of the border was in favor of the effort of course; drugs and guns meant big money, even—especially—for the police down there.

“Now, I was telling Charles. It is a most unfortunate thing that has just happened. A big shipment. A load of one hundred M-Four machine guns, some fifty eighteen-caliber H & Ks. Two thousand rounds.”

Overby asked, “They were delivered through the—?”

“Yes. Through the Salinas hub. They came from Oakland.”

“We didn’t hear,” Overby said.

“No. No, you didn’t. An informant down here told us. He had firsthand knowledge, obviously, to be that accurate.” Santos sighed. “We found the truck but it was empty. Those weapons are on our streets now. And responsible for several deaths. This is very bad.”

She recalled that the commissioner was, of course, adamant to stop the cartels from shipping their heroin and cocaine north. But what upset him more was the flood of weapons into Mexico, a country where owning a gun was illegal under most circumstances, despite having one of the highest death-by-gunshot rates in the world.