Michelle Cooper had just seen someone die.

More P.A. announcements. Michelle couldn’t hear them. Not that it mattered. She had absolutely no control over anything.

Trish, she prayed, stay on your feet. Don’t fall. Please…

As the mass surrounding her stumbled closer to the fire doors, the crowd began to shift to the right and soon Michelle could see the rest of the club.

There! Yes, there was her daughter! Trish was still on her feet, though she too was pinned in a mass of churning bodies. “Trish, Trish!” she screamed. Or tried to. Maybe she’d lost her voice. Maybe the shriek was simply lost in the cacophony.

Mother and daughter were moving in opposite directions.

Michelle blinked tears and sweat from her eyes. Her group was only feet away from the exits. She’d be out in a few seconds. Trish was still near the kitchen—where somebody had just said the fire was raging.

“Trish! This way!”

Another silent scream.

And then she saw a man beside her daughter lose control completely—he began pounding the face of the man next to him and started to climb on top of the crowd, as if, in his madness, he believed he could claw his way through the ceiling. One of the people he used as a launching pad was Trish, who weighed a hundred pounds less. Michelle saw her daughter open her mouth to scream, raise her arm in a pathetic gesture for help and then, under the man’s bulk, vanish into the sea of madness.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 5

Baseline

Chapter 3

The two people sitting at the long conference table looked her over with varying degrees of curiosity.

Anything else? she wondered. Suspicion, dislike, jealousy?

Kathryn Dance, a kinesics (body language) expert, got paid to read people, but law enforcers were typically hard to parse and so at the moment she wasn’t sure what was flitting through their minds.

Also present was her boss, Charles Overby, though he wasn’t at the table but hovering in the doorway, engrossed in his Droid. He’d just arrived.

The four were in an interrogation observation room on the ground floor of the California Bureau of Investigation’s West-Central Division, off Route 68 in Monterey, near the airport. One of those dim, pungent chambers separated from the interrogation room by a see-through mirror that nobody, even the most naïve or stoned perps, believed was for straightening your tie or coiffing.

A no-nonsense crowd, fashion-wise. The man at the table—he’d commandeered the head spot—was Steve Foster, wearing a draping black suit and white shirt. He was the head of special investigations with the California Bureau of Investigation’s Criminal Division. He was based in Sacramento. Dance, five six and about 120 pounds, didn’t know exactly when to describe somebody as “hulking,” but Foster had to figure close. Broad, an impressive silver mane, with a droopy mustache that could have been waxed into a handlebar, had it been horizontal and not staple-shaped. He looked like an Old West marshal.

Perpendicular to Foster was Carol Allerton, in a bulky gray pantsuit. Short hair frosted silver, black and gray, Carol Allerton was a senior DEA agent operating out of Oakland. The stocky woman had a dozen serious collars to her credit. Not legend, but respectable. She’d had the opportunity to be fast-tracked to Sacramento or even Washington but she’d declined.