It hurt, what I’m saying. Bad. That bitch . . .

Lincoln Rhyme asked, “You ever perform professionally?”

She had, some. But those years, in Boston and then Berkeley and North Beach in San Francisco, had left her empty. Performance seems personal but she’d found that it’s really about you and the music, not you and the listener. Kathryn Dance was much more curious about what other people had to say—and to sing—about themselves, about life and love. She realized that with music, as with her job, she preferred the role of professional audience.

She told Rhyme, “Tried it. But in the end I just thought it was better to keep music as a friend.”

“So you became a cop instead. About a hundred-and-eighty-degree change.”

“Go figure.”

“How’d that happen?”

Dance debated. Normally reluctant to talk about herself (listen first, talk last), she nonetheless felt a connection to Rhyme. They were rivals, in a way—forensics versus kinesics—yet ones who shared a common purpose. Also, his drive and his stubbornness reminded her of herself. His clear love of the hunt, as well.

So she said, “Jonny Ray Hanson . . . Jonny without an h.”

“A perp?”

She nodded and told him the story. Six years ago Dance had been hired by prosecutors as a consultant to help pick jurors in the case of the State of California v. Hanson.

A thirty-five-year-old insurance agent, Hanson lived in Contra Costa County, north of Oakland, a half hour from the home of his ex-wife, who had a restraining order against him. One night someone had tried to break into her house. The woman wasn’t home and some county sheriff’s deputies, who regularly patrolled past her house, spotted and chased him, though the perp got away.

“Doesn’t seem all that serious . . . but there was more to it. The sheriff’s department was concerned because Hanson kept up the threats and had assaulted her twice. So they picked him up and talked to him for a while. He denied it and they let him go. But finally they thought they could make a case and arrested him.”

Because of the prior offenses, Dance explained, a B-and-E charge would put him away for at least five years—and give his ex-wife and college-age daughter a respite from his harassment.

“I spent some time with them at the prosecutor’s office. I felt so bad for them. They’d been living in absolute terror. Hanson would mail them blank sheets of paper, he’d leave weird messages on their phone. He’d stand exactly one block away—that was okay under the restraining order—and stare at them. He’d have food delivered to their house. Nothing illegal but the message was clear: I’ll always be watching you.”

To go shopping, mother and daughter had been forced to sneak out of their neighborhood in disguise and go to malls ten or fifteen miles from where they lived.

Dance had picked what she thought was a good jury, stacking it with single women and professional men (liberal but not too liberal), who’d be sympathetic to the victims’ situation. As she often did, Dance stayed through trial to give the prosecution team advice—and to critique her choices, as well.