“Sure,” the detective said. “Evidence, crime scene? You’re a better interrogator than I am but I’m game.”

“No,” she said. She took him by the shoulders and walked him backward five feet. She then stepped away and examined him closely. “Just stand right there and don’t move.”

As she walked out the door, O’Neil looked around and said, “I can do that.”

A HALF HOUR later, Dance and O’Neil, along with a contingent of FMCSO deputies, sped through the hazy late-summer afternoon toward a motel off Highway 41.

It was a Red Roof Inn. Decent, clean but surely far below what the guest they were about to arrest had been used to at certain points in his life.

The four cars approached silently.

There were jurisdictional considerations, of course, but Dance and O’Neil weren’t here to claim the trophy, merely to help out. They were happy to let the local constabulary handle the arrest. She had, after all, agreed to let Madigan take the collar and corner the publicity, though it would be FMCSO in general who’d get the credit, since he wasn’t on active duty.

The three police cars and Dance’s Nissan slipped silently up to the motel and parked. With a shared smile and tacit understanding, Dance and O’Neil glanced at each other and wandered to the back of the place, while Harutyun, Stanning and four other deputies sprinted through the halls to the room where surveillance had revealed the suspect was staying.

As they’d guessed, the nervous perp had been anticipating the visit; he’d seen the cars approach and he literally leapt out the window of his room onto an unpleasant patch of grass reserved for dogs doing their business. He righted himself fast, wrapped his computer bag strap around his chest and poised for a sprint, then wisely chose to stop as he glanced at the guns in the hands of Dance and O’Neil, both of the muzzles pointed steadily at his head.

Two other somber deputies, one Latino and one Anglo, joined them in the back. They were the ones who slapped the cuffs on Kayleigh’s producer, Barry Zeigler, and led him toward the parking lot around front. It was Kathryn Dance who took possession of the computer bag that would contain the priceless songs that he’d stolen from Bobby Prescott’s trailer, the morning after he’d killed the roadie.

Chapter 49

“YOUR HEIGHT,” DANCE explained to him.

Zeigler sat, miserable, in the backseat of a sheriff’s office cruiser. The door was open and he was facing outward, hands shackled behind him.

She continued to elaborate, answering his question about how she knew it was he. “The perp would know Bobby pretty well and had probably been in his trailer before. And he’d been somebody who was very familiar with everyone connected with the band.”

The deciding factor was what she told him next: “And he was tall.”

“Tall?”

She explained about her interview with Tabatha, across the street, several days ago. “She said she’d seen somebody inside that morning. Except, she couldn’t see the intruder’s head, only his chest.”