“No.”

“Hm.” He studied the crisp, jaundiced grass. “You don’t fish? Or you don’t like to?”

“Neither. But I’ve got a friend who’d live on his boat in Monterey Bay if he could.”

Michael O’Neil was always out in the choppy water. Often with Dance’s son, Wes, and his own children. Sometimes Dance’s father, a retired marine biologist, went along.

“Monterey Bay. Hm. Salmon.” Madigan looked around. “I like to fish.”

“You catch and release?”

“No. Seems crueler to me. I catch and eat.”

“Michael does that too.”

“Michael?”

“My friend.”

More silence, dense as the growing heat, as they watched Harutyun and Stanning string the yellow tape.

“I told her, Tabatha, that we’d have somebody keep an eye on her.”

“We can do that.”

“It’s important.”

“We can do that,” he repeated, with a bit of edge. To Harutyun: “Get a car over here. Some rookie. Keep an eye on the place. That trailer across the street too.”

“Thanks,” Dance said.

He didn’t respond.

She sensed Old Spice or something clove-oriented rising from his large body. He actually wore a gun belt with single spare cartridges stuck into loops, pointing downward, like a cowboy’s. No speed loaders, those accessories that contained a disk of six or eight rounds to be dropped quickly into an open cylinder of a revolver. Detectives in Fresno probably didn’t have much cause to shoot people, much less reload quickly.

Madigan stepped closer to the door, examined the lock. “Could’ve been jimmied.”

They waited in more silence for the Crime Scene Unit to arrive and when they did, Dance was again impressed at the efficiency of the operation. The team dressed fast, in full jumpsuits, masks and booties, and—she was surprised—two of them with weapons drawn cleared the interior of the trailer, making sure there were no threats. Most police outfits have SWAT or regular officers—unswathed in evidence-protective clothing—handle this job, resulting in contamination of the scene.

CSU proceeded to process the trailer, dusting and using alternative light source wands for prints, taking trace evidence samples, electrostatic footprints on the front stoop and inside, looking for tire treads and anything else the perp might have discarded or shed.

Dance’s friend, Lincoln Rhyme, was perhaps the country’s leading expert in forensic evidence and crime scene work. She herself was a bit skeptical of the extreme reliance on the art; one case she knew of had nearly resulted in the execution of an innocent man because certain clues had been planted by the real perp. On the other hand, Rhyme and his partner, Amelia Sachs, had worked miracles in identifying and convicting suspects on the basis of nearly nonexistent evidence.

She noted that Madigan’s eyes grew animated for the first time since she’d arrived as he watched the team scour the grounds and move in and out of the trailer. He likes his forensics, she thought; he’s a thing cop, not a people cop.

An hour later they’d finished and carted out some boxes and bags, both paper and plastic, and announced that they were releasing the scene.