Dance, however, couldn’t impart this warning in person, only via a phone message. The assistant had left the convention center by the time Dance went to find her.

As she looked over her notes, movement at the corner of her eye caught her attention. Dance’s gaze swept to the confusion of shadows throughout the concert hall. She’d counted two dozen doors and emergency exits. Recalled too the casual attitude of locking doors when there was no event in progress.

Was he here now, observing from the shadows? Was there a faint movement from that window? That doorway?

Her eyes were tricking her.

Had to be.

A moment later Dance noticed Kayleigh freeze and pull her mobile from her pocket. The look on the young woman’s face left little doubt. It would be a call she didn’t recognize.

She stared for a moment and then lifted the unit to her ear.

The woman gasped, a wrenching sound clearly audible, thanks to the acoustics of the center.

Her head swiveled toward Dance and she said, “It’s another call, Kathryn. It’s the second verse!”

Chapter 22

IN A QUARTER hour, Dance was at the sheriff’s office, hurrying inside. Harutyun met her at the door.

She asked, “Could the mobile providers triangulate on his phone?”

Harutyun said evenly, “It wasn’t one of Edwin’s prepaids. Or any mobile at all. The call was from a pay phone, on the Fresno College campus. School’s not in session yet. It’s pretty deserted there. Nobody saw the caller.”

“Well, where’s Edwin?”

“That’s the curious thing. Still in the Rialto—the theater. It must be somebody else.”

They stepped into Madigan’s office, where both the chief detective and Stanning, next to her boss, were on their phones.

Madigan looked up. He disconnected his mobile and ignored his desk phone when it rang, after a glance at caller ID. He looked too at a half-empty ice cream cup and pitched it. Rocky Road.

“Where’s Kayleigh?” Harutyun asked.

Dance said, “She and the crew are at the convention center. Darthur Morgan’s with her, and the deputy you sent is outside. Alicia’s the only one not accounted for. I called her on the way here and left a message. I haven’t heard back.”

The detective glanced toward his phone. “That was Fuentes. Edwin’s still watching his movie.”

Harutyun asked, “Any way he could’ve called from the theater, either the landline or another mobile, and routed the call through the phone at the college?”

Good question. But Madigan had a good answer: “No, we checked with the Bell folks, or whoever the hell they are nowadays. The call was made from the phone at the school, direct to Kayleigh’s.”

Dance had to ask, “And there’s no way he could’ve gotten out of the theater?”

“No. Fuentes is in a restaurant on Olive. He’s watching the front entrance. The back doors’re alarmed. He checked.”

Dance supposed that Edwin was just what he seemed to be: a sad lump of a young man without a life, drawn to a woman who existed in an entirely different universe from his.