It was then that she heard a man’s voice crying from the back of the hall, “Kayleigh!” It was Bobby, now rising from behind the mixing console, knocking his chair over and ripping off his hard-shell earphones. He waved to her with one hand and pointed to a spot over her head with another. “Look out! … No, Kayleigh!”

She glanced up fast and saw one of the strip lights—a seven-foot Colortran unit—falling free of its mounting and swinging toward the stage by its thick electric cable.

Stepping back instinctively, she tripped over a guitar stand she hadn’t remembered was behind her.

Tumbling, arms flailing, gasping …

The young woman hit the stage hard, on her tailbone. The massive light plummeted toward her, a deadly pendulum, growing bigger and bigger. She tried desperately to rise but fell back, blinded as the searing beams from the thousand-watt bulbs turned her way.

Then everything went black.

Chapter 2

KATHRYN DANCE HAD several lives.

Widowed mother of two children approaching their teen years.

Agent with the California Bureau of Investigation, her specialty interrogation and kinesics—body language analysis.

Dutiful, if sometimes irreverent and exasperated, daughter to parents who lived nearby.

That was the order in which she placed these aspects of her life.

Then there was number four, which was nearly as vital to her psychic well-being as the first three: music. Like Alan Lomax in the middle of the last century, Dance was a folklorist, a song catcher. Occasionally she’d take time off, climb into her SUV, sometimes with kids and dogs, sometimes, like now, solo, and go in search of music, the way hunters take to the fields for deer or turkey.

Dance was now piloting her Pathfinder along Highway 152 from the Monterey Peninsula through a largely barren stretch of California to Fresno in the San Joaquin Valley, three hours away. This was the agricultural heart of the country and open double-trailer trucks, piled high with garlic, tomatoes, and other fruits and vegetables, rolled endlessly toward the massive food-processing plants in the hazy distance. The working fields were verdant or, if harvested already, rich black, but everything else was dry and dun as forgotten toast.

Dust swirled in the Nissan’s wake and insects died splatty deaths on the windshield.

Dance’s mission over the next few days was to record the homemade tunes of a local group of Mexican musicians, all of whom lived in or near Fresno. Most of them picked in the fields so they’d adopted the name Los Trabajadores, the Workers. Dance would record them on her digital TASCAM HD-P2, a bit more expensive than she could afford but superb, then edit and post the songs on her website, “American Tunes.”

People could download them for a small fee, of which she would send most to the musicians, and would keep enough to cover the cost of the site and to take herself and the kids out to dinner occasionally. No one got rich from the downloads but some of the groups that she and her business partner in the venture, Martine Christensen, had discovered had come to regional and even national attention.