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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.

She’d just come off a tough case in Monterey, the CBI office she was assigned to, and decided to take some time off. The children were at their music and sports camps, spending the nights with their grandparents. Dance was free to roam Fresno, Yosemite, and environs, record Los Trabajadores and look for other talent in this musically rich area. Not only Latino but a unique strain of country could be found here (there’s a reason, of course, the genre is often called country-western). In fact the Bakersfield sound, originating in that city a few hours south of Fresno, had been a major country music movement; it had arisen in reaction to what some people thought was the overly slick productions of Nashville in the fifties. Performers like Buck Owens and Merle Haggard began the movement and it had enjoyed a recent resurgence, in the music of such artists as Dwight Yoakam and Gary Allan.

Dance sipped a Sprite and juggled radio stations. She’d considered making this trip a romantic getaway and inviting Jon Boling to come with her. But he’d just gotten a consulting assignment for a computer start-up and would be tied up for several days. And for some reason, Dance had decided she preferred to make the trip solo. The kidnapping case she’d just closed had been tough; two days ago she’d attended the funeral of the one victim they couldn’t save, in the company of the two they had.

She turned up the AC. This time of year the Monterey Peninsula was comfortable, even chilly occasionally, and she’d dressed according to her port of embarkation. In a long-sleeved gray cotton shirt and blue jeans, she was hot. She slipped off her pink-rimmed glasses and wiped them on a napkin, steering with her knees. Somehow sweat had managed to crawl down one lens. The Pathfinder’s thermometer reported 96 degrees outside.

September. Right.

Dance was looking forward to the trip for another reason-to see her only celebrity friend, Kayleigh Towne, the now famous singer-songwriter. Kayleigh had been a longtime supporter of Dance’s website and the indigenous musicians she and Martine championed. The singer had invited Dance to her big concert Friday night in Fresno. Though a dozen years younger than Dance, Kayleigh had been a performer since she was nine or ten years old and a pro since her late teens. Funny, sophisticated and one hell of a writer and entertainer, with no ego whatsoever, the woman was mature beyond her years, and Dance enjoyed her company very much.

She was also the daughter of country music legend Bishop Towne.

On the two or three occasions when Dance had come to Kayleigh’s performances, or visited her in Fresno, bearlike Bishop had lumbered into the room with his thousand-pound ego and the intensity of somebody as addicted to recovery as he had been to cocaine and liquor. He’d rambled on about people in the Industry-spoken with an inflected capital I: musicians he knew intimately (hundreds), musicians he’d learned from (only the greats), musicians he’d mentored (most of the present-day superstars) and musicians he’d gotten into fistfights with (plenty of those too).

He was brash, crude and overtly theatrical; Dance had been enthralled.

On the other hand, his latest album had tanked. His voice had deserted him, his energy too, and those were two things that even the most sophisticated digital massaging in the studio can’t do much about. And nothing could rescue the trite songwriting, so different from the brilliant words and tunes that had made him a hit years ago.

Still, he had his faithful entourage and he was in bold control of Kayleigh’s career; woe to any producer or record company or music venue that didn’t treat her right.

Dance now entered Fresno proper. Salinas Valley, one hundred miles to the west, was known as the nation’s Lettuce Bowl. But the San Joaquin was bigger and produced more and Fresno was its heart. The place was a nondescript working town of about a half million. It had some gang activity and the same domestic, robbery, homicide and even terrorist threats that you saw in every small urban area nowadays, with the rate a bit higher than the national average for all crimes. That inflation, she surmised, was a reflection of unemployment-hovering here around 18 percent. She noticed a number of young men, living evidence of this statistic, hanging out on hazy street corners. Dressed in sleeveless T-shirts and baggy shorts or jeans, they watched her and other cars pass by or talked and laughed and drank from bottles swathed in paper bags.

Dust and heat waves rose from baking surfaces. Dogs sat on porches and gazed through her car at distant nothingness and she caught glimpses of children in backyards jumping happily over trickling sprinklers, a questionable if not illegal activity in perpetually drought-plagued California.

The satellite got her easily to the Mountain View Motel off Highway 41. It had no such vista, though that might be due to the haze. At best, she deduced, squinting east and north, were some timid foothills that would eventually lead to majestic Yosemite.

Stepping into the brittle heat, Dance actually felt light-headed. Breakfast with the kids and dogs had been a long time ago.

The hotel room wasn’t ready yet but that didn’t matter, since she was meeting Kayleigh and some friends in a half hour, at one. She checked her bags with the front desk and jumped back into the Pathfinder, which was already the temperature of a hotplate.

She punched another address into the GPS and dutifully headed where directed, wondering why most of the programmed voices in sat-nav were women’s.

At a stoplight she picked up her phone and glanced at the incoming call and text list.

Empty.

Good that no one at the office or the children’s camps had contacted her.

But odd that there was nothing from Kayleigh, who was going to call that morning to confirm their get- together. And one thing about the performer that had always impressed Dance: despite her fame, she never neglected the little things. In fact, in life, and performances, she seemed to be utterly responsible.

Another call to Kayleigh.

Straight to voicemail.

KATHRYN DANCE HAD to laugh.

The owners of the Cowboy Saloon had a sense of humor. The dark, woody place, giddily cool, had not a single cowboy artifact. But life in the saddle was well represented-by the women who rode the range, roped, branded and punched cattle… and did some fancy six-gun work, if you could believe the poster showing an Old West version of Rosie the Riveter shooting bottles off a fence rail.

According to the movie art, blown-up book jackets, lunch boxes, toys, paintings and photos, the era must have been saturated with flip-haired, excessively busty gals in five-gallon hats, cute neckerchiefs, suede skirts and embroidered blouses, as well as some of the finest boots ever made. Kathryn Dance loved footwear and owned two pairs of elaborately tooled Noconas. But neither came close to the ones worn by Dale Evans, Roy Rogers’s partner, from the 1950s TV show, on impressive display in a faded poster.

At the bar she ordered an iced tea, drank it down fast and got another, then sat at one of the round tables, overvarnished and nicked, looking at the clientele. Two elderly couples; a trio of tired, jumpsuited utility workers, who’d probably been on the job at dawn; a slim young man in jeans and plaid shirt, studying the old-fashioned jukebox; several businessmen in white shirts and dark ties, minus jackets.

She was looking forward to seeing Kayleigh, to recording the songs of the Workers; looking forward to lunch too. She was starving.

And concerned.

It was now one-twenty. Where was her friend?

Music from the jukebox filled the place. Dance gave a faint laugh. It was a Kayleigh Towne song-a particularly