The woman inside turned desperate eyes to her and mouthed something.
Dance gestured for her to move back and she slammed the extinguisher base into the passenger-side window. It shattered easily. Dance tossed the extinguisher away-it wasn’t going to do any good on a fire like this-and reached inside to yank the woman out. Sheri was convulsing in spasms and coughing hard, spittle flying from her mouth. Tears streamed down her sooty face.
The agent dragged her thirty feet from the car, crouching, in case the attacker was still there with his gun. They sprawled on the ground in a depression by the roadside.
The woman dropped to her knees and vomited hard and tried to stand.
“No, stay down,” Dance said, starting for her SUV and her phone to see if Madigan had gotten her message and, if not, to call 911.
Which was when she heard a loud bang behind her and felt something slam into her lower back. She pitched forward onto the hard, sunbaked earth.
Chapter 37
DENNIS HARUTYUN WAS standing over the gurney Kathryn Dance lay on, face down.
The medic was on the opposite side from the deputy, laboring away on her back.
“No leads yet,” the detective said.
With her perpendicular view of the scene, Dance could see the ever-efficient CSU team scouring the grounds where the attacker had nearly killed Sheri Towne… and Dance herself. But there wasn’t much left; the fire had spread and taken out some of the trees and brush where he’d been standing.
“That hurt?” the med tech asked.
“A bit.”
“Hm.” He continued working on her, without otherwise acknowledging her answer.
After a few minutes: “You almost through there?” Dance asked, irritated that the doctor was taking so long and that he hadn’t responded to her comment about the pain. She should have said, “Yeah, hurts like hell, butcher.”
“I think that’ll do it.”
She pulled her shirt down.
“Just a scratch. Wasn’t deep at all.”
Dance was sure she’d been shot in the back-her immediate thought was of her friend, the crime scene expert, Lincoln Rhyme, who was a quadriplegic, paralyzed from the neck down. How can I be a good mother if I can’t walk? she’d thought, tumbling over Sheri Towne from the impact. In fact, what had happened was that the fire extinguisher she’d tossed aside had landed in the burning grass and exploded, sending either a rock or a piece of its own casing flying into her back. She’d lain stunned for a moment then had turned to see on the ground a big disk of white foam or powder from the detonated extinguisher. And she’d understood, then crawled on to the SUV and retrieved her phone and-giving up on Madigan-called 911. A quarter hour later the police and fire and medical teams arrived.
The medic took his bad bedside manner and wandered off to tend to his other patient-Sheri Towne, who was sitting next to her husband. She was breathing oxygen and staring at her bandaged hand. Her long nails were, coincidentally, the color of fresh blood.
“It’s a real mess,” Harutyun said. He explained that Edwin had complained to the state DOJ about his detention and the illegal search. Madigan and Miguel Lopez had just been arrested, though released right away, no bail required, but they were no longer active-duty law enforcers.
“Oh, no,” Dance said in a harsh whisper. “He’s out of commission?”
“Sure is.” Harutyun added bitterly, “The perp took out Gabriel Fuentes, stealing his gun. Now it’s the Chief and Miguel. The whole team now’s Crystal, me and you.”
“Any sightings of Edwin?” Dance asked.
“No sign of him or that bull’s-eye-red car of his. The luncheon went on as scheduled. Kayleigh didn’t look too good, to hear the stories. She sang a few songs, had lunch with the fan and then left. People were saying she wasn’t really there. Not mentally.”
Dance nodded toward the smoldering Mercedes. “Pretty dangerous to be on Kayleigh’s bad side.”
“Still have trouble seeing that for a motive for murder.”
“It’s a
Harutyun looked toward Sheri and Bishop. “She nearly burned to death but what she took hardest was that Kayleigh didn’t really ask her to the lunch.”
“What’s the story on the email he used to invite Sheri to the party?” Dance asked.
“Set up an anonymous account this morning. Something like ‘KTowne’ and some numbers. Sent from an Internet cafe in the Tower District. One of the deputies checked but nobody recognized Edwin’s picture. ’Course, the baristas said they’d had about two hundred people in over the course of the morning.”
“And sent it to Sheri’s address that was what? On Bishop’s website?”
“Kayleigh’s own.”
“Sure.”
There was silence for a time.
“Hey, Charlie.” Harutyun nodded to a round, pinkish man, approaching in a jumpsuit. “You know Kathryn Dance, CBI? This’s Charlie Shean, head of our crime scene unit.”
He nodded to her, then, frowning: “That true about P.K.? He’s suspended? And Miguel too?”
“Afraid so.”
“And this stalker fellow’s the one orchestrated it?”
“We don’t know.”
“Bullshit and a half,” Shean muttered. And Dance got the impression that he wasn’t a man who cursed much.
“What’d your folks find, Charlie? Business cards? Phone bills with Edwin’s name on it?” Dennis Harutyun, of the thick mustache and unflappable face, seemed to be loosening up a bit.
“He’s good, whoever he-or she-is. No footprints, tire treads or trace other than the five million bits of trace you’re going to find in a forest. Though we did get a little cigarette ash that’s recent, just past the perimeter of the burn. Analysis’ll take time.”
Dance explained about seeing the person smoking outside her motel room window. “I didn’t catch anything specific, though.” She added, “Edwin did smoke. Still may, but I don’t know for sure.”
The crime scene chief said, “The gun was a nine-like Gabriel’s Glock-but we don’t have any casings or slugs from his so we don’t know if there’s a match. No immediate prints on the casings we found.”
“And I didn’t get any description here either,” Dance muttered. “He was in the shade of the trees.” Stalkers were not only good at disguises; they were good at camouflage too. Anything that helped them observe their target undisturbed and unobtrusively, for as long as possible. “Did Sheri see anything?”
“Haven’t been able to interview her. Smoke inhalation was pretty bad.”
It was then that a vehicle sped up to the scene. Dance instinctively reached for her absent Glock once again. But then saw it was Kayleigh Towne’s dark green SUV, driven expertly by Darthur Morgan. They hadn’t stopped completely before the singer was out of the Suburban and running toward Bishop and Sheri. She bypassed her father completely and bent down and threw her arms around her stepmother. Morgan didn’t seem happy his charge had come to the site of a shootout but Dance supposed that, aside from relations with her father, Kayleigh could be pretty single-minded.
Dance was too far away to hear the conversation but there was no doubt about the messages in the body language: apology, regret and humor.
A heartfelt reconciliation was under way.
Bishop Towne stood and embraced them both.
Family is about love and affection but about friction and separation, too. Yet, with work and luck, the distances-geographic and emotional-can be shrunk, even made to vanish. What struck Dance at the moment was
