He hesitated, still staring at Dance, then wandered off, uncomfortable, fishing in his pockets.
“Don’t go far, Sammy.”
Dance took the bottle of detergent from under Sonja’s pale arm and followed her toward the house. Sonia’s jaw was firm, eyes straight forward.
“Mrs.—”
“I have to put this away,” Sonia Brigham said in a clipped tone.
Dance opened the unlocked door for her. She followed Sonia inside. The woman moved straight into the kitchen and separated the baskets. “If you let them sit… the wrinkles, you know what it’s like.” She smoothed a T-shirt.
Woman to woman.
“I washed it thinking I could give it to him.”
“Mrs. Brigham, there are some things you should know. Travis wasn’t driving the car on June 9. He took the blame.”
“What?” She stopped fussing with her laundry.
“He had a crush on the girl who was driving. She’d been drinking. He tried to get her to pull over and let him drive. She crashed before that happened.”
“Oh, heavens!” Sonia lifted the shirt to her face, as if it could ward off the impending tears.
“And he wasn’t the killer, leaving the crosses. Someone set it up to make it seem like he’d left them and caused those deaths. A man with a grudge against James Chilton. We stopped him.”
“And Travis?” Sonia asked desperately, fingers white as they gripped the shirt.
“We don’t know where he is. We’re looking everywhere, but we haven’t found any leads yet.” Dance explained briefly about Greg Schaeffer and his plan for revenge.
Sonia wiped her round cheeks. There was prettiness still in her face, though obscured. The remnants of the prettiness evident in the picture of her in the state fair stall taken years earlier. Sonia whispered, “I knew Travis wouldn’t hurt those people. I told you that.”
Yes, you did, Dance thought. And your body language told me that you were telling the truth. I didn’t listen to you. I listened to logic when I should have listened to intuition. Long ago Dance had done a Myers-Briggs analysis of herself. She got into trouble when she strayed too far from her nature.
She replaced the shirt, smoothed the cotton again. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“We have no evidence he is. Absolutely none.”
“But you think so.”
“It’d be logical for Schaeffer to keep him alive. I’m doing everything we can to save him. That’s one of the reasons I’m here.” She displayed a picture of Greg Schaeffer, a copy from his DMV picture. “Have you ever seen him? Maybe following you? Talking to neighbors?”
Sonia pulled on battered glasses and looked at the face for a long time. “No. I can’t say I have. So he’s him. The one done it, took my boy?”
“Yes.”
“I told you no good would come of that blog.”
Her eyes slipped toward the side yard, where Sammy was disappearing into the ramshackle shed. She sighed. “If Travis is gone, telling Sammy… oh, that’ll destroy him. I’ll be losing two sons at once. Now, I’ve got to put the laundry away. Please go now.”
DANCE AND O’NEIL stood next to each other on the pier, leaning against the railing. The fog was gone, but the wind was steady. Around Monterey Bay you always had one or the other.
“Travis’s mother,” O’Neil said, speaking loudly. “That was tough, I’ll bet.”
“Hardest part of it all,” she said, her hair flying. Then asked him, “How was the interview?” Thinking of the Indonesian investigation.
The Other Case.
“Good.”
She was glad O’Neil was running the case, regretted her jealousy. Terrorism kept all law enforcers up nights. “If you need anything from me let me know.”
His eyes on the bay, he said, “I think we’ll wrap it in the next twenty-four hours.”
Below them were their children, the four of them, on the sand at water’s edge. Maggie and Wes led the expedition; being grandchildren of a marine biologist, they had some authority.
Pelicans flew solemnly nearby, gulls were everywhere, and not far offshore, a brown curl of sea otter floated easily on its back, inverted elegance. It happily smashed open mollusks against a rock balanced on its chest. Dinner. O’Neil’s daughter, Amanda, and Maggie stared at it gleefully, as if trying to figure out how to get it home as a pet.
Dance touched O’Neil’s arm and pointed at ten-year-old Tyler, who was crouching beside a long whip of kelp and poking it cautiously, ready to flee if the alien creature came to life. Wes stood protectively near in case it did.
O’Neil smiled but she sensed from his stance and the tension in his arm that something was bothering him.
Only a moment later he explained, calling over the blast of wind, “I heard from Los Angeles. The defense is trying to move the immunity hearing back again. Two weeks.”
“Oh, no,” Dance muttered. “Two weeks? The grand jury’s scheduled for then.”
“Seybold’s going all-out to fight it. He didn’t sound optimistic.”
“Hell.” Dance grimaced. “War of attrition? Keep stalling and hope it all goes away?”
“Probably.”
“We won’t,” she said firmly. “You and me, we won’t go away. But will Seybold and the others?”
O’Neil considered this. “If it takes much more time, maybe. It’s an important case. But they have a lot of important cases.”
Dance sighed. She shivered.
“You cold?”
Her forearm was docked against his.
She shook her head. The involuntary ripple had come from thinking of Travis. As she’d been looking over the water, she’d wondered if she was also gazing at his grave.