A bit of that nightmare world had coalesced here on earth, smack within her jurisdiction.
Boling tapped his cell phone, on his belt. “Irv’s monitoring the game. He wrote a bot — an automated computer program — that’ll tell him when Stryker’s online. He’ll call or IM me the instant Travis logs on.”
Dance glanced into the kitchen and saw her mother staring out the window. Her palms were clenched.
“Now, what I was thinking,” Boling continued, “tracing is out, but if we can find him online and watch him, maybe we can learn something about him. Where he is, who he knows.”
“How?”
“Watching his instant messages. That’s how players communicate in DQ. But there’s nothing we can do until he logs on again.”
He sat back. They sipped wine in silence.
Which was suddenly broken as Wes called, “Mom!” from the doorway.
Dance jumped and found herself easing away from Boling as she turned toward her son.
“When do we eat?”
“As soon as Martine and Steve get here.”
The boy retreated to the TV. And Dance and Boling walked inside, carting wine and the computer. The professor replaced the unit in his bag and then snagged a bowl of pretzels from the island in the kitchen.
He headed into the living room and offered the bowl to Wes and Stu. “Emergency rations to keep our strength up.”
“Yea!” the boy cried, grabbing a handful. Then said, “Grandpa, go back to that fumble so Mr. Boling can see it.”
DANCE HELPED HER mother and daughter finish setting out the food, buffet style, on the island in the kitchen.
She and Edie talked about the weather, about the dogs, about the children, about Stuart. Which led to the aquarium, which led to a water referendum, which led to a half dozen other trivial subjects, all of which had one thing in common: They were as far away from the subject of the arrest of Edie Dance as could be.
She watched Wes, Jon Boling and her father sitting together in the living room, with the sports show on the screen. They all laughed hard when a receiver crashed into a Gatorade tank and drenched a cameraman, and were digging into the pretzels and dip as if dinner were an empty promise. Dance had to smile at the homey, comforting scene.
Then she glanced down at her cell phone, disappointed that Michael O’Neil hadn’t called.
As she was setting the table on the Deck, the other guests arrived: Martine Christensen and her husband, Steven Cahill, climbed the stairs, their nine-year-old twin boys in tow. Delighting Wes and Maggie, they also brought with them a long-haired tawny puppy, a briard named Raye.
The couple greeted Edie Dance warmly, avoiding any mention of the cases; either the Roadside Cross attacks or the one involving Edie.
“Hey, girlfriend,” long-haired Martine said to Dance, winking, and passed her a dangerous-looking homemade chocolate cake.
Dance and Martine had been best friends ever since the woman had decided to single-handedly wrest Dance from the addictive lethargy of widowhood and force her back into life.
As if moving from the synth world back to the real, Dance now reflected.
She hugged Steven, who promptly vanished into the den to join the menfolk, his Birkenstocks flapping in time to his long ponytail.
The adults had wine while the children held an impromptu dog show in the backyard. Raye had apparently been doing his homework and was, literally, running circles around Patsy and Dylan, doing tricks and leaping over benches. Martine said he was a star in his obedience and agility classes.
Maggie appeared and said she wanted to take their dogs to school too.
“We’ll see,” Dance told her.
Soon candles were lit, sweaters distributed and everybody was sitting around the table, food steaming in the false autumn of a Monterey evening. Conversation was whirling as fast as the wine flowed. Wes was whispering jokes to the twins, who giggled not because of the punch lines but because an older boy was spending time whispering jokes to them.
Edie was laughing at something Martine said.
And for the first time in two days, Kathryn Dance felt the gloom fade.
Travis Brigham, Hamilton Royce, James Chilton… and the Dark Knight — Robert Harper — slipped from the forefront of her thoughts and she began to think that life might eventually right itself.
Jon Boling turned out to be quite social and fit right in, though he hadn’t known a single soul there before today. He and Steven, the computer programmer, had much to talk about, though Wes kept injecting himself into the conversation.
Everyone studiously avoided talking about Edie’s problem, which meant that current affairs and politics took center stage. Dance was amused to note that the first subjects to come up were ones Chilton had written about: the desalination plant and the new highway to Salinas.
Steve, Martine and Edie were adamantly opposed to the plant.
“I suppose,” Dance said. “But we’ve all lived here for a long time.” A glance at her parents. “Aren’t you tired of the droughts?”
Martine said she doubted the water produced by the desalination plant would benefit them. “It’ll be sold to rich cities in Arizona and Nevada. Somebody’ll make billions and we won’t see a drop.”
After that they debated the highway. The group was divided on this, as well. Dance said, “It’d come in handy for the CBI and sheriff’s office if we’re running cases in the fields north of Salinas. But that cost-overrun issue is a problem.”
“What overrun?” Stuart asked.
Dance was surprised to see everyone looking at her blankly. She explained what she’d learned by reading The Chilton Report: that the blogger had uncovered some possible malfeasance.
“I hadn’t heard about that,” Martine said. “I was so busy reading about the roadside crosses that I didn’t pay much attention… . But I’m sure going to look into it now, I’ll tell you.” She was the most political of Dance’s friends. “I’ll check out the blog.”