‘What is it?’ The freckled girl’s eyes went wide.
‘When I was your age, at dinner, I’d put butter on the broccoli and feed it to our dog when my mother wasn’t looking.’
‘Her?’ Bethany glanced at Edie Dance, in the other room.
‘Her. Now, I’m trusting you. You won’t tell.’
‘No. I won’t tell. I don’t like broccoli either.’
Dance said, ‘Pretty much sucks, doesn’t it?’
Bethany nodded as if considering a litigant’s petition. Then passed judgment. ‘That’s a good secret. We’ll vote you in.’ She turned and trotted back to the den, where the other girls were waking.
The official, and presumably only, adult member of the Pacific Hills Secrets Club now left the house. She nodded at the MCSO deputy keeping guard and smiled. He waved back. Then Dance jumped into her SUV and drove to headquarters. She’d no sooner walked into the lobby than Rey Carreneo spotted her and said, ‘Looked into it, the situation you asked me about.’ He handed her a folder. ‘All in there.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Anything else, Kathryn?’
‘Not yet. But stay close.’
‘Sure.’
Dance flipped through the folder, skimmed. She closed it and walked through the corridors to Overby’s office. Her boss gestured her inside, dropping his landline phone into its cradle. ‘Sacramento.’ He said this with a grimace. An explanation would logically follow that but none was forthcoming and she didn’t press it. She supposed he’d been dinged because of the latest incident on the Peninsula – the hospital attack – and the corollary: the tardiness of finding the Solitude Creek killer. Or the Oakland warehouse fire, which had damaged Operation Pipeline. Or the Serrano operation.
Or just because bureaucracy was bureaucracy.
As she sat down in one of the office chairs, Michael O’Neil stepped into the office too.
‘Michael, greetings,’ Overby said.
‘Charles.’ Then to Dance a nod. She thought he looked tired, as he sat heavily beside her.
‘What do you have?’
The deputy answered, ‘The preliminary report from the hospital. Not much, sorry to say. But not surprising. Given how smart this guy is.’
‘How did he do it, the elevator?’
‘There’s not a lot of security video but it seems he dressed in scrubs – cap and booties too – and stole a key from the maintenance room. He got into the elevator motor room on the top floor, cut the wires feeding both cars. Primary and backup. CSU took tool marks but you know how helpful those are.’
‘There was some power,’ Dance said, recalling the blinding glare from the lights attached to the security camera. She explained this.
O’Neil said, ‘Probably battery backup for that in the car itself. But it must not’ve been connected to the intercom.’ He glanced at his notes. ‘There was a fire in the elevator shaft but it was from ether. Hot burn but no smoke. What people smelled was from the burning Honda. We think he did that to make sure the fire alarms didn’t go off. That would send an automatic notice to the fire department. They’d be there in five, ten minutes. He wanted to keep the carnage going for as long as he could.’
‘Well,’ Overby said.
Dance added, ‘And we have no idea what he’s driving now. There’s no security video in the garage at the hospital. If that’s, in fact, where he parked. Or, for all we know, he hiked a mile to where he left his new wheels.’
She explained that while she believed the unsub was a pro, hired by somebody else, their one suspect – Frederick Martin – had not panned out. The other victims at Solitude Creek seemed unlikely targets for a pro. ‘We’re back to thinking somebody may have been targeting the venues themselves. The roadhouse, the Bay View Center or the hospital. But why? We just don’t know.’
She noted that Overby wasn’t fully attentive. He was staring at his computer screen, which showed a streaming newscast from a local TV station. The Hero Fireman was giving another interview – this time about his efforts at the hospital incident.
Overby muted the set. ‘I read an article one time. It was pretty interesting. About a fireman in Buffalo, New York. You ever hear about it?’
There were presumably a lot of firemen in Buffalo, Dance reflected. But you usually let Charles Overby run with whatever it was he was running with. ‘No, Charles.’
‘Nup.’
‘He was pretty good at his job. Brave. There’d be a fire in an apartment. He’d race in, make his way around the flames, save a family or the pet dog. Happened three or four times. He knew just where the fire’d started, how best to fight it. Amazing how he saved people. His truck was usually first on the scene and he could read a fire like nobody else. That’s what they say: reading a fire. Firemen say that, I mean.
‘Well, guess what, boys and girls? The fireman set the fires himself. Not because he was a pyromaniac, if that’s what they call those people. No, he didn’t care about the fires. He cared about the prestige. The glory. He basked in it. Went away for attempted murder, in addition to the arson, burglary and assault charges. I think they dropped the vandalism. Didn’t need it, really.’
He stabbed a finger at the TV. ‘Have you noticed that Brad Dannon has been on the scene of the disasters pretty damn fast? And that he was real eager to talk to the media about what he did? “Hero”. That’s what they’re calling him. So. You think he might be the perp, your unsub?’ A faint smile of triumph.
‘I—’ Dance began.
‘Wonder why we didn’t think of that before?’
Dance wished he hadn’t added that last sentence. Throughout his monologue she’d been trying to figure out some way to sideline him before he tossed out a line like that.