Solitude Creek

Dance noted the time: it was nearly eleven p.m. As she ordered files on her desk, she glanced at her computer, on which was streaming a local TV news account of the Bay View incident, the sound down. Who was on but Brad Dannon, the Hero Firefighter. He hadn’t been the first on the scene this time but a close second or third. She watched the stark images. The blood on the doorway, the shards of glass from the shattered windows and the rocks, the huddled survivors who’d been fished from the water and wrapped in thin, efficient hypothermia blankets. People stumbling through the parking lot and among the crowd of onlookers, calling out, pathetic, for their missing relatives or friends.

A new, related story appeared. Dance turned the volume up. Henderson Jobbing had been sued by eighteen people for negligence in not securing their vehicles and keys. The commentators said bankruptcy was likely, not because of liability — it probably wasn’t responsible legally — but because defending the suit would be so expensive that it would have to close down.

‘The company has been a Monterey employer for years, providing warehouse services and running trucks throughout the state … and internationally as well. A local success story, but now, it seems, it will be shuttering its doors for good.’

Dance turned away from the screen. And thought, too, about poor Sam Cohen. The roadhouse would surely close, as well.

This is something you never recover from. Ever.

She pulled out her phone and made a call.

‘Kathryn,’ the man’s voice said.

‘You still here, Rey?’

‘Sure am.’

Rey Carreneo was an agent she described as older in heart than in years. The man had been a patrol officer in Reno, Nevada, where he’d got quite the lesson in policing. He’d had a rich past, some good, some dark, and he bore a tiny scar in the Y between his thumb and forefinger; it was where a gang tat had resided not too many years ago before he’d had it removed.

‘Need some help.’

‘Sure, Kathryn. The Serrano case?’

‘No, this is our Solitude Creek unsub. I need you to look into a couple of things. Can I come to your office in five?’

‘I’ll be here.’

CHAPTER 34

Antioch March sat parked in the Honda, observing a house fifty feet away and waiting for the right moment to change Kathryn Dance’s life for ever.

He shifted. A big man, March didn’t much care for the Accord. At home he drove a full-size Mercedes, and AMG, over 500 horsepower. A present from his boss. Here, though, of course, he needed to keep a low profile.

Squinting as he looked over the house.

He was there because he’d found some quite helpful information in Dance’s Pathfinder not long ago, and an obvious plan had presented itself. On the seat beside him were his ski mask, the cotton gloves and a tire iron. He pictured dear Kathryn’s face when she learned of the tragedy here. Would she cry? Scream? Both March and the Get wondered.

He was intermittently listening to the account of the Bay View disaster and to an audiobook, Keith Hopkins’s brilliant Death and Renewal. March had failed as an academic because of the Get, not because of his intelligence: he had always read a great deal. He preferred non-fiction — biographies and histories primarily. Renewal was a scholarly work about death and social structure in ancient Rome, an era that fascinated him. The battles, the spreading of the empire, the culture. Gladiatorial contests were one of the topics covered in the book and they were of particular interest to March. He’d read whatever he could find on them, but there was little scholarship on gladiators and their world. It was astonishing to March that the bulk of the books on the topic were romance novels, featuring muscular men sweating through the strappy leather garb that encased them.

Romance novels!

My God.

He shut off the audiobook and stared at the house. He wondered how long he’d have to wait.

March relaxed, sat back.

What interested him about gladiators, of course, wasn’t the erotic side — hetero or homo — which was a product of Hollywood and, apparently, popular publishing. No, it was the institutionalization of death that was so captivating to him.

History taught, history explained. A man can’t be judged by one day: you have to examine his whole life to see trends, to see who he really is. The great leveling of time.

Mankind in general, the same.

And the world of gladiatorial contests had informed Antioch March’s being. Now, the combat itself was interesting and complicated. It had begun in a very modest form as a tribute to a deceased relative, called the munus, a fight between two or three professionals, sometimes to the death, sometimes not. Eventually Roman officials combined the munera and non-combative entertainments, like sporting events, popular with the citizenry, into gladiatorial (the word referred to ‘swordsmen’) shows.