Xo

  She supposed one of them could get to her in a hurry if the source of the shadow had been him.

  Dammit, quit making him more than he is! Him, him, him, like you're even afraid to say his name. As if to utter it would conjure up his presence.

  She'd had other obsessed fans, plenty of them--what gorgeous singer-songwriter with a voice from heaven wouldn't collect a few inappropriate admirers? She'd had twelve marriage proposals from men she'd never met, three from women. A dozen couples wanted to adopt her, thirty or so teen girls wanted to be her best friend, a thousand men wanted to buy her a drink or dinner at Bob Evans or the Mandarin Oriental ... and there'd been plenty of invitations to enjoy a wedding night without the inconvenience of a wedding. Hey Kayleigh think on it cause Ill show you a good time better than you ever had and by the by heres a picture of what you can expect yah its really me not bad huh???

  (Very stupid idea to send a picture like that to a seventeen-year-old, Kayleigh's age at the time. By the by.)

  Usually she was cautiously amused by the attention. But not always and definitely not now. Kayleigh found herself snagging her denim jacket from a nearby chair and pulling it on to cover her T-shirt, providing another barrier to any prying eyes. This, despite the characteristic September heat in Fresno, which filled the murky venue like thin stew.

  And more of those clicks and taps from nowhere.

  "Kayleigh?"

  She turned quickly, trying to hide her slight jump, even though she recognized the voice.

  A solidly built woman of around thirty paused halfway across the stage. She had cropped red hair and some subdued inking on arms, shoulders and spine, partly visible thanks to her trim tank top and tight, hip-hugging black jeans. Fancy cowboy boots. "Didn't mean to scare you. You okay?"

  "You didn't. What's up?" she asked Alicia Sessions.

  A nod toward the iPad she carried. "These just came in. Proofs for the new posters? If we get them to the printer today we'll definitely have them by the show. They look okay to you?"

  Kayleigh bent over the screen and examined them. Music nowadays is only partly about music, of course. Probably always has been, she supposed, but it seemed that as her popularity had grown, the business side of her career took up a lot more time than it used to. She didn't have much interest in these matters but she generally didn't need to. Her father was her manager, Alicia handled the day-to-day paperwork and scheduling, the lawyers read the contracts, the record company made arrangements with the recording studios and the CD production companies and the retail and download outlets; her longtime producer and friend at BHRC Records, Barry Zeigler, handled the technical side of arranging and production, and Bobby and the crew set up and ran the shows.

  All so that Kayleigh Towne could do what she did best: write songs and sing them.

  Still, one business matter of interest to her was making sure fans--many of them young or without much money--could buy cheap but decent memorabilia to make the night of the concert that much more special. Posters like this one, T-shirts, key chains, bracelets, charms, guitar chord books, headbands, backpacks ... and mugs, for the moms and dads driving the youngsters to and from the shows and, of course, often buying the tickets, as well.

  She studied the proofs. The image was of Kayleigh and her favorite Martin guitar--not a big dreadnought-size but a smaller, 000-18, ancient, with a crisp yellowing spruce top and a voice of its own. The photo was the inside picture from her latest album, Your Shadow.

  Him ...

  No, don't.

  Eyes scanning the doors again.

  "You sure you're okay?" Alicia asked, voice buzzing with a faint Texas twang.

  "Yeah." Kayleigh returned to the poster proofs, which all featured the same photo though with different type, messages and background. Her picture was a straight-on shot, depicting her much as she saw herself: at five-two, shorter than she would have liked, her face a bit long, but with stunning blue eyes, lashes that wouldn't quit and lips that had some reporters talking collagen. As if ... Her trademark golden hair, four feet long--and no, not cut, only trimmed, in ten years and four months--flowed in the fake gentle breeze from the photographer's electric fan. Designer jeans and high-collared dark-red blouse. A small diamond crucifix.

  "You gotta give the fans the package," Bishop Towne always said. "That's visual too, I'm talking. And the standards're different 'tween men and women. You get into trouble, you deny it." He meant that in the country music world a man could get away with a look like Bishop's own: jutting belly, cigarette, a lined, craggy face riddled with stubble, wrinkled shirt, scuffed boots and faded jeans. A woman singer, he lectured--though he really intended to say "girl"--had to be put together for date night. And in Kayleigh's case that meant a church social, of course: the good girl next door was the image on which she'd built her career. Sure, the jeans could be a little tight, the blouses and sweaters could closely hug her round chest, but the necklines were high. The makeup was subtle and leaned toward pinks.

  "Go with them."

  "Great." Alicia shut off the device. A slight pause. "I haven't gotten your father's okay yet."

  "They're good," the singer reassured her, nodding at the iPad.

  "Sure. I'll just run it by him. You know."

  Now Kayleigh paused. Then: "Okay."

  "Acoustics good here?" asked Alicia, who had been a performer herself; she had quite a voice and a love of music, which was undoubtedly why she'd taken a job for someone like Kayleigh Towne, when the efficient, no-nonsense woman could have earned twice as much as a personal assistant for a corporate executive. She'd signed on last spring and had never heard the band perform here.

  "Oh, the sound is great," Kayleigh said enthusiastically, glancing at the ugly concrete walls. "You wouldn't think it." She explained how the designers of the venue, back in the 1960s, had done their homework; too many concert halls--even sophisticated ones intended for classical music--had been built by people without confidence in the natural ability of musical instruments and voices to reach the farthest seats with "direct volume," that is, the sound emanating from the stage. Architects would add angular surfaces and free-standing shapes to boost the volume of the music, which did that but also sent the vibrations in a hundred different directions. This resulted in every performer's acoustic nightmare, reverberation: in effect, echoes upon echoes that yielded muddy, sometimes even off-key, sounds.

  Here, in modest Fresno, Kayleigh explained to Alicia, as her father had to her, the designers had trusted in the power and purity of the voice and drum skin and sounding board and reed and string. She was about to ask the assistant to join her in a chorus of one of her songs to prove her point--Alicia did great harmonies--when she noticed her looking toward the back of the hall. She assumed the woman was bored with the scientific discussion. But the frowning gaze suggested something else was on her mind.

  "What?" Kayleigh asked.

  "Isn't it just us and Bobby?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "I thought I saw somebody." She lifted a finger tipped in a black-painted nail. "That doorway. There."

  Just where Kayleigh herself had thought she'd seen the shadow ten minutes before.

  Palms sweating, absently touching her phone, Kayleigh stared at the changing shapes in the back of the hall.

  Yes ... no. She just couldn't tell.

  Then shrugging her broad shoulders, one of them sporting a tattoo of a snake in red and green, Alicia said, "Hm. Guess not. Whatever it was it's gone now.... Okay, see you later. The restaurant at one?"

  "Yeah, sure."

  Kayleigh listened absently to the thumping of boots as she left and continued to stare at the black doorways.

  Angrily, she suddenly whispered, "Edwin Sharp."

  There I've said his name.

  "Edwin, Edwin, Edwin."

  Now that I've conjured you up, listen here: Get the hell out of my concert hall! I've got work to do.

  And she turned away from the shadowy, gaping doorway from which, of
course, no one was leering at her at all. She stepped to center stage, looking over the masking tape on the dusty wood, blocking out where she would stand at different points during the concert.

  It was then that she heard a man's voice crying from the back of the hall, "Kayleigh!" It was Bobby, now rising from behind the mixing console, knocking his chair over and ripping off his hard-shell earphones. He waved to her with one hand and pointed to a spot over her head with another. "Look out! ... No, Kayleigh!"

  She glanced up fast and saw one of the strip lights--a seven-foot Colortran unit--falling free of its mounting and swinging toward the stage by its thick electric cable.

  Stepping back instinctively, she tripped over a guitar stand she hadn't remembered was behind her.

  Tumbling, arms flailing, gasping ...

  The young woman hit the stage hard, on her tailbone. The massive light plummeted toward her, a deadly pendulum, growing bigger and bigger. She tried desperately to rise but fell back, blinded as the searing beams from the thousand-watt bulbs turned her way.

  Then everything went black.

  Chapter 2

  KATHRYN DANCE HAD several lives.

  Widowed mother of two children approaching their teen years.

  Agent with the California Bureau of Investigation, her specialty interrogation and kinesics--body language analysis.

  Dutiful, if sometimes irreverent and exasperated, daughter to parents who lived nearby.

  That was the order in which she placed these aspects of her life.

  Then there was number four, which was nearly as vital to her psychic well-being as the first three: music. Like Alan Lomax in the middle of the last century, Dance was a folklorist, a song catcher. Occasionally she'd take time off, climb into her SUV, sometimes with kids and dogs, sometimes, like now, solo, and go in search of music, the way hunters take to the fields for deer or turkey.

  Dance was now piloting her Pathfinder along Highway 152 from the Monterey Peninsula through a largely barren stretch of California to Fresno in the San Joaquin Valley, three hours away. This was the agricultural heart of the country and open double-trailer trucks, piled high with garlic, tomatoes, and other fruits and vegetables, rolled endlessly toward the massive food-processing plants in the hazy distance. The working fields were verdant or, if harvested already, rich black, but everything else was dry and dun as forgotten toast.

  Dust swirled in the Nissan's wake and insects died splatty deaths on the windshield.

  Dance's mission over the next few days was to record the homemade tunes of a local group of Mexican musicians, all of whom lived in or near Fresno. Most of them picked in the fields so they'd adopted the name Los Trabajadores, the Workers. Dance would record them on her digital TASCAM HD-P2, a bit more expensive than she could afford but superb, then edit and post the songs on her website, "American Tunes."

  People could download them for a small fee, of which she would send most to the musicians, and would keep enough to cover the cost of the site and to take herself and the kids out to dinner occasionally. No one got rich from the downloads but some of the groups that she and her business partner in the venture, Martine Christensen, had discovered had come to regional and even national attention.

  She'd just come off a tough case in Monterey, the CBI office she was assigned to, and decided to take some time off. The children were at their music and sports camps, spending the nights with their grandparents. Dance was free to roam Fresno, Yosemite, and environs, record Los Trabajadores and look for other talent in this musically rich area. Not only Latino but a unique strain of country could be found here (there's a reason, of course, the genre is often called country-western). In fact the Bakersfield sound, originating in that city a few hours south of Fresno, had been a major country music movement; it had arisen in reaction to what some people thought was the overly slick productions of Nashville in the fifties. Performers like Buck Owens and Merle Haggard began the movement and it had enjoyed a recent resurgence, in the music of such artists as Dwight Yoakam and Gary Allan.

  Dance sipped a Sprite and juggled radio stations. She'd considered making this trip a romantic getaway and inviting Jon Boling to come with her. But he'd just gotten a consulting assignment for a computer start-up and would be tied up for several days. And for some reason, Dance had decided she preferred to make the trip solo. The kidnapping case she'd just closed had been tough; two days ago she'd attended the funeral of the one victim they couldn't save, in the company of the two they had.

  She turned up the AC. This time of year the Monterey Peninsula was comfortable, even chilly occasionally, and she'd dressed according to her port of embarkation. In a long-sleeved gray cotton shirt and blue jeans, she was hot. She slipped off her pink-rimmed glasses and wiped them on a napkin, steering with her knees. Somehow sweat had managed to crawl down one lens. The Pathfinder's thermometer reported 96 degrees outside.

  September. Right.

  Dance was looking forward to the trip for another reason--to see her only celebrity friend, Kayleigh Towne, the now famous singer-songwriter. Kayleigh had been a longtime supporter of Dance's website and the indigenous musicians she and Martine championed. The singer had invited Dance to her big concert Friday night in Fresno. Though a dozen years younger than Dance, Kayleigh had been a performer since she was nine or ten years old and a pro since her late teens. Funny, sophisticated and one hell of a writer and entertainer, with no ego whatsoever, the woman was mature beyond her years, and Dance enjoyed her company very much.

  She was also the daughter of country music legend Bishop Towne.

  On the two or three occasions when Dance had come to Kayleigh's performances, or visited her in Fresno, bearlike Bishop had lumbered into the room with his thousand-pound ego and the intensity of somebody as addicted to recovery as he had been to cocaine and liquor. He'd rambled on about people in the Industry--spoken with an inflected capital I: musicians he knew intimately (hundreds), musicians he'd learned from (only the greats), musicians he'd mentored (most of the present-day superstars) and musicians he'd gotten into fistfights with (plenty of those too).

  He was brash, crude and overtly theatrical; Dance had been enthralled.

  On the other hand, his latest album had tanked. His voice had deserted him, his energy too, and those were two things that even the most sophisticated digital massaging in the studio can't do much about. And nothing could rescue the trite songwriting, so different from the brilliant words and tunes that had made him a hit years ago.

  Still, he had his faithful entourage and he was in bold control of Kayleigh's career; woe to any producer or record company or music venue that didn't treat her right.

  Dance now entered Fresno proper. Salinas Valley, one hundred miles to the west, was known as the nation's Lettuce Bowl. But the San Joaquin was bigger and produced more and Fresno was its heart. The place was a nondescript working town of about a half million. It had some gang activity and the same domestic, robbery, homicide and even terrorist threats that you saw in every small urban area nowadays, with the rate a bit higher than the national average for all crimes. That inflation, she surmised, was a reflection of unemployment--hovering here around 18 percent. She noticed a number of young men, living evidence of this statistic, hanging out on hazy street corners. Dressed in sleeveless T-shirts and baggy shorts or jeans, they watched her and other cars pass by or talked and laughed and drank from bottles swathed in paper bags.

  Dust and heat waves rose from baking surfaces. Dogs sat on porches and gazed through her car at distant nothingness and she caught glimpses of children in backyards jumping happily over trickling sprinklers, a questionable if not illegal activity in perpetually drought-plagued California.

  The satellite got her easily to the Mountain View Motel off Highway 41. It had no such vista, though that might be due to the haze. At best, she deduced, squinting east and north, were some timid foothills that would eventually lead to majestic Yosemite.

  Stepping into the brittle heat, Dance
actually felt light-headed. Breakfast with the kids and dogs had been a long time ago.

  The hotel room wasn't ready yet but that didn't matter, since she was meeting Kayleigh and some friends in a half hour, at one. She checked her bags with the front desk and jumped back into the Pathfinder, which was already the temperature of a hotplate.

  She punched another address into the GPS and dutifully headed where directed, wondering why most of the programmed voices in sat-nav were women's.

  At a stoplight she picked up her phone and glanced at the incoming call and text list.

  Empty.

  Good that no one at the office or the children's camps had contacted her.

  But odd that there was nothing from Kayleigh, who was going to call that morning to confirm their get-together. And one thing about the performer that had always impressed Dance: despite her fame, she never neglected the little things. In fact, in life, and performances, she seemed to be utterly responsible.

  Another call to Kayleigh.

  Straight to voicemail.

  KATHRYN DANCE HAD to laugh.

  The owners of the Cowboy Saloon had a sense of humor. The dark, woody place, giddily cool, had not a single cowboy artifact. But life in the saddle was well represented--by the women who rode the range, roped, branded and punched cattle ... and did some fancy six-gun work, if you could believe the poster showing an Old West version of Rosie the Riveter shooting bottles off a fence rail.

  According to the movie art, blown-up book jackets, lunch boxes, toys, paintings and photos, the era must have been saturated with flip-haired, excessively busty gals in five-gallon hats, cute neckerchiefs, suede skirts and embroidered blouses, as well as some of the finest boots ever made. Kathryn Dance loved footwear and owned two pairs of elaborately tooled Noconas. But neither came close to the ones worn by Dale Evans, Roy Rogers's partner, from the 1950s TV show, on impressive display in a faded poster.