Five or six oozed between Michelle and her daughter, who was still rummaging for the purse. Michelle stepped forward fast and went for the girl’s shoulder to pull her up. Hand gripped sweater. It stretched.

‘Mom!’ Trish pulled away.

It was then that a brilliant light came on, focused on the exit doors.

The music stopped abruptly. The lead singer called into the microphone, ‘Hey, uhm, guys, I don’t know … Look, don’t panic.’

‘Jesus, what’s—’ somebody beside Michelle shouted.

The screams began. Wails filled the venue, loud, nearly loud enough to shatter eardrums.

Michelle struggled to get to Trish but more patrons surged between them. The two were pushed in different directions.

An announcement on the PA: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, there’s a fire. Evacuate! Evacuate now! Do not use the kitchen or stage exit – that’s where the fire is! Use the emergency doors.’

Howling screams now.

Patrons rose and stools fell, drinks scattered. Two high-top tables tipped over and crashed to the floor. People began moving toward the exit doors – their glowing red signs were still obvious; the smell of smoke was strong but visibility was good.

‘Trish! Over here!’ Michelle screamed. Now two dozen people were between them. Why the hell had she gone back for the damn purse? ‘Let’s get out!’

Her daughter started toward her through the crowd. But the tide of people surging for the exit doors lifted Michelle off her feet and tugged her away, while Trish was enveloped in another group.

‘Honey!’

‘Mom!’

Michelle, being dragged toward the doors, used every muscle in her body to turn toward her daughter but she was helpless, crushed between two patrons: a heavy-set man in a T-shirt, which was already savagely torn, his skin red, bearing scratch marks from fingernails, and a woman, whose fake breasts pressed painfully into Michelle’s side.

‘Trish, Trish, Trish!’

She might have been mute. The patrons’ screams and wailing – from fear and from pain – were numbing. All she could see was the head of the man in front of her and the exit sign they surged toward. Michelle pounded her fists on shoulders, on arms, on necks, on faces, just as she, too, was pounded by other patrons.

‘I have to get my daughter! Go back, go back, go back!’

But there was no stopping the tide streaming for the exits. Michelle Cooper could breathe only an ounce or two of air at a time. And the pain – in her chest, her side, her gut. Terrible! Her arms were pinned, feet suspended above the floor.

The house lights were on, bright. Michelle turned slightly – not her doing – and saw the faces of the patrons near her: eyes coin-wide in panic, crimson streaks from mouths. Had people bitten their tongues out of fear? Or was the crush snapping ribs and piercing lungs? One man, in his forties, was unconscious, skin gray. Had he fainted? Or died of a heart attack? He was still upright, though, wedged into the moving crowd.

The smell of smoke was stronger now and it was hard to breathe – maybe the fire was sucking the oxygen from the room, though she could still see no flames. Perhaps the patrons, in their panic, were depleting the air. The pressure of bodies against her chest, too.

‘Trish! Honey!’ she called, but the words were whispers. No air in, no air out.

Where was her baby? Was someone helping her escape? Not likely. Nobody, not a single soul, seemed to be helping anyone else. This was an animal frenzy. Every person was out for himself. It was pure survival.

Please …

The group of patrons she was welded to stumbled over something.

Oh, God …

Glancing down, Michelle could just make out a slim young Latina in a red-and-black dress, lying on her side, her face registering pure terror and agony. Her right arm was broken, bent backward. Her other hand was reaching up, fingers gripping a man’s pants pocket.

Helpless. She couldn’t rise; no one paid the least attention to her even as she cried out with every shuffled foot that trampled her body.

Michelle was looking right into the woman’s eyes when a booted foot stepped onto her throat. The man tried to avoid it, crying, ‘No, move back, move back,’ to those around him. But, like everyone else, he had no control of his direction, his motion, his footfalls.

Under the pressure of the weight on her throat, the woman’s head twisted even farther sideways and she began to shake fiercely. By the time Michelle had moved on, the Latina’s eyes were glazed and her tongue protruded slightly from her bright red lips.

Michelle Cooper had just seen someone die.

More PA announcements. Michelle couldn’t hear them. Not that it mattered. She had absolutely no control over anything.

Trish, she prayed, stay on your feet. Don’t fall. Please …

As the mass surrounding her stumbled closer to the fire doors, the crowd began to shift to the right and soon Michelle could see the rest of the club.

There! Yes, there was her daughter! Trish was still on her feet, though she too was pinned in a mass of bodies. ‘Trish, Trish!’

But no sound at all came from her now.

Mother and daughter were moving in opposite directions.

Michelle blinked tears and sweat from her eyes. Her group was only feet away from the exits. She’d be out in a few seconds. Trish was still near the kitchen – where somebody had just said the fire was raging.

‘Trish! This way!’

Pointless.

And then she saw a man beside her daughter lose control completely – he began pounding the face of the man next to him and started to climb on top of the crowd, as if, in his madness, he believed he could claw his way through the ceiling. He was large and one of the people he used as a launching pad was Trish, who weighed a hundred pounds less than he did. Michelle saw her daughter open her mouth to scream and then, under the man’s massive weight, vanish beneath the sea of madness.

BASELINE

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 5

CHAPTER 3

The two people sitting at the long conference table looked her over with varying degrees of curiosity.

Anything else? she wondered. Suspicion, dislike, jealousy?

Kathryn Dance, a kinesics (body language) expert, got paid to read people but law enforcers were typically hard to parse so at the moment she wasn’t sure what was flitting through their minds.

Also present was her boss, Charles Overby, though he wasn’t at the table but hovering in the doorway, engrossed in his Droid. He’d just arrived.

The four were in an interrogation-observation room on the ground floor of the California Bureau of Investigation’s West Central Division, off Route 68 in Monterey, near the airport. One of those dim, pungent chambers separated from the interrogation room by a see-through mirror that nobody, even the most naïve or stoned perps, believed was for straightening your tie or coiffing.

A no-nonsense crowd, fashion-wise. The man at the table – he’d commandeered the head spot – was Steve Foster, wearing a draping black suit and white shirt. He was the head of special investigations with the California Bureau of Investigation’s Criminal Division. He was based in Sacramento. Dance, five six and about a hundred twenty pounds, didn’t know exactly when to describe somebody as ‘hulking’ but Foster had to figure close. Broad, an impressive silver mane, and a droopy moustache that could have been waxed into a handlebar, had it been horizontal and not staple-shaped, he looked like an Old West marshal.

Perpendicular to Foster was Carol Allerton, in a bulky gray pants suit. Short hair frosted silver, black and gray, Carol Allerton was a senior DEA agent operating out of Oakland. The stocky woman had a dozen serious collars to her credit. Not legend, but respectable. She’d had the opportunity to be fast-tracked to Sacramento or even Washington but she’d declined.