A lean boy with sandy hair wandered into the sunroom beside the kitchen. He was on the phone. Though only twelve, Wes was nearly as tall as his mother. She wiggled a finger at him and he wandered over to her. She kissed him on the forehead and he didn't cringe. Which was the same as "I love you very much, Mother dear."

"Off the phone," she said. "Dinnertime."

"Like, gotta go."

"Don't say 'like.'"

The boy hung up. "What're we having?"

"Chicken," Maggie said dubiously.

"You like Albertsons."

"What about bird flu?"

Wes snickered. "Don't you know anything? You get it from live chickens."

"It was alive once," the girl countered.

From the corner where his sister had backed him, Wes said, "Well, it's not an Asian chicken."

"Hell-o. They migrate. And how you die is you throw up to death."

"Mags, not at dinnertime!" Dance said.

"Well, you do."

"Oh, like chickens migrate? Yeah, right. And they don't have bird flu here. Or we would've heard."

Sibling banter. But there was a little more to it, Dance believed. Her son remained deeply shaken by his father's death. This made him more sensitive to mortality and violence than most boys his age. Dance steered him away from those topics-a tough job for a woman who tracked down felons for a living. She now announced, "As long as the chicken's cooked, it's fine." Though she wasn't sure that this was right and wondered if Maggie would dispute her.

But her daughter was lost in her seashell book.

The boy said, "Oh, mashed potatoes too. You rock, Mom."

Maggie and Wes set the table and laid the food out, while Dance washed up.

When she returned from the bathroom, Wes asked, "Mom, aren't you going to change?" He was looking at her black suit.

"I'm starving. I can't wait." Not sharing that the real reason she'd kept the outfit on was as an excuse to wear her weapon. Usually the first thing she did upon coming home was to put on jeans and a T-shirt and slip the gun into the lockbox beside her bed.

Yeah, it's a tough life being a cop. The little ones spend a lot of time alone, don't they? They'd probably love some friends to play with…

Wes glanced once more at her suit as if he knew exactly what she'd been thinking.

But then they turned to the food, eating and talking about their day-the children's at least. Dance, of course, said nothing about hers. Wes was in a tennis camp in Monterey, Maggie at a music camp in Carmel. Each seemed to be enjoying the experience. Thank goodness neither of them asked about Daniel Pell.

When dinner was over, the trio cleared the table and did the dishes-her children always had a share of the housework. When they were through, Wes and Maggie headed into the living room to read or play video games.

Dance logged onto her computer and checked email. Nothing about the case, though she had several about her other "job." She and her best friend, Martine Christensen, ran a website called "American Tunes," after the famous Paul Simon song from the 1970s.

Kathryn Dance was not a bad musician, but a brief attempt at a full-time career as a singer and guitarist had left her dissatisfied (which, she was afraid, was how she'd left her audiences). She decided that her real talent was listening to music and encouraging other people to, as well.

On her infrequent vacations or on long weekends, she'd head off in search of homemade music, often with the children and dogs in tow. A "folklorist" was the name of the avocation or, more popularly, "song catcher." Alan Lomax was perhaps the most famous, collecting music from Louisiana to the Appalachians for the Library of Congress throughout the midtwentieth century. While his taste ran to black blues and mountain music, Dance's scavenger hunt took her farther afield, to places reflecting the changing sociology of North America: music grounded in Latino, Caribbean, Nova Scotian, Canadian, urban African-American and Native American cultures.

She and Martine helped the musicians copyright their original material, posted the taped songs and distributed to them the money that listeners paid for downloads.

When the day came when Dance was no longer willing or able to track down criminals, she knew music would be a good way to spend retirement.

Her phone rang. She looked at the caller ID number.

"Well, hello."

"Hey there." Michael O'Neil asked, "How'd it go with Reynolds?"

"Nothing particularly helpful. But he's checking his old files from the Croyton case." She added that she'd picked up Morton Nagle's material too, but hadn't had a chance to look through it yet.

O'Neil told her that the Focus stolen from Moss Landing hadn't been located, and they'd discovered nothing else helpful at Jack's Seafood. The techs had lifted fingerprints from the T-bird and the utensils: Pell's and others that were common to both locations, presumably the woman's. A search through state and federal databases revealed she had no record.

"We did find one thing we're a little troubled about. Peter Bennington-"

"Your crime lab guy."

"Right. He said there was acid on the floorboard of the T-bird, driver's seat side, the part that didn't burn. It was recent. Peter said it was a corrosive acid-pretty diluted but Watsonville Fire soaked the car to cool it, so it could've been pretty strong when Pell left it there."

"You know me and evidence, Michael."

"Okay, the bottom line is that it was mixed with the same substance found in apples, grapes and candy."

"You think Pell was…what? Poisoning something?"

Food was the raison d'etre of Central California. There were thousands of acres of fields and orchards, a dozen big wineries and other food processors all within a half-hour drive.

"It's a possibility. Or maybe he's hiding out in an orchard or vineyard. We scared him at Moss Landing and he gave up on staying in a motel or boardinghouse. Think about the Pastures… We ought to get some people searching."

"Have you got anybody available?" she asked.

"I can shift some troops. Get CHP too. Hate to pull them off the search downtown and along One, but I don't think we have any choice."

Dance agreed. She relayed to him Carraneo's information about the T-bird.

"Not racing forward at the speed of light, are we?"

"Nup," she agreed.

"What're you up to?"

"Schoolwork."

"I thought the kids were out for the summer."

"My schoolwork. On the manhunt."

"I'm headed your way right now. Want some help sharpening your pencils and cleaning the blackboard?"

"Bring an apple for the teacher, and you're on."

"Hi, Michael," Wes said, slapping him five.

"Hey there."

They talked about the boy's tennis camp-O'Neil played too-and about restringing rackets. Her lean, muscular son was skillful at most sports he tried, though he was now concentrating on tennis and soccer. He wanted to try karate or aikido, but Dance deflected him from martial arts. Sometimes the boy boiled over with anger-its source his father's death-and she didn't like encouraging fighting as a sport.

O'Neil had undertaken a mission to keep the boy's mind occupied with healthy diversions. He'd introduced him to two activities that were polar opposites: collecting books and spending time on O'Neil's favorite spot on earth, Monterey Bay. (Dance sometimes thought the detective had been born in the wrong era and could easily picture him as the captain of an old-time sailing ship, or a fishing vessel in the 1930s.) Sometimes, while Dance had a mother/daughter outing with Maggie, Wes would spend the afternoon on O'Neil's boat fishing or whale watching. Dance was violently seasick unless she popped Dramamine, but Wes had been born with sea legs.