Solitude Creek

Then he snagged his gym bag from the back seat. No key, so he had to leave the car unlocked. This didn’t, however, seem like a place where car theft was a big risk. Again, no choice.

Then, head down, he walked an indirect route to the one-story, ranch-style apartment complex.

In the courtyard, he paused. Another glance around. No security videos. No one visible. He stepped up to ground-floor apartment 236, listened. Faint music came from inside. Pop music.

He reached into his pocket with his right hand, gripping the gun, and with his left rapped on the door. ‘Excuse me?’

The music went down. ‘Who’s there?’

‘Your neighbor.’ He stood directly in front of the peephole to prove he was white. And therefore no threat. It seemed like that sort of neighborhood.

The chain, then the latch.

The man inside could be big. Dangerous. And armed.

The door opened. Hm. Ahmed was indeed big, yes, but mostly fat. Pear-shaped. He was also probably not an Ahmed since he was as Anglo as they came. About forty, curly hair. A goatee, shaved head. And a dozen tats, the biggest of which were the American flag and an eagle.

No gun, though one would have looked right at home in his belt.

‘Which unit you from?’ he asked.

March shoved his Glock into the man’s thick chest. Pushed him back into the room.

‘Fuck. No. What is this?’

‘Sssh.’ March frisked him. Then collected the gym bag, closed and latched the door.

Five minutes later the heavyset man, crying, was lying on his back, hands and feet bound with duct tape.

‘Please, don’t hurt me. I don’t— What do you want? Please, no!’

March got down to the fun and soon had his answers. Stan Prescott was not, of course, a terrorist. He was a Christian. A well-thumbed Bible sat beside a well-sat-in armchair. By profession, a bartender. But his avocation was — he might have said — patriot.

After being caressed by the muzzle of March’s Glock, he’d admitted he’d posted the images and claimed credit in the name of Allah, or whatever the fine print read, to arouse anti-Islam sentiment in the country. Was he crazy? March reflected. Everyone with half a brain would see through the plan. And those who believed the claims? Well, that was one group that nobody needed to convert.

Stupid on all fronts. Not the least because he’d picked the wrong person to draw attention to.

But, of course, Prescott had his own Get: the need to keep his country safe and free … from anyone who wasn’t American. That is, Christian American. That is, white Christian American. What he hadn’t learned was that you need to treat the Get like an animal that’s only partly domesticated. You can’t be stupid: it’ll kill its owner as fast as anyone else.

‘Give me your passcode. Your computer.’

The man did, instantly.

March was surveying Prescott’s files. Looking at all the man’s pseudonymous diatribes against America. He looked over the dozens of grim photos of beheadings, bombs and other supposedly terrorist attacks that no self-respecting jihadist would have been behind. He had quite the collection of gruesome pictures.

He got the passcodes to Prescott’s Vidster account and blog, and took everything down.

‘What’s this about, man? Come on! Are you working for them? You seem like one of us!’

Them …

It occurred to March that there might be a benefit here: if the authorities had seen the post, the terror angle would lodge in their minds as a motive for what had happened. That would obscure just a bit more the real reason for the attacks in Monterey, which had, of course, to be kept completely secret.

‘I’m sorry. I’ll do whatever you want. Jesus, man. Come on. We’re both … alike, you know.’

White.

March shut down the laptop. He looked around the room, then dragged a pole lamp over, positioned it above the man’s sweating face.

‘What’re you doing?’

March walked to the front door and fetched his gym bag.

‘What’re you doing?’ Prescott repeated, more desperate.

March crouched down and examined the man’s face closely. He patted him on the shoulder, said, ‘Don’t you worry.’

And unzipped the bag.

CHAPTER 39

‘This’s it,’ Michael O’Neil said, pulling the rental car into the parking lot of Stan Prescott’s apartment complex in Tustin, California.

They parked several units down from Prescott’s to wait for an Orange County deputy to join them.

In the time it had taken the state jet to whisk Dance and O’Neil from Monterey Regional Airport to John Wayne, Orange County, O’Neil’s computer people had the identity of the man who’d posted that clip of the Solitude Creek deaths.

Stanley Prescott, aka Ahmed, was a forty-one-year-old bartender. Single. The information gathered also revealed that he had been working in his club’s Long Beach location at the time of the Solitude Creek and Bay View disasters, so he wasn’t the unsub.

His Facebook and blog profile revealed he was essentially a rabid bigot. It was obvious that he was claiming Solitude Creek and the other incidents were the work of Muslims to incite anti-Islamic sentiment.

People could be such idiots.