ANCE BLINKED, WAITING for a punch line.

But Jon Boling was serious.

“You found him? Where?”

“In Aetheria, the fictional land in DimensionQuest.”

“He’s online?”

“Not now, but he has been. Recently.”

“Can you find out where he is in real life from that?”

“There’s no way of knowing. We can’t trace him. I called the gaming company—they’re in England—and talked to some executives. DimensionQuest’s servers are in India and at any given moment there are a million people online.”

“And since we have his computer, that means he’s using a friend’s,” Dance said.

“Or he’s at a public terminal or he’s borrowed or stolen a computer and is logging on through a Wi-Fi spot.”

“But whenever he’s online we know he’s standing still and we have a chance to find him.”

“In theory, yes,” Boling agreed.

“Why is he still playing? He must know we’re looking for him.”

“Like I was saying, he’s addicted.”

A nod at the computer: “Are you sure it’s Travis?”

“Has to be. I got into his folders in the game and found a list of ava tars he’s created to represent himself. Then I had a few of my students go online and look for those names. He’s been logging on and off today. The character’s name is Stryker—with a y. He’s in the category of Thunderer, which makes him a warrior. A killer, basically. One of my students—a girl who’s played DimensionQuest for a few years—found him about an hour ago. He was roaming around the countryside just killing people. She watched him slaughter a whole family. Men, women and children. And then he corpse camped.”

“What’s that?”

“In these games, when you kill another character they lose power, points and whatever they’re carrying with them. But they’re not permanently dead. Avatars come to life again after a few minutes. But they’re in a weakened state until they can start to regain power. Corpse camping is when you kill a victim and just wait nearby for them to come back to life. Then you kill them again, when they have no defenses. It’s very bad form, and most players don’t do it. It’s like killing a wounded soldier on the battlefield. But Travis apparently does it regularly.”

Dance stared at the homepage of DimensionQuest, an elaborate graphic of foggy glens, towering mountains, fantastical cities, turbulent oceans. And mythical creatures, warriors, heroes, wizards. Villains too, including Qetzal, the spiky demon with the sewn-shut mouth, wide eyes chillingly staring at her.

A bit of that nightmare world had coalesced here on earth, smack within her jurisdiction.

Boling tapped his cell phone, on his belt. “Irv’s monitoring the game. He wrote a bot—an automated computer program—that’ll tell him when Stryker’s online. He’ll call or IM me the instant Travis logs on.”

Dance glanced into the kitchen and saw her mother staring out the window. Her palms were clenched.

“Now, what I was thinking,” Boling continued, “tracing is out, but if we can find him online and watch him, maybe we can learn something about him. Where he is, who he knows.”

“How?”

“Watching his instant messages. That’s how players communicate in DQ. But there’s nothing we can do until he logs on again.”

He sat back. They sipped wine in silence.

Which was suddenly broken as Wes called, “Mom!” from the doorway.

Dance jumped and found herself easing away from Boling as she turned toward her son.

“When do we eat?”

“As soon as Martine and Steve get here.”

The boy retreated to the TV. And Dance and Boling walked inside, carting wine and the computer. The professor replaced the unit in his bag and then snagged a bowl of pretzels from the island in the kitchen.

He headed into the living room and offered the bowl to Wes and Stu. “Emergency rations to keep our strength up.”

“Yea!” the boy cried, grabbing a handful. Then said, “Grandpa, go back to that fumble so Mr. Boling can see it.”

DANCE HELPED HER mother and daughter finish setting out the food, buffet style, on the island in the kitchen.

She and Edie talked about the weather, about the dogs, about the children, about Stuart. Which led to the aquarium, which led to a water referendum, which led to a half dozen other trivial subjects, all of which had one thing in common: They were as far away from the subject of the arrest of Edie Dance as could be.

She watched Wes, Jon Boling and her father sitting together in the living room, with the sports show on the screen. They all laughed hard when a receiver crashed into a Gatorade tank and drenched a cameraman, and were digging into the pretzels and dip as if dinner were an empty promise. Dance had to smile at the homey, comforting scene.

Then she glanced down at her cell phone, disappointed that Michael O’Neil hadn’t called.

As she was setting the table on the Deck, the other guests arrived: Martine Christensen and her husband, Steven Cahill, climbed the stairs, their nine-year-old twin boys in tow. Delighting Wes and Maggie, they also brought with them a long-haired tawny puppy, a briard named Raye.

The couple greeted Edie Dance warmly, avoiding any mention of the cases; either the Roadside Cross attacks or the one involving Edie.

“Hey, girlfriend,” long-haired Martine said to Dance, winking, and passed her a dangerous-looking homemade chocolate cake.

Dance and Martine had been best friends ever since the woman had decided to single-handedly wrest Dance from the addictive lethargy of widowhood and force her back into life.

As if moving from the synth world back to the real, Dance now reflected.

She hugged Steven, who promptly vanished into the den to join the menfolk, his Birkenstocks flapping in time to his long ponytail.

The adults had wine while the children held an impromptu dog show in the backyard. Raye had apparently been doing his homework and was, literally, running circles around Patsy and Dylan, doing tricks and leaping over benches. Martine said he was a star in his obedience and agility classes.

Maggie appeared and said she wanted to take their dogs to school too.

“We’ll see,” Dance told her.

Soon candles were lit, sweaters distributed and everybody was sitting around the table, food steaming in the false autumn of a Monterey evening. Conversation was whirling as fast as the wine flowed. Wes was whispering jokes to the twins, who giggled not because of the punch lines but because an older boy was spending time whispering jokes to them.

Edie was laughing at something Martine said.

And for the first time in two days, Kathryn Dance felt the gloom fade.

Travis Brigham, Hamilton Royce, James Chilton…and the Dark Knight—Robert Harper—slipped from the forefront of her thoughts and she began to think that life might eventually right itself.

Jon Boling turned out to be quite social and fit right in, though he hadn’t known a single soul there before today. He and Steven, the computer programmer, had much to talk about, though Wes kept injecting himself into the conversation.

Everyone studiously avoided talking about Edie’s problem, which meant that current affairs and politics took center stage. Dance was amused to note that the first subjects to come up were ones Chilton had written about: the desalination plant and the new highway to Salinas.

Steve, Martine and Edie were adamantly opposed to the plant.

“I suppose,” Dance said. “But we’ve all lived here for a long time.” A glance at her parents. “Aren’t you tired of the droughts?”

Martine said she doubted the water produced by the desalination plant would benefit them. “It’ll be sold to rich cities in Arizona and Nevada. Somebody’ll make billions and we won’t see a drop.”

After that they debated the highway. The group was divided on this, as well. Dance said, “It’d come in handy for the CBI and sheriff’s office if we’re running cases in the fields north of Salinas. But that cost-overrun issue is a problem.”

“What overrun?” Stuart asked.

Dance was surprised to see everyone looking at her blankly. She explained what she’d learned by reading The Chilton Report: that the blogger had uncovered some possible malfeasance.

“I hadn’t heard about that,” Martine said. “I was so busy reading about the roadside crosses that I didn’t pay much attention…. But I’m sure going to look into it now, I’ll tell you.” She was the most political of Dance’s friends. “I’ll check out the blog.”

After dinner Dance asked Maggie to bring out her keyboard for a brief concert.

The group retired to the living room, more wine was passed around. Boling lounged back in a deep armchair, joined by Raye the briard. Martine laughed—Raye was a bit bigger than a lapdog—but the professor insisted the puppy stay.

Maggie plugged in and, with the gravity of a recital pianist, sat down and played four songs from her Suzuki Book Three, simple arrangements of pieces by Mozart, Beethoven and Clementi. She hardly missed a note.

Everyone applauded and then went for cake, coffee and more wine.

Finally around 9:30, Steve and Martine said they wanted to get the twins to bed, and they headed out the door with the children. Maggie was already making plans to enter Dylan and Patsy in Raye’s dog classes.

Edie gave a distant smile. “We should go too. It’s been a long day.”

“Mom, stay for a while. Have another glass of wine.”

“No, no, I’m exhausted, Katie. Come on, Stu. I want to go home.”

Dance received a distracted embrace from her mother, and her comfort from earlier diminished. “Call me later.” Disappointed at their quick retreat, she watched the taillights disappear up the road. Then she told the children to say good night to Boling. The professor smiled and shook their hands, and Dance sent them off to wash up.

Wes appeared a few minutes later with a DVD. Ghost in the Shell, a Japanese anime science fiction tale involving computers.

“Here, Mr. Boling. This is pretty sweet. You can borrow it if you want.”

Dance was astonished that her son was behaving so well with a man. Probably he recognized Boling as a business associate of his mother’s, not a love interest; still, he’d been known to grow defensive even around her coworkers.

“Well, thanks, Wes. I’ve written about anime. But I’ve never seen this one.”

“Really?”

“Nope. I’ll bring it back in good shape.”

“Whenever. ’Night.”

The boy hurried back to his room, leaving the two of them together.

But only for a moment. A second later Maggie appeared with a gift of her own. “This is my recital.” She handed him a CD in a jewel box.

“The one you were talking about at dinner?” Boling asked. “Where Mr. Stone burped during the Mozart?”

“Yeah!”

“Can I borrow it?”

“You can have it. I have about a million of them. Mom made them.”

“Well, thanks, Maggie. I’ll burn it on my iPod.”

The girl actually blushed. Unusual for her. She charged off.

“You don’t have to,” Dance whispered.

“Oh, no. I will. She’s a great girl.”

He slipped the disk into his computer bag and looked over the anime that Wes had lent him.

Dance lowered her voice again, “How many times have you seen it?”

He chuckled. “Ghost in the Shell? Twenty, thirty times…along with the two sequels. Damn, you can even spot the white lies.”

“Appreciate your doing that. It means a lot to him.”

“I could tell he was excited.”

“I’m surprised you don’t have children. You seem to understand them.”

“No, that never worked out. But if you want children, it definitely helps to have a woman in your life. I’m one of those men you have to be careful of. Don’t you say that, all you girls?

“Careful of? Why’s that?”

“Never date a man over forty who’s never been married.”

“I think nowadays whatever works, works.”

“I just never met anybody I wanted to settle down with.”

Dance noted the flicker of an eyebrow and a faint fluctuation of pitch. She let those observations float away.

Boling began, “You’re…?” His eyes dipped to her left hand, where a gray pearl ring encircled the heart finger.

“I’m a widow,” Dance said.

“Oh, gosh. I’m sorry.”

“Car crash,” she said, feeling only a hint of the familiar sorrow.

“Terrible.”

And Kathryn Dance said nothing more about her husband and the accident for no reason other than she preferred not to talk about them any longer. “So, you’re a real bachelor, hmm?”

“I guess I am. Now there’s a word you haven’t heard for…about a century.”

She went to the kitchen to retrieve more wine, instinctively grabbing a red—since that was Michael O’Neil’s favorite—then remembered that Boling liked white. She filled their glasses halfway up.

They chatted about life on the Peninsula—his mountain-biking trips and hikes. His professional life was far too sedentary for him so Boling would often jump into his old pickup truck and head out to the mountains or a state park.

“I’ll do some biking this weekend. It’ll be some sanity in an island of madness.” He then told her more about the family get-together he’d mentioned earlier.

“Napa?”

“Right.” His brow wrinkled in a cute and charming way. “My family is…how do I put this?”

“A family.”

“Hit the nail on the head,” he said, laughing. “Two parents healthy. Two siblings I get along with a majority of the time, though I like their children better. Assorted uncles and aunts. It’ll be fine. Lot of wine, lot of food. Sunsets—but not a lot of those, thank goodness. Two, tops. That’s sort of the way weekends work.”

Again, a silence fell between them. Comfortable. Dance felt no rush to fill it.

But the peace was broken just then as Boling’s cell phone hiccuped. He looked at the screen. Immediately his body language had shifted to high alert.

“Travis is online. Let’s go.”