O’Neil and Dance shared a troubled glance. The phrase was the title of a Beatles song, which Charles Manson was obsessed with. He had used the term to refer to an impending race war in America. It was also the title of the award-winning book about the cult leader and the murders by the man who prosecuted him.
“Then he went to Visual-Earth dot com. Like Google Earth. You can see satellite pictures of practically everywhere on the planet.”
Great, Dance thought. Though it turned out not to be. There was no way to narrow down what he’d looked for.
“It could’ve been highways in California, it could’ve been Paris or Key West or Moscow.”
“And what’s ‘Nimue’?”
“No idea.”
“Does it mean anything in Capitola?”
“No.”
“Any employees there named Alison?”
The disembodied voice of the techie said, “Nope. But I was going to say I might be able to find out what sites he logged onto. It depends on whether he just erased or shredded them. If they’re shredded, forget it. But if they’re just dumped I might be able to find them floating around in the free space somewhere on the hard drive.”
“Anything you can do would be appreciated,” Dance said.
“I’ll get right on it.”
She thanked him and they disconnected.
“TJ, check out ‘Nimue.’ ”
His fingers flew over the keyboard. The results came up and he scrolled through them. After a few minutes he said, “Hundreds of thousands of hits. Looks like a lot of people use it as a screen name.”
O’Neil said, “Somebody he knew online. Or a nickname. Or somebody’s real last name.”
Staring at the screen, TJ continued, “Trademarks too: cosmetics, electronic equipment—hm, sex products . . . Never seen one of those before.”
“TJ,” Dance snapped.
“Sorry.” He scrolled again. “Interesting. Most references are to King Arthur.”
“As in Camelot?”
“I guess.” He continued to read. “Nimue was the Lady of the Lake. This wizard, Merlin, fell in love with her—he was like a hundred or something and she was sixteen. Now that’ll guarantee you twenty minutes on Dr. Phil.” He read some more. “Merlin taught her how to be a sorceress. Oh, and she gave King Arthur this magic sword.”
“Excalibur,” O’Neil said.
“What?” TJ asked.
“The sword. Excalibur. Haven’t you heard any of this before?” the detective asked.
“Naw, I didn’t take Boring Made-up Stuff in college.”
“I like the idea that it’s somebody he was trying to find. Cross-check ‘Nimue’ with ‘Pell,’ ‘Alison,’ ‘California,’ ‘Carmel,’ ‘Croyton’ . . . Anything else?”
O’Neil suggested, “The women: Sheffield, McCoy, Whitfield.”
“Good.”
After several minutes of frantic typing the agent looked over at Dance. “Sorry, boss. Zip.”
“Check the search terms out with VICAP, NCIC and the other main criminal databases.”
“Will do.”
Dance stared at the words she’d written. What did they mean? Why had he risked going online to check them out?
Helter Skelter, Nimue, Alison . . .
And what had he been looking at on Visual-Earth? A place he intended to flee to, a place he intended to burglarize?
She asked O’Neil, “What about the forensics at the courthouse?”
The detective consulted his notes. “No red flags. Almost everything was burned or melted. The gas was in plastic milk jugs inside a cheap roller suitcase. Sold in a dozen places—Wal-Mart, Target, stores like that. The fireproof bag and fire suit were made by Protection Equipment, Inc., New Jersey. Available all over the world but most are sold in Southern California.”
“Brushfires?”
“Movies. For stuntmen. A dozen outlets. Not much to follow up on, though. There’re no serial numbers. They couldn’t lift any prints off the bag or the suit. Now, the additives in the gas mean it was BP but we can’t narrow it down to a particular station. The fuse was homemade. Rope soaked in slow-burning chemicals. None of them’re traceable either.”
“TJ, what’s the word on the aunt?”
“Zip so far. I’m expecting a breakthrough any moment.”
Her phone rang. It was another call from Capitola. The warden was with the prisoner who claimed he had some information about Daniel Pell. Did Dance want to talk to him now?
“Sure.” She hit the speakerphone button. “This is Agent Dance. I’m here with Detective O’Neil.”
“Hey. I’m Eddie Chang.”
“Eddie,” the warden added, “is doing a five-to-eight for bank robbery. He’s in Capitola because he can be a bit . . . slippery.”
“How well did you know Daniel Pell?” Dance asked.
“Not really good. Nobody did. But I was somebody who, you know, wasn’t no threat to him. So he kind of opened up to me.”
“And you’ve got some information on him?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Why’re you helping us?” O’Neil asked.
“Up for parole in six months. I help you, it’ll go good for me. Provided you catch him, of course. If you don’t, I think I’ll stay in the Big C here until you do, now that I’m rolling over on him.”
O’Neil asked, “Did Pell talk about girlfriends or anyone on the outside? Particularly a woman?”
“He bragged about the women he’d had. He’d give us these great stories. It was like watching a porn film. Oh, man, we loved those stories.”
“You remember any names? Someone named Alison?”
“He never mentioned anybody.”
After what Tony Waters had told her, Dance suspected that Pell was making up the sex stories—using them as incentives to get the cons to do things for him.
She asked, “So, what do you want to tell us?”
“I have this idea where he might be headed.” Dance and O’Neil shared a glance. “Outside of Acapulco. There’s a town there, Santa Rosario, in the mountains.”
“Why there?”
“Okay, what it was, maybe a week ago we were sitting around bullshitting and there was a new con, Felipe Rivera, doing a back-to-back ’cause he got trigger-happy during a GTA. We were talking and Pell finds out he was from Mexico. So Pell’s asking him about this Santa Rosario. Rivera’d never heard of it, but Pell’s pretty anxious to find out more, so he describes it, like trying to jog his memory. It’s got a hot spring and it’s not near any big highways and there’s this steep mountain nearby. . . . But Rivera couldn’t remember anything. Then Pell shut up about it and changed the subject. So I was figuring that’s what he might’ve had in mind.”
Dance asked, “Before that, had he ever mentioned Mexico?”
“Maybe. Can’t say as I recall.”
“Think back, Eddie. Say, six months, a year. Did Pell ever talk about someplace else he’d like to go?”
Another pause. “No. Sorry. I mean, no place he thought was, man, I’ve gotta go there because it’s kick-ass, or whatever.”
“How about somewhere he was just interested in? Or curious about?”
“Oh, hey, a couple times he mentioned that Mormon place.”
“Salt Lake City.”
“No. The state. Utah. What he liked was that you could have a lot of wives.”
The Family . . .
“He said in Utah the police don’t give you any shit because it’s the Mormons who run the state and they don’t like the FBI or the state police snooping around. You can do whatever you want in Utah.”
“When did he tell you that?”
“I don’t know. A while ago. Last year. Then maybe a month ago.”
Dance glanced at O’Neil and he nodded.
“Let me call you back. Can you wait there for a minute?”
A laugh from Chang. “And where would I go?”
She disconnected, then called Linda Whitfield and, after her, Rebecca Sh
effield. Neither woman knew of any interest Pell had ever expressed in either Mexico or Utah. As for the attraction of Mormon polygamy, Linda said he’d never mentioned it. Rebecca laughed. “Pell liked sleeping with several women. That’s different from being married to several women. Real different.”
Dance and O’Neil walked upstairs to Charles Overby’s office and briefed him about the possible destinations, as well as the three references they’d found in the Google search, and the crime-scene results.
“Acapulco?”
“No. It was a plant, I’m sure. He asked about it just last week and in front of other cons. It’s too obvious. Utah’s more likely. But I’ve got to find out more.”
“Well, front burner it, Kathryn,” Overby said. “I just got a call from The New York Times.” His phone rang.
“It’s Sacramento on two, Charles,” his assistant said. He sighed and grabbed the handset.
Dance and O’Neil left and just as they got into the hallway, his phone rang too. As they walked, she glanced at him several times. Michael O’Neil’s affect displays—signals of emotion—were virtually invisible most of the time, but they were obvious to her. She deduced the call was about Juan Millar. She could see clearly how upset he was about his fellow officer’s injury. She didn’t know the last time he’d been so troubled.
O’Neil hung up and gave her a summary of the detective’s condition: It was the same as earlier but he’d been awake once or twice.
“Go see him,” Dance said.
“You sure?”
“I’ll follow up here.”
Dance returned to her office, pausing to pour another coffee from the pot near Maryellen Kresbach, who said nothing more about phone messages, though Dance sensed she wanted to.
Brian called. . . .
This time she grabbed the chocolate chip cookie she’d been fantasizing about. At her desk she called Chang and the warden back.
“Eddie, I want to keep going. I want you to tell me more about Pell. Anything about him you can remember. Things he said, things he did. What made him laugh, what made him mad.”
A pause. “I don’t know what to tell you, really.” He sounded confused.
“Hey, how’s this for an idea? Pretend somebody was going to set me up on a date with Pell. What would you tell me about him before we went out?”
“A date with Daniel Pell. Whoa, that’s one fucking scary thought.”
“Do your best, Cupid.”
Chapter 13
Back in her office, Dance heard the frog croak again and she picked up her cell phone.
The caller was Rey Carraneo, reporting that the manager of the You Mail It franchise on San Benito Way in Salinas did remember a woman in the store about a week ago.
“Only, she didn’t mail anything, Agent Dance. She just asked about when the different delivery services stopped there. Worldwide Express was the most regular, he told her. Like clockwork. He wouldn’t’ve thought anything about it, except that he saw her outside a few days later, sitting on a park bench across the street. I’d guess she was checking the times herself.”
Unfortunately, Carraneo couldn’t do an EFIS image because she’d worn the baseball cap and dark sunglasses then too. Nor had the manager seen her car.
They disconnected, and she wondered again when the Worldwide Express driver’s body would be found.
More violence, more death, another family altered.
The ripples of consequence can spread almost forever.
It was just as that recollection of Morton Nagle’s words was passing through her mind that Michael O’Neil called. Coincidentally, his message was about that very driver’s fate.
• • •
Dance was in the front seat of her Taurus.
From the CD player, the original Fairfield Four gospel singers did their best to distract her from the carnage of the morning: “I’m standing in the safety zone . . .”
Music was Kathryn Dance’s salvation. Policework for her wasn’t test tubes and computer screens. It was people. Her job required her to blend her mind and heart and emotions with theirs and stay close to them so that she could discern the truths they knew but hesitated to share. The interrogations were usually difficult and sometimes wrenching, and the memories of what the subjects had said and done, often horrendous crimes, never left her completely.
If Alan Stivell’s Celtic harp melodies or Natty Bo and Beny Billy’s irrepressible ska Cubano tunes or Lightnin’ Hopkins’s raw, zinging chords were churning in her ears and thoughts, she tended not to hear the shocking replays of her interviews with rapists and murderers and terrorists.
Dance now lost herself in the scratchy tones of the music from a half-century ago.
“Roll, Jordan, roll . . .”
Five minutes later she pulled into an office park on the north side of Monterey, just off Munras Avenue, and climbed out. She walked into the ground-floor garage, where the Worldwide Express driver’s red Honda Civic sat, trunk open, blood smeared on the sheet metal. O’Neil and a town cop were standing beside it.
Someone else was with them.
Billy Gilmore, the driver Dance had been sure was Pell’s next victim. To her shock, he’d been found very much alive.
The heavyset man had some bruises and a large bandage on his forehead—covering the cut that was apparently the source of the blood—but, it turned out, the injuries weren’t from being beaten by Pell; he’d cut himself shifting around in the trunk to get comfortable. “I wasn’t trying to get out. I was afraid to. But somebody heard me, I guess, and called the police. I was supposed to stay in there for three hours, Pell told me. If I didn’t he said he’d kill my wife and kids.”
“They’re okay,” O’Neil explained to Dance. “We’ve got them in protection.” He related Billy’s story about Pell’s hijacking the truck, then the car. The driver had confirmed that Pell was armed.
“What was he wearing?”
“Shorts, a dark windbreaker, baseball cap, I think. I don’t know. I was really freaked out.”
O’Neil had called in the new description to the roadblocks and search parties.
Pell had given Billy no idea where he was ultimately going, but was very clear about directions to this garage. “He knew just where it was and that it’d be deserted.”
The woman accomplice had checked this out too, of course. She’d met him here and they’d headed for Utah, presumably.
“Do you remember anything else?” Dance asked.
Just after he’d slammed the trunk lid, Billy said, he’d heard the man’s voice again.
“Somebody was with him?”
“No, it was just him. I think he was making a call. He had my phone.”
“Your phone?” Dance asked, surprised. A glance at O’Neil, who immediately called the Sheriff’s Office technical-support people, and had the techs get in touch with the driver’s cell phone service provider to set up a trace.
Dance asked if Billy had heard anything that Pell said. “No. It was just mumbling to me.”
O’Neil’s mobile rang and he listened for a few minutes and said to Dance, “Nope. It’s either destroyed or the battery’s out. They can’t find a signal.”
Dance looked around the garage. “He’s dumped it somewhere. Let’s hope nearby. We should have somebody check the trash cans—and the drains in the street.”
“Bushes too,” O’Neil said and sent two of his deputies off on the task.
TJ joined them. “He did come this way. Call me crazy, boss, but this isn’t on the route I myself would take to Utah.”
Whether or not Pell was headed for Utah, his coming to downtown Monterey was surprising. It was a small town and he’d easily be spotted, and there were far fewer escape routes than if he’d gone east, north or south. A risky place to meet his accomplice, but a brilliant move. This was the last place they’d expect him.
One other question nagged.
“Billy, I need to ask you something. Why are you still alive?”
�
��I . . . Well, I begged him not to hurt me. Practically got on my hands and knees. It was embarrassing.”
It was also a lie. Dance didn’t even need a baseline to see the stress flood through the man’s body. He looked away and his face flushed.
“I need to know the truth. It could be important,” she said.
“Really. I was crying like a baby. I think he felt sorry for me.”
“Daniel Pell has never felt sorry for a human being in his life,” O’Neil said.
“Go on,” Dance said softly.
“Well, okay . . .” He swallowed and his face turned bright red. “We made a deal. He was going to kill me. I’m sure he was. I said if he’d let me live . . .” Tears filled his eyes. It was hard to watch the misery but Dance needed to understand Pell, and why this man was still alive, when two others had been killed under similar circumstances.
“Go on,” she said softly.
“I said if he let me live I’d do anything for him. I meant give him money or something. But he said he wanted me to . . . See, he saw my wife’s picture and he liked how she looked. So he asked me to tell him about the things we did together. You know, intimate things.” He stared at the concrete floor of the garage. “Like, he wanted all the details. I mean, everything.”
“What else?” Dance prompted.
“Naw, that was it. It was so embarrassing.”
“Billy, please tell me.”
His eyes filled with tears. His jaw was trembling.
“What?”
A deep breath. “He got my home phone number. And he said he’d call me at night sometime. Maybe next month, maybe six months. I’d never know. And when he called, my wife and me were supposed to go in the bedroom. And, you know . . .” The words caught in his throat. “I was supposed to leave the phone off the hook so he could listen to us. Pam had to say some things he told me.”
Dance glanced at O’Neil, who exhaled softly. “We’ll catch him before anything like that happens.”
The man wiped his face. “I almost told him, ‘No, you fucker. Go ahead and kill me.’ But I couldn’t.”
“Why don’t you go be with your family? Get out of town for a while.”
“I almost told him that. I really did.”
A medical tech led him back to the ambulance.
Kathryn Dance Ebook Boxed Set : Roadside Crosses, Sleeping Doll, Cold Moon (9781451674217) Page 52
