Dance sighed, upset. If the woman had come forward when they’d first arrived, they might have Pell by now.
Or if I hadn’t blindly believed the CLOSED sign and knocked on the door sooner, she added to herself bitterly.
“I—” The woman started to cry.
“I understand. We’ll make sure you’re safe. What kind of car?”
“It’s a dark blue Ford Focus. Three years old. There’s a bumper sticker about global warming on it. And a dent in the—”
“Where did they go?”
“North.”
Dance got the tag number and called O’Neil, who would in turn relay a message to MCSO dispatch for an announcement to all units about the car.
As the clerk made arrangements to stay with a friend until Pell’s recapture, Dance stared at the lingering cloud of smoke around the Thunderbird. Angry. She’d made a sharp deduction from Eddie Chang’s information and they’d come up with a solid plan for the collar. But it had been a waste.
TJ joined her, with the manager of Jack’s Seafood. He gave his story of the events, clearly omitting a few facts, probably that he’d inadvertently tipped off Pell about the police. Dance couldn’t blame him. She remembered Pell from the interview—how sharp and wary he was.
The manager described the woman, who was skinny and pretty in a “mousy way” and had looked at the man adoringly throughout most of the meal. He’d thought they were honeymooners. She couldn’t keep her hands off him. He put her age at midtwenties. The manager added that they pored over a map for a good portion of the meal.
“What was it of?”
“Here, Monterey County.”
Michael O’Neil joined her, flipping closed his phone. “No reports of the Focus,” he said. “But with the evacuation it must’ve gotten lost in the traffic. Hell, he could’ve turned south and driven right past us.”
Dance called Carraneo over. The young man looked tired. He’d had a busy day but it wasn’t over yet. “Find out everything you can about the T-bird. And start calling motels and boardinghouses from Watsonville down to Big Sur. See if any blond women checked in by themselves and listed a Thunderbird as their car on the registration form. Or if anybody saw a T-bird. If the car was stolen on Friday, she’d’ve checked in Friday, Saturday or Sunday.”
“Sure, Agent Dance.”
She and O’Neil both stared west, over the water, which was calm. The sun was a wide, flat disk, low over the Pacific, the fierce beams muted; the fog hadn’t arrived yet but the late-afternoon sky was hazy, grainy. Monterey Bay looked like a flat, blue desert. He said, “Pell’s taking a huge risk staying around here. He’s got something important to do.”
It was just then that she got a call from someone who, she realized, might have some thoughts about what the killer might have in mind.
Chapter 17
There are probably ten thousand streets named Mission in California, and James Reynolds, the retired prosecutor who eight years earlier had won the conviction of Daniel Pell, lived on one of the nicer ones.
He had a Carmel zip code, though this street wasn’t in the cute part of town—the gingerbread area flooded on weekends with tourists (whom the locals simultaneously love and hate). Reynolds was in working Carmel, but it was not exactly the wrong side of the tracks. He had a precious three-quarters of an acre of secluded property not far from the Barnyard, the landscaped multilevel shopping center where you could buy jewelry and art and complicated kitchen gadgets, gifts and souvenirs.
Dance now pulled into the long driveway, reflecting that people with so much property were either the elite of recent money—neurosurgeons or geeks who survived the Silicon Valley shakeout—or longtime residents. Reynolds, who’d made his living as a prosecutor, had to be the latter.
The tanned, balding man in his midsixties met her at the door, ushered her inside.
“My wife’s at work. Well, at volunteer. I’m cooking dinner. Come on into the kitchen.”
As she followed him along the corridor of the brightly lit house Dance could read the man’s history in the many frames on the wall. The East Coast schools, Stanford Law, his wedding, the raising of two sons and a daughter, their graduations.
The most recent photos had yet to be framed. She nodded at a stack of pictures, on the top of which was one of a young woman, blond and beautiful in her elaborate white dress, surrounded by her maids of honor.
“Your daughter? Congratulations.”
“The last to fly the nest.” He gave her a thumbs-up and a grin. “How ’bout you?”
“Weddings’re a while off. I’ve got middle school next on the agenda.”
She also noticed a number of framed newspaper pages: big convictions he’d won. And, she was amused to see, trials he’d lost. He noticed her looking at one and chuckled. “The wins are for ego. The losses’re for humility. I’d take the high ground and say that I learned something from the not-guilties. But the fact is, sometimes juries’re just out to lunch.”
She knew this very well from her previous job as jury consultant.
“Like with our boy Pell. The jury should’ve recommended the death penalty. But they didn’t.”
“Why not? Extenuating circumstances?”
“Yep, if that’s what you call fear. They were scared the Family would come after them for revenge.”
“But they didn’t have a problem convicting him.”
“Oh, no. The case was solid. And I ran the prosecution hard. I picked up on the Son of Manson theme—I was the one who called him that in the first place. I pointed out all the parallels: Manson claimed he had the power to control people. A history of petty crimes. A cult of subservient women. He was behind the deaths of a rich family. In his house, crime scene found dozens of books about Manson, underlined and annotated.
“Pell actually helped get himself convicted,” Reynolds added with a smile. “He played the part. He’d sit in court and stare at the jurors, trying to intimidate, scare them. He tried it with me too. I laughed at him and said I didn’t think psychic powers had any effect on lawyers. The jury laughed too. It broke the spell.” He shook his head. “Not enough to get him the needle, but I was happy with consecutive life sentences.”
“You also prosecuted the three women in the Family?”
“I pled them out. It was pretty much minor stuff. They didn’t have anything to do with the Croyton thing. I’m positive of that. Before they ran into Pell, none of them’d ever been picked up for anything worse than drinking in public or a little pot, I think. Pell brainwashed them. . . . Jimmy Newberg was different. He had a history of violence—some aggravateds and felony drug charges.”
In the spacious kitchen, decorated entirely in yellow and beige, Reynolds put on an apron. He’d apparently slipped it off to answer the door. “I took up cooking after I retired. Interesting contrast. Nobody likes a prosecutor. But”—he nodded at a large orange skillet filled with cooking seafood—“my cioppino . . . everybody loves that.”
“So,” Dance said, looking around with an exaggerated frown. “This is what a kitchen looks like.”
“Ah, a take-out queen. Like me when I was a working bachelor.”
“My poor kids. The good news is that they’re learning defensive cooking. For last Mother’s Day? They made me strawberry crepes.”
“And all you had to do was clean up. Here, try a bowl.”
She couldn’t resist. “Okay, just a sample.”
He dished up a portion. “It needs red wine to accompany.”
“That I’ll pass on.” She tried the stew. “Excellent!”
Reynolds had been in touch with Sandoval and the Monterey County sheriff and learned the latest details of the manhunt, including the information that Pell was staying in the area. (Dance noted that, regarding the CBI, he’d called her and not Charles Overby.)
“I’ll do whatever I can to help you nail this bastard.” The former prosecutor meticulously sliced a tomato. “Just name it. I’ve already called the county storage company.
They’re bringing me all my notes from the case. Probably ninety-nine percent of them won’t be helpful, but there could be a nugget or two. And I’ll go through every damn page, if I have to.” Dance glanced at his eyes, which were dark coals of determination, very different from, say, Morton Nagle’s sparkle. She had never worked any cases with Reynolds, but knew he’d be a fierce and uncompromising prosecutor.
“That’d be very helpful, James. Appreciate it.” Dance finished the stew and rinsed the bowl, placing it in. “I didn’t even know you were in the area. I’d heard you retired to Santa Barbara.”
“We have a little place there. But we’re here most of the year.”
“Well, when you called, I got in touch with MCSO. I’d like to have a deputy stationed outside.”
Reynolds dismissed the idea. “I’ve got a good alarm system. I’m virtually untraceable. When I became lead prosecutor I started getting threats—those Salinas gang prosecutions. I had my phone unlisted and transferred title to the house to a trust. There’s no way he could find me. And I’ve got a carry permit for my six-gun.”
Dance wasn’t going to take no for an answer. “He’s already killed several times today.”
A shrug. “Sure, what the hell. I’ll take a babysitter. Can’t hurt—my younger son’s here visiting. Why take chances?”
Dance scooted onto a stool. She rested her maroon wedge Aldos on the supports. The straps on the shoes were inlaid with bright daisies. Even ten-year-old Maggie had more conservative taste than she did when it came to shoes, which were one of Dance’s passions.
“For now, could you tell me something about the murders eight years ago? It might give me an idea of what he’s up to.”
Reynolds sat on an adjoining stool, sipping wine. He ran through the facts of the case: How Pell and Jimmy Newberg had broken into the house of William Croyton in Carmel, killed the businessman, his wife and two of their three children. They were all stabbed to death.
“Newberg too. My theory was that he balked about killing the kids and got into a fight with Pell, who killed him.”
“Any history between Pell and Croyton?”
“Not that we could establish. But Silicon Valley was at its peak then, and Croyton was one of the big boys. He was in the press all the time—he not only designed most of the programs himself, he was the chief of sales too. Larger-than-life kind of guy. Work hard, play hard. Big, loud, tanned. Not the most sympathetic victim in the world. Pretty ruthless businessman, rumors of affairs, disgruntled employees. But if murder was a crime only against saints, we prosecutors’d be out of a job.
“His company had been burglarized a couple of times in the year before the killing. The perps got away with computers and software, but Santa Clara County could never come up with a suspect. No indication that Pell had anything to do with it. But I always wondered if it could’ve been him.”
“What happened to the company after he died?”
“It was acquired by somebody else, Microsoft or Apple or one of the game companies, I don’t know.”
“And his estate?”
“Most of it went in trust to his daughter, and I think some to his wife’s sister, the aunt who took custody of the girl. Croyton’d been in computers ever since he was a kid. He had probably ten, twenty million dollars’ worth of old hardware and programs that he left to Cal State–Monterey Bay. The computer museum there’s really impressive, and techies come from all over the world to do research in the archives.”
“Still?”
“Apparently so. Croyton was way ahead of his time.”
“And rich.”
“Way rich.”
“That was the actual motive for the killings?”
“Well, we never knew for sure. On the facts, it was a plain-vanilla burglary. I think Pell read about Croyton and thought it’d be a cakewalk to pick up some big bucks.”
“But his take was pretty skimpy, I read.”
“A thousand and some jewelry. Would’ve been a small case. Except for five dead bodies, of course. Almost six—good thing that little girl was upstairs.”
“What’s her story?”
“Poor kid. You know what they called her?”
“ ‘The Sleeping Doll.’ ”
“Right. She didn’t testify. Even if she’d seen something, I wouldn’t’ve subjected her to the stand, not with that prick in the courtroom. I had enough evidence anyway.”
“She didn’t remember anything?”
“Nothing helpful. She went to bed early that night.”
“Where is she now?”
“No idea. She was adopted by the aunt and uncle and they moved away.”
“What was Pell’s defense?”
“They’d gone there with some business idea. Newberg snapped and killed everybody. Pell tried to stop him, they fought and Pell, quote, ‘had’ to kill him. But there was no evidence Croyton had a meeting planned—the family was in the middle of dinner when they showed up. Besides, the forensics were clear: time of death, fingerprints, trace, blood spatter, everything. Pell was the doer.”
“In prison Pell got access to a computer. Unsupervised.”
“That’s not good.”
She nodded. “We found some things he searched for. Do they mean anything to you? One was ‘Alison.’ ”
“It wasn’t one of the girls in the Family. I don’t remember anybody else connected to him with that name.”
“Another word he searched was ‘Nimue.’ A character out of mythology. King Arthur legend. But I’m thinking it’s a name or screen name of somebody Pell wanted to get in touch with.”
“Sorry, nothing.”
“Any other ideas about what he might have in mind?”
Reynolds shook his head. “Sorry. It was a big case—for me. And for the county. But, the fact is, it wasn’t remarkable. He was caught red-handed, the forensics were waterproof and he was a recidivist with a history of criminal activity going back to his early teens. I mean, this guy and the Family were on watch lists in beach communities from Big Sur to Marin. I’d’ve had to screw up pretty bad to lose.”
“All right, James. I should get going,” she said. “Appreciate the help. If you find something in the files, let me know.”
He gave her a solemn nod, no longer a dabbling retiree or kindly father-of-the-bride. She could see in Reynolds’s eyes the fierce determination that had undoubtedly characterized his approach in court. “I’ll do anything I can to help get that son of a bitch back where he belongs. Or into a body bag.”
• • •
They’d separated, and now, several hundred yards apart, they made their way on foot to a motel in quaint Pacific Grove, right in the heart of the Peninsula.
Pell walked leisurely and wide-eyed, like a dumbfounded tourist who’d never seen surf outside Baywatch.
They were in a change of clothing, which they’d bought at a Goodwill store in a poor part of Seaside (where he’d enjoyed watching Jennie hesitate, then discard her beloved pink blouse). Pell was now in a light gray windbreaker, cords, and cheap running shoes, a baseball cap on backward. He also carried a disposable camera. He would occasionally pause to take pictures of the sunset, on the theory that one thing escaped killers rarely do is stop to record panoramic seascapes, however impressive.
He and Jennie had driven east from Moss Landing in the stolen Ford Focus, taking none of the major roads and even cutting through a Brussels sprout field, aromatic with the scent of human gas. Eventually they’d headed back toward Pacific Grove. But when the area became more populous, Pell knew it was time to ditch the wheels. The police would learn about the Focus soon. He hid it in tall grass in the middle of a large field off Highway 68, marked with a FOR SALE—COMMERCIAL ZONED sign.
He decided they should separate on the hike to the motel. Jennie didn’t like it, not being with him, but they stayed in touch via their prepaid mobiles. She called every five minutes until he told her it was probably better not to, because the police might be listening in.
Which they weren’t, of course, but he was tired of the honey-bunny chatter and wanted to think.
Daniel Pell was worried.
How had the police tracked them to Jack’s?
He ran through the possibilities. Maybe the cap, sunglasses and shaved face hadn’t fooled the manager at the restaurant, though who’d believe that a murderous escapee would sit down like a day-tripper from San Francisco to devour a plate of tasty sand dabs fifteen miles from the detention center he’d just redecorated with fire and blood?
Finding that the T-bird was stolen was another possibility. But why would somebody run the tag of a car stolen four hundred miles away? And even if it was boosted, why call out the 101 Airborne just for a set of stolen wheels—unless they knew it had some connection to Pell?
And the cops were supposed to believe he was headed to that camper park outside of Salt Lake City he’d called.
Kathryn?
He had a feeling she hadn’t bought into the Utah idea, even after the trick with Billy’s phone and leaving the driver alive on purpose. Pell wondered if she’d put out the announcement about Utah to the press intentionally, to flush him into the open.
Which had, in fact, worked, he reflected angrily.
Wherever he went, he had a feeling, she’d be supervising the manhunt for him.
Pell wondered where she lived. He thought again about his assessment of her in the interview—her children, her husband—recalled when she gave her faint reactions, when she didn’t.
Kids, yes, husband, probably not. A divorce didn’t seem likely. He sensed good judgment and loyalty within her.
Pell paused and took a snap of the sun easing into the Pacific Ocean. It was really quite a sight.
Kathryn as a widow. Interesting idea. He felt the swelling within him again.
Somehow he managed to tuck it away.
For the time being.
He bought a few things at a store, a little bodega, which he picked because he knew his picture wouldn’t be looping on the news every five minutes; he was right, the tiny set showed only a Spanish-language soap opera.
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