“I’m a little tired. Haven’t had much sleep lately.”
“Welcome to the club,” Rebecca said.
Samantha half rose but Dance waved her down. “Milk, sugar?”
“Oh, don’t go to any trouble. Really.”
The agent noticed that Linda and Rebecca shared a faint smile at Samantha’s habitual timidity.
Mouse . . .
“Thanks. Milk.”
Dance continued, “Linda mentioned Pell might have wanted to move to the country somewhere, a ‘mountaintop.’ Do you have any idea what he was talking about?”
“Well, Daniel told me a bunch of times he wanted to get out to the country. Move the Family there. It was real important to him to get away from everybody. He didn’t like neighbors, didn’t like the government. He wanted space for more people. He wanted the Family to grow.”
“He did?” Rebecca asked.
Linda said nothing about this.
“Did he ever mention Utah?”
“No.”
“Where could he have had in mind?”
“He didn’t say. But it sounded like he’d been doing some serious thinking about it.”
Recalling that he’d possibly used a boat to escape from the Pemberton crime scene, Dance had an idea. She asked, “Did he ever mention an island?”
Samantha laughed. “An island? No way.”
“Why not?”
“He’s terrified of the water. He’s not getting into anything that floats.”
Linda blinked. “I didn’t know that.”
Rebecca didn’t either. A wry smile. “Of course not. He’d only share his fears with his Mouse.”
“Daniel said the ocean’s somebody else’s world. People have no business being there. You shouldn’t be in a place that you can’t be master of. Same thing with flying. He didn’t trust pilots or airplanes.”
“We were thinking he escaped from the murder scene by boat.”
“Impossible.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
Dance excused herself for a moment, called Rey Carraneo and had him call off the search for stolen boats. She hung up, reflecting that O’Neil’s theory was wrong and Kellogg’s was right.
“Now, I’d like to think about his motives for staying here. What about money?” She mentioned Rebecca’s comment about a big score—a robbery or break-in, a big heist. “I was thinking he might be here because he hid money or something valuable somewhere. Or has unfinished business. Something to do with the Croyton murders?”
“Money?” Samantha shook her head. “No, I don’t really think that’s it.”
Rebecca said firmly, “I know he said it.”
“Oh, no, I’m not saying he didn’t,” the Mouse added quickly. “Just, he might not have meant ‘big’ in the sense we’d use. He didn’t like to commit crimes that’d be too visible. We broke into houses—”
“Well, hardly any,” Linda corrected.
Rebecca sighed. “Well . . . we pretty much did, Linda. And you folks’d been busy before I joined you.”
“It was exaggerated.”
Samantha said nothing to support either woman, and seemed uneasy, as if afraid they’d call on her again to be the tiebreaker. She continued, “He said if somebody did anything too illegal, the press would cover the story and then the police got after you in a big way. We stayed away from banks and check-cashing offices. Too much security, too risky.” She shrugged. “Anyway, all the stealing—it was never about the money.”
“It wasn’t?” Dance asked.
“No. We could’ve made as much doing legitimate jobs. But that’s not what turned Daniel on. What he liked was getting people to do things they didn’t want to. That was his high.”
Linda said, “You make it sound like that’s all we did.”
“I didn’t mean it like that—”
“We weren’t a gang of thugs.”
Rebecca ignored Linda. “I think he was definitely into making money.”
Samantha smiled uncertainly. “Well, I just had this sense it was more about manipulating people. He didn’t need a lot of money. He didn’t want it.”
“He’d have to pay for his mountaintop somehow,” Rebecca pointed out.
“That’s true, I guess. I could be wrong.”
Dance sensed this was an important key to understanding Pell, so she asked them about their criminal activities, hoping it might spark some specific memories.
Samantha said, “He was good, Daniel was. Even knowing what we were doing was wrong, I couldn’t help but admire him. He’d know the best places to go for pickpocketing or breaking into houses. How security worked in department stores, what designer labels had security tags and which didn’t, what kind of clerk would take returns without receipts.”
Linda said, “Everybody makes him out to be this terrible criminal. But it was really just a game to him. Like, we’d have disguises. Remember? Wigs, different clothes, fake glasses. It was all harmless fun.”
Dance was inclined to believe Samantha’s theory that sending the Family out on their missions was more about power than money.
“But what about the Charles Manson connection?”
“Oh,” Samantha said. “There was no Manson connection.”
Dance was surprised. “But all the press said so.”
“Well, you know the press.”
Samantha was typically reluctant to disagree, but she was clearly certain about this. “He thought Manson was an example of what not to do.”
But Linda shook her head. “No, no, he had all those books and articles about him.”
Dance recalled that she’d gotten a longer prison sentence because she’d destroyed some of the incriminating material about Manson the night of the Croyton murders. She seemed troubled now that her heroic act might have been pointless.
“The only parallels were that he lived with several women and had us doing crimes for him. Manson wasn’t in control of himself, Daniel said. He claimed he was Jesus, he tattooed a swastika on his forehead, he thought he had psychic powers, he ranted about politics and race. That was another example of emotions controlling you. Just like tattoos and body piercings or weird haircuts. They give people information about you. And information is control. No, he thought Manson did everything wrong. Daniel’s heroes were Hitler—”
“Hitler?” Dance asked her.
“Yep. Except he faulted him because of that ‘Jewish thing.’ It was a weakness. Pell said that if Hitler could suck it up and live with Jews, even include them in the government, he’d have been the most powerful man in history. But he couldn’t control himself, so he deserved to lose the war. He admired Rasputin too.”
“The Russian monk?”
“Right. He worked his way into Nicholas and Alexandra’s household. Pell liked Rasputin’s use of sex to control people.” Drawing a laugh from Rebecca and a blush from Linda. “Svengali too.”
“The Trilby book?” Dance asked.
“Oh,” Samantha said. “You know about that? He loved that story. Linda read it a dozen times.”
“And frankly,” Rebecca said, “it was pretty bad.”
Glancing at her notebook, the agent asked the newcomer about the keywords Pell had searched in prison.
“ ‘Nimue’?” Samantha repeated. “No. But he had a girlfriend named Alison once.”
“Who?” Linda asked.
“When he was in San Francisco. Before the Family. She was in this group, sort of like the Family.”
“What’re you talking about?” Linda asked.
Samantha nodded. She looked uneasily at Linda. “But it wasn’t his group. He just was bumming around and met Alison and got to know some of the people in that cult, or whatever it was. Daniel wasn’t a member—he didn’t take orders from anybody—but he was fascinated with it, and hung out with them. He learned a lot about how to control people. But they got suspicious of him—he wouldn’t really commit. So he and Alison left. They hitchhiked around the sta
te. Then he got arrested or picked up by the police for something, and she went back to San Francisco. He tried to find her but he never could. I don’t know why he’d want to try now.”
“What was her last name?”
“I don’t know.”
Dance wondered aloud if Pell was looking for this Alison—or someone named Nimue—for revenge. “After all, he’d need a pretty good reason to risk going online in Capitola to find somebody.”
“Oh,” Samantha said, “Daniel didn’t believe in revenge.”
Rebecca said, “I don’t know, Sam. What about that biker? That punk up the street? Daniel almost killed him.”
Dance remembered Nagle telling them about a neighbor in Seaside whom Pell had assaulted.
“First of all,” Linda said, “Daniel didn’t do it. That was somebody else.”
“Well, no, he beat the crap out of him. Nearly killed him.”
“But the police let him go.”
Curious proof of innocence, Dance reflected.
“Only because the guy didn’t have the balls to press charges.” Rebecca looked at Samantha. “Was it our boy?”
Samantha shrugged, avoiding their gaze. “I think so. I mean, yeah, Daniel beat him up.”
Linda looked unconvinced.
“But that wasn’t about revenge . . . See, the biker thought he was some kind of neighborhood godfather. He tried to blackmail Daniel, threatened to go to the police about something that never even happened. Daniel went to see him and started playing these mind games with him. But the biker just laughed at him and told Daniel he had one day to come up with the money.
“Next thing there’s an ambulance in front of the biker’s house. His wrists and ankles were broken. But that wasn’t revenge. It was because he was immune to Daniel. If you’re immune, then Daniel can’t control you, and that makes you a threat. And he said all the time, ‘Threats have to be eliminated.’ ”
“Control,” Dance said. “That pretty much sums up Daniel Pell, doesn’t it?”
This, it seemed, was one premise from their past that all three members of the Family could agree on.
Chapter 34
From the patrol car, the MCSO deputy kept his vigilant eye on his turf: the grounds, the trees, the gardens, the road.
Guard duty—it had to be the most boring part of being a police officer, hands down. Stakeouts came in a close second, but at least then you had a pretty good idea that the surveillee was a bad guy. And that meant you might get a chance to draw your weapon and go knock heads.
You’d get to do something.
But baby-sitting witnesses and good guys—especially when the bad guys don’t even know where the good ones are—was borrrrring.
All that happened was you got a sore back and sore feet and had to balance the issue of coffee with bathroom breaks and—
Oh, hell, the deputy muttered to himself. Wished he hadn’t thought that. Now he realized he had to pee.
Could he risk the bushes? Not a good idea, considering how nice this place was. He’d ask to use one inside. First he’d make a fast circuit just to be sure everything was secure, then go knock on the door.
He climbed out of the car and walked down the main road, looking around at the trees, the bushes. Still nothing odd. Typical of what you’d see around here: a limo driving past slowly, the driver actually wearing one of those caps like they did in the movies. A housewife across the street was having her gardener arrange flowers beneath her mailbox before he planted them, the poor guy frustrated at her indecision.
The woman looked up and saw the deputy, nodded his way.
He nodded back, flashing on a wispy fantasy of her coming over and saying how much she liked a man in a uniform. The deputy had heard stories of cops making a traffic stop and the women “paying the fine” behind a row of trees near the highway or in the backs of squad cars (the seats of Harley-Davidsons figured in some versions, as well). But those were always I-know-somebody-who-knows-somebody stories. It’d never happened to any of his friends. He suspected too that if anybody—even this desperate housewife—proposed a romp, he couldn’t even get it up.
Which put him in mind of the geography below the belt again and how much he needed to relieve himself.
Then he noticed the housewife was waving to him and approaching. He stopped.
“Is everything okay around here, Officer?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Ever noncommittal.
“Are you here about that car?” she asked.
“Car?”
She gestured. “Up there. About ten minutes ago I saw it park, but the driver, he sort of pulled up in between some trees, I thought it was a little funny, parking that way. You know, we’ve had a few break-ins around here lately.”
Alarmed now, the deputy stepped closer to where she was indicating. Through the bushes he saw a glint of chrome or glass. The only reason to drive a car that far off the road was to hide it.
Pell, he thought.
Reaching for his gun, he took a step up the street.
Wsssssh.
He glanced back at the odd sound just as the shovel, swung by the housewife’s gardener, slammed into his shoulder and neck, connecting with a dull ring.
A grunt. The deputy dropped to his knees, his vision filled with a dull yellow light, black explosions going off in front of him. “Please, no!” he begged.
But the response was simply another blow of the shovel, this one better aimed.
• • •
Dressed in his dirt-stained gardener outfit, Daniel Pell dragged the cop into the bushes where he couldn’t be seen. The man wasn’t dead, just groggy and hurting.
Quickly he stripped off the deputy’s uniform and put it on, rolled up the cuffs of the too-long slacks. He duct-taped the officer’s mouth and cuffed him with his own bracelets. He slipped the cop’s gun and extra clips into his pocket, then placed the Glock he’d brought with him in the holster; he was familiar with that weapon and had dry-fired it often enough to be comfortable with the trigger pull.
Glancing behind him, he saw Jennie retrieving the flowers from the patch of dirt around the neighbor’s mailbox and dumping them into a shopping bag. She’d done a good job in her role as housewife. She’d distracted the cop perfectly and she’d hardly flinched when Pell had smacked the poor bastard with the shovel.
The lesson of “murdering” Susan Pemberton had paid off; she’d moved closer to the darkness within her. But he’d still have to be careful now. Killing the deputy would be over the top. Still, she was coming along nicely; Pell was ecstatic. Nothing made him happier than transforming someone into a creature of his own making.
“Get the car, lovely.” He handed her the gardener outfit.
A smile blossoming, full. “I’ll have it ready.” She turned and hurried up the street with the clothes, shopping bag and shovel. She glanced back, mouthing, “I love you.”
Pell watched her, enjoying the confident stride.
Then he turned away and walked slowly up the driveway that led to the house of the man who’d committed an unforgivable sin against him, a sin that would spell the man’s death: former prosecutor James Reynolds.
• • •
Daniel Pell peered through a crack in the curtain of a front window. He saw Reynolds on a cordless phone, holding a bottle of wine, walking from one room to another. A woman—his wife, Pell guessed—walked into what seemed to be the kitchen. She was laughing.
Pell had thought it’d be easy to find almost anybody nowadays, computers, the Internet, Google. He’d discovered some information about Kathryn Dance, which would be useful. But James Reynolds was invisible. No phone listing, no tax records, no addresses in any of the old state and county directories or bar association lists.
He would eventually have found the prosecutor through public records, Pell supposed, but could hardly browse through the very county government building he’d just escaped from. Besides, he had little time. He needed to finish his business in Monterey and leave.
/> But then he’d had his brainstorm and turned to the archives of local newspapers on the Internet. He’d found a listing in the Peninsula Times about the prosecutor’s daughter’s wedding. He’d called the venue where the event was held, the Del Monte Spa and Resort, and found the name of the wedding planner, the Brock Company. A bit of coffee—and pepper spray—with Susan Pemberton had earned Pell the files that contained the name and address of the man who’d paid for the fete, James Reynolds.
And now here he was.
More motion inside.
A man in his late twenties was also in the house. Maybe a son—the brother of the bride. He’d have to kill them all, of course, and anyone else inside. He didn’t care one way or the other about hurting the family but he couldn’t leave anyone alive. Their deaths were simply a practical matter, to give Pell and Jennie more time to get away. At gunpoint he’d force them into a closed space—a bathroom or den—then use the knife, so no one would hear shots. With some luck, the bodies wouldn’t be found until after he’d finished his other mission here on the Peninsula and would be long gone.
Pell now saw the prosecutor hang up his phone and start to turn. Pell ducked back, checked his pistol and pressed the doorbell. There was the rustle of noise from inside. A shadow filled the peephole. Pell stood where he could be seen in his uniform, though he was looking down casually.
“Yes? Who is it?”
“Mr. Reynolds, it’s Officer Ramos.”
“Who?”
“I’m the relief deputy, sir. I’d like to talk to you.”
“Just a second. I’ve got something on the stove.”
Pell gripped his pistol, feeling that a huge irritation was about to be relieved. He suddenly felt aroused. He couldn’t wait to get Jennie back to the Sea View. Maybe they wouldn’t make it all the way to the motel. He’d take her in the backseat. Pell now stepped back into the shadows of a large, tangled tree beside the door, enjoying the feel of the heavy gun in his hand. A minute passed. Then another. He knocked again. “Mr. Reynolds?”
“Pell, don’t move!” a voice shouted. It was coming from outside, behind him. “Drop the weapon.” The voice was Reynolds’s. “I’m armed.”
No! What had happened? Pell shivered with anger. He nearly vomited he was so shaken and upset.
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