“About—”
“Your name. They know who you are.”
“They do?” she whispered in horror.
“Yes.”
“Oh, no . . . Daniel, sweetheart, I’m sorry . . .” She’d started shaking.
“You left something in the room, right?”
Then she remembered. The email. It was in her jeans. In a weak voice she said, “It was the first one where you said you loved me. I couldn’t throw it out. You told me to, but I just couldn’t. I’m so sorry. I—”
“It’s okay, lovely. But now we have to talk.”
“Sure, sweetheart,” she’d said, resigned to the worst. She caressed her bumpy nose and no silent recitations of angel songs, angel songs were going to help.
He was going to leave her. Make her go away.
But things were more complicated than that. It seemed that one of the women in the Family was working with him. Rebecca. They were going to get another Family together and go to his mountaintop, live by themselves.
“You weren’t supposed to be part of it, lovely, but when I got to know you I changed my mind. I knew I couldn’t live without you. I’ll talk to Rebecca. It’ll take a little while. She’s . . . difficult. But eventually she’ll do what I say. You’ll become friends.”
“I don’t know.”
“You and me, lovely, we’ll be the team. She and I never had that connection. It was about something else.”
If he meant they just had sex, that was okay. Jennie wasn’t jealous about that, not too much. She was jealous about him loving someone else, sharing laughs and stories, someone else being his lovely.
He’d continued, “But now we have to be careful. The police know you and they’ll be able to find you easily. So you’ve got to disappear.”
“Disappear?”
“For a while. A month or two. Oh, I don’t like it either. I’ll miss you.”
And she could see that he would.
“Don’t worry. Everything’ll work out. I won’t let you go.”
“Really?”
“We’re going to pretend that I killed you. The police will stop looking for you. I’m going to have to cut you a little. We’ll put some blood on that rock and purse. They’ll think I hit you with the rock and threw you into the ocean. It’ll hurt.”
“If it means we can be together.” (Though thinking: Not my hair, not again! What would she look like now?)
“I’d rather cut myself, lovely. But there’s no way around it.”
“It’s okay.”
“Come on over here. Sit down. Hold my leg. Squeeze my leg tight. It’ll hurt less that way.”
The pain was terrible. But she bit down on her sleeve and squeezed his leg hard and managed not to scream as the knife cut and the blood flowed.
The bloody purse, the bloody statue of Jasmine . . .
They’d driven to where he’d hidden the blue Ford Focus stolen at Moss Landing, and he gave her the keys. They’d said good-bye and she’d gotten another room, in this cheap hotel. Just as she’d entered the room, and turned on the TV, lying back and cradling the agonizing wound on her head, she’d seen on the news that her Daniel had been shot dead at Point Lobos.
She’d screamed into the pillow, beaten the mattress with her bony hands. Finally she’d sobbed herself into a tortured sleep. Then she’d wakened and lain in bed, staring at the ceiling, her eyes flicking from one corner to the other. Endlessly. The compulsive gazing.
It reminded her of the endless hours lying in the bedroom when she was married, head back, waiting for the nosebleed to stop, the pain to go away.
And Tim’s bedroom.
And a dozen others.
Lying on her back, waiting, waiting, waiting . . .
Jennie knew she had to get up, get moving. The police were looking for her—she’d seen her driver’s license picture on TV, unsmiling, and her nose huge. Her face burned with horror at the image.
So get off your ass . . .
Yet for the past few hours, as she’d lain on the cheap bed, swayback and with coils ridging through the skimpy cover, she’d felt something curious within her.
A change, like the first frost of autumn. She wondered what the feeling was. Then she understood.
Anger.
This was an emotion rare to Jennie Marston. Oh, she was great at feeling bad, great at being afraid, great at scurrying, great at waiting for the pain to go away.
Or waiting for the pain to begin.
But now she was angry. Her hands shook and her breath came fast. And then, though the fury remained, she found herself completely calm. It was just like making candy—you cook the sugar for a long time until it reaches the hard-boil stage, bubbling and dangerous (it would stick to your skin like burning glue). And then you poured it onto a piece of marble, and it cooled into a brittle sheet.
That’s what Jennie felt within her now. Cold anger within her heart. Hard . . .
Teeth set, heart pounding, she walked into the bathroom and took a shower. She sat at the cheap desk, in front of a mirror, and put on her makeup. She spent nearly a half-hour doing this, then looked at herself in the mirror. And she liked what she saw.
Angel songs . . .
She was thinking back to last Thursday, as they’d stood beside the Ford Focus, Jennie crying, hugging Daniel hard.
“I’ll miss you so much, sweetie,” she said.
Then his voice had lowered. “Now, lovely, I’ve got to go take care of something, make sure our mountaintop is safe. But there’s one thing you need to do.”
“What, Daniel?”
“Remember that night on the beach? When I needed you to help me? With that woman in the trunk?”
She nodded. “You . . . you want me to help you do something like that again?”
His blue eyes staring into hers. “I don’t want you to help. I need you to do it yourself.”
“Me?”
He’d leaned close and gazed into her eyes. “Yes. If you don’t, we’ll never have any peace, we’ll never be together.”
She slowly nodded. He’d then handed her the pistol he’d taken from the deputy guarding James Reynolds’s house. He showed her how to use it. Jennie was surprised at how easy it was.
Now, feeling the anger within her, splintery as hard candy, Jennie walked to the bed of the cheap motel and shook out the contents of the small shopping bag she was using as a purse: the gun, half of her remaining money, some personal effects and the other thing Daniel had given her: a slip of paper. Jennie now opened the note and stared at what it contained: the names Kathryn Dance, Stuart and Edie Dance, and several addresses.
She heard her lover’s voice as he’d slipped the gun into the bag and handed it to her. “Be patient, lovely. Take your time. And what’s the most important thing I’ve taught you?”
“To stay in control,” she’d recited.
“You get an A-plus, lovely.” And he delivered what turned out to be their last kiss.
Chapter 62
Leaving headquarters, Dance headed down to the Point Lobos Inn, to see about transferring the bill from Kellogg’s credit card to the CBI’s own account.
Charles Overby wasn’t happy about the expenditure, of course, but there was an inherent conflict of interest in having a criminal defendant pay for expenses to help out the very institution that had arrested him. So Overby had agreed to swallow the cost of the inn. His shining moment of supporting Kellogg’s prosecution didn’t extend to other aspects of his personality, though. He whined mightily about the bill. (“Jordan Cabernet? Who drank the Jordan? And two bottles?”)
Dance didn’t tell him that she’d volunteered to let Samantha McCoy stay there for an extra few days.
As she was driving she listened to some music by Altan, the Celtic group. “Green Grow the Rushes O” was the song. The melody was haunting, which seemed appropriate under the circumstances, since she was en route to the location where people had died.
She was thinking of the trip to Southern Califo
rnia next weekend, the kids and dogs in tow. She was going to record a group of Mexican musicians near Ojai. They were fans of the website and had emailed Martine some samples of their music. Dance wanted to get some live recordings. The rhythms were fascinating. She was looking forward to the trip.
The roads here weren’t crowded; the bad weather had returned. Dance saw only one car behind her on the entire road, a blue sedan trailing behind her a half-mile.
Dance turned off the road and headed to the Point Lobos Inn. She glanced at her phone. Still no message from O’Neil, she was troubled to learn. Dance could call him on the pretense of a case, and he’d call her back immediately. But she couldn’t do that. Besides, probably better to keep some distance. It’s a fine line when you’re friends with a married man.
She turned down the inn’s driveway and parked, listened to the end of the elegiac song. Dance recalled her own husband’s funeral. It was logical that Bill, with a wife, two children and a home in Pacific Grove, should be buried nearby. His headstrong mother, though, had wanted him buried in San Francisco, a city he’d fled when he was eighteen, returning only on holidays, and not a lot of them. Mrs. Swenson had been strident when discussing her son’s resting place.
Dance had prevailed, though she felt bad to see her mother-in-law’s tears and had paid for the victory in small ways for a year afterward. Bill was now on a hillside where you could see plenty of trees, a stretch of Pacific Ocean and a sliver of the ninth hole at Pebble Beach—a gravesite for which thousands of golfers would have paid dearly. She recalled that, though neither she nor her husband played, they’d planned on taking lessons at some point.
“Maybe when we retire,” he’d said.
“Retire. What’s that mean again?”
She now parked and walked into the Point Lobos Inn office, then took care of the paperwork.
“We already had some calls,” the clerk said. “Reporters wanting to get pictures of the cabin. And somebody’s planning to give tours of where Pell got shot. That’s sick.”
Yep, it was. Morton Nagle would not have approved; perhaps the tactless entrepreneur would appear as a footnote in The Sleeping Doll.
As Dance was walking back to the car, she was aware of a woman nearby, looking out into the mists toward the ocean, her jacket fluttering in the breeze. As Dance continued on, the woman turned away from the view and fell into a pace that matched the agent’s, not far behind.
She also noticed that a blue car was parked nearby. It was familiar. Was this the driver who’d been behind her? Then she noticed that it was a Ford Focus, and recalled that the vehicle stolen at Moss Landing had never been recovered. It too was blue. Were there any other loose ends that—
At that moment the woman walked up to her quickly and called, a harsh voice over the wind, “Are you Kathryn Dance?”
Surprised, the agent stopped and turned. “That’s right. Do I know you?”
The woman continued until she was a few feet away.
She took off her sunglasses, revealing a familiar face, though Dance couldn’t place it.
“We’ve never met. But we kind of know each other. I’m Daniel Pell’s girlfriend.”
“You’re—” Dance gasped.
“Jennie Marston.”
Dance’s hand dropped to her pistol.
But before she touched the weapon’s grip, Jennie said, “I want to turn myself in.” She held her wrists out, apparently for the handcuffs. A considerate gesture Dance had never seen in all her years as a law-enforcement agent.
• • •
“I was supposed to kill you.”
This news didn’t alarm her as much as it might, considering that Daniel Pell was dead, Jennie’s hands were cuffed and Dance had found no weapons on her or in the car.
“He gave me a gun, but it’s back at the motel. Really, I’d never hurt you.”
She didn’t seem capable of it, true.
“He said no policeman had ever gotten into his mind like you had. He was afraid of you.”
Threats have to be eliminated. . . .
“So he faked your death?”
“He cut me.” Jennie showed her a bandage on the back of her head. “Some skin and hair and blood. Your head bleeds a lot.” She sighed. “Then he gave me your address and your parents’. I was supposed to kill you. He knew you’d never let him get away.”
“You agreed?”
“I didn’t really say anything one way or the other.” She shook her head. “He was so hard to say no to. . . . He just assumed I would. Because I’d always done what he wanted. He wanted me to kill you and then come live with him and Rebecca in the woods somewhere. We’d start a new Family.”
“You knew about Rebecca?”
“He told me.” In a wisp of a voice: “Did she write the emails to me? Pretending to be him?”
“Yes.”
Her lips pressed together tightly. “They didn’t sound like the way he talked. I thought somebody else wrote them. But I didn’t want to ask. Sometimes you just don’t want to know the truth.”
Amen, thought Kathryn Dance. “How did you get here? Did you follow me?”
“That’s right. I wanted to talk to you in person. I thought if I just turned myself in, they’d take me right to jail. But I had to ask: Were you there when he was shot? Did he say anything?”
“No, I’m sorry.”
“Oh. I was just wondering.” Her lips tightened, a kinesic clue to remorse. Then a glance at Dance. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“I’ve had worse scares lately,” Dance told her. “Why didn’t you run, though? Maybe in a few weeks, when your body didn’t wash up on shore, we’d’ve wondered. But you could’ve gotten to Mexico or Canada by the time we started searching.”
“I guess I just got out from underneath his spell. I thought things’d be different with Daniel. I got to know him first—you know, not just the physical stuff—and we developed this real connection. Or I thought it was. But then I figured that was all a lie. Rebecca probably told him everything about me so he could hook me in, you know. Just like my husband and boyfriends. I used to get picked up in bars or at catering jobs. Daniel did the same thing, only he was just a lot smarter about it.
“All my life I thought I needed a man. I’d have this idea I was like a flashlight and men were the batteries. I couldn’t shine without one in my life. But then after Daniel was killed I was in this motel room and all of a sudden I felt different. I got mad. It was weird. I could taste it, I was so mad. That, like, never happened to me before. And I knew I had to do something about it. But not moaning about Daniel, not going out and finding a new man. Which I always would do in the past. No, I wanted to do something for me. And what’s the best thing I could do? Get arrested.” She gave a laugh. “Sounds stupid, but it’s all my decision. Nobody else’s.”
“I think that’s a good one.”
“We’ll see. So, I guess that’s it.”
It pretty much was, Dance decided.
She escorted Jennie back to the Taurus. As they drove to Salinas, Dance mentally tallied up the charges. Arson, felony murder, conspiracy, harboring a fugitive, several others.
Still, the woman had surrendered voluntarily and appeared as contrite as they came. Dance would interview her later, if she agreed, and if Jennie was as sincere as she seemed, the agent would go to bat for her with Sandoval.
At the lockup in the courthouse Dance processed her into the system.
“Is there anybody you want me to call?” Dance asked.
She started to say something, then stopped and gave a soft laugh. “No. I think it’s best, you know, just to start over. I’m fine.”
“They’ll get you a lawyer, then maybe you and I could spend some more time talking.”
“Sure.”
And she was led down the very hallway her lover had escaped from almost one week before.
Chapter 63
It was perhaps a spectacularly bright Saturday afternoon two or three hundred feet up,
but the grounds of Monterey Bay Hospital were leached gray by the dense fog.
The mist carried with it the fragrance of pine, eucalyptus and flowers—gardenia, Kathryn Dance believed, but wasn’t sure. She liked plants but, like meals, she preferred to purchase them fully functional from those in the know, rather than try her own hand and risk destruction.
Standing beside one of the gardens, Dance watched Linda Whitfield being wheeled out of the front door by her brother. Roger was a slim, austere man whose age could have been anywhere from thirty-five to fifty-five. He fit Dance’s expectations, quiet and conservative, wearing pressed jeans, a dress shirt starched and ironed, and a striped tie, held in place with a bar that had a cross on it. He’d greeted Dance with a very firm handshake and no smile whatsoever.
“I’ll get the truck. Excuse me, please.”
“Are you up for the drive?” Dance asked the woman after he’d gone.
“We’ll see. We know some people in Mendocino who used to be in our church. Roger called them. We might stop there for the night.”
Linda’s eyes were unfocused and she’d been giving giddy laughs at nothing in particular; Dance deduced that the painkiller she’d taken was really, really good.
“I’d vote for stopping. Take it easy. Be coddled.”
“Coddled.” She laughed at the word. “How’s Rebecca? I haven’t asked about her.”
“Still in intensive care.” A nod at the hospital. “Probably not too far from where you were.”
“Is she going to be okay?”
“They think so.”
“I’ll pray for her.” Another laugh. It reminded Dance of Morton Nagle’s signature chuckle.
Dance crouched down beside the chair. “I can’t thank you enough for what you did. I know it was hard. And I’m so sorry you were hurt. But we couldn’t’ve stopped him without you.”
“God does His work, life goes on. It’s all for the good.”
Dance didn’t follow; it was like one of Charles Overby’s nonsequiturs.
Linda blinked. “Where will Daniel be buried?”
“We called his aunt in Bakersfield, but she doesn’t even remember her own name. His brother—Richard? He’s not interested. He’ll be buried here after the autopsy. In Monterey County, for indigent funerals, the body’s cremated. There’s a public cemetery.”
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