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 inThe 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 alot .” 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.”