“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 Salinasdid 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. “Hedid come this way. Call me crazy, boss, but this isn’t on the route Imyself 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?”