“I…Well, I begged him not to hurt me. Practically got on my hands and knees. It was embarrassing.”
It was also a lie. Dance didn’t even need a baseline to see the stress flood through the man’s body. He looked away and his face flushed.
“I need to know the truth. It could be important,” she said.
“Really. I was crying like a baby. I think he felt sorry for me.”
“Daniel Pell has never felt sorry for a human being in his life,” O’Neil said.
“Go on,” Dance said softly.
“Well, okay…” He swallowed and his face turned bright red. “We made a deal. He was going to kill me. I’m sure he was. I said if he’d let me live…” Tears filled his eyes. It was hard to watch the misery but Dance needed to understand Pell, and why this man was still alive, when two others had been killed under similar circumstances.
“Go on,” she said softly.
“I said if he let me live I’d do anything for him. I meant give him money or something. But he said he wanted me to…See, he saw my wife’s picture and he liked how she looked. So he asked me to tell him about the things we did together. You know, intimate things.” He stared at the concrete floor of the garage. “Like, he wanted all the details. I mean, everything.”
“What else?” Dance prompted.
“Naw, that was it. It was so embarrassing.”
“Billy, please tell me.”
His eyes filled with tears. His jaw was trembling.
“What?”
A deep breath. “He got my home phone number. And he said he’d call me at night sometime. Maybe next month, maybe six months. I’d never know. And when he called, my wife and me were supposed to go in the bedroom. And, you know…” The words caught in his throat. “I was supposed to leave the phone off the hook so he could listen to us. Pam had to say some things he told me.”
Dance glanced at O’Neil, who exhaled softly. “We’ll catch him before anything like that happens.”
The man wiped his face. “I almost told him, ‘No, you fucker. Go ahead and kill me.’ But I couldn’t.”
“Why don’t you go be with your family? Get out of town for a while.”
“I almost told him that. I really did.”
A medical tech led him back to the ambulance.
O’Neil whispered, “What the hell’re we up against here?”
Echoing Dance’s exact thought.
“Detective, I’ve got a phone,” an MCSO deputy called as he joined them. “Was up the street in a trash can. The battery was in another can, across the street.”
“Good catch,” O’Neil told the man.
Dance took a pair of latex gloves from TJ, pulled them on, then took the phone and replaced the battery. She turned it on and scrolled through recent calls. None had been received but five had been made since the escape. She called them out to O’Neil, who was on the phone with his tech people again.
They did a reverse lookup.
The first wasn’t a working number; it wasn’t even a real exchange prefix—which meant that the call to the accomplice about Billy’s family had never occurred. It was simply to frighten him into cooperating.
The second and third calls were to another number, which turned out to be a prepaid mobile phone. It was presently off, probably destroyed; there was no signal to triangulate on.
The last two numbers were more helpful. The first was a 555-1212 call, directory assistance. The area code was Utah. The last number—the one Pell had presumably gotten from the operator—was an RV
campsite outside Salt Lake City.
“Bingo,” TJ said.
Dance called the number and identified herself. She asked if they’d received a call forty minutes ago.
The clerk said that she had, a man from Missouri, driving west, who was curious how much it cost to park a small Winnebago there by the week.
“Any other calls around that time?”
“My mother and two of the guests here, complaining about something or other. That was all.”
“Did the man say when he’d be arriving?”
“No.”
Dance thanked the woman and told her to call them immediately if he contacted them again. She explained to O’Neil and TJ what the RV camp manager had said and then phoned the Utah State Police—she was friends with a captain in Salt Lake City—and told him the situation. The USP would immediately send a surveillance team to the campsite.
Dance’s eyes slipped to the miserable driver, staring at the ground again. The man would live for the rest of his life with the horror he’d experienced today—perhaps less the kidnapping itself than the degradation of Pell’s deal.
She thought again of Morton Nagle; Billy had escaped with his life, but was yet another victim of Daniel Pell.
“Should I tell Overby about Utah?” TJ asked. “He’ll want to get word out.”
She was interrupted, though, by a phone call. “Hold on,” she told the young agent. She answered. It was the computer specialist from Capitola prison. Excited, the young man said that he’d managed to find one site that Pell had visited. It had to do with the Helter Skelter search.
“It was pretty smart,” the man said. “I don’t think he had any interest in the term itself. He used it to find a bulletin board where people post messages about crime and murder. It’s called ‘Manslaughter.’
There’re different categories, depending on the type of crimes. One’s ‘The Bundy Effect,’ about serial killers. You know, after Ted Bundy. ‘Helter Skelter’ is devoted to cult murders. I found a message that had been posted on Saturday, and I think it was meant for him.”
Dance said, “And he didn’t type the URL to Manslaughter dot com directly, in case we checked the computer and would find the website.”
“Right. He used the search engine instead.”
“Clever. Can you find out who posted it?”
“It was anonymous. No way to trace it.”
“And what did it say?”