There are probably ten thousand streets named Mission in California, and James Reynolds, the retired prosecutor who eight years earlier had won the conviction of Daniel Pell, lived on one of the nicer ones.
He had a Carmel zip code, though this street wasn’t in the cute part of town—the gingerbread area flooded on weekends with tourists (whom the locals simultaneously love and hate). Reynolds was in working Carmel, but it was not exactly the wrong side of the tracks. He had a precious three-quarters of an acre of secluded property not far from the Barnyard, the landscaped multilevel shopping center where you could buy jewelry and art and complicated kitchen gadgets, gifts and souvenirs.
Dance now pulled into the long driveway, reflecting that people with so much property were either the elite of recent money—neurosurgeons or geeks who survived the Silicon Valley shakeout—or longtime residents. Reynolds, who’d made his living as a prosecutor, had to be the latter.
The tanned, balding man in his midsixties met her at the door, ushered her inside.
“My wife’s at work. Well, atvolunteer. I’m cooking dinner. Come on into the kitchen.”
As she followed him along the corridor of the brightly lit house Dance could read the man’s history in the many frames on the wall. The East Coast schools, Stanford Law, his wedding, the raising of two sons and a daughter, their graduations.
The most recent photos had yet to be framed. She nodded at a stack of pictures, on the top of which was one of a young woman, blond and beautiful in her elaborate white dress, surrounded by her maids of honor.
“Your daughter? Congratulations.”
“The last to fly the nest.” He gave her a thumbs-up and a grin. “How ’bout you?”
“Weddings’re a while off. I’ve got middle school next on the agenda.”
She also noticed a number of framed newspaper pages: big convictions he’d won. And, she was amused to see, trials he’d lost. He noticed her looking at one and chuckled. “The wins are for ego. The losses’re for humility. I’d take the high ground and say that I learned something from the not-guilties. But the fact is, sometimes juries’re just out to lunch.”
She knew this very well from her previous job as jury consultant.
“Like with our boy Pell. The jury should’ve recommended the death penalty. But they didn’t.”
“Why not? Extenuating circumstances?”
“Yep, if that’s what you call fear. They were scared the Family would come after them for revenge.”
“But they didn’t have a problem convicting him.”
“Oh, no. The case was solid. And I ran the prosecution hard. I picked up on the Son of Manson
theme—I was the one who called him that in the first place. I pointed out all the parallels: Manson claimed he had the power to control people. A history of petty crimes. A cult of subservient women. He was behind the deaths of a rich family. In his house, crime scene found dozens of books about Manson, underlined and annotated.
“Pell actually helped get himself convicted,” Reynolds added with a smile. “He played the part. He’d sit in court and stare at the jurors, trying to intimidate, scare them. He tried it with me too. I laughed at him and said I didn’t think psychic powers had any effect on lawyers. The jury laughed too. It broke the spell.” He shook his head. “Not enough to get him the needle, but I was happy with consecutive life sentences.”
“You also prosecuted the three women in the Family?”
“I pled them out. It was pretty much minor stuff. They didn’t have anything to do with the Croyton thing.
I’m positive of that. Before they ran into Pell, none of them’d ever been picked up for anything worse than drinking in public or a little pot, I think. Pell brainwashed them…. Jimmy Newberg was different. He had a history of violence—some aggravateds and felony drug charges.”
In the spacious kitchen, decorated entirely in yellow and beige, Reynolds put on an apron. He’d apparently slipped it off to answer the door. “I took up cooking after I retired. Interesting contrast.
Nobody likes a prosecutor. But”—he nodded at a large orange skillet filled with cooking seafood—“my cioppino…everybodyloves that.”
“So,” Dance said, looking around with an exaggerated frown. “This is what a kitchen looks like.”
“Ah, a take-out queen. Like me when I was a working bachelor.”
“My poor kids. The good news is that they’re learning defensive cooking. For last Mother’s Day? They made me strawberry crepes.”
“And all you had to do was clean up. Here, try a bowl.”
She couldn’t resist. “Okay, just a sample.”
He dished up a portion. “It needs red wine to accompany.”
“That I’ll pass on.” She tried the stew. “Excellent!”
Reynolds had been in touch with Sandoval and the Monterey County sheriff and learned the latest details of the manhunt, including the information that Pell was staying in the area. (Dance noted that, regarding the CBI, he’d calledher and not Charles Overby.)
“I’ll do whatever I can to help you nail this bastard.” The former prosecutor meticulously sliced a tomato. “Just name it. I’ve already called the county storage company. They’re bringing me all my notes from the case. Probably ninety-nine percent of them won’t be helpful, but there could be a nugget or two.
And I’ll go through every damn page, if I have to.” Dance glanced at his eyes, which were dark coals of determination, very different from, say, Morton Nagle’s sparkle. She had never worked any cases with Reynolds, but knew he’d be a fierce and uncompromising prosecutor.
“That’d be very helpful, James. Appreciate it.” Dance finished the stew and rinsed the bowl, placing it in.
“I didn’t even know you were in the area. I’d heard you retired to Santa Barbara.”