“I—”
“Go wait for me. It’s okay.” He said nothing more and Jennie walked back to the Toyota. He continued to the trunk of the Lexus and looked down.
At Susan Pemberton’s lifeless body.
He’d killed her an hour before, in the parking lot of her building. Suffocated her with duct tape.
Pell had never intended Jennie help him kill the woman. He’d known she’d balk. This whole incident
was merely another lesson in the education of his pupil.
She’d moved a step closer to where he wanted her. Death and violence were on the table now. For at least five or ten seconds she’d considered slipping the knife into a human body, prepared to watch the blood flow, prepared to watch a human life vanish. Last week she’d never have been able to conceive of the thought; next week she’d consider it for a longer period.
Then she might actually agree to help him kill someone. And later still? Maybe he could get her to the point where she’d commit murder by herself. He’d gotten the girls in the Family to do things they hadn’t wanted to—but only petty crimes. Nothing violent. Daniel Pell, though, believed he had the talent to turn Jennie Marston into a robot who would do whatever he ordered, even kill.
He slammed the trunk. Then snagging a pine branch, he used it to obscure the footprints in the sand. He returned to the car, sweeping behind him. He told Jennie to drive up the road until the car was on gravel and he obliterated the tire prints, as well. He joined her.
“I’ll drive,” he said.
“I’m sorry, Daniel,” she said, wiping her face. “I’ll make it up to you.”
Begging for reassurance.
But the lesson plan dictated that he give no response whatsoever.
Chapter 25
He was a curious man, Kathryn Dance was thinking.
Morton Nagle tugged at his sagging pants and sat down at the coffee table in her office, opening a battered briefcase.
He was a bit of a slob, his thinning hair disheveled, goatee unevenly trimmed, gray shirt cuffs frayed, body spongy. But he seemed comfortable with his physique, Dance the kinesics analyst assessed. His mannerisms, precise and economical, were stress-free. His eyes, with their elfin twinkle, performed triage, deciding instantly what was important and what wasn’t. When he’d entered her office, he’d ignored the decor, noted what Dance’s face revealed (probably exhaustion), gave young Rey Carraneo a friendly but meaningless glance and fixed immediately on Winston Kellogg.
And after he learned Kellogg’s employer, the writer’s eyes narrowed a bit further, wondering what an FBI agent was doing here.
Kellogg was dressed quite unfederal compared with this morning—in a beige checkered sports coat, dark slacks and blue dress shirt. He wore no tie. Still, his behavior was right out of the bureau, as noncommittal as their agents always are. He told Nagle only that he was here as an observer, “helping out.”
The writer offered one of his chuckles, which seemed to mean: I’ll get you to talk.
“Rebecca and Linda have agreed to help us,” Dance told him.
He lifted an eyebrow. “Really? The other one, Samantha?”
“No, not her.”
Nagle extracted three sheets of paper from his briefcase. He set them on the table. “My mini-opus, if that’s not an oxymoron. A brief history of Daniel Pell.”
Kellogg scooted his chair next to Dance’s. Unlike with O’Neil, she could detect no aftershave.
The writer repeated what he’d said to Dance the day before: his book wasn’t about Pell himself, but about his victims. “I’m looking into everybody affected by the Croytons’ deaths. Even employees.
Croyton’s company was eventually bought by a big software developer and hundreds of people were laid off. Maybe that wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t died. And what about his profession?That ’s a victim too. He was one of the most innovative computer designers in Silicon Valley at the time. He had dozens of copyrights on programs and patents on hardware that were way ahead of their time. A lot of them didn’t even have any application back then, they were so advanced. Now they’re gone. Maybe some were revolutionary programs for medicine or science or communications.”
Dance remembered thinking the same as she’d driven past the Cal State campus that was the recipient of much of Croyton’s estate.
Nagle continued, with a nod toward what he’d written. “It’s interesting—Pell changes his autobiography depending on whom he’s talking to. Say, he needs to form a connection with somebody whose parents died at a young age. Well, to them Pell says he was orphaned at ten. Or if he has to exploit somebody whose father was in the military, then he was the army brat of a soldier killed in combat. To hear him tell it, there are about twenty different Pells. Well, here’s the truth:
“He was born in Bakersfield, October of nineteen sixty-three. The seventh. But he tells everyone that his birthday is November twenty-second. That was the day Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy.”
“He admired a presidential assassin?” Kellogg asked.
“No, apparently he considered Oswald a loser. He thought he was too pliable and simpleminded. But what he admired was the fact that one man, with one act, could affect so much. Could make so many people cry, change the entire course of a country—well, the world.
“Now, Joseph Pell, his father, was a salesman, mother a receptionist when she could keep a job.
Middle-class family. Mom—Elizabeth—drank a lot, have to assume she was distant, but no abuse, no incarceration. Died of cirrhosis when Daniel was in his midteens. With his wife gone, the father did what he could to raise the boy but Daniel couldn’t take anyone else being in charge. Didn’t do well with authority figures—teachers, bosses and especially his old man.”