“Any favorite watering hole?”
“No. Wherever the client wanted to go.”
“Excuse me.” Dance found her phone and called Rey Carraneo.
“Agent Dance,” he said.
“Where are you?”
“Near Marina. Still checking on stolen boats for Detective O’Neil. Nothing yet. And no luck on the motels, either.”
“Okay. Keep at it.” She disconnected and called TJ. “Where areyou ?”
“The emphasis tells me I’m the second choice.”
“But the answer is?”
“Near downtown. Monterey.”
“Good.” She gave him the address of Eve Brock’s company and told him to meet her on the street in ten minutes. She’d give him a picture of Susan Pemberton and have him canvass all the bars and restaurants
within walking distance, as well as the shopping center and Fisherman’s Wharf. Cannery Row too.
“You love me best, boss. Bars and restaurants. My kind of assignment.”
She also asked him to check with the phone company and find out about incoming calls to Susan’s phones. She didn’t think the client was Pell; he was ballsy, but he wouldn’t come to downtown Monterey in broad daylight. But the prospective client might have valuable information about, say, where Susan was going after their meeting.
Dance got the numbers from Eve and recited them to TJ.
After they disconnected, she asked, “What would be in the files that were stolen?”
“Oh, everything about our business. Clients, hotels, suppliers, churches, bakeries, caterers, restaurants, liquor stores, florists, photographers, corporate PR departments who’d hired us…just everything….”
The recitation seemed to exhaust her.
What had worried Pell so much he had to destroy the files?
“Did you ever work for William Croyton, his family or his company?”
“For…oh, the man he killed…No, we never did.”
“Maybe a subsidiary of his company, or one of his suppliers?”
“I suppose we could have. We do a lot of corporate functions.”
“Do you have backups of the material?”
“Some are in the archives…tax records, cancelled checks. Things like that. Probably copies of the invoices. But a lot of things I don’t bother with. It never occurred to me that somebody would steal them.
The copies would be at my accountant’s. He’s in San Jose.”
“Could you get as many of them as possible?”
“There’s so much….” Her mind was stalled.
“Limit it to eight years ago, up to May of ’ninety-nine.”
It was then that Dance’s mind did another of its clicks. Could Pell be interested in something that the woman was planning in thefuture ?
“All your upcoming jobs too.”
“I’ll do what I can, sure.”
The woman seemed crushed by the tragedy, paralyzed.
Thinking of Morton Nagle’s bookThe Sleeping Doll, Dance realized that she was looking at yet one more victim of Daniel Pell.
I see violent crime like dropping a stone into a pond. The ripples of consequence can spread almost forever….
Dance got a picture of Susan to give to TJ and walked downstairs to the street to meet him. Her phone rang.
O’Neil’s mobile on caller ID.
“Hi,” she said, glad to see the number.
“I have to tell you something.”
“Go ahead.”
He spoke softly and Dance took the news without a single affect display, no revealed emotion.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“It’s a blessing, really,” Juan Millar’s mother told Dance through her tears.
She was standing next to a grim-faced Michael O’Neil in the corridor of Monterey Bay Hospital, watching the woman do her best to reassurethem and deflect their own words of sympathy.
Winston Kellogg arrived and walked up to the family, offered condolences, then shook O’Neil’s hand, fingers on the detective’s biceps, a gesture conveying sincerity among businessmen, politicians and mourners. “I’m so sorry.”
They were outside the burn unit of the ICU. Through the window they could see the complicated bed and its surrounding spacecraft accoutrements: wires, valves, gauges, instrumentation. In the center was a still mound, covered by a green sheet.
The same color sheet had covered her husband’s corpse. Dance recalled seeing it and thinking, frantically, But where did the life go, where did itgo ?
At that moment she’d come to loathe this particular shade of green.
Dance stared at the body, hearing in her memory Edie Dance’s whispered words.
He said, “Kill me.” He said it twice. Then he closed his eyes….
Millar’s father was inside the room itself, asking the doctor questions whose answers he probably wasn’t digesting. Still, the role of parent who’d survived his son required this—and would require much more in the days ahead.
The mother chatted away and told them again that the death was for the best, there was no doubt, the years of treatment, the years of grafts…
“For the best, absolutely,” she said, inadvertently offering Charles Overby’s favorite adverbial crutch.
Edie Dance, working an unplanned late shift, now came down the hall, looking distraught but determined, a visage that her daughter recognized clearly. Sometimes feigned, sometimes genuine, the expression had served her well in the past. Today it would, of course, be a reflection of her true heart.
Edie moved straight to Millar’s mother. She took the woman by the arm and, recognizing approaching hysteria, bestowed words on her—a few questions about her own state of mind, but mostly about her husband’s and other children’s, all aimed at diverting the woman’s focus from this impossible tragedy.
Edie Dance was a genius in the art of compassion. It was why she was such a popular nurse.
Rosa Millar began to calm and then cried, and Dance could see the staggering horror melting into manageable grief. Her husband joined them, and Edie handed his wife over to him like a trapeze artist transferring one acrobat to another in midair.