After hanging up, Dance talked to Rey Carraneo again. Still no luck on the motels and no reports of boats stolen from local marinas.
Just as she hung up, TJ called. He’d heard back from the DMV. The car that Pell had been driving during the Croyton murders hadn’t been registered for years, which meant it’d probably been sold for scrap. If he had stolen something valuable from the Croytons’ the night of the murders, it was most likely lost or melted into oblivion. TJ had also checked the inventory from when the car was impounded. The list was short and nothing suggested that any of the items had come from the businessman’s house.
She gave him the news about Juan Millar too, and the young agent responded with utter silence. A sign that he was truly shaken.
A few moments later her phone rang again. It was Michael O’Neil with his ubiquitous, “Hey. It’s me.”
His voice was laden with exhaustion, sorrow too. Millar’s death was weighing on him heavily.
“Whatever’d been on the pier where we found the Pemberton woman was gone—if there was anything.
I just talked to Rey. He tells me there’re no reports of any stolen craft so far. Maybe I was off base.
Your friend find anything the other way—toward the road?”
She noted the loaded term “friend” and replied, “He hasn’t called. I assume he didn’t stumble across Pell’s address book or a hotel key.”
“And negative on sources for the duct tape, and the pepper spray’s sold in ten thousand stores and mail-order outlets.”
She told O’Neil that Nagle’s attempt to contact Theresa had failed.
“She won’t cooperate?”
“Her aunt won’t. And she’s first base. I don’t know how helpful it’d be anyway.”
O’Neil said, “I liked the idea. She’s the only nexus to Pell and that night.”
“We’ll have to try harder without her,” Dance said.
“How’re you doing?”
“Fine,” he answered.
Stoic…
A few minutes after they disconnected, Winston Kellogg arrived and Dance asked him, “Any luck at the Pemberton crime scene, the road?”
“Nope. The scene itself—we searched for an hour. No tread marks, no discarded evidence. Maybe Michael was right. Pelldid get away by boat from that pier.”
Dance laughed to herself. The chest-bumping males had each just conceded the other might’ve been right—though she doubted they’d ever admit it to each other.
She updated him on the missing files from Susan Pemberton’s office and Nagle’s failure to arrange an interview with Theresa Croyton. TJ, she explained, was looking for the client Susan had met with just before Pell had killed her.
Dance glanced at her watch. “Got an important meeting. Want to come?”
“Is it about Pell?”
“Nope. It’s about snack time.”
Chapter 31
As they walked down the halls of CBI, Dance asked Kellogg where he lived.
“The District—that’s Washington, D.C., to you all. Or that little place known as ‘Inside the Beltway,’ if you watch the pundits on Sunday-morning talk TV. Grew up in the Northwest—Seattle—but didn’t really mind the move east. I’m not a rainy-day kind of guy.”
The talk meandered to personal lives and he volunteered that he and his ex had no children, though he himself had come from a big family. His parents were still alive and lived on the East Coast.
“I’ve got four brothers. I was the youngest. I think my parents ran out of names and started on consumer products. So, I’m Winston, like cigarettes. Which is a really bad idea when your last name is cornflakes.
If my parents had been any more sadistic my middle name’d be Oldsmobile.”
Dance laughed. “I’m convinced I didn’t get invited to the junior prom because nobody wanted to take a Dance to the dance.”
Kellogg received a degree in psych from the University of Washington, then went into the army.
“CID?” She was thinking about her late husband’s stint in the army, where he’d been a Criminal Investigations Division officer.
“No. Tactical planning. Which meant paper, paper, paper. Well, computer, computer, computer. I was fidgety. I wanted to get into the field so I left and joined the Seattle Police Department. Made detective and did profiling and negotiations. But I found the cult mentality interesting. So I thought I’d specialize in that. I know it sounds lame but I just didn’t like the idea of bullies preying on vulnerable people.”
She didn’t think it was lame at all.
Down more corridors.
“How’dyou get into this line?” he asked.
Dance gave him a brief version of the story. She’d been a crime reporter for a few years—she’d met her husband while covering a criminal trial (he gave her an exclusive interview in exchange for a date). After she grew tired of reporting, she went back to school and got degrees in psychology and communications, improving her natural gift of observation and an ability to intuit what people were thinking and feeling. She became a jury consultant. But nagging dissatisfaction with that job and a sense that her talents would be more worthwhile in law enforcement had led her to the CBI.
“And your husband was like me, a feebie?”
“Been doing your homework?” Her late husband, William Swenson, had been a dependable career special agent for the FBI, but he was just like tens of thousands of others. There was no reason for a specialist like Kellogg to have heard of him, unless he’d gone to some trouble to check.
A bashful grin. “I like to know where I’m going on assignments. And who I’m going to meet when I get there. Hope you’re not offended.”
“Not at all. When I interview a subject I like to know everything about his terrarium.” Not sharing with Kellogg that she’d had TJ scope out the agent through his friend in the Chico resident agency.
A moment passed and he asked, “Can I ask what happened to your husband? Line of duty?”
The thud in her belly generated by that question had become less pronounced over the years. “It was a traffic accident.”
“I’m sorry.”