"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 the future?
"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 book The 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 reassure them 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 it go?
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 . . .