"Where's your car?" Dance asked.
"My--?"
Eyes play an ambiguous role in kinesic analysis. There's the belief among some officers that if a suspect looks to his left under your gaze, it's a sign of lying. Dance knew that was just an old cops' tale; averting eyes--unlike turning the body or face away from the interrogator--has no correlation to deception; direction of eye gaze is too easily controlled.
But eyes are still very revealing.
As Dance was talking to the woman, she'd noticed her looking at a particular place in the parking lot. Every time she did, she displayed general stress indicators: shifting her weight, pressing her fingers together. Dance understood: Pell had stolen her car and said that he or the infamous partner would kill her family if she said anything. Just as with the Worldwide Express driver.
Dance sighed, upset. If the woman had come forward when they'd first arrived, they might have Pell by now.
Or if I hadn't blindly believed the CLOSED sign and knocked on the door sooner, she added to herself bitterly.
"I--" The woman started to cry.
"I understand. We'll make sure you're safe. What kind of car?"
"It's a dark blue Ford Focus. Three years old. There's a bumper sticker about global warming on it. And a dent in the--"
"Where did they go?"
"North."
Dance got the tag number and called O'Neil, who would in turn relay a message to MCSO dispatch for an announcement to all units about the car.
As the clerk made arrangements to stay with a friend until Pell's recapture, Dance stared at the lingering cloud of smoke around the Thunderbird. Angry. She'd made a sharp deduction from Eddie Chang's information and they'd come up with a solid plan for the collar. But it had been a waste.
TJ joined her, with the manager of Jack's Seafood. He gave his story of the events, clearly omitting a few facts, probably that he'd inadvertently tipped off Pell about the police. Dance couldn't blame him. She remembered Pell from the interview--how sharp and wary he was.
The manager described the woman, who was skinny and pretty in a "mousy way" and had looked at the man adoringly throughout most of the meal. He'd thought they were honeymooners. She couldn't keep her hands off him. He put her age at midtwenties. The manager added that they pored over a map for a good portion of the meal.
"What was it of?"
"Here, Monterey County."
Michael O'Neil joined her, flipping closed his phone. "No reports of the Focus," he said. "But with the evacuation it must've gotten lost in the traffic. Hell, he could've turned south and driven right past us."
Dance called Carraneo over. The young man looked tired. He'd had a busy day but it wasn't over yet. "Find out everything you can about the T-bird. And start calling motels and boardinghouses from Watsonville down to Big Sur. See if any blond women checked in by themselves and listed a Thunderbird as their car on the registration form. Or if anybody saw a T-bird. If the car was stolen on Friday, she'd've checked in Friday, Saturday or Sunday."
"Sure, Agent Dance."
She and O'Neil both stared west, over the water, which was calm. The sun was a wide, flat disk, low over the Pacific, the fierce beams muted; the fog hadn't arrived yet but the late-afternoon sky was hazy, grainy. Monterey Bay looked like a flat, blue desert. He said, "Pell's taking a huge risk staying around here. He's got something important to do."
It was just then that she got a call from someone who, she realized, might have some thoughts about what the killer might have in mind.
Chapter 17
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, at volunteer. 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.