"Claustrophobia?"
"No. Volunteerphobia. He cleared one tunnel, then never raised his hand again. Nobody can quite figure out why exactly you stepped forward on this one."
She laughed. "You're assuming I did." She told him about Overby's gambit to seize control of the case before CHP and O'Neil's own office.
"Wondered about that. Just for the record, we miss the Fish as much as you do."
Stanley Fishburne, the former head of CBI.
"No, not as much as we do," Dance said definitively.
"Okay, probably not. But in answer to your question, everybody's de-lighted you're on point here. God bless and more power to you."
Dance moved aside piles of magazines and books, then spread Morton Nagle's material out in front of them. Maybe the sheets represented only a small percentage of the books, clippings and notes filling Nagle's study, but it was still a daunting quantity.
She found an inventory of the evidence and other items removed from Pell's house in Seaside after the Croyton murders. There were a dozen books about Charles Manson, several large files and a note from the crime-scene officer: Item No. 23. Found in the box where the Manson books were kept: Trilby, novel by George du Maurier. Book had been read numerous times. Many notes in margins. Nothing relevant to case.
"You ever heard of it?" she asked.
O'Neil read a huge amount and his large collection, filling his den, contained just about every genre of book that existed. But this was one he hadn't heard of.
Dance got her laptop, went online and looked it up. "This is interesting. George du Maurier was Daphne du Maurier's grandfather." She read several synopses and reviews of the book. "Seems like Trilby was a huge best seller, a Da Vinci Code of the time. Svengali?"
"Know the name--a mesmerizer--but nothing else."
"Interesting. The story's about a failed musician, Svengali, who meets a young and beautiful singer--her first name's Trilby. But she wasn't very successful. Svengali falls in love with her but she won't have anything to do with him, so he hypnotizes her. Her career's successful, but she becomes his mental slave. In the end, Svengali dies and--because du Maurier believed a robot can't survive without its master--she dies too."
"Guess there was no sequel." O'Neil flipped through a stack of notes. "Nagle have any thoughts about what he's up to?"
"Not really. He's writing us a bio. Maybe there'll be something in it."
For the next hour they sifted through the photocopies, looking for references to any place or person in the area that Pell might've had an interest in, some reason for him to stay on the Peninsula. There was no reference to Alison or Nimue, from the killer's Google search.
Nothing.
Most of the videotapes were feature TV magazine reports about Pell, the Croyton murders or about Croyton himself, the flamboyant, larger-than-life Silicon Valley entrepreneur.
"Sensationalist crap," O'Neil announced.
"Superficial sensationalist crap." Exactly what Morton Nagle objected to in the coverage of crime
and conflict.
But there were two others, police interview tapes that Dance found more illuminating. One was for a burglary bust, thirteen years ago.
"Who are your next of kin, Daniel?"
"I don't have any. No family."
"Your parents?"
"Gone. Long gone. I'm an orphan, you could say."
"When did they die?"
"When I was seventeen. But my dad'd left before that."
"You and your father get along?"