The Sleeping Doll (49 page)

For funerals too, of course, Dance couldn’t help but think.

“First, let’s get work out of the way.” He opened his attaché case and handed her the plastic evidence bag containing the computer found in the Butterfly Inn.

“Oh, you’ve got it already?” she asked. “The mystery of Nimue is about to be solved.”

He grimaced. “Afraid not, sorry.”

“Nothing?” she asked.

“The file was either intentionally written as gibberish or it had a wipe bomb on it, the bureau tech guys said.”

“Wipe bomb?”

“Like a digital booby trap. When TJ tried to open it, it got turned to mush. That was their term too, by the way.”

“Mush.”

“Just random characters.”

“No way to reconstruct it?”

“Nope. And, believe me, they’re the best in the business.”

“Not that it matters that much, I suppose,” Dance said, shrugging. “It was just a loose end.”

He smiled. “I’m the same way. Hate it when there are danglers. That’s what I call them.”

“Danglers. I like that.”

“So are you ready to go?”

“Just a second or two.” She rose and walked to the door. Albert Stemple was standing in the hallway. TJ too.

She glanced at them, sighed and nodded.

The massive, shaved–head agent stepped into the office, with TJ right behind him.

Both men drew their weapons — Dance just didn’t have the heart — and in a few seconds Winston Kellogg was disarmed, cuffs on his hands.

“What the hell’s going on?” he raged.

Dance provided the answer, surprised at how serene her voice sounded as she said, “Winston Kellogg, you’re under arrest for the murder of Daniel Pell.”

Dance and Kellogg were alone. Behind the sparkling mirror the video camera was set up and running. TJ was there, along with Charles Overby, both unseen, though the mirror, of course, implied observers.

Winston Kellogg had declined an attorney and was willing to talk. Which he did in an eerily calm voice (very much the same tone as Daniel Pell’s in his interrogation, she reflected, unsettled at the thought). “Kathryn, let’s just step back here, can we? Is that all right? I don’t know what you think is going on but this isn’t the way to handle it. Believe me.”

The subtext of these words was arrogance — and the corollary, betrayal. She tried to push the pain away as she replied simply, “Let’s get started.” She slipped her black–framed glasses on, her predator specs.

“Maybe you’ve gotten some bad information. Why don’t you tell me what you
think
the problem is and we’ll see what’s really going on?”

As if he were talking to a child.

She looked Winston Kellogg over closely. It’s an interrogation just like any other, Dance told herself. Though it wasn’t, of course. Here was a man she’d felt romantic toward and who had lied to her. Someone who had used her, like Daniel Pell had used … well, everyone.

Then she forced aside her own emotion, hard though that was, and concentrated on the task in front of her. She was going to break him. Nothing would stop her.

Because she knew him well by now, the analysis unfolded quickly in her mind.

First, how should he be categorized in the context of the crime? A suspect in a homicide.

Second, does he have a motive to lie? Yes.

Third, what’s his personality type? Extroverted, thinking, judging. She could be as tough with him as she needed to be.

Fourth, what is his liar’s personality? A High Machiavellian. He’s intelligent, has a good memory, is adept at the techniques of deception and will use all those skills to create lies that work to his advantage. He’ll give up lying if he’s caught, and use other weapons to shift the blame, threaten or attack. He’ll demean and patronize, trying to unnerve her and exploit her own emotional responses, a dark mirror image of her own mission as an interrogator. He’ll try to get information to use against me later, she reminded herself.

You had to be very careful with High Machs.

The next step in her kinesic analysis would be to determine what stress response state he fell into when lying — anger, denial, depression or bargaining — and to probe his story when she recognized one.

But here was the problem. She was one of the best kinesics analysts in the country, yet she hadn’t spotted Kellogg’s lies, which he’d dished up right in front of, and to, her. Largely his behavior was not outright lying but evasion — withholding information is the hardest type of deception to detect. Still, Dance was skilled at spotting evasion. More significant, Kellogg was, she decided, in that rare class of individuals virtually immune to kinesic analysts and polygraph operators: excluded subjects, like the mentally ill and serial killers.

The category also includes zealots.

Which was what she now believed Winston Kellogg was. Not the leader of a cult, but someone just as fanatical and just as dangerous, a man convinced of his own righteousness.

Still, she needed to break him. She needed to get to the truth, and to do that, Dance had to spot stress flags within him to know where to probe.

So she attacked. Hard, fast.

From her purse, Dance took a digital audiotape recorder and set it on the table between them. She hit play.

The sounds of a phone ringing, then:

“
Tech Resource. Rick Adams speaking.
”

“
My name’s Kellogg from Ninth Street. MVCC.
”

“
Sure, Agent Kellogg. What can I do for you?
”

“
I’m in the area and have a problem on my computer. I’ve got a protected file and the guy who sent it to me can’t remember the password. It’s a Windows XP operating system.
”

“
Sure. That’s a piece of cake. I can handle it.
”

“
Rather not use you guys for a personal job. They’re cracking down on that back at HQ.
”

“
Well, there’s a good outfit in Cupertino we farm stuff out to. They’re not cheap.
”

“
Are they fast?
”

“
Oh, for that? Sure.
”

“
Great. Give me their number.
”

She shut the recorder off. “You lied to me. You said the ‘bureau tech guys’ cracked it. They didn’t.”

“I —”

“Winston, Pell didn’t write anything about Nimue or suicides.
I
created that file last night.”

He could only stare at her.

She said, “Nimue was a red herring. There was nothing on Jennie’s computer until I put it there. TJ did find a reference to Nimue but it was a newspaper story about a woman named Alison Sharpe, an interview in a local paper in Montana — ‘My Month with Daniel Pell,’ something like that. They met in San Francisco about twelve years ago, when she was living in a group like the Family and going by the name Nimue. The leader named everyone after Arthurian characters. She and Pell hitchhiked around the state but she left him after he was picked up in Redding on that murder charge. Pell probably didn’t know her surname and searched the only two names he knew — Alison and Nimue — to find her and kill her because she knew where his mountaintop was.”

“So you faked this file and asked me to help you crack it. Why the masquerade, Kathryn?”

“I’ll tell you why. Body language isn’t limited to the living, you know. You can read a lot into a
corpse
’s posture too. Last night TJ brought me all the files in the case for the final disposition report. I was looking over the crime–scene pictures from Point Lobos. Something didn’t seem right. Pell wasn’t hiding behind the rocks. He was out in the open, on his back. His legs were bent and there were water and sand stains on his knees.
Both
knees, not just one. That was curious. People
crouch
when they’re fighting, or at least keep one foot planted on the ground. I saw exactly the same posture in a case involving a man who’d been killed in a gang hit, forced on his knees to beg before he was shot. Why would Pell leave cover, get down on both knees and shoot at you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” No emotion whatsoever.

“And the coroner’s report said that from the downward angle of the bullets through his body you were standing full height, not crouching. If it was a real firefight you would’ve been in a defensive stance, crouching yourself … And I remembered the sequence of the sounds. The flash–bang went off and then I heard the shots, after a delay. No, I think that you saw where he was, tossed the flash–bang and moved in fast, disarmed him. Then had him kneel and you tossed your cuffs on the ground for him to put on. When he was reaching for them, you shot him.”

“Ridiculous.”

She continued, unfazed. “And the flash–bang? After the assault at the Sea View you were supposed to check all the ordnance back in. That’s standard procedure. Why keep it? Because you were waiting for a chance to move in and kill him. And I checked the timing of your call for backup. You
didn’t
make it from the inn, like you pretended. You made it later, to give you a chance to get Pell alone.” She held up a hand, silencing another protest. “But whether my theory was
ridiculous
or not, his death raised questions. I thought I should check further. I wanted to know more about you. I got your file from a friend of my husband’s on Ninth Street. I found some interesting facts. You’d been involved in the shooting deaths of several suspected cult leaders during attempts to apprehend. And two cult leaders died of suicides under suspicious circumstances when you were consulting with local law enforcement agencies in their investigations.”

“The suicide in L.A. was the most troubling. A woman who ran a cult committed suicide by jumping out of her sixth–story window, two days after you arrived to help out the LAPD. But it was curious — no one had ever heard her talk about suicide before that. There was no note, and, yes, she was being investigated but only for civil tax fraud. No reason to kill herself.”

“So, I had to test you, Winston. I wrote the document in that file.”

It was a fake email that suggested a girl with the name of Nimue was in the suicide victim’s cult and had information that the woman’s death was suspicious.

“I got a tap warrant on your phone, put a simple Windows password on the file and handed over the computer to see what you’d do. If you’d told me you’d read the file and what it contained, that would’ve been the end of the matter. You and I’d be on our way to Big Sur right now.”

“But, no, you made your phone call to the tech, had the private company crack the code and you read the file. There was no wipe bomb. No mush. You destroyed it yourself. You
had
to, of course. You were afraid we’d catch on to the fact that your life for the past six years has been traveling around the country and murdering people like Daniel Pell.”

Kellogg gave a laugh. Now, faint kinesic deviation; the tone was different. An excluded subject, yes, but he was feeling the stress. She’d touched close to home.

“Please, Kathryn. Why on earth would I do that?”

“Because of your daughter.” She said this not without some sympathy.

And the fact that he gave no response, merely held her eye as if he were in great pain, was an indication — though a tiny one — that she was narrowing in on the truth.

“It takes a lot to fool me, Winston. And you’re very, very good. The only variation from your baseline behavior I ever noticed was when it came to children and family. But I didn’t think much of it. At first I supposed that was because of the connection between us, and you weren’t comfortable with children and were wrestling with the idea of having them in your life.”

“Then, I think you saw that I was curious, or suspicious, and you confessed that you’d lied, that you had had a daughter. You told me about her death. Of course, that’s a common trick — confession to one lie to cover up another, related one. And what was the lie? Your daughter did die in a car accident, yes, but it wasn’t exactly how you described it. You apparently destroyed the police report in Seattle — nobody could find it — but TJ and I made some calls and pieced together the story.”

“When she was sixteen your daughter ran away from home because you and your wife were getting divorced. She ended up with a group in Seattle — very much like the Family. She was there for about six months. Then she and three other members of the cult died in a suicide pact because the leader told them to leave, they hadn’t been loyal enough. They drove their car into Puget Sound.”

There’s something terrifying about the idea of being kicked out of your family …

“And then you joined the MVCC and made it your life’s work to stop people like that. Only sometimes the law didn’t cooperate. And you had to take it into your own hands. I called a friend in Chicago PD. You were the cult expert on the scene last week, assisting them. Their report said you claimed the perp fired at you, and you had to ‘neutralize the threat.’ But I don’t think he did shoot. I think you killed him and then wounded yourself.” She tapped her neck, indicating his bandage. “Which makes that murder too, just like Pell.”

She grew angry. It hit fast, like a flash of hot sunlight as a cloud passed on. Control it, she told herself. Take a lesson from Daniel Pell.

Take a lesson from Winston Kellogg.

“The dead man’s family filed a complaint. They claimed he was set up. He had a long rap sheet, sure. Just like Pell. But he
never
touched guns. He was afraid of the deadly–weapon count.”

“He touched one long enough to shoot me.”