The Sleeping Doll

M.
    JMSUNGIRL .
    O’Neil added, “Our tech department’s contacting the ISP now. Foreign servers aren’t very cooperative but we’ll keep our fingers crossed.”
    Dance was staring at the email. “Look at what he said: beach, desert and fireworks every night. All three near her house. That ought to give us some ideas.”
    Kellogg said, “The car was stolen in Los Angeles. . . . She’s from Southern California somewhere: beach and desert. But fireworks every night?”
    “Anaheim,” Dance said.
    The other parent present nodded. O’Neil said, “Disneyland.”
    Dance met O’Neil’s eye. She said, “Your idea earlier: the banks and withdrawals of ninety-two hundred dollars. All of L.A. County—okay, maybe that was too much. But Anaheim? Much smaller. And now, we know her first name. And possibly an initial. Can your people handle this one, Win?”
    “Sure, that’d be a more manageable number of banks,” he said agreeably. He picked up the phone and called the request in to the L.A. field office.
    Dance called the Point Lobos Inn. She explained to the women what had happened at the motel.
    “He got away again?” Samantha asked.
    “I’m afraid so.” She gave her the details of the email, including the screen name, but none of them could recall anybody with that name or initials.
    “We also found evidence of S and M activity.” She described the sexual gear. “Could that’ve been Pell, or would it’ve been the woman’s idea? Might help us narrow down a search, if it was hers. A professional, a dominatrix maybe.”
    Samantha was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “I, ah . . . That would’ve been Daniel’s idea. He was kind of that way.” Embarrassed.
    Dance thanked her. “I know you’re anxious to leave. I promise I won’t keep you much longer.”
    It was only a few minutes later that Winston Kellogg received a call. His eyes flashed in surprise. He looked up. “They’ve got an ID. A woman named Jennie Marston withdrew nine thousand two hundred dollars—virtually her whole savings account—from Pacific Trust in Anaheim last week. Cash. We’re getting a warrant, and our agents and Orange County deputies’re going to raid her house. They’ll let us know what they find.”
    Sometimes you do get a break.
    O’Neil grabbed the phone and in five minutes a jpeg image of a young woman’s driver’s license photo was on Dance’s computer. She called TJ into her office.
    “Yo?”
    She nodded at the screen. “Do an EFIS image. Make her a brunette, redhead, long hair, short hair. Get it to the Sea View. I want to make sure it’s her. And if it is, I want a copy sent to every TV station and newspaper in the area.”
    “You bet, boss.” Without sitting, he typed on her keyboard, then hurried out, as if he were trying to beat the picture’s arrival to his office.
    Charles Overby stepped into the doorway. “That call from Sacramento is—”
    “Hold on, Charles.” Dance briefed him on what had happened and his mood changed instantly.
    “Well, a lead. Good. At last . . . Anyway, we’ve got another issue. Sacramento got a call from the Napa County Sheriff’s Office.”
    “Napa?”
    “They’ve got someone named Morton Nagle in jail.”
    Dance nodded slowly. She hadn’t told Overby about enlisting the writer’s aid to find the Sleeping Doll.
    “I talked to the sheriff. And he’s not a happy camper.”
    “What’d Nagle do?” Kellogg asked, lifting an eyebrow to Dance.
    “The Croyton girl? She lives up there somewhere with her aunt and uncle. He apparently wanted to talk her into being interviewed by you.”
    “That’s right.”
    “Oh. I didn’t hear about it.” He let that linger for a moment. “The aunt told him no. But this morning he snuck onto their property and tried to convince the girl in person.”
    So much for uninvolved, objective journalism.
    “The aunt took a shot at him.”
    “What?”
    “She missed but if the deputies hadn’t shown up, the sheriff thinks she would’ve taken him out on the second try. And nobody seemed very upset about that possibility. They think we had something to do with it. This’s a can of worms.”
    “I’ll handle it,” Dance told him.
    “We weren’t involved, were we? I told him we weren’t.”
    “I’ll handle it.”
    Overby considered this, then gave her the sheriff’s number and headed back to his office. Dance called the sheriff and identified herself. She told him the situation.
    The man grunted. “Well,