The Sleeping Doll

enforcer.
    Without any greetings, he asked Dance, “He wasn’t in the truck?”
    “No. Local gangbanger. Pell left the truck running. He knew somebody’d snatch it, and we’d focus on that. He took off in the delivery driver’s own car.”
    “The driver?”
    “No sign.”
    “Ouch.” Brown-haired, sunburned Charles Overby was athletic in a pear-shaped way, a tennis and golf player. He was the newly appointed headof the CBI’s west-central office. The agent in charge he replaced, Stan Fishburne, had taken early retirement on a medical, much to the CBI staff’s collective dismay (because of the severe heart attack on Fishburne’s account—and because of who had succeeded him on theirs).
    O’Neil took a call and Dance updated Overby, adding the details of Pell’s new wheels and their concern that the partner was still nearby.
    “You think he’s really planted another device?”
    “Unlikely. But the accomplice staying around makes sense.”
    O’Neil hung up. “The roadblocks’re all back in place.”
    “Who took them down?” Overby asked.
    “We don’t know.”
    “I’m sure it wasn’t us or you, Michael, right?” Overby asked uneasily.
    An awkward silence. Then O’Neil said, “No, Charles.”
    “Who was it?”
    “We’re not sure.”
    “We should find that out.”
    Recrimination was such a drain. O’Neil said he’d look into it. Dance knew he’d never do anything though, and with this comment to Overby the finger pointing came to a close.
    The detective continued, “Nobody’s spotted the Civic. But the timing was just wrong. He could’ve gotten through on Sixty-eight or the One-Oh-One. I don’t think Sixty-eight though.”
    “No,” Overby agreed. The smaller Highway 68 would take Pell back to heavily populated Monterey. The 101, wide as an interstate, could get him to every major expressway in the state.
    “They’re setting up new checkpoints in Gilroy. And about thirty miles south.” O’Neil stuck monarch butterfly notes in the appropriate places.
    “And you’ve got the bus terminals and airport secure?” Overby asked.
    “That’s right,” Dance said.
    “And San Jose and Oakland PD’re in the loop?”
    “Yep. And Santa Cruz, San Benito, Merced, Santa Clara, Stanislaus and San Mateo.” The nearby counties.
    Overby jotted a few notes. “Good.” He glanced up and said, “Oh, I just talked to Amy.”
    “Grabe?”
    “That’s right.”
    Amy Grabe was the SAC—the special agent in charge—of the FBI’s San Francisco field office. Dance knew the sharp, focused law enforcer well. Thewest-central region of the CBI extended north to the Bay area, so she’d had a number of opportunities to work with her. Dance’s late husband, an agent with the FBI’s local resident agency, had too.
    Overby continued, “If we don’t get Pell soon, they’ve got a specialist I want on board.”
    “A what?”
    “Somebody in the bureau who handles situations like this.”
    It was a jailbreak, Dance reflected. What kind of specialist? She thought of Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive .
    O’Neil too was curious. “A negotiator?”
    But Overby said, “No, he’s a cult expert. Deals a lot with people like Pell.”
    Dance shrugged, an illustrator gesture—those that reinforce verbal content, in this case, her doubts. “Well, I’m not sure how useful that’d be.” She had worked many joint task forces. She wasn’t opposed to sharing jurisdiction with the Feds or anyone else, but involving other agencies inevitably slowed response times. Besides, she didn’t see how a cult leader would flee for his life any differently than a murderer or bank robber.
    But Overby had already made up his mind; she knew it from his tone and body language. “He’s a brilliant profiler, can really get into their minds. The cult mentality is a lot different from your typical perp’s.”
    Is it?
    The agent in charge handed Dance a slip of paper with a name and phone number on it. “He’s in Chicago, finishing up some case, but he can be here tonight or tomorrow morning.”
    “You sure about this, Charles?”
    “With Pell we can use all the help we can get. Absolutely. And a big gun from Washington? More expertise, more person power.”
    More places to stash the blame, Dance thought cynically, realizing now what had happened. Grabe had asked if the FBI could help out in the search for Pell, and Overby had jumped at the offer, thinking that if more innocents were injured or the escapee remained at