The Sleeping Doll

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-scenepictures 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