The Sleeping Doll

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.”
    A very faint shift of Kellogg’s foot. Almost invisible, but it telegraphed stress. So, he wasn’t completely immune to her interrogation.
    His response was a lie.
    “We’ll know more after reviewing the files. And we’re checking with other jurisdictions too, Winston. Apparently you insisted on helping local police all over the country whenever there was a crime involving a cult.”
    Charles Overby had implied that it was his own idea to bring in a federal specialist on cults. Last night, though, she’d begun to suspect that this probably wasn’t what happened and she’d asked her boss point-blank how the FBI agent had come to work the Pell case. Overby hemmed and hawed but ultimately admitted that Kellogg had told the bureau’s Amy Grabe he was coming to the Peninsula to consult on the manhunt for Pell; it wasn’t up for debate. He’d been here as soon as the paperwork in Chicago was cleaned up.
    “I looked back at the Pell case. Michael O’Neil was upset that you wanted a takedown at the Sea View, rather than surveillance. And I wondered why you wanted to be first through the door. The answer is so that you’d have a clear shot at Pell. And yesterday, at the beach at Point Lobos, you got him on his knees. And then you killed him.”
    “That’s your evidence that I murdered him? His posture? Really, Kathryn.”
    “And MCSO crime scene found the bullet of the slug you fired at me on the ridge.”
    He fell silent at this.
    “Oh, you weren’t shooting to hit me, I understand. You just wanted to keep me where I was, with Samantha and Linda, so that I wouldn’t interfere with your chance to kill Pell.”
    “It was an accidental discharge,” he said matter-of-factly. “Careless of me. I should’ve owned up to it but it was embarrassing. Here I am, a professional.”
    Lie . . .
    Under her gaze, his shoulders dipped slightly. His lips tightened. Dance knew there’d be no confession—she wasn’t even after that—but he did shift into a different stress state. He wasn’t a completely emotionless machine, it seemed. She’d hit him hard, and it hurt.
    “I don’t talk about my past and what happened with my daughter. I should’ve shared more with you, maybe, but you don’t talk about your husband much either, I notice.” He fell silent for a moment. “Look around us, Kathryn. Look at the world. We’re so fragmented, so shattered. The family’s a dying breed, and yet we’re starving for the comfort of one. Starving . . . And what happens? Along come people like Daniel Pell. And they suck the vulnerable, needy ones right in. The women in Pell’s Family—Samantha and Linda. They were good kids, never did anything wrong, not really. And they got seduced by a killer. Why? Because he dangled in front of them the one thing they didn’t have: a family.
    “It was only a matter of time before they, or Jennie Marston, or somebody else under his spell started killing. Or maybe kidnapping children. Abusing them. Even in prison, Pell had his followers. How many of them went on to do the same thing he’d done, after they were released? . . . These people have to be stopped. I’m aggressive about it, I get results. But I don’t cross the line.”
    “You don’t cross your line, Winston. But it’s not your own standards you have to apply. That’s not how the system works. Daniel Pell never thought he was doing anything wrong either.”
    He gave her a smile and a shrug, the emblem gesture, which she took to mean, You see it your way, I see it mine. And we’ll never agree on this.
    To Dance it was as clear as saying, “I’m guilty.”
    Then the smile faded, as it had at the beach yesterday. “One thing. Us? That was real. Whatever else you think about me, that was real.”
    Kathryn Dance recalled walking down the hall with him at CBI when he’d made the wistful comment on the Family, implying gaps in his own life: solitude, a job substituting for a failed marriage, his daughter’s unspeakably terrible death. Dance didn’t doubt that, though he had deceived her about his mission, this lonely man had been trying, genuinely, to make a connection with her.
    And as a kinesic analyst she could see that his comment—“That was