The Sleeping Doll

on Dr. Phil .” He read some more. “Merlin taught her how to be a sorceress. Oh, and she gave King Arthur this magic sword.”
    “Excalibur,” O’Neil said.
    “What?” TJ asked.
    “The sword. Excalibur. Haven’t you heard any of this before?” the detective asked.
    “Naw, I didn’t take Boring Made-up Stuff in college.”
    “I like the idea that it’s somebody he was trying to find. Cross-check ‘Nimue’ with ‘Pell,’ ‘Alison,’ ‘California,’ ‘Carmel,’ ‘Croyton’ . . . Anything else?”
    O’Neil suggested, “The women: Sheffield, McCoy, Whitfield.”
    “Good.”
    After several minutes of frantic typing the agent looked over at Dance. “Sorry, boss. Zip.”
    “Check the search terms out with VICAP, NCIC and the other main criminal databases.”
    “Will do.”
    Dance stared at the words she’d written. What did they mean? Why had he risked going online to check them out?
    Helter Skelter, Nimue, Alison  . . .
    And what had he been looking at on Visual-Earth? A place he intended to flee to, a place he intended to burglarize?
    She asked O’Neil, “What about the forensics at the courthouse?”
    The detective consulted his notes. “No red flags. Almost everything wasburned or melted. The gas was in plastic milk jugs inside a cheap roller suitcase. Sold in a dozen places—Wal-Mart, Target, stores like that. The fireproof bag and fire suit were made by Protection Equipment, Inc., New Jersey. Available all over the world but most are sold in Southern California.”
    “Brushfires?”
    “Movies. For stuntmen. A dozen outlets. Not much to follow up on, though. There’re no serial numbers. They couldn’t lift any prints off the bag or the suit. Now, the additives in the gas mean it was BP but we can’t narrow it down to a particular station. The fuse was homemade. Rope soaked in slow-burning chemicals. None of them’re traceable either.”
    “TJ, what’s the word on the aunt?”
    “Zip so far. I’m expecting a breakthrough any moment.”
    Her phone rang. It was another call from Capitola. The warden was with the prisoner who claimed he had some information about Daniel Pell. Did Dance want to talk to him now?
    “Sure.” She hit the speakerphone button. “This is Agent Dance. I’m here with Detective O’Neil.”
    “Hey. I’m Eddie Chang.”
    “Eddie,” the warden added, “is doing a five-to-eight for bank robbery. He’s in Capitola because he can be a bit . . . slippery.”
    “How well did you know Daniel Pell?” Dance asked.
    “Not really good. Nobody did. But I was somebody who, you know, wasn’t no threat to him. So he kind of opened up to me.”
    “And you’ve got some information on him?”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “Why’re you helping us?” O’Neil asked.
    “Up for parole in six months. I help you, it’ll go good for me. Provided you catch him, of course. If you don’t, I think I’ll stay in the Big C here until you do, now that I’m rolling over on him.”
    O’Neil asked, “Did Pell talk about girlfriends or anyone on the outside? Particularly a woman?”
    “He bragged about the women he’d had. He’d give us these great stories. It was like watching a porn film. Oh, man, we loved those stories.”
    “You remember any names? Someone named Alison?”
    “He never mentioned anybody.”
    After what Tony Waters had told her, Dance suspected that Pell was making up the sex stories—using them as incentives to get the cons to do things for him.
    She asked, “So, what do you want to tell us?”
    “I have this idea where he might be headed.” Dance and O’Neil shared a glance. “Outside of Acapulco. There’s a town there, Santa Rosario, in the mountains.”
    “Why there?”
    “Okay, what it was, maybe a week ago we were sitting around bullshitting and there was a new con, Felipe Rivera, doing a back-to-back ’cause he got trigger-happy during a GTA. We were talking and Pell finds out he was from Mexico. So Pell’s asking him about this Santa Rosario. Rivera’d never heard of it, but Pell’s pretty anxious to find out more, so he describes it, like trying to jog his memory. It’s got a hot spring and it’s not near any big highways and there’s this steep mountain nearby. . . . But Rivera couldn’t remember anything. Then Pell shut up about it and changed the subject. So I was figuring that’s what he might’ve had in mind.”
    Dance asked, “Before that, had he ever mentioned Mexico?”
    “Maybe. Can’t say as I