The Sleeping Doll

shell,” he said to Dance. “Very rare here. But Maggie found one.”
    “It was just there ,” the girl said.
    “Okay, I’m headed home to the staff sergeant. She’s fixing dinner and my presence is required. ’Night, all.”
    “ ’Bye, Grandpa.”
    Her father climbed down the stairs, and Dance thanked fate or God or whatever might be, as she often did, for a good, dependable male figure in the life of a widow with children.
    On her way to the kitchen her phone rang. Rey Carraneo reported that the Thunderbird at Moss Landing had been stolen from the valet parking lot of an upscale restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles the previous Friday. There were no suspects. They were expecting the report from LAPD but, like most car thefts, there were no forensics. Also he’d had no luck finding the hotel, motel or boardinghouse the woman might’ve checked into. “There’re a lot of them,” he confessed.
    Welcome to the Monterey Peninsula. “We’ve got to stash the tourists somewhere, Rey. Keep at it. And say hi to your wife.”
    Dance began unpacking dinner.
    A lean boy with sandy hair wandered into the sunroom beside the kitchen. He was on the phone. Though only twelve, Wes was nearly as tall as his mother. She wiggled a finger at him and he wandered over to her. She kissed him on the forehead and he didn’t cringe. Which was the same as “I love you very much, Mother dear.”
    “Off the phone,” she said. “Dinnertime.”
    “Like, gotta go.”
    “Don’t say ‘like.’ ”
    The boy hung up. “What’re we having?”
    “Chicken,” Maggie said dubiously.
    “You like Albertsons.”
    “What about bird flu?”
    Wes snickered. “Don’t you know anything? You get it from live chickens.”
    “It was alive once,” the girl countered.
    From the corner where his sister had backed him, Wes said, “Well, it’s not an Asian chicken.”
    “Hell- o . They migrate. And how you die is you throw up to death.”
    “Mags, not at dinnertime!” Dance said.
    “Well, you do.”
    “Oh, like chickens migrate? Yeah, right. And they don’t have bird flu here. Or we would’ve heard.”
    Sibling banter. But there was a little more to it, Dance believed. Her son remained deeply shaken by his father’s death. This made him more sensitive to mortality and violence than most boys his age. Dance steered him away from those topics—a tough job for a woman who tracked down felons for a living. She now announced, “As long as the chicken’s cooked, it’s fine.” Though she wasn’t sure that this was right and wondered if Maggie would dispute her.
    But her daughter was lost in her seashell book.
    The boy said, “Oh, mashed potatoes too. You rock, Mom.”
    Maggie and Wes set the table and laid the food out, while Dance washed up.
    When she returned from the bathroom, Wes asked, “Mom, aren’t you going to change?” He was looking at her black suit.
    “I’m starving. I can’t wait.” Not sharing that the real reason she’d kept the outfit on was as an excuse to wear her weapon. Usually the first thing she did upon coming home was to put on jeans and a T-shirt and slip the gun into the lockbox beside her bed.
    Yeah, it’s a tough life being a cop. The little ones spend a lot of time alone, don’t they? They’d probably love some friends to play with . . . .
    Wes glanced once more at her suit as if he knew exactly what she’d been thinking.
    But then they turned to the food, eating and talking about their day—the children’s at least. Dance, of course, said nothing about hers. Wes was in a tennis camp in Monterey, Maggie at a music camp in Carmel. Each seemed to be enjoying the experience. Thank goodness neither of them asked about Daniel Pell.
    When dinner was over, the trio cleared the table and did the dishes—herchildren always had a share of the housework. When they were through, Wes and Maggie headed into the living room to read or play video games.
    Dance logged onto her computer and checked email. Nothing about the case, though she had several about her other “job.” She and her best friend, Martine Christensen, ran a website called “American Tunes,” after the famous Paul Simon song from the 1970s.
    Kathryn Dance was not a bad musician, but a brief attempt at a full-time career as a singer and guitarist had left her dissatisfied (which, she was afraid, was how she ’d left her audiences). She decided that her real talent was listening to music and encouraging other people