The Sleeping Doll

their effusive apologies for their younger son’s behavior. Dance spent a few minutes reassuring them, then she and O’Neil said good-bye and headed outside.
    The detective was jiggling his car keys.
    A kinesics expert knows that it’s impossible to keep strong feelings hidden. Charles Darwin wrote, “Repressed emotion almost always comes to the surface in some form of body motion.” Usually it’s revealed as hand or finger gestures or tapping feet—we may easily control our words, glances and facial expressions but we exercise far less conscious mastery over our extremities.
    Michael O’Neil was wholly unaware that he was playing with his keys.
    She said, “He’s got the best doctors in the area here. And Mom’ll keep an eye on him. You know her. She’ll manhandle the chief of the department into his room if she thinks he needs special attention.”
    A stoic smile. Michael O’Neil was good at that.
    “They can do pretty miraculous things,” she said. Not having any idea what doctors could or couldn’t do. She and O’Neil had had a number of occasions on which to reassure each other over the past few years, mostly professionally, sometimes personally, like her husband’s death or O’Neil’s father’s deteriorating mental state.
    Neither of them did a very good job expressing sympathy or comfort; platitudes seemed to diminish the relationship. Usually the other’s simple presence worked much better.
    “Let’s hope.”
    As they approached the exit she took a call from FBI Agent Winston Kellogg, in his temporary quarters at CBI. Dance paused and O’Neil continued on into the lot. She told Kellogg about Millar. And she learned from him that a canvass by the FBI in Bakersfield had located no witnesses who’d seen anybody break into Pell’s aunt’s toolshed or garage to steal the hammer. As for the wallet bearing the initials R.H. , found in the well with the hammer, the federal forensic experts were unable to trace it to a recent buyer.
    “And, Kathryn, I’ve got the jet tanked up in Oakland, if Linda Whitfield gets the okay from on high. One other thing? That third woman?”
    “Samantha McCoy?”
    “Right. Have you called her?”
    At that moment Dance happened to look across the parking lot.
    She saw Michael O’Neil pausing, as a tall, attractive blonde approached him. The woman smiled at O’Neil, slipped her arms around him and kissed him. He kissed her back.
    “Kathryn,” Kellogg said. “You there?”
    “What?”
    “Samantha McCoy?”
    “Sorry.” Dance looked away from O’Neil and the blonde. “No. I’m driving up to San Jose now. If she’s gone to this much trouble to keep her identity quiet I want to see her in person. I think it’ll take more than a phone call to convince her to help us out.”
    She disconnected and walked up to O’Neil and the woman he was embracing.
    “Kathryn.”
    “Anne, good to see you,” Dance said to Michael O’Neil’s wife. The women smiled, then asked about each other’s children.
    Anne O’Neil nodded toward the hospital. “I came to see Juan. Mike said he’s not doing well.”
    “No. It’s pretty bad. He’s unconscious now. But his parents are there. They’d be glad for some company, I’m sure.”
    Anne had a small Leica camera slung over her shoulder. Thanks to the landscape photographer Ansel Adams and the f 64 Club, Northern and Central California made up one of the great photography meccas in the world. Anne ran a gallery in Carmel that sold collectible photographs, “collectible” generally defined as those taken by photographers no longer among the living: Adams, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Henri Cartier-Bresson. Anne was also a stringer for several newspapers, including big dailies in San Jose and San Francisco.
    Dance said, “Michael told you about the party tonight? My father’s birthday.”
    “He did. I think we can make it.”
    Anne kissed her husband again and headed into the hospital. “See you later, honey.”
    “ ’Bye, dear.”
    Dance nodded good-bye and climbed into her car, tossing the Coach purse onto the passenger seat. She stopped at Shell for gas, coffee and a cake doughnut and headed onto Highway 1 north, getting a beautiful view of Monterey Bay. She noted that she was driving past the campus of Cal State at Monterey Bay, on the site of the former Fort Ord (probably the only college in the country overlooking a restricted area filled with unexploded ordnance). A large banner