The Sleeping Doll

half-hour.”
    Kellogg sipped his wine. “The fact is, there’s another problem. I’mworried if we go to the SAC or Homeland with something like that—too tenuous—we might lose support we’d need later for something more solid.”
    “Crying wolf, hm?” O’Neil nodded. “Guess you have to play more politics at that level than we do here.”
    “But let’s think about it. I’ll make some calls.”
    O’Neil looked past Dance’s shoulder. “Hey, happy birthday, young man.”
    Stuart Dance, wearing a badge that said “Birthday Boy,” handmade by Maggie and Wes, shook hands, refilled O’Neil’s and Dance’s wineglasses and said to Kellogg, “You’re talking shop. Not allowed. I’m stealing you away from these children, come play with the adults.”
    Kellogg gave a shy laugh and followed the man to the candlelit table, where Martine had her battered Gibson guitar out of the case and was organizing a sing-along. Dance and O’Neil stood alone. She saw Wes looking up. He’d apparently been studying the adults. He turned away, back to the Star Wars improvisation.
    “He seems good,” O’Neil said, tilting his head toward Kellogg.
    “Winston? Yes.”
    Typically, O’Neil carried no grudge about the rejection of his suggestions. He was the antithesis of pettiness.
    “He take a hit recently?” O’Neil tapped his neck.
    “How’d you know?” The bandage wasn’t visible tonight.
    “He was touching it the way you touch a wound.”
    She laughed. “Good kinesic analysis. Yeah, just happened. He was in Chicago. The perp got a round off first, I guess, and Win took him out. He didn’t go into the details.”
    They fell silent, looking over the backyard, the children, the dogs, the lights glowing brighter in the encroaching dusk. “We’ll get him.”
    “Will we?” she asked.
    “Yep. He’ll make a mistake. They always do.”
    “I don’t know. He’s something different. Don’t you feel that?”
    “No. He’s not different. He’s just more .” Michael O’Neil—the most widely read person she knew—had surprisingly simple philosophies of life. He didn’t believe in evil or good, much less God or Satan. Those were all abstractions that deflected you from your job, which was to catch people who broke rules that humans had created for their own health and safety.
    No good, no bad. Just destructive forces that had to be stopped.
    To Michael O’Neil, Daniel Pell was a tsunami, an earthquake, a tornado.
    He watched the children playing, then said, “I gather that guy you’ve been seeing . . . It’s over with?”
    Brian called . . . .
    “You caught that, hm? Busted by my own assistant.”
    “I’m sorry. Really.”
    “You know how it goes,” Dance said, noting she’d spoken one of those sentences that were meaningless flotsam in a conversation.
    “Sure.”
    Dance turned to see how her mother was coming with dinner. She saw O’Neil’s wife looking at the two of them. Anne smiled.
    Dance smiled back. She said to O’Neil, “So, let’s go join the sing-along.”
    “Do I have to sing?”
    “Absolutely not,” she said quickly. He had a wonderful speaking voice, low with a natural vibrato. He couldn’t stay on key under threat of torture.
    After a half-hour of music, gossip and laughter, Edie Dance, her daughter and granddaughter set out Worcestershire-marinated flank steak, salad, asparagus and potatoes au gratin. Dance sat beside Winston Kellogg, who was holding his own very well among strangers. He even told a few jokes, with a deadpan delivery that reminded her of her late husband, who had shared not only Kellogg’s career but his easy-going nature—at least once the federal ID card was tucked away.
    The conversation ambled from music to Anne O’Neil’s critique of San Francisco arts, to politics in the Middle East, Washington and Sacramento, to the far more important story of a sea otter pup born in captivity at the aquarium two days ago.
    It was a comfortable gathering: friends, laughter, food, wine, music.
    Though, of course, complete comfort eluded Kathryn Dance. Pervading the otherwise fine evening, like the moving bass line of Martine’s old guitar, was the thought that Daniel Pell was still at large.

W EDNESDAY

Chapter 27
    Kathryn Dance was sitting in a cabin at the Point Lobos Inn—the first time she’d ever been in the expensive place. It was an upscale lodge of private cabins on a quiet road off Highway 1, south of Carmel, abutting the rugged and