Jeffery Deaver - The Sleeping Doll

"Hi," she responded. "Hey, sorry I haven't gotten back to you. I know you called a few times."

Brian gave a laugh and she remembered the times they'd spent together, dinner, walking on the beach. He had a nice laugh. And he kissed well. "I'd say if anybody has an excuse, it's you. I've been watching the news. Who's Overby?"

"My boss."

"Oh, the crazy one you told me about?"

"Yep." Dance wondered how indiscreet she'd been.

"I saw a press conference and he mentioned you. He said you were his assistant in capturing Pell."

She laughed. If TJ had heard, it was only a matter of time until she got a message for "Assistant Dance."

"So you got him."

"He's got."

And then some.

"How've you been?" she asked.

"Good. Up in San Fran for a few days, wheedling money out of people who were wheedling money out of other people. And I wheedled a fee. Worked out for everybody." He added that he'd had a flat tire on the 101, returning home. An amateur barbershop quartet coming back from a gig had stopped, directed traffic and changed the tire for him.

"They sing while they changed it?"

"Sadly, no. But I'm going to one of their shows in Burlingame."

Was this an invitation? she wondered

"How are the kids?" he asked.

"Fine. Being kids." She paused, wondering if she should ask him out for drinks first, or go right for dinner. She figured dinner was safe, given that they had a history.

Brian said, "Anyway, thanks for calling back."

"Sure."

"But, never mind."

Never mind?

"The reason I called? A friend and I're going down to La Jolla this week."

Friend. What a marvelously diverse word that is.

"That's great. You going to snorkel? You said you wanted to, I remember." There was a huge underwater wildlife refuge there. She and Brian had talked about going.

"Oh, yeah. We've got that planned. I just called to see if I could pick up that book I lent you, the one about backpacking trails down near San Diego."

"Oh, I'm sorry."

"Not a problem. I bought another one. Keep it. I'm sure you'll get down there some day."

She gave a laugh-a Morton Nagle chuckle. "Sure."

"Everything else going well?"

"Real well, yeah."

"I'll call you when I'm back in town."

Kathryn Dance, kinesics analyst and seasoned interrogator, knew that people often lie expecting-even hoping-that the listener spots the deception. Usually in contexts just like this one.

"That'd be great, Brian."

She guessed they'd never share another word together in their lives.

Dance folded up the phone and walked into her bedroom. She pushed aside the sea of shoes and found her old Martin 00-18 guitar, with a mahogany back and sides and a spruce top aged the color of taffy.

She carried it out to the Deck, sat down and, with fingers clumsy from the chill-and lack of practice-tuned up and started to play. First, some scales and arpeggios, then the Bob Dylan song "Tomorrow Is a Long Time."

Her thoughts were meandering, from Brian Gunderson to the front seat of the CBI Taurus and Winston Kellogg.

Tasting mint, smelling skin and aftershave…

As she played, she noticed motion inside the house. Dance saw her son beeline to the refrigerator and cart a cookie and glass of milk back into his room. The raid took all of thirty seconds.

She found herself thinking that she'd been treating Wes's attitude all along as an aberration, a flaw to be fixed.

Parents tend to feel that their children raise valid objections about potential stepparents or even casual dates. You can't think that way.

But now Dance wasn't so sure. Maybe they do raise real concerns at times. Maybe we should listen to them, and as carefully and with as open a mind as if interviewing witnesses in a criminal investigation. Maybe she'd been taking him for granted all along. Sure, Wes was a child, not a partner, but he still should have a vote. Here I am, she thought, a kinesic expert, establishing baselines and looking for deviations as signals that something's not right.

With Winston Kellogg, was I deviating from my own baseline?

Maybe the boy's reaction was a clue that she had.

Something to think about.

Dance was halfway through a Paul Simon song, humming the melody, not sure of the lyrics, when she heard the creak of the gate below the Deck.

The instrument went silent as she glanced over to see Michael O'Neil breach the stairs. He was wearing the gray and maroon sweater she'd bought for him when she'd been skiing in Colorado a year ago.

"Hey," he said. "Intruding?"

"Never."

"Anne's got an opening in an hour. But I thought I'd stop by here first, say hi."

"Glad you did."

He pulled a beer from the fridge and, when she nodded, got another for her too. He sat down next to her. The Becks snapped open crisply. They both sipped long.

She started playing an instrumental transcribed for guitar, an old Celtic tune by Turlough O'Carolan, the blind, itinerant Irish harpist.

O'Neil said nothing, just drank the beer and nodded with the rhythm. His eyes, she noticed, were turned toward the ocean-though he couldn't see it; the view was obscured by lush pines. She remembered that once, after seeing the old Spencer Tracy movie about Hemingway's obsessed fisherman, Wes had called O'Neil the "Old Man of the Sea." He and Dance had laughed hard at that.

When she finished playing, he said, "There's a problem with the Juan situation. Did you hear?"

"Juan Millar? No, what?"

"The autopsy report came in. The Coroner's Division found secondary causes. Labeled them suspicious. We've got a file started at MCSO."

"What happened?"

"It wasn't infection or shock he died of, which is usually what happens in a bad burn. It was from an interaction of morphine and diphenhydramine-that's an antihistamine. The morphine drip was open wider than it should've been and none of the doctors had prescribed an antihistamine. It's dangerous to mix with morphine."

"Intentional?"

"Looks like it. He couldn't do it himself. We're probably looking at murder."

Dance heard her mother's whispered report of Millar's words.

Kill me…

She wondered who might've been behind the death. Mercy killings were among the most difficult, and emotional, cases to investigate.

Dance shook her head. "And after all his family's been through. Whatever we can do, let me know."

They sat in silence for a moment, Dance smelling wood-fire smoke-and another dose of O'Neil's aftershave. She enjoyed the combination. She started to play once again. Elizabeth Cotten's finger-picking version of "Freight Train," as infectious a melody as ever existed. It would rattle around in her brain for days.

O'Neil said, "Heard about Winston Kellogg. Never would've called that one."

Word travels fast.

"Yep."

"TJ gave me all the gruesome details." He shook his head and gestured for Dylan and Patsy. The dogs bounded over to him. He handed out Milk Bones from a cookie jar that sat beside a bottle of dubious tequila. They took the treats and raced off. He said, "Sounds like it'll be a tough case. Pressure from Washington to drop it, I'll bet."

"Oh, yeah. Uphill all the way."

"If you've interested, we might want to make some calls."

"Chicago, Miami or L.A.?"

O'Neil blinked, then gave a laugh. "You've been considering it too, hm? What's the strongest?"

Dance replied, "I'd go with the suspicious suicide in L.A. It's in state, so CBI's got jurisdiction and Kellogg can't claim that the cult leader died during a takedown. And that's the file that Kellogg destroyed. Why else would he do that, if he wasn't guilty?"

She'd decided that if Kellogg got off the hook on the Pell killing, which was a possibility, she wouldn't let the matter rest there. She'd pursue the case against him in other venues.