He was exhausted.

And his round belly contained pretty much an entire bottle of Vallejo Springs’s smooth Merlot wine.

There was no way Morton Nagle was going to drive home tonight through a tangle of combat traffic in Contra Costa County, then the equally daunting roads around San Jose. He’d found a motel not far from the vineyards he’d moped around in all day and checked in. He washed his face and hands, ordered a club sandwich from room service and uncorked the wine.

Waiting for the food to arrive, he called his wife and spoke to her and the children, then got through to Kathryn Dance.

She told him that Pell had tried to kill the prosecutor in the Croyton trial.

“Reynolds? No!”

“Everybody’s all right,” Dance said. “But he got away.”

“You think maybe that was his goal? Why he was staying in the area?”

The agent explained she didn’t think so. She believed he’d intended to kill Reynolds as a prelude to his real plan, because he was frightened of the prosecutor. But what that real plan might be continued to elude them.

Dance sounded tired, discouraged.

Apparently he did too.

“Morton,” Dance asked, “are you all right?”

“I’m just wondering how bad my headache’ll be tomorrow morning.”

She gave a sour laugh.

Room service knocked on the door. He said good-bye and hung up the phone.

Nagle ate the meal without much appetite and channel surfed, seeing virtually nothing that flickered by on the screen.

The large man lay back in bed, kicking off his shoes. As he sipped from the plastic glass of wine he was thinking of a color photo of Daniel Pell in Time magazine years ago. The killer’s head was turned partially away but the unearthly blue eyes stared straight into the camera. They seemed to follow you wherever you were, and you couldn’t shake the thought that even if you closed the magazine, Pell would continue to stare into your soul.

Nagle was angry that he’d failed in his attempt to get the aunt’s agreement, that the trip here had been a waste of time.

But then he told himself that, at least, he’d stayed true to his journalist’s ethics and protected his sources—and protected the girl. He’d been as persuasive as he could with the aunt but hadn’t stepped over the moral boundary and told Kathryn Dance the girl’s new name and location.

No, Nagle realized, he’d done everything right in a difficult situation.

Growing drowsy, he found he was feeling better. He’d go home tomorrow, back to his wife and children. He’d do the best he could with the book without Theresa. He’d heard from Rebecca Sheffield and she was game to go ahead—she’d been making a lot of notes on life in the Family—and wanted to sit down with him when he returned. She was sure she could convince Linda Whitfield to be interviewed, as well. And there were certainly no lack of victims of Daniel Pell to write about.