“Michael?” Overby asked. “You want to contact your people?”

O’Neil hesitated, then called his office and asked for the MCSO SWAT commander.

Lying in bed in the soft morning light, Daniel Pell was thinking that they’d now have to be particularly careful. The police would know what he looked like in the Latino disguise. He could bleach much of the color out and change his hair again, but they’d be expecting that too.

Still, he couldn’t leave yet. He had one more mission on the Peninsula, the whole reason for his remaining here.

Pell made coffee and when he returned to the bed, carrying the two cups, he found Jennie looking at him.

Like last night, her expression was different. She seemed more mature than when they’d first met.

“What, lovely?”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“You’re not coming with me to my house in Anaheim, are you?”

Her words hit him hard. He hesitated, not sure what to say, then asked, “Why do you think that?”

“I just feel it.”

Pell set the coffee on the table. He started to lie—deception came so easily to him. And he could have gotten away with it. Instead he said, “I have other plans for us, lovely. I haven’t told you yet.”

“I know.”

“You do?” He was surprised.

“I’ve known all along. Not exactly known. But I had a feeling.”

“After we take care of a few things here, we’re going somewhere else.”

“Where?”

“A place I have. It’s not near anything. There’s no one around. It’s wonderful, beautiful. We won’t be bothered there. It’s on a mountain. Do you like the mountains?”

“Sure, I guess.”

That was good. Because Daniel Pell owned one.

Pell’s aunt, in Bakersfield, was the only decent person in his family, as far as he was concerned. Aunt Barbara thought her brother, Pell’s father, was mad, the chain-smoking failed minister obsessed with doing exactly what the Bible told him, terrified of God, terrified of making decisions on his own, as if that might offend Him. So the woman tried to divert the Pell boys as best she could. Richard would have nothing to do with her. But she and Daniel spent a lot of time together. She didn’t corral him, didn’t order him around. Didn’t force him to be a housekeeper, and never even raised her voice to him, much less her hand. She let him come and go as he wished, spent money on him, asked about what he’d done during the days when he visited. She took him places. Pell remembered driving up into the hills for picnics, the zoo, movies—where he sat amid the smell of popcorn and her weighty perfume, mesmerized by the infallible assuredness of Hollywood villains and heroes up on the screen.