She laughed and declined his offer. He started to eat, not bothering to open the soy sauce or wasabi. He looked very tired. Maybe it was just too much trouble to wrestle with the packets.

“One thing I wanted to ask,” Dance said. “Is the sheriff okay with CBI running the manhunt?”

O’Neil set down the chopsticks and ran his hand through his salt-and-pepper hair. “Well, I’ll tell you. When my father was in Nam his platoon sometimes had to take out Vietcong tunnels. Sometimes they’d find booby traps. Sometimes they’d find VC. It was the most dangerous job in the war. Dad developed this fear that stayed with him all his life.”

“Claustrophobia?”

“No. Volunteerphobia. He cleared one tunnel, then never raised his hand again. Nobody can quite figure out why exactly you stepped forward on this one.”

She laughed. “You’re assuming I did.” She told him about Overby’s gambit to seize control of the case before CHP and O’Neil’s own office.

“Wondered about that. Just for the record, we miss the Fish as much as you do.”

Stanley Fishburne, the former head of CBI.

“No, not as much as we do,” Dance said definitively.

“Okay, probably not. But in answer to your question, everybody’s de-lighted you’re on point here. God bless and more power to you.”

Dance moved aside piles of magazines and books, then spread Morton Nagle’s material out in front of them. Maybe the sheets represented only a small percentage of the books, clippings and notes filling Nagle’s study, but it was still a daunting quantity.

She found an inventory of the evidence and other items removed from Pell’s house in Seaside after the Croyton murders. There were a dozen books about Charles Manson, several large files and a note from the crime-scene officer: Item No. 23. Found in the box where the Manson books were kept: Trilby, novel by George du Maurier. Book had been read numerous times. Many notes in margins. Nothing relevant to case.

“You ever heard of it?” she asked.

O’Neil read a huge amount and his large collection, filling his den, contained just about every genre of book that existed. But this was one he hadn’t heard of.

Dance got her laptop, went online and looked it up. “This is interesting. George du Maurier was Daphne du Maurier’s grandfather.” She read several synopses and reviews of the book. “Seems like Trilby was a huge best seller, a Da Vinci Code of the time. Svengali?”

“Know the name—a mesmerizer—but nothing else.”