“Interesting. The story’s about a failed musician, Svengali, who meets a young and beautiful singer—her first name’s Trilby. But she wasn’t very successful. Svengali falls in love with her but she won’t have anything to do with him, so he hypnotizes her. Her career’s successful, but she becomes his mental slave. In the end, Svengali dies and—because du Maurier believed a robot can’t survive without its master—she dies too.”

“Guess there was no sequel.” O’Neil flipped through a stack of notes. “Nagle have any thoughts about what he’s up to?”

“Not really. He’s writing us a bio. Maybe there’ll be something in it.”

For the next hour they sifted through the photocopies, looking for references to any place or person in the area that Pell might’ve had an interest in, some reason for him to stay on the Peninsula. There was no reference to Alison or Nimue, from the killer’s Google search.

Nothing.

Most of the videotapes were feature TV magazine reports about Pell, the Croyton murders or about Croyton himself, the flamboyant, larger-than-life Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

“Sensationalist crap,” O’Neil announced.

“Superficial sensationalist crap.” Exactly what Morton Nagle objected to in the coverage of crime and conflict.

But there were two others, police interview tapes that Dance found more illuminating. One was for a burglary bust, thirteen years ago.

“Who are your next of kin, Daniel?”
“I don’t have any. No family.”
“Your parents?”
“Gone. Long gone. I’m an orphan, you could say.”
“When did they die?”
“When I was seventeen. But my dad’d left before that.”
“You and your father get along?”
“My father…That’s a hard story.”

Pell gave the officer an account of his abusive father, who had forced young Daniel to pay rent from the age of thirteen. He’d beat the boy if he didn’t come up with the money—and beat the mother as well if she defended her son. This, he explained, was why he’d taken to stealing. Finally the father had abandoned them. Coincidentally, his separated parents had died the same year—his mother of cancer, his father in a drunk-driving accident. At seventeen Pell was on his own.

“And no siblings, hm?”
“No, sir…I always thought that if I had somebody to share that burden with, I would’ve turned out differently…. And I don’t have any children myself, either. That’s a regret, I must say…. But I’m a young man. I’ve got time, right?”
“Oh, if you get your act together, Daniel, there’s no reason in the world you couldn’t have a family of your own.”
“Thank you for saying that, Officer. I mean that. Thank you. And what about you, Officer? You a family man? I see you’re wearing a wedding ring.”