Roadside Crosses: A Kathryn Dance Novel (15 page)

“Travis, can you think of anybody who saw you there?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I’ll have to think about it.” Eyes studying the floor.

“Good. And what time did you come home?”

“One-thirty. Maybe two. I don’t know.”

She asked more questions about Monday night and then about school and his classmates. She wasn’t able to decide whether or not he was telling the truth since he wasn’t deviating much from his baseline. She thought again about what Jon Boling had told her about the synth world. If Travis was mentally there, not in the real world, baseline analysis might be useless. Maybe a whole different set of rules applied to people like Travis Brigham.

Then the mother’s eyes flickered toward the doorway. The boy’s too.

Dance and O’Neil turned to see a large man enter, tall and broad. He was wearing workmen’s overalls streaked in dirt,
Central Coast Landscaping
embroidered on his chest. He looked at everybody in the room, slowly. Dark eyes still and unfriendly beneath a fringe of thick, brown hair.

“Bob, these are police—”

“They’re not here with the report for the insurance, are they?”

“No. They—”

“You have a warrant?”

“They’re here to—”

“I’m talking to her.” A nod at Dance.

“I’m Agent Dance with the California Bureau of Investigation.” She offered an ID he didn’t look at. “And this is Senior Deputy O’Neil, Monterey County Sheriff’s Office. We’re asking your son a few questions about a crime.”

“There was no crime. It was an accident. Those girls died in an accident. That’s all that happened.”

“We’re here about something else. Someone who’d posted a message about Travis was attacked.”

“Oh, that blog bullshit.” He growled. “That Chilton is a danger to society. He’s like a fucking poisonous snake.” He turned to his wife. “Joey, down at the dock, nearly got hisself popped in the mouth, the stuff he was saying about me. Egging on the other boys. Just ’cause I’m his father. They don’t read the newspaper, they don’t read
Newsweek.
But they read that Chilton crap. Somebody should . . .” His voice faded. He turned toward his son. “I told you not to say anything to anybody without we have a lawyer. Did I tell you that? You say the wrong fucking thing
to the wrong person, and we get sued. And they take the house away and half my paycheck for the rest of my life.” He lowered his voice. “And your brother goes into a home.”

“Mr. Brigham, we’re not here about the accident,” O’Neil reminded him. “We’re investigating the assault last night.”

“Doesn’t matter, does it? Things get written down and go into the record.”

He seemed more concerned about responsibility for the accident than that his son might get arrested for attempted murder.

Ignoring them completely, he said to his wife, “Why’d you let ’em in? This ain’t Nazi Germany, not yet. You can tell ’em to shove it.”

“I thought—”

“No, you didn’t. You didn’t think at all.” To O’Neil: “Now, I’ll ask you to leave. And if you come back it better be with a warrant.”

“Dad!” Sammy cried, racing from his bedroom, startling Dance. “It’s working! I wanta show you!” He was holding up a circuit board, from which wires sprouted.

Brigham’s gruffness vanished instantly. He hugged the younger son and said kindly, “We’ll look at it later, after supper.”

Dance was watching Travis’s eyes, which grew still at the display of affection toward his younger brother.

“Okay.” Sammy hesitated, then went out the back door and clomped down the porch and headed toward the shed.

“Stay close,” Sonia called.

Dance noted that she hadn’t told her husband about the vandalism that had just occurred. She’d be afraid of delivering bad news. She did, however, say of Sammy, “Maybe he
should
be on his pills.” Eyes everywhere but at her husband.

“They’re a rip-off, what they cost. Weren’t you listening to me? And what’s the point, if he stays home all day?”

“But he doesn’t stay home all day. That’s—”

“Because Travis don’t watch him like he should.”

The boy listened passively, apparently unmoved by the criticism.

O’Neil said to Bob Brigham, “A serious crime was committed. We need to talk to everyone who might be involved. And your son
is
involved. Can you confirm he was at the Game Shed last night?”

“I was out. But that’s none of your business. And listen up, my boy didn’t have nothing to do with any attacks. You staying’s trespassing, isn’t it?” He lifted a bushy eyebrow as he lit a cigarette, waved the match out and dropped it accurately into the ashtray. “And you,” he snapped to Travis. “You’re going to be late for work.”

The boy went into his bedroom.

Dance was frustrated. He was their prime suspect, but she simply couldn’t tell what was going on in Travis’s mind.

The boy returned, carrying a brown-and-beige-striped uniform jacket on a hanger. He rolled it up and stuffed it into his backpack.

“No,” Brigham barked. “Your mother ironed it. Put it on. Don’t crumple it up like that.”

“I don’t want to wear it now.”

“Show some respect to your mother, after all her work.”

“It’s a bagel shop. Who cares?”

“That’s not the point. Put it on. Do what I’m telling you.”

The boy stiffened. Dance gave an audible gasp seeing Travis’s face. Eyes widening, shoulders rising. His lips drew back like those of a snarling animal. Travis raged to his father, “It’s a stupid fucking uniform. I wear it on the street and they laugh at me!”

The father leaned forward. “You do not ever talk to me that way, and
never
in front of other people!”

“I get laughed at
enough.
I’m not going to wear it! You don’t have any fucking idea!” Dance saw the boy’s frantic eyes flicker around the room and settle on the ashtray, a possible weapon. O’Neil noticed this too and tensed, in case a fight was about to break out.

Travis had become somebody else entirely, possessed with anger.

The tendency to violence in young people almost always comes from rage, not watching movies or TV. . . .

“I didn’t do anything wrong!” Travis growled, wheeled around and pushed through the screen door, letting it snap back loudly. He hurried into the side yard, grabbed his bike, which was leaning against a broken fence, and walked it down a path through the woods bordering the backyard.

“You two, thanks for fucking up our day. Now get out.”

With neutral-toned good-byes, Dance and O’Neil headed for the door, Sonia offering a timid glance of apology. Travis’s father strode into the kitchen.
Dance heard the refrigerator door open; a bottle fizzed open.

Outside, she asked, “How’d you do?”

“Not bad, I think,” O’Neil offered and held up a tiny tuft of gray. He’d tugged it off the sweatshirt in the laundry basket when he’d stepped away to let Dance take over the questioning.

They sat in the front seat of O’Neil’s cruiser. The doors slammed simultaneously. “I’ll drop the fiber off with Peter Bennington.”

It wouldn’t be admissible—they had no warrant—but it would at least tell them that Travis was the likely suspect.

“If it matches, put him under surveillance?” she asked.

A nod. “I’ll stop by the bagel shop. If his bike’s outside, I can get a soil sample from the treads. I think a magistrate’d go with a warrant if the dirt matches the beach scene.” He looked Dance’s way. “Gut feeling? You think he did it?”

Dance debated. “All I can say is that I only got clear deception signals twice.”

“When?”

“First when he said he was at the Game Shed last night.”

“And the second time?”

“When he said he didn’t do anything wrong.”

DANCE RETURNED TO
her office at the CBI. She smiled at Jon Boling. He reciprocated, but then his face grew grim. He nodded at his computer. “More postings about Travis on
The Chilton Report.
Attacking him. And then other posts, attacking the attackers. It’s an all-out flame war. And I know you wanted to keep the connection between the Roadside Cross Case and the attack secret, but somebody caught on.”

“How on earth?” Dance asked angrily.

Boling shrugged. He nodded to a recent posting.

Reply to Chilton, posted by BrittanyM.

Is anybody watching the news???? Somebody left a cross and then went out and attacked that girl. What’s that all about? OMG, I’ll bet it’s [the driver]!

Subsequent postings suggested Tammy was attacked by Travis because she’d posted a critical comment in
The Chilton Report.
And he had become the “Roadside Cross Killer,” even though Tammy had survived.

“Great. We try to keep it secret and we get outed by a teenage girl named Brittany.”

“Did you see him?” Boling asked.

“Yes.”

“You think he’s the one?”

“I wish I could say. I’m leaning toward it.” She explained her theory that it was hard to read Travis because he was living more in the synth world than the real, and he was masking his kinesic responses. “I will say there’s a huge amount of anger there. How ’bout we take a walk, Jon? There’s somebody I want you to meet.”

A few minutes later they arrived at Charles Over by’s office. On the phone, as he often was, her boss gestured Dance and Boling in, with a glance of curiosity at the professor.

The agent-in-charge hung up. “They made the connection, the press did. He’s now the ‘Roadside Cross Killer.’ ”

BrittanyM . . .

Dance said, “Charles, this is Professor Jonathan Boling. He’s been helping us.”

A hearty handshake. “Have you now? What area?”

“Computers.”

“That’s your profession? Consultant?” Overby let this hang like a balsa-wood glider over the trio for a moment. Dance spotted her cue and was about to say that Boling was volunteering his time when the professor said, “I teach mostly, but, yes, I do some consulting, Agent Overby. It’s really how I make most of my money. You know, academia pays next to nothing. But as a consultant I can charge up to three hundred an hour.”

“Ah.” Overby looked stricken. “Per hour. Really?”

Boling held a straight face for exactly the right
length of time before adding, “But I get a real kick out of volunteering for free to help organizations like yours. So I’m tearing up my bill in your case.”

Dance nearly had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing. Boling, she decided, could have been a good psychologist; he’d deduced Overby’s prissy frugality in ten seconds flat, defused it—and slipped in a joke. For her benefit, Dance noted—since she was the only member of the audience.

“It’s getting hysterical, Kathryn. We’ve had a dozen reports of killers wandering around in backyards. A couple of people’ve already taken some shots at intruders, thinking it’s him. Oh, and there’ve been a couple more reports of crosses.”

Dance was alarmed.
“More?”

Overby held up a hand. “They were all real memorials, apparently. Accidents that had happened in the past few weeks. None with
prospective
dates on them. But the press is all over it. Even Sacramento’s heard.” He nodded at the phone, presumably indicating a call from their boss—the director of the CBI. Possibly even
his
boss, the attorney general.

“So where are we?”

Dance brought him up to date on Travis, the incidents at his parents’ house, her take on the boy. “Definitely a person of interest.”

“But you didn’t bring him in?” Overby asked.

“No probable cause. Michael’s checking out some physical evidence right now to link him to the scene.”

“And no other suspects?”

“No.”

“How the hell is a
kid
doing this, a kid riding around on a bicycle?”

Dance pointed out that local gangs, centered primarily in and around Salinas, had terrorized people for years, and many of them had members much younger than Travis.

Boling added, “And one thing we’ve found out about him. He’s very active in computer games. Young people who are good at them learn very sophisticated combat and evasion techniques. One of the things military recruiters always ask is how much the applicants game; everything else being equal they’d take a gamer over another kid any day.”

Overby asked, “Motive?”

Dance then explained to her boss that if Travis was the killer, his motive was probably revenge based on cyberbullying.

“Cyberbullying,” Overby said, gravely. “I was just reading up on that.”

“You were?” Dance asked.

“Yep. There was a good article in
USA Today
last weekend.”

“It’s become a popular topic,” Boling said. Did Dance detect slight dismay about the sources that informed the head of a regional office of the CBI?

“That’s enough to turn him to violence?” Overby asked.

Boling continued, nodding, “He’s being pushed over the edge. The postings and the rumors have spread. And it’s become physical bullying too. Somebody’s put up a YouTube video about him. They got him in a happy slap vid.”

“A what?”

“It’s a cyberbullying technique. Somebody came up to Travis at Burger King and pushed him. He stumbled—it
was embarrassing—and one of the other kids was waiting to record it on a cell phone. Then they uploaded it. It’s been viewed two hundred thousand times so far.”

It was then that a slightly built, unsmiling man stepped out of the conference room across the hall and into the doorway of Overby’s office. He noted the visitors and ignored them.

“Charles,” he said in a baritone.

“Oh . . . Kathryn, this is Robert Harper,” Overby said. “From the AG’s office in San Francisco. Special Agent Dance.”

The man walked into the room and shook her hand firmly, but kept a distance, as if she’d think he was coming on to her.

“And Jon . . .” Overby tried to recall.

“Boling.”

Harper gave the professor a distracted glance. Said nothing to him.

The man from San Francisco had an unrevealing face and perfectly trimmed black hair. He wore a conservative navy blue suit and white shirt, a red-and-blue striped tie. On his lapel was an American flag pin. His cuffs were perfectly starched, though she noticed a few stray gray threads at the ends. A professional state’s attorney, long after his colleagues had gone into private practice and were making buckets of money. She put him in his early fifties.