Roadside Crosses: A Kathryn Dance Novel (19 page)

Seeing their wan, forlorn faces, she grew all the angrier at Robert Harper.

Dance plugged in her phone’s hands-free mike, thought for a moment and called the best defense law
yer she could think of. George Sheedy had once spent four hours trying to discredit Dance on the witness stand. He’d come close to winning a verdict of not guilty for a Salinas gang leader who clearly was. But the good guys had won and the punk got life. After the trial, Sheedy had come up to Dance and shaken her hand, complimenting her on the solid job she’d done testifying. She’d told him too that she’d been impressed by his skill.

As her call was being transferred to Sheedy, she noticed that the cameramen continued to record the excitement, every one of them focused on the car in which her mother sat, handcuffed. They looked like insurgents firing rocket launchers at shell-shocked troops.

CALM NOW, AFTER
the intruder in the backyard turned out not to be the Abominable Snowman, Kelley Morgan was concentrating on her hair.

The teenager was never far from her curlers.

Her hair was the most frustrating thing in the world. A little humidity and it went all frizzy. Pissed her off
sooo
much.

She had to meet Juanita and Trey and Toni on Alvarado in forty minutes, and they were
such
great friends that if she was more than ten minutes late they’d ditch her. She lost track of time writing a post on Bri’s Town Hall board on OurWorld, about Tammy Foster.

Then Kelley’d looked up, into the mirror, and realized that the damp air had turned the strands into this total
creature.
So she logged off and attacked the brunette tangles.

Somebody had once posted on a local blog—anonymously, of course:

Kelley Morgan . . . whats with her hair?????? its like shes a mushroom. I dont like girls with shaved heads but she should go for THAT look. LOL. yikes why dosnt she get a clue.

Kelley had sobbed, paralyzed at the terrible words, which cut her like a razor.

That post was the reason she’d defended Tammy on OurWorld and flamed AnonGurl (who she
did
end up owning, big-time).

Even now, thinking of the cruel post about her hair, she shivered with shame. And anger. Never mind that Jamie said he loved everything about her. The posting had devastated her and made her hypersensitive about the subject. And had cost her countless hours. Since that April 4 post, she hadn’t once gone outside without battling the do into shape.

Okay, get to work, girl.

She rose from her desk and went to her dressing table and plugged in the heated rollers. They gave her split ends but at least the heat tamed the worst of the renegade tresses.

She flicked the dressing table light on and sat down, stripped off her blouse and tossed it onto the floor, then pulled two tank tops over her bra, liking the look of the three straps: red, pink and black. Tested the curlers. A few more minutes. Almost right. She started to brush. It was
soooo
unfair. Pretty face, nice boobs, great ass. And this effing hair.

She happened to glance at her computer and saw an instant message from a friend.

Check out TCR, I mean NOW!!!!!!!!

Kelley laughed. Trish was
so
exclamation point.

Usually she didn’t read
The Chilton Report
—it was more politics than she cared about—but she’d put it on her RSS feed after Chilton had begun posting about the accident on June 9 under the “Roadside Crosses” thread. Kelley had been at the party that night and, just before Caitlin and the other girls left, had seen Travis Brigham arguing with Caitlin.

She swung to the keyboard and typed, Don’t Xplode. Y?

Trish responded,
Chilton took out names but people are saying Travis attacked Tammy!!

Kelley typed,
Is this win or r u guessing?

The response:
WIN, WIN!!!! Travis is pissed b/c she flamed him in the blog, READ IT!!!! THE DRIVER = TRAVIS and THE VICTIM = TAMMY.

Sick to her stomach, Kelley began pounding the keys, calling up
The Chilton Report
and plowing through the “Roadside Crosses” thread. Toward the end, she read:

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]!

Reply to Chilton, posted by CT093.

Where the [deleted] are the police? I heard that that girl in the trunk was raped and had crosses carved on her,
then he LEFT her in the trunk to drown. Just because she dissed him—[the driver], I mean I just looked at the news and he hasn’t been arrested yet. WHY NOT?????

Reply to Chilton, posted by Anonymous.

Me and my friends were near the beach where [the victim] was found and they heard the police talking about this cross. They were like he left it as a warning for people to shut up. [The victim] was attacked and raped because she dissed [the driver] HERE, i mean what she wrote in the blog!!! Listen if you flamed him here and you’re not using proxies or posting anon, you’re totally [deleted], he’s going to get you!!

Reply to Chilton, posted by Anonymous.

I know a d00d where [the driver] goes to game and he was saying that [the driver] was saying he was going to get everybody who was posting stuff about him, he planned to cut their throats like terrorists do on arab TV, hey, cops, [the driver] is the Roadside Cross killer!!! And that’s WORD!!!

No . . . God, no! Kelley thought back to what she’d posted about Travis. What’d she said? Would the boy be mad at
her
? She frantically scrolled up and found her post.

Reply to Chilton, posted by BellaKelley.

u r so right!!! Me and my friend were at that party on the 9
^th
where it happened and [the driver] was coming on to
[deleted] and they were like, just go away. But he didn’t, he followed them out the door when they were leaving. But we have ourselves to blame too for not doing anything, all of us who were there. We all knew [the driver] is a luser and perv and we should have called the police or somebody when they left. I had this bad feeling like in Ghost Whisperer. And look what happened.

Why?
Why did I say that?

I was all, Leave Tammy alone. Don’t flame people online. And then I went and said something about Travis.

Shit. Now he’s going to get me too! Is
that
what I’d heard outside earlier? Maybe he really was outside and, when my brother showed up, that scared him off.

Kelley thought of the bicyclist she’d seen. Hell, Travis rode a bike all the time; a lot of kids at school made fun of him because he couldn’t afford a car.

Dismayed, angry, scared . . .

Kelley was staring at the posts on the screen of the computer, when she heard a noise behind her.

A snap, like earlier.

Another.

She turned.

A wrenching scream poured from Kelley Morgan’s lips.

A face—the most frightening face she’d ever seen—was staring at her from the window. Kelley’s rational thinking stopped cold. She dropped to her knees, feeling the warm liquid gush between her legs as she lost control of her bladder. A pain spurted in her chest, spread to her jaw, her nose, eyes. She nearly stopped breathing.

The face, motionless, staring with its huge black eyes, scarred skin, slits for the nose, the mouth sewn shut and bloody.

The pure horror from her childhood fears flooded through her.

“No, no, no!” Sobbing like a baby, Kelley was scrabbling away as fast as she could and as far as she could. She slammed into the wall and sprawled, stunned, on the carpet.

Eyes staring, black eyes.

Staring right at her.

“No . . .”

Jeans drenched with pee, stomach churning, Kelley crawled desperately toward the door.

The eyes, the mouth with the bloody stitching in it. The yeti, the Abominable Snowman. Somewhere in that portion of her mind that still worked she knew it was only a mask, tied to the crape myrtle tree outside the window.

But that didn’t lessen the fear it ignited within her—the rawest of her childhood fears.

And she knew too what it meant.

Travis Brigham was here. He’d come to kill her, just like he’d tried to kill Tammy Foster.

Kelley finally managed to climb to her feet and stumbled to her door. Run. Get the fuck out.

In the hall she turned toward the front door.

Shit! It was open! Her brother hadn’t locked it at all.

Travis was here, in the house!

Should she just sprint through the living room?

As she stood frozen in fear, he got her from behind, his arm snaking around her throat.

She struggled—until he jammed a gun against her temple.

Sobbing. “Please, no, Travis.”

“Perv?” he whispered. “Luser?”

“I’m sorry, I’m
sorry,
I didn’t mean it!”

As he dragged her backward, toward the basement door, she felt his arm flex harder until her pleas and the choking grew softer and softer and the glare from the spotless living room window turned gray and then went black.

KATHRYN DANCE WAS
no stranger to the American justice system. She had been in magistrates’ offices and courtrooms as a crime journalist, a jury consultant, a law enforcement officer.

But she’d never been the relative of the accused.

After leaving the hospital, she’d dropped the children off at Martine’s and called her sister, Betsey, who lived with her husband down in Santa Barbara.

“Bet, there’s a problem with Mom.”

“What? Tell me what happened.” There’d been a rare edge in the voice of the otherwise flighty woman, younger than Dance by several years. Betsey had curly angelic hair and flitted from career to career like a butterfly testing out flowers.

Dance had run through the details she knew.

“I’ll call her now,” Betsey had announced.

“She’s in detention. They’ve got her phone. There’ll be a bail hearing soon. We’ll know more then.”

“I’m coming up.”

“It might be better later.”

“Sure, of course. Oh, Katie, how serious is this?”

Dance had hesitated. She recalled Harper’s still,
determined eyes, missionary’s eyes. Finally she’d said, “It could be bad.”

After they’d disconnected, Dance had continued here, to the magistrate’s office at the courthouse, where she now sat with her father. The lean, white-haired man was even paler than usual (he’d learned the hard way of the dangers a marine biologist faces in the ocean sun and was now a sunscreen and hat addict). His arm was around her shoulders.

Edie had spent an hour in the holding cell—the intake area in which many of Dance’s collars had been booked. Dance knew the procedures well: All personal effects were confiscated. You went through the warrant check and the inputting of information, and you sat in a cell, surrounded by other arrestees. And then you waited and waited.

Finally you were brought here, into the magistrate’s chilly impersonal room for a bail hearing. Dance and her father were surrounded by dozens of family members of arrestees. Most of the accused here, some in street clothes, some in red Monterey County jumpsuits, were young Latino men. Dance recognized plenty of gang tats. Some were sullen whites, scruffier than the Latinos, with worse teeth and hair. In the back sat the public defenders. The bail bondsmen, too, waiting to pick up their 10 percent from the carcasses.