Roadside Crosses: A Kathryn Dance Novel (26 page)

AT 8:00 IN
the morning, Kathryn Dance walked into her office and smiled to see Jon Boling, in too-large latex gloves, tapping on the keyboard of Travis’s computer.

“I know what I’m doing. I watch
NCIS.
” He grinned. “I like it better than
CSI.
”

“Hey, boss, we need a TV show about us,” TJ said from a table he’d dragged into the corner, his workstation for his search for the origins of the eerie mask from the Kelley Morgan scene.

“I like that.” Boling picked up on the joke. “A show about kinesics, sure. You could call it
The Body Reader.
Can I be a special guest star?”

Though she was hardly in a humorous mood, Dance laughed.

TJ said, “I get to be the handsome young sidekick who’s always flirting with the gorgeous girl agents. Can we hire some gorgeous girl agents, boss? Not that you aren’t. But you know what I mean.”

“How’re we doing?”

Boling explained that the supercomputer linked to Travis’s hadn’t had any luck cracking the boy’s pass code.

One hour, or three hundred years.

“Nothing to do but keep waiting.” He pulled off the gloves and returned to tracking down the identities of posters who might be at risk.

“And, Rey?” Dance glanced at quiet Rey Carraneo, who still was going through the many pages of notes and sketches they’d found in Travis’s bedroom.

“Lot of gobbledygook, ma’am,” Carraneo said, the Anglo word very stiff in a Latino mouth. “Languages I don’t recognize, numbers, doodles, spaceships, trees with faces in them, aliens. And pictures of bodies cut open, hearts and organs. Kid’s pretty messed up.”

“Any places at all he’s mentioned?”

“Sure,” the agent said. “They just don’t seem to be on earth.”

“Here are some more names.” Boling handed her a sheet of paper with another six names and addresses of posters.

Dance looked up the phone numbers in the state database and called to warn them that Travis presented a threat.

It was then that her computer pinged with an incoming email. She read it, surprised to see the sender. Michael O’Neil. He must’ve been real busy; he rarely sent her messages, preferring to talk to her in person.

K—

Hate to say, but the container situation is heating up big time. TSA and Homeland Sec. are getting worried.

I’ll still help you out on the Travis Brigham case—ride herd on forensics and drop in when I can—but this one’ll take up most of my time. Sorry.

—M

The case involving the shipping container from Indonesia. Apparently he couldn’t put it on hold any longer. Dance was fiercely disappointed. Why
now
? She sighed in frustration. A twinge of loneliness too. She realized that between the Los Angeles homicide case against J. Doe and the roadside crosses situation, she and O’Neil had seen each other almost daily for the past week. That was more, on average, than she’d seen her husband.

She really wanted his expertise in the pursuit of Travis Brigham. And she wasn’t ashamed to admit that she simply wanted his company too. Funny how just talking, sharing thoughts and speculations was such an elixir. But his case was clearly important and that was enough for her. She typed a fast reply.

Good luck, miss you.

Backspaced, deleting the final two words and the punctuation. She rewrote:
Good luck. Stay in touch.

Then he was gone from her mind.

Dance had a small TV in the office. It was on now and she happened to glance at it. She blinked in shock. On the screen at the moment was a wooden cross.

Did it have to do with the case? Had they found another one?

Then the camera panned on and settled on the Reverend R. Samuel Fisk. It was a report on the euthanasia protest—which now, she realized with a sinking heart, had shifted to focus on her mother. The cross was in the hand of a protester.

She turned up the volume. A reporter was asking Fisk if he’d actually called for the murder of abortion doctors, as
The Chilton Report
had said. With eyes that struck her as icy and calculating, the man of the
cloth gazed back at the camera and said that his words had been twisted by the liberal media.

She recalled the Fisk quotation in
The Report.
She couldn’t think of a clearer call to murder. She’d be curious to see if Chilton posted a follow-up.

She muted the set. She and the CBI had their own problems with the media. Through leaks, scanners and that magical way the press learns details about cases, the story about the crosses as prelude to murder, and that a teenage student was the suspect, had gone public. Calls about the “Mask Killer,” the “Social Network Killer,” the “Roadside Cross Killer” were now flooding the CBI lines (despite the fact that Travis hadn’t managed actually to kill the two intended victims—and that no social networking sites were directly involved).

The calls kept coming in. Even the media-hungry head of the CBI was, as TJ cleverly and carelessly put it, “Overbywhelmed.”

Kathryn Dance spun around in her chair and gazed out the window at a gnarled trunk that had started as two trees and had grown, through pressure and accommodation, into one, stronger than either alone. An impressive knot was visible just outside the window and she often rested her eyes on it, a form of meditation.

Now she had no time for reflection. She called Peter Bennington, at MCSO forensics, about the scenes at the second cross and Kelley Morgan’s house.

The roses left with the second cross were bound with the same type of rubber bands used by the deli near where Travis used to work but they revealed no trace that was helpful. The fiber that Michael O’Neil
had gotten from the gray hooded sweatshirt in the Brighams’ laundry basket was indeed almost identical to the fiber found near the second cross, and the tiny scrap of brown paper from the woods Ken Pfister had pointed out was most likely from an M&M package—candy that she knew Travis bought. The grain trace from the scene was associated with that used in oat-bran bagels at Bagel Express. At Kelley Morgan’s house, the boy had shed no trace or physical evidence except a bit of red rose petal that matched the bouquet with cross number two.

The mask was homemade, but the paste and paper and ink used in its construction were generic and unsourceable.

The gas that had been used in the attempt to murder Kelley Morgan was chlorine—the same that had been used in World War I to such devastating effect. Dance told Bennington, “There’s a report he got it from a neo-Nazi site.” She explained about what she’d learned from Caitlin’s friend.

The crime lab boss chuckled. “Doubt it. It was probably from somebody’s kitchen.”

“What?”

“He used household cleaners.” The deputy explained that a few simple substances could make the gas; they were available in any grocery or convenience store. “But we didn’t find any containers or anything that would let us determine the source.”

Nothing at the scene or nearby had given them clues as to where the boy might be hiding out.

“And David stopped by your house a little bit ago.”

Dance hesitated, not sure whom he was speaking of. “David?”

“Reinhold. He works in the CS Unit.”

Oh, the young, eager deputy.

“He collected the branches left in your backyard. But we still can’t tell if they were left intentionally or it was a coincidence. No other trace, he said.”

“He got up early. I left the house at seven.”

Bennington laughed. “Just two months ago he was writing speeding tickets with the Highway Patrol and now I think he’s got his eye on my job.”

Dance thanked the Crime Scene head and disconnected.

Stung with frustration, Dance found herself looking at the photo of the mask. It was just plain awful—cruel and unsettling. She picked up her phone and called the hospital. Identified herself. She asked about Kelley Morgan’s condition. It was unchanged, a nurse told her. Still in a coma. She’d probably live, but none of the staff was willing to speculate about whether she’d return to consciousness—or, if so, whether she’d regain a normal life.

Sighing, Kathryn Dance hung up.

And got angry.

She swept the phone up again, found a number in her notebook and, with a heavy finger, punched the keypad hard.

TJ, nearby, watched the stabbing. He tapped Jon Boling on the arm and whispered, “Uh-oh.”

James Chilton answered on the third ring.

“This is Kathryn Dance, the Bureau of Investigation.”

A brief pause. Chilton would be recalling meeting her . . . and wondering why she was contacting him
again. “Agent Dance. Yes. I heard there was another incident.”

“That’s right. Why I’m calling, Mr. Chilton. The only way we were able to save the victim—a high school girl—was by tracing her screen name. It took a long time, and a lot of people, to find out who she was and where she lived. We got to her house about a half hour before she died. We saved her but she’s in a coma and might not recover.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“And it looks like the attacks are going to continue.” She explained about the stolen bouquets.

“Twelve of them?” His voice registered dismay.

“He’s not going to stop until he’s killed everybody who’s attacked him in your blog. I’m going to ask you again, will you please give us the Internet addresses of the people who’ve posted?”

“No.”

Goddammit. Dance shivered in rage.

“Because if I did, it would be a breach of trust. I can’t betray my readers.”

That
again. She muttered, “Listen to me—”

“Please, Agent Dance, just hear me out. But what I will do . . . write this down. My hosting platform is Central California Internet Services. They’re in San Jose.” He gave her the address and phone number, as well as a personal contact. “I’ll call them right now and tell them I won’t object to their giving you the addresses of everybody who’s posted. If they want a warrant, that’s
their
business, but I won’t fight it.”

She paused. She wasn’t sure of the technical implications but she thought he’d just agreed to what she’d asked for, while saving some journalistic face.

“Well . . . thank you.”

They hung up and Dance called to Boling, “I think we can get the IP addresses.”

“What?”

“Chilton’s had a change of heart.”

“Sweet,” he said, smiling, and seemed like a boy who’d just been told his father’d gotten tickets to a play-off game.

Dance gave it a few minutes and called the hosting company. She was skeptical both that Chilton had called and the service itself would give up the information without a court battle. But to her surprise the representative she spoke with said, “Oh, Mr. Chilton just called. I’ve got the IP addresses of the posters. I’ve okayed forwarding them to a dot-gov location.”

She smiled broadly, and gave the hosting employee her email address.

“They’re on their way. I’ll go back to the blog every few hours or so and get the addresses of the new posters.”

“You’re a lifesaver . . . literally.”

The man said grimly, “This is about that boy who’s getting even with people, right? The Satanist? Is it true they found biological weapons in his locker?”

Brother, Dance thought. The rumors were spreading faster than the Mission Hills fire a few years ago.

“We’re not sure what’s happening at this point.” Always noncommittal.

They disconnected. And a few minutes later her computer dinged with incoming mail.

“Got it,” Dance said to Boling. He rose and walked behind her, put his hand on her chair back, leaning forward. She smelled subtle aftershave. Pleasant.

“Okay. Good. Of course, you know those are the raw computer addresses. We’ve got to contact all the providers and find out names and physical addresses. I’ll get right on it.”

She printed out the list—it contained about thirty individuals’ names—and handed it to him. He disappeared back into his corner of the lair and hunkered down in front of his computer.

“May have something, boss.” TJ had been posting pictures of the mask on the Web and in blogs and asking if anybody knew its source. He ran his hand through his curly red hair. “Pat me on the back.”

“What’s the story?”

“The mask is of some character in a computer game.” A glance at the mask. “Qetzal.”

“What?”

“That’s his name. Or
its
name. A demon who kills people with these beams from its eyes. And it can only moan because somebody laced up the lips.”

Dance asked, “So it’s getting even with people who have the ability to communicate.”

“Didn’t really run a Dr. Phil on him, boss,” TJ said.

“Fair enough.” She smiled.

“The game,” TJ continued, “is
DimensionQuest.
”

“It’s a Morpeg,” Boling announced, without looking up from his own computer.

“What’s that?”

“
DimensionQuest
is an M-M-O-R-P-G—massively multiplayer online role-playing game. I call them ‘Morpegs.’ And
DQ
is one of the most popular.”

“Helpful to us?”

“I don’t know yet. We’ll see when we get into Travis’s computer.”

Dance liked the professor’s confidence. “When,” not “if.” She sat back, pulled out her cell phone and called her mother. Still no answer.

Finally she tried her father.

“Hey, Katie.”

“Dad. How’s Mom? She never called me.”

“Oh.” A hesitation. “She’s upset, of course. I think she’s just not in the mood to talk to anybody.”

Dance wondered how long her mother’s conversation had been with Dance’s sister, Betsey, last night.

“Has Sheedy said anything else?”

“No. He’s doing some research, he said.”

“Dad, Mom didn’t say anything, did she? When she was arrested?”

“To the police?”

“Or to Harper, the prosecutor?”

“No.”

“Good.”

She felt an urge to ask him to put her mother on the phone. But she didn’t want the rejection if she said no. Dance said brightly, “You
are
coming over for dinner tonight? Right?”

He assured her they would, though his tone really meant that they’d
try.