Roadside Crosses: A Kathryn Dance Novel (8 page)

“It’s toast . . .”

He corrected, “With the water, more likely it’s oatmeal—if we’re keeping to breakfast food metaphors.”

Just then a young MCSO deputy stepped into Dance’s office, carrying a large paper bag. Good-looking and eager, though more cute than handsome, he had bright blue eyes, and for a moment he seemed about to salute. “Agent Dance?”

“That’s right.”

“I’m David Reinhold. Crime Scene at the Sheriff’s Office.”

She nodded a greeting. “Nice to meet you. Thanks for bringing that over.”

“You bet. Anything I can do.”

He and Boling shook hands. Then the trim officer, in a perfectly pressed uniform, handed Dance the paper bag. “I didn’t put it in plastic. Wanted it to breathe. Get as much moisture out as we could.”

“Thanks,” Boling said.

“And I took the liberty of taking the battery out,” the young deputy said. He held up a sealed metal tube. “It’s a lithium-ion. I thought if water got inside there could be a fire risk.”

Boling nodded, clearly impressed. “Good thinking.”

Dance had no clue what he was talking about. Boling noticed her frown and explained that some lithium batteries, under certain circumstances, could burst into flames when exposed to water.

“You a geek?” Boling asked him.

The deputy replied, “Not really. Just stuff you pick up, you know.” He held out a receipt for Dance to sign and then pointed out the chain-of-custody card, attached to the bag itself. “If there’s anything else I can do, let me know.” He handed her a business card.

She thanked him, and the young man retreated.

Dance reached inside the bag and extracted Tammy’s laptop. It was pink.

“What a color,” Boling said, shaking his head. He turned it over and examined the back.

Dance asked him, “So, do you know somebody who could get it running and take a look at her files?”

“Sure. Me.”

“Oh, I thought you said you weren’t that much of a tech anymore.”

“That’s not tech, not by today’s standards.” He smiled again. “It’s like rotating your tires on a car. Only I need a couple of tools.”

“We don’t have a lab here. Nothing as sophisticated as you probably need.”

“Well, that depends. I see you collect shoes.” Her closet door was open and Boling must’ve glanced
inside, where a dozen pairs sat, more or less ordered, on the floor—for those nights when she went out after work, without stopping at home. She gave a laugh.

Busted.

He continued, “How ’bout personal care appliances?”

“Personal care?”

“I need a hair dryer.”

She chuckled. “Sadly, all my beauty aids are at home.”

“Then we better go shopping.”

JON BOLING NEEDED
a bit more than a hair dryer, as it turned out. Though not much.

Their shopping spree had yielded a Conair, a set of miniature tools and a metal box called an enclosure—a three-by-five-inch rectangle from which sprouted a wire that ended in a USB plug.

These items now sat on Dance’s coffee table in her office at the CBI.

Boling surveyed Tammy Foster’s designer laptop. “I can take it apart? I’m not going to screw up any evidence, am I?”

“It’s been dusted for prints. All we found were Tammy’s. Go ahead and do what you want—she’s not a suspect. Besides, she lied to me, so she’s in no position to complain.”

“Pink,” he said again, as if this was a shocking breach of propriety.

He turned the machine over and, with a tiny Phillips-head screwdriver, had the panel off the back in a few minutes. He then extracted a small metal-and-plastic rectangle.

“The hard drive,” he explained. “By next year this’ll be considered huge. We’re going to flash memory
in central processing units. No hard drives—no moving parts at all.” The subject seemed to excite him but he sensed a lecture was a digression inappropriate at the moment. Boling fell silent and examined the drive closely. He didn’t seem to wear contacts; Dance, who’d worn glasses since girlhood, had a mild attack of eye envy.

The professor then gently rattled the drive beside his ear. “Okay.” He set it on the table.

“Okay?”

He grinned, unpacked the hair dryer, plugged it in and wafted a stream of balmy heat over the drive. “Shouldn’t be long. I don’t think it’s wet but we can’t take the chance. Electricity and water equal uh-oh.”

With his free hand he sipped the coffee. He mused, “We professors’re very envious of the private sector, you know. ‘Private sector’—that’s Latin for ‘actually making money.’” He nodded at the cup. “Take Starbucks. . . . Coffee was a pretty good idea for a franchise. I keep looking for the next big one. But all I could think of were things like House O’ Pickles and Jerky World. Beverages’re the best, but all the good ones’re taken.”

“Maybe a milk bar,” Dance suggested. “You could call it Elsie’s.”

His eyes brightened. “Or how ’bout ‘Just An-Udder Place.’ ”

“That was really bad,” she said as they shared a brief laugh.

When he finished drying the hard drive he slipped it into the enclosure. He then plugged the USB connection into his own laptop, which was a somber gray, apparently the shade computers should be.

“I’m curious what you’re doing.” She was watching his sure fingers pound the keys. Many of the letters were worn off. He didn’t need to see them to type.

“The water would’ve shorted out the computer itself, but the hard drive should be okay inside. I’m going to turn it into a readable drive.” After a few minutes he looked up and smiled. “Nope, it’s good as new.”

Dance scooted her chair closer to his.

She glanced at the screen and saw that Windows Explorer was reading Tammy’s hard drive as “Local Disk (G).”

“It’ll have everything on it—her emails, the websites she’s browsed, her favorite places, records of her instant messages. Even deleted data. It’s not encrypted or password-protected—which, by the way, tells me that her parents are very uninvolved in her life. Kids whose folks keep a close eye on them learn to use all kinds of tricks for privacy. Which I, by the way, am pretty good at cracking.” He unplugged the disk from his computer and handed it and the cable to her. “It’s all yours. Just plug it in and read to your heart’s content.” He shrugged. “My first assignment for the police . . . short but sweet.”

With a good friend, Kathryn Dance owned and operated a website devoted to homemade and traditional music. The site was pretty sophisticated technically but Dance knew little of the hardware and software; her friend’s husband handled that side of the business. She now said to Boling, “You know, if you’re not too busy, any chance you could stay around for a little? Help me search it?”

Boling hesitated.

“Well, if you have plans . . .”

“How much time are we talking? I’ve got to be in Napa on Friday night. Family reunion sort of thing.”

Dance said, “Oh, nothing that long. A few hours. A day at the most.”

Eyes brightening again. “I’d love to. Puzzles are an important food group to me. . . . Now, what would I be looking for?”

“Any clues as to the identity of Tammy’s attacker.”

“Oh,
Da Vinci Code.
”

“Let’s hope it’s not as tricky and that whatever we find won’t get us excommunicated. . . . I’m interested in any communications that seem threatening. Disputes, fights, comments about stalkers. Would instant messages be there?”

“Fragments. We can probably reconstruct a lot of them.” Boling plugged the drive back into his computer and leaned forward.

“Then social networking sites,” Dance said. “Anything to do with roadside memorials or crosses.”

“Memorials?”

She explained, “We think he left a roadside cross to announce the attack.”

“That’s pretty sick.” The professor’s fingers snapped over the keys. As he typed, he asked, “Why do you think her computer’s the answer?”

Dance explained about the interview with Tammy Foster.

“You picked up all that just from her body language?”

“That’s right.”

She told him about the three ways humans communicate: First, through verbal content—
what
we say. “That’s the meaning of the words themselves.
But content is not only the least reliable and most easily faked, it’s actually only a small portion of the way we send messages to each other. The second and third are much more important: verbal quality—
how
we say the words. That would be things like pitch of voice, how fast we talk, whether we pause and use ‘uhm’ frequently. And then, third, kinesics—our body’s behavior. Gestures, glances, breathing, posture, mannerisms. The last two are what interviewers are most interested in, since they’re much more revealing than speech content.”

He was smiling. Dance lifted an eyebrow.

Boling explained, “You sound as excited about your work as—”

“You and your flash memory.”

A nod. “Yep. They’re amazing little guys . . . even the pink ones.”

Boling continued to type and scroll through page after page of the guts of Tammy’s computer, speaking softly. “Typical rambling of a teenage girl. Boys, clothes, makeup, parties, a little bit about school, movies and music . . . no threats.”

He scrolled quickly through various screens. “So far, negative on the emails, at least the ones for the past two weeks. I can go back and check the earlier ones if I need to. Now, Tammy’s in all the big social networking sites—Facebook, MySpace, OurWorld, Second Life.” Though Boling was offline, he could pull up and view recent pages Tammy had read. “Wait, wait. . . . Okay.” He was sitting forward, tense.

“What is it?”

“She was almost drowned?”

“That’s right.”

“A few weeks ago she and some of her friends started a discussion in OurWorld about what scared them the most. One of Tammy’s big fears was drowning.”

Dance’s mouth tightened. “Maybe he picked the means of death specifically for her.”

In a surprisingly vehement tone, Boling said, “We give away too much information about ourselves online. Way too much. You know the term ‘escribitionist’?”

“Nope.”

“A term for blogging about yourself.” A grimacing smile. “Tells it pretty well, doesn’t it? And then there’s ‘dooce.’”

“That’s new too.”

“A verb. As in ‘I’ve been dooced.’ It means getting fired because of what you posted on your blog—whether facts about yourself or your boss or job. A woman in Utah coined it. She posted some things about her employer and got laid off. ‘Dooce’ comes from a misspelling of ‘dude,’ by the way. Oh, and then there’s pre-doocing.”

“Which is?”

“You apply for a job and the interviewer asks you, ‘You ever write anything about your former boss in a blog?’ Of course, they already know the answer. They’re waiting to see if you’re honest. And if you have posted anything bad? You were knocked out of contention before you brushed your teeth the morning of the interview.”

Too much information. Way too much. . . .

Boling continued to type, lightning fast. Finally he said, “Ah, think I’ve got something.”

“What?”

“Tammy posted a comment on a blog a few days
ago. Her screen name is TamF1399.” Boling spun the computer around for Dance to look at.

Reply to Chilton, posted by TamF1399.

[The driver] is effing weird, i mean dangerous. 1 time after cheerleader practice he was hanging out outside our locker room, like he was trying to look inside and get pictures on his phone. I go up to him and I’m like, what’re you doing here, and he looks at me like he was going to kill me. He’s a total fr33k. i know a girl who goes to [deleted] with us and she told me [the driver] grabbed her boobs, only she’s afraid to say anything because she thinks he’ll come get her or start shooting people, like in Virginia Tech.

Boling added, “What’s interesting is that she posted that in a part of the blog called ‘Roadside Crosses.’ ”

Dance’s heart rate pumped up a bit. She asked, “Who’s ‘the driver’?”

“Don’t know. The name’s deleted in all the posts.”

“A blog, hmm?”

“Right.” Boling gave a brief laugh and said, “Mushrooms.”

“What?”

“Blogs are the mushrooms of the Internet. They’re sprouting up everywhere. A few years ago everybody in Silicon Valley was wondering what would be the next big thing in the dot-com world. Well, it turned out to be not a revolutionary new type of hardware or software, but online content: games, social networking sites . . . and blogs. You can’t write about computers now without studying them. The one Tammy posted to was
The Chilton Report.
”

Dance shrugged. “Never heard of it.”

“I have. It’s local but it’s well known in blogging circles. It’s like a California-based Matt Drudge, only more fringe. Jim Chilton’s a bit of a character.” He continued to read. “Let’s go online and check it out.”

Dance got her own laptop from her desk. “What’s the URL?” she asked.

Boling gave it to her.

Http://www.thechiltonreport.com

The professor tugged his chair closer and together they read the homepage.

T
HE MORAL VOICE OF
A
MERICA
. A
COLLECTION OF MUSINGS ABOUT WHERE THIS COUNTRY’S GOING WRONG . . . AND WHERE IT’S GOING RIGHT
.

Dance chuckled. “ ‘Where it’s going
right.
’ Clever. He’s Moral Majority, conservative, I take it.”

Boling shook his head. “From what I know he’s more cut-and-paste.”

She lifted an eyebrow.

“I mean that he picks and chooses his causes. He’s more right than left but he’ll take on anybody who falls short of his standards of morality or judgment or intelligence. That’s one of the points of blogs, of course: to stir things up. Controversy sells.”

Below was a greeting to the readers.

Dear Reader . . .

Whether you’ve ended up here because you’re a subscriber or a fan or simply because you happened to be browsing the Web and stumbled across
The Report,
welcome.

Whatever your positions on political and social issues, I hope you’ll find something in my reflections here that, at the very least, makes you question, makes you doubt, makes you want to know more.