Roadside Crosses

Chapter 2

The faint light-the light of a ghost, pale green-danced just out of her reach.

If she could only get to it.

If she could only reach the ghost she'd be safe.

The glow, floating in the dark of the car's trunk, dangled tauntingly above her feet, which were duct-taped together, as were her hands.

A ghost…

Another piece of tape was pasted over her mouth and she was inhaling stale air through her nose, rationing it, as if the trunk of her Camry held only so much.

A painful bang as the car hit a pothole. She gave a brief, muted scream.

Other hints of light intruded occasionally: the dull red glow when he hit the brake, the turn signal. No other illumination from outside; the hour was close to 1:00 a.m.

The luminescent ghost rocked back and forth. It was the emergency trunk release: a glow-in-the-dark hand pull emblazoned with a comical image of a man escaping from the car.

But it remained just out of reach of her feet.

Tammy Foster had forced the crying to stop. The sobs had begun just after her attacker came up behind her in the shadowy parking lot of the club, slapped tape on her mouth, taped her hands behind her back and shoved her into the trunk. He'd bound her feet as well.

Frozen in panic, the seventeen-year-old had thought: He doesn't want me to see him. That's good. He doesn't want to kill me.

He just wants to scare me.

She'd surveyed the trunk, spotting the dangling ghost. She'd tried to grip it with her feet but it slipped out from between her shoes. Tammy was in good shape, soccer and cheerleading. But, because of the awkward angle, she could keep her feet raised for only a few seconds.

The ghost eluded her.

The car pressed on. With every passing yard, she felt more and more despair. Tammy Foster began to cry again.

Don't, don't! Your nose'll clog up, you'll choke.

She forced herself to stop.

She was supposed to be home at midnight. She'd be missed by her mother-if she wasn't drunk on the couch, pissed about some problem with her latest boyfriend.

Missed by her sister, if the girl wasn't online or on the phone. Which of course she was.

Clank.

The same sound as earlier: the bang of metal as he loaded something into the backseat.

She thought of some scary movies she'd seen. Gross, disgusting ones. Torture, murder. Involving tools.

Don't think about that. Tammy focused on the dangling green ghost of the trunk release.

And heard a new sound. The sea.

Finally they stopped and he shut off the engine.

The lights went out.

The car rocked as he shifted in the driver's seat. What was he doing? Now she heard the throaty croak of seals nearby. They were at a beach, which at this time of night, around here, would be completely deserted.

One of the car doors opened and closed. And a second opened. The clank of metal from the backseat again.

Torture…tools.

The door slammed shut, hard.

And Tammy Foster broke. She dissolved into sobs, struggling to suck in more lousy air. "No, please, please!" she cried, though the words were filtered through the tape and came out as a sort of moan.

Tammy began running through every prayer she could remember as she waited for the click of the trunk.

The sea crashed. The seals hooted.

She was going to die.

"Mommy."

But then…nothing.

The trunk didn't pop, the car door didn't open again, she heard no footsteps approaching. After three minutes she controlled the crying. The panic diminished.

Five minutes passed, and he hadn't opened the trunk.

Ten.

Tammy gave a faint, mad laugh.

It was just a scare. He wasn't going to kill her or rape her. It was a practical joke.

She was actually smiling beneath the tape, when the car rocked, ever so slightly. Her smile faded. The Camry rocked again, a gentle push-pull, though stronger than the first time. She heard a splash and felt a shudder. Tammy knew an ocean wave had struck the front end of the car.

Oh, my God, no! He'd left the car on the beach, with high tide coming in!

The car settled into the sand, as the ocean undermined the tires.

No! One of her worst fears was drowning. And being stuck in a confined space like this…it was unthinkable. Tammy began to kick at the trunk lid.

But there was, of course, no one to hear, except the seals.

The water was now sloshing hard against the sides of the Toyota.

The ghost…

Somehow she had to pull the trunk release lever. She worked off her shoes and tried again, her head pressing hard against the carpet, agonizingly lifting her feet toward the glowing pull. She got them on either side of it, pressed hard, her stomach muscles quivering.

Now!

Her legs cramping, she eased the ghost downward.

A tink.

Yes! It worked!

But then she moaned in horror. The pull had come away in her feet, without opening the trunk. She stared at the green ghost lying near her. He must've cut the wire! After he'd dumped her into the trunk, he'd cut it. The release pull had been dangling in the eyelet, no longer connected to the latch cable.

She was trapped.

Please, somebody, Tammy prayed again. To God, to a passerby, even to her kidnapper, who might show her some mercy.

But the only response was the indifferent gurgle of saltwater as it began seeping into the trunk.

THE PENINSULA GARDEN Hotel is tucked away near Highway 68-the venerable route that's a twenty-mile-long diorama, "The Many Faces of Monterey County." The road meanders west from the Nation's Salad Bowl-Salinas-and skirts the verdant Pastures of Heaven, punchy Laguna Seca racetrack, settlements of corporate offices, then dusty Monterey and pine-and-hemlock-filled Pacific Grove. Finally the highway deposits those drivers, at least those bent on following the complex via from start to finish, at legendary Seventeen Mile Drive-home of a common species around here: People With Money.

"Not bad," Michael O'Neil said to Kathryn Dance as they climbed out of his car.

Through narrow glasses with gray frames, the woman surveyed the Spanish and deco main lodge and half-dozen adjacent buildings. The inn was classy though a bit worn and dusty at the cuffs. "Nice. I like."

As they stood surveying the hotel, with its distant glimpse of the Pacific Ocean, Dance, an expert at kinesics, body language, tried to read O'Neil. The chief deputy in the Monterey County Sheriff's Office Investigations Division was hard to analyze. The solidly built man, in his forties, with salt-and-pepper hair, was easygoing, but quiet unless he knew you. Even then he was economical of gesture and expression. He didn't give a lot away kinesically.

At the moment, though, she was reading that he wasn't at all nervous, despite the nature of their trip here.

She, on the other hand, was.

Kathryn Dance, a trim woman in her thirties, today wore her dark blond hair as she often did, in a French braid, the feathery tail end bound with a bright blue ribbon her daughter had selected that morning and tied into a careful bow. Dance was in a long, pleated black skirt and matching jacket over a white blouse. Black ankle boots with two-inch heels-footwear she'd admired for months but been able to resist buying only until they had gone on sale.

O'Neil was in one of his three or four civilian configurations: chinos and powder blue shirt, no tie. His jacket was dark blue, in a faint plaid pattern.

The doorman, a cheerful Latino, looked them over with an expression that said, You seem like a nice couple. "Welcome. I hope you enjoy your stay." He opened the door for them.

Dance smiled uncertainly at O'Neil and they walked through a breezy hallway to the front desk.

FROM THE MAIN building, they wound through the hotel complex, looking for the room.

"Never thought this would happen," O'Neil said to her.

Dance gave a faint laugh. She was amused to realize that her eyes occasionally slipped to doors and windows. This was a kinesic response that meant the subject was subconsciously thinking about ways to escape-that is, was feeling stress.

"Look," she said, pointing to yet another pool. The place seemed to have four.

"Like Disneyland for adults. I hear a lot of rock musicians stay here."

"Really?" She frowned.

"What's wrong?"

"It's only one story. Not much fun getting stoned and throwing TVs and furniture out the window."

"This is Carmel," O'Neil pointed out. "The wildest they'd get here is pitching recyclables into the trash."

Dance thought of a comeback line but kept quiet. The bantering was making her more nervous.

She paused beside a palm tree with leaves like sharp weapons. "Where are we?"

The deputy looked at a slip of paper, oriented himself and pointed to one of the buildings in the back. "There."

O'Neil and Dance paused outside the door. He exhaled and lifted an eyebrow. "Guess this is it."

Dance laughed. "I feel like a teenager."

The deputy knocked.

After a short pause the door opened, revealing a narrow man, hovering near fifty, wearing dark slacks and a white shirt and striped tie.

"Michael, Kathryn. Right on time. Come on in."

ERNEST SEYBOLD, A career district attorney for Los Angeles County, nodded them into the room. Inside, a court reporter sat beside her three-legged dictation machine. Another young woman rose and greeted the new arrivals. She was, Seybold said, his assistant from L.A.

Earlier this month, Dance and O'Neil had run a case in Monterey -the convicted cult leader and killer Daniel Pell had escaped from prison and remained on the Peninsula, targeting more victims. One of the people involved in the case had turned out to be somebody very different from the person Dance and her fellow officers had believed. The consequences of that involved yet another murder.

Dance adamantly wanted to pursue the perp. But there was much pressure not to follow up-from some very powerful organizations. Dance wouldn't take no for an answer, though, and while the Monterey prosecutor had declined to handle the case, she and O'Neil learned that the perp had killed earlier-in Los Angeles. District Attorney Seybold, who worked regularly with Dance's organization, the California Bureau of Investigation, and was a friend of Dance's, agreed to bring charges in L.A.

Several witnesses, though, were in the Monterey area, including Dance and O'Neil, and so Seybold had come here for the day to take statements. The clandestine nature of the get-together was due to the perp's connections and reputation. In fact, for the time being they weren't even using the killer's real name. The case was known internally as The People v. J. Doe.

As they sat, Seybold said, "We might have a problem, I have to tell you."

The butterflies Dance had felt earlier-that something would go wrong and the case would derail-returned.

The prosecutor continued, "The defense's made a motion to dismiss based on immunity. I honestly can't tell you what the odds are it'll succeed. The hearing's scheduled for day after tomorrow."

Dance closed her eyes. "No." Beside her O'Neil exhaled in anger.

All this work…

If he gets away, Dance thought…but then realized she had nothing to add to that, except: If he gets away, I lose.

She felt her jaw trembling.

But Seybold said, "I've got a team putting together the response. They're good. The best in the office."

"Whatever it takes, Ernie," Dance said. "I want him. I want him real bad."

"A lot of people do, Kathryn. We'll do everything we can."

If he gets away…

"But I want to proceed as if we're going to win." He said this confidently, which reassured Dance somewhat. They got started, Seybold asking dozens of questions about the crime-what Dance and O'Neil had witnessed and the evidence in the case.

Seybold was a seasoned prosecutor and knew what he was doing. After an hour of interviewing them both, the wiry man sat back and said he had enough for the time being. He was momentarily expecting another witness-a local state trooper-who had also agreed to testify.

They thanked the prosecutor, who agreed to call them the instant the judge ruled in the immunity hearing.

As Dance and O'Neil walked back to the lobby, he slowed, a frown on his face.

"What?" she asked.

"Let's play hooky."

"What do you mean?"

He nodded at the beautiful garden restaurant, overlooking a canyon with the sea beyond. "It's early. When was the last time anybody in a white uniform brought you eggs Benedict?"

Dance considered. "What year is it again?"

He smiled. "Come on. We won't be that late."

A glance at her watch. "I don't know." Kathryn Dance hadn't played hooky in school, much less as a senior agent with the CBI.

Then she said to herself: Why're you hesitating? You love Michael's company, you get to spend hardly any downtime with him.

"You bet." Feeling like a teenager again, though now in a good way.

They were seated beside each other at a banquette near the edge of the deck, overlooking the hills. The early sun was out and it was a clear, crisp June morning.

The waiter-not fully uniformed, but with a suitably starched white shirt-brought them menus and poured coffee. Dance's eyes strayed to the page on which the restaurant bragged of their famous mimosas. No way, she thought, and glanced up to see O'Neil looking at exactly the same item.

They laughed.

"When we get down to L.A. for the grand jury, or the trial," he said. "champagne then."

"Fair enough."

It was then that O'Neil's phone trilled. He glanced at Caller ID. Dance was immediately aware of his body language changing-shoulders slightly higher, arms closer to his body, eyes focused just past the screen.

She knew whom the call was from, even before he said a cheerful, "Hi, dear."

Dance deduced from his conversation with his wife, Anne, a professional photographer, that a business trip had come up unexpectedly soon and she was checking with her husband about his schedule.

Finally O'Neil disconnected and they sat in silence for a moment while the atmosphere righted itself and they consulted their menus.

"Yep," he announced, "eggs Benedict."

She was going to have the same and glanced up for the waiter. But then her phone vibrated. She glanced at the text message, frowned, then read it again, aware that her own body orientation was changing quickly. Heart rate revving, shoulders lifted, foot tapping on the floor.

Dance sighed, and her gesture to the waiter changed from a polite beckon to one of mimicking signing the check.

Chapter 3

The California Bureau of Investigation's west-central regional headquarters is in a nondescript modern building identical to those of the adjacent insurance companies and software consulting firms, all tucked neatly away behind hills and decorated with the elaborate vegetation of Central Coast California.

The facility was near the Peninsula Garden, and Dance and O'Neil arrived from the hotel in less than ten minutes, minding traffic but not red lights or stop signs.

Climbing out of his car, Dance slung her purse over her shoulder, and hefted her bulging computer bag-which her daughter had dubbed "Mom's purse annex," after the girl had learned what annex meant-and she and O'Neil walked into the building.

Inside they headed immediately to where she knew her team would be assembled: her office, in the portion of the CBI known as the Gals' Wing, or "GW"-owing to the fact that it was populated exclusively by Dance, fellow agent Connie Ramirez, as well as their assistant, Maryellen Kresbach, and Grace Yuan, the CBI administrator, who kept the entire building humming like a timepiece. The name of the wing derived from an unfortunate comment by an equally unfortunate, and now former, CBI agent, who coined the designation while trying to press his cleverness on a date he was touring around the headquarters.

Everyone on the GW still debated if he-or one of his dates-had ever found all the feminine hygiene products Dance and Ramirez had seeded into his office, briefcase and car.

Dance and O'Neil now greeted Maryellen. The cheerful and indispensable woman could easily run both a family and the professional lives of her charges without a bat of one of her darkly mascaraed eyelashes. She also was the best baker Dance had ever met. "Morning, Maryellen. Where are we?"

"Hi, Kathryn. Help yourself."

Dance eyed, but didn't give in to, the chocolate chip cookies in the jar on the woman's desk. They had to be a biblical sin. O'Neil, on the other hand, didn't resist. "Best breakfast I've had in weeks."

Eggs Benedict…

Maryellen gave a pleased laugh. "Okay, I called Charles again and left another message. Honestly." She sighed. "He wasn't picking up. TJ and Rey are inside. Oh, Deputy O'Neil, one of your people is here from MCSO."

"Thanks. You're a dear."

In Dance's office wiry young TJ Scanlon was perched in her chair. The redheaded agent leapt up. "Hi, boss. How'd the audition go?"

He meant the deposition.

"I was a star." Then she delivered the bad news about the immunity hearing.

The agent scowled. He too had known the perp and was nearly as adamant as Dance about winning a conviction.

TJ was good at his job, though he was the most unconventional agent in a law enforcement organization noted for its conventional approach and demeanor. Today he was wearing jeans, a polo shirt and plaid sports coat-madras, a pattern on some faded shirts in her father's storage closet. TJ owned one tie, as far as Dance had been able to tell, and it was an outlandish Jerry Garcia model. TJ suffered from acute nostalgia for the 1960s. In his office two lava lamps bubbled merrily away.

Dance and he were only a few years apart, but there was a generational gap between them. Still, they clicked professionally, with a bit of mentor-mentee thrown in. Though TJ tended to run solo, which was against the grain in the CBI, he'd been filling in for Dance's regular partner-still down in Mexico on a complicated extradition case.

Quiet Rey Carraneo, a newcomer to the CBI, was about as opposite to TJ Scanlon as one could be. In his late twenties, with dark, thoughtful features, he today wore a gray suit and white shirt on his lean frame. He was older in heart than in years, since he'd been a beat cop in the cowboy town of Reno, Nevada, before moving here with his wife for the sake of his ill mother. Carraneo held a coffee cup in a hand that bore a tiny scar in the Y between thumb and forefinger; it was where a gang tat had resided not too many years ago. Dance considered him to be the calmest and most focused of all the younger agents in the office and she sometimes wondered, to herself only, if his days in the gang contributed to that.

The deputy from the Monterey County Sheriff's Office-typically crew cut and with a military bearing-introduced himself and explained what had happened. A local teenager had been kidnapped from a parking lot in downtown Monterey, off Alvarado, early that morning. Tammy Foster had been bound and tossed into her own car trunk. The attacker drove her to a beach outside of town and left her to drown in high tide.

Dance shivered at the thought of what it must've been like to lie cramped and cold as the water rose in the confined space.

"It was her car?" O'Neil asked, sitting in one of Dance's chairs and rocking on the back legs-doing exactly what Dance told her son not to do (she suspected Wes had learned the practice from O'Neil). The legs creaked under his weight.

"That's right, sir."

"What beach?"

"Down the coast, south of the Highlands."

"Deserted?"

"Yeah, nobody around. No wits."

"Witnesses at the club where she got snatched?" Dance asked.

"Negative. And no security cameras in the parking lot."

Dance and O'Neil took this in. She said, "So he needed other wheels near where he left her. Or had an accomplice."

"Crime scene found some footprints in the sand, headed for the highway. Above the tide level. But the sand was loose. No idea of tread or size. But definitely only one person."

O'Neil asked, "And no signs of a car pulling off the road to pick him up? Or one hidden in the bushes nearby?"

"No, sir. Our people did find some bicycle tread marks but they were on the shoulder. Could've been made that night, could've been a week old. No tread match. We don't have a bicycle database," he added to Dance.

Hundreds of people biked along the beach in that area daily.

"Motive?"

"No robbery, no sexual assault. Looks like he just wanted to kill her. Slowly."

Dance exhaled a puffy breath.

"Any suspects?"

"Nope."

Dance then looked at TJ. "And what you told me earlier, when I called? The weird part. Anything more on that?"

"Oh," the fidgety young agent said, "you mean the roadside cross."

THE CALIFORNIA BUREAU of Investigation has broad jurisdiction but usually is involved only in major crimes, like gang activity, terrorism threats and significant corruption or economic offenses. A single murder in an area where gangland killings occur at least once a week wouldn't attract any special attention.

But the attack on Tammy Foster was different.

The day before the girl had been kidnapped, a Highway Patrol trooper had found a cross, like a roadside memorial, with the next day's date written on it, stuck in the sand along Highway 1.

When the trooper heard of the attack on the girl, not far off the same highway, he wondered if the cross was an announcement of the perp's intentions. He'd returned and collected it. The Monterey County Sheriff's Office's Crime Scene Unit found a tiny bit of rose petal in the trunk where Tammy had been left to die-a fleck that matched the roses from the bouquet left with the cross.

Since on the surface the attack seemed random and there was no obvious motive, Dance had to consider the possibility that the perp had more victims in mind.

O'Neil now asked, "Evidence from the cross?"

His junior officer grimaced. "Truth be told, Deputy O'Neil, the Highway Patrol trooper just tossed it and the flowers in his trunk."

"Contaminated?"

"Afraid so. Deputy Bennington said he did the best he could to process it." Peter Bennington-the skilled, diligent head of the Monterey County Crime Scene Lab. "But didn't find anything. Not according to the preliminary. No prints, except the trooper's. No trace other than sand and dirt. The cross was made out of tree branches and florist wire. The disk with the date on it was cut out of cardboard, looked like. The pen, he said, was generic. And the writing was block printing. Only helpful if we get a sample from a suspect. Now, here's a picture of the cross. It's pretty creepy. Kind of like Blair Witch Project, you know."

"Good movie," TJ said, and Dance didn't know if he was being facetious or not.

They looked at the photo. It was creepy, the branches like twisted, black bones.

Forensics couldn't tell them anything? Dance had a friend she'd worked with not long ago, Lincoln Rhyme, a private forensic consultant in New York City. Despite the fact he was a quadriplegic, he was one of the best crime scene specialists in the country. She wondered, if he'd been running the scene, would he have found something helpful? She suspected he would have. But perhaps the most universal rule in police work was this: You go with what you've got.

She noticed something in the picture. "The roses."

O'Neil got her meaning. "The stems are cut the same length."

"Right. So they probably came from a store, not clipped from somebody's yard."

TJ said, "But, boss, you can buy roses about a thousand places on the Peninsula."

"I'm not saying it's leading us to his doorstep," Dance said. "I'm saying it's a fact we might be able to use. And don't jump to conclusions. They might've been stolen." She felt grumpy, hoped it didn't come off that way.

"Gotcha, boss."

"Where exactly was the cross?"

"Highway One. Just south of Marina." He touched a location on Dance's wall map.

"Any witnesses to leaving the cross?" Dance now asked the deputy.

"No, ma'am, not according to the CHP. And there are no cameras along that stretch of highway. We're still looking."

"Any stores?" O'Neil asked, just as Dance took a breath to ask the identical question.

"Stores?"

O'Neil was looking at the map. "On the east side of the highway. In those strip malls. Some of them have to have security cameras. Maybe one was pointed toward the spot. At least we could get a make and model of the car-if he was in one."

"TJ," Dance said, "check that out."

"You got it, boss. There's a good Java House there. One of my favorites."

"I'm so pleased."

A shadow appeared in her doorway. "Ah. Didn't know we were convening here."

Charles Overby, the recently appointed agent in charge of this CBI branch, walked into her office. In his midfifties, tanned; the pear-shaped man was athletic enough to get out on the golf or tennis courts several times a week but not so spry to keep up a long volley without losing his breath.

"I've been in my office for…well, quite some time."

Dance ignored TJ's subtle glance at his wristwatch. She suspected that Overby had rolled in a few minutes ago.

"Charles," she said. "Morning. Maybe I forgot to mention where we'd be meeting. Sorry."

"Hello, Michael." A nod toward TJ too, whom Overby sometimes gazed at curiously as if he'd never met the junior agent-though that might have just been disapproval of TJ's fashion choices.

Dance had in fact informed Overby of the meeting. On the drive here from the Peninsula Garden Hotel, she'd left a message on his voice mail, giving him the troubling news of the immunity hearing in L.A. and telling him of the plan to get together here, in her office. Maryellen had told him about the meeting too. But the CBI chief hadn't responded. Dance hadn't bothered to call back, since Overby usually didn't care much for the tactical side of running cases. She wouldn't have been surprised if he'd declined attending this meeting altogether. He wanted the "big picture," a recent favorite phrase. (TJ had once referred to him as Charles Overview; Dance had hurt her belly laughing.)

"Well. This girl-in-the-trunk thing…the reporters are calling already. I've been stalling. They hate that. Brief me."

Ah, reporters. That explained the man's interest.

Dance told him what they knew at this point, and what their plans were.

"Think he's going to try it again? That's what the anchors are saying."

"That's what they're speculating," Dance corrected delicately.

"Since we don't know why he attacked her in the first place, Tammy Foster, we can't say," O'Neil said.

"And the cross is connected? It was left as a message?"

"The flowers match forensically, yes."

"Ouch. I just hope it doesn't turn into a Summer of Sam thing."

"A…what's that, Charles?" Dance asked.

"That guy in New York. Leaving notes, shooting people."

"Oh, that was a movie." TJ was their reference librarian of popular culture. "Spike Lee. The killer was Son of Sam."

"I know," Overby said quickly. "Just making a pun. Son and Summer."

"We don't have any evidence one way or the other. We don't know anything yet, really."

Overby was nodding. He never liked not having answers. For the press, for his bosses in Sacramento. That made him edgy, which in turn made everybody else edgy too. When his predecessor, Stan Fishburne, had had to retire unexpectedly on a medical and Overby had assumed the job, dismay was the general mood. Fishburne was the agents' advocate; he'd take on anybody he needed to in supporting them. Overby had a different style. Very different.

"I got a call from the AG already." Their ultimate boss. "Made the news in Sacramento. CNN too. I'll have to call him back. I wish we had something specific."

"We should know more soon."

"What're the odds that it was just a prank gone bad? Like hazing the pledges. Fraternity or sorority thing. We all did that in college, didn't we?"

Dance and O'Neil hadn't been Greek. She doubted TJ had been, and Rey Carraneo had gotten his bachelor's in criminal justice at night while working two jobs.

"Pretty grim for a practical joke," O'Neil said.

"Well, let's keep it as an option. I just want to make sure that we stay away from panic. That won't help anything. Downplay any serial-actor angle. And don't mention the cross. We're still reeling from that case earlier in the month, the Pell thing." He blinked. "How did the deposition go, by the way?"

"A delay." Had he not listened to her message at all?

"That's good."

"Good?" Dance was still furious about the motion to dismiss.

Overby blinked. "I mean it frees you up to run this Roadside Cross Case."

Thinking about her old boss. Nostalgia can be such sweet pain.

"What are the next steps?" Overby asked.

"TJ's checking out the security cameras at the stores and car dealerships near where the cross was left." She turned to Carraneo. "And, Rey, could you canvass around the parking lot where Tammy was abducted?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"What're you working on now, Michael, at MCSO?" Overby asked.

"Running a gang killing, then the Container Case."

"Oh, that."

The Peninsula had been largely immune to terrorist threats. There were no major seaports here, only fishing docks, and the airport was small and had good security. But a month or so ago a shipping container had been smuggled off a cargo ship from Indonesia docked in Oakland and loaded on a truck headed south toward L.A. A report suggested that it had gotten as far as Salinas, where, possibly, the contents had been removed, hidden and then transferred to other trucks for forward routing.

Those contents might've been contraband-drugs, weapons…or, as another credible intelligence report went, human beings sneaking into the country. Indonesia had the largest Islamic population in the world and a number of dangerous extremist cells. Homeland Security was understandably concerned.

"But," O'Neil added, "I can put that on hold for a day or two."

"Good," Overby said, relieved that the Roadside Cross Case would be task-forced. He was forever looking for ways to spread the risk if an investigation went bad, even if it meant sharing the glory.

Dance was simply pleased she and O'Neil would be working together.

O'Neil said, "I'll get the final crime scene report from Peter Bennington."

O'Neil's background wasn't specific to forensic science, but the solid, dogged cop relied on traditional techniques for solving crimes: research, canvassing and crime scene analysis. Occasionally head-butting. Whatever his concoction of techniques, though, the senior detective was good at his job. He had one of the highest arrest-and more important-conviction records in the history of the office.

Dance glanced at her watch. "And I'll go interview the witness."

Overby was silent for a moment. "Witness? I didn't know there was one."

Dance didn't tell him that that very information too was in the message she'd left her boss. "Yep, there is," she said, and slung her purse over her shoulder, heading out of the door.

Chapter 4

Oh, that's sad," the woman said.

Her husband, behind the wheel of their Ford SUV, which he'd just paid $70 to fill, glanced at her. He was in a bad mood. Because of the gas prices and because he'd just had a tantalizing view of Pebble Beach golf course, which he couldn't afford to play even if the wife would let him.

One thing he definitely didn't want to hear was something sad.

Still, he'd been married for twenty years, and so he asked her, "What?" Maybe a little more pointedly than he intended.

She didn't notice, or pay attention to, his tone. "There."

He looked ahead, but she was just gazing out of the windshield at this stretch of deserted highway, winding through the woods. She wasn't pointing at anything in particular. That made him even more irritated.

"Wonder what happened."

He was about to snap, "To what?" when he saw what she was talking about.

And he felt instantly guilty.

Stuck in the sand ahead of them, about thirty yards away, was one of those memorials at the site of a car accident. It was a cross, kind of a crude thing, sitting atop some flowers. Dark red roses.

"Is sad," he echoed, thinking of their children-two teenagers who still scared the hell out of him every time they got behind the wheel. Knowing how he'd feel if anything happened to them in an accident. He regretted his initial snippiness.

He shook his head, glancing at his wife's troubled face. They drove past the homemade cross. She whispered. "My God. It just happened."

"It did?"

"Yep. It's got today's date on it."

He shivered and they drove on toward a nearby beach that somebody had recommended for its walking trails. He mused, "Something odd."

"What's that, dear?"

"The speed limit's thirty-five along here. You wouldn't think somebody'd wipe out so bad that they'd die."

His wife shrugged. "Kids, probably. Drinking and driving."

The cross sure put everything in perspective. Come on, buddy, you could be sitting back in Portland crunching numbers and wondering what kind of insanity Leo will come up with at the next team rally meeting. Here you are in the most beautiful part of the state of California, with five days of vacation left.

And you couldn't come close to par at Pebble Beach in a million years. Quit your moaning, he told himself.

He put his hand on his wife's knee and drove on toward the beach, not even minding that fog had suddenly turned the morning gray.

DRIVING ALONG 68, Holman Highway, Kathryn Dance called her children, whom her father, Stuart, was driving to their respective day camps. With the early-morning meeting at the hotel, Dance had arranged for Wes and Maggie-twelve and ten-to spend the night with their grandparents.

"Hey, Mom!" Maggie said. "Can we go to Rosie's for dinner tonight?"

"We'll have to see. I've got a big case."

"We made noodles for the spaghetti for dinner last night, Grandma and me. And we used flour and eggs and water. Grandpa said we were making them from scratch. What does 'from scratch' mean?"

"From all the ingredients. You don't buy them in a box."

"Like, I know that. I mean, what does 'scratch' mean?"

"Don't say 'like.' And I don't know. We'll look it up."

"Okay."

"I'll see you soon, sweetie. Love you. Put your brother on."

"Hey, Mom." Wes launched into a monologue about the tennis match planned for today.

Wes was, Dance suspected, just starting the downhill coast into adolescence. Sometimes he was her little boy, sometimes a distant teenager. His father had died two years ago, and only now was the boy sliding out from under the weight of that sorrow. Maggie, though younger, was more resilient.

"Is Michael still going out on his boat this weekend?"

"I'm sure he is."

"That rocks!" O'Neil had invited the boy to go fishing this Saturday, along with Michael's young son, Tyler. His wife, Anne, rarely went out on the boat and, though Dance did from time to time, seasickness made her a reluctant sailor.

She then spoke briefly to her father, thanking him for baby-sitting the children, and mentioned that the new case would be taking up a fair amount of time. Stuart Dance was the perfect grandfather-the semiretired marine biologist could make his own hours and truly loved spending time with the children. Nor did he mind playing chauffeur. He did, however, have a meeting today at the Monterey Bay aquarium but assured his daughter that he'd drop the children off with their grandmother after camp. Dance would pick them up from her later.

Every day Dance thanked fate or the gods that she had loving family nearby. Her heart went out to single mothers with little support.

She slowed, turned at the light and pulled into the parking lot of Monterey Bay Hospital, studying a crowd of people behind a row of blue saw-horse barriers.

More protesters than yesterday.

And yesterday had seen more than the day before.

MBH was a famed institution, one of the best medical centers in the region, and one of the most idyllic, set in a pine forest. Dance knew the place well. She'd given birth to her children here, sat with her father as he recovered from major surgery. She'd identified her husband's body in the hospital's morgue.

And she herself had recently been attacked here-an incident related to the protest Dance was now watching.

As part of the Daniel Pell case, Dance had sent a young Monterey County deputy to guard the prisoner in the county courthouse in Salinas. The convict had escaped and, in the process, had attacked and severely burned the deputy, Juan Millar, who'd been brought here to intensive care. That had been such a hard time-for his confused, sorrowful family, for Michael O'Neil, and for his fellow officers at the MCSO. For Dance too.

It was while she was visiting Juan that his distraught brother, Julio, had assaulted her, enraged that she was trying to take a statement from his semi-conscious sibling. Dance had been more startled than hurt by the attack and had chosen not to pursue a case against the hysterical brother.

A few days after Juan was admitted, he'd died. At first, it seemed that the death was a result of the extensive burns. But then it was discovered that somebody had taken his life-a mercy killing.

Dance was saddened by the death, but Juan's injuries were so severe that his future would have been nothing but pain and medical procedures. Juan's condition had also troubled Dance's mother, Edie, a nurse at the hospital. Dance recalled standing in her kitchen, her mother nearby, gazing into the distance. Something was troubling her deeply, and she soon told Dance what: She'd been checking on Juan when the man had swum to consciousness and looked at her with imploring eyes.

He'd whispered, "Kill me."

Presumably he'd delivered this plea to anybody who'd come to visit or tend to him.

Soon after that, someone had fulfilled his wish.

No one knew the identity of the person who had combined the drugs in the IV drip to end Juan's life. The death was now officially a criminal investigation-being handled by the Monterey County Sheriff's Office. But it wasn't being investigated very hard; doctors reported that it would have been highly unlikely for the deputy to live for more than a month or two. The death was clearly a humane act, even if criminal.

But the case had become a cause célèbre for pro-lifers. The protesters that Dance was now watching in the parking lot held posters emblazoned with crosses and pictures of Jesus and of Terry Schiavo, the comatose woman in Florida, whose right-to-die case the U.S. Congress itself became entwined in.

The placards being waved about in front of Monterey Bay Hospital decried the horrors of euthanasia and, apparently because everyone was already assembled and in a protesting mood, abortion. They were mostly members of Life First, based in Phoenix. They'd arrived within days of the young officer's death.

Dance wondered if any of them caught on to the irony of protesting death outside a hospital. Probably not. They didn't seem like folks with a sense of humor.

Dance greeted the head of security, a tall African-American, standing outside the main entrance. "Morning, Henry. They keep coming, it looks like."

"Morning, Agent Dance." A former cop, Henry Bascomb liked using departmental titles. He gave a smirk, nodding their way. "Like rabbits."

"Who's the ringleader?" In the center of the crowd was a scrawny balding man with wattles beneath his pointy chin. He was in clerical garb.

"That's the head, the minister," Bascomb told her. "Reverend R. Samuel Fisk. He's pretty famous. Came all the way from Arizona."

"R. Samuel Fisk. Very ministerial-sounding name," she commented.

Beside the reverend stood a burly man with curly red hair and a buttoned dark suit. A bodyguard, Dance guessed.

"Life is sacred!" somebody called, aiming the comment to one of the news trucks nearby.

"Sacred!" the crowd took up.

"Killers," Fisk shouted, his voice surprisingly resonant for such a scarecrow.

Though it wasn't directed at her, Dance felt a chill and flashed back to the incident in the ICU, when enraged Julio Millar had grabbed her from behind as Michael O'Neil and another companion intervened.

"Killers!"

The protesters took up the chant. "Kill-ers. Kill-ers!" Dance guessed they'd be hoarse later in the day.

"Good luck," she told the security chief, who rolled his eyes uncertainly.

Inside, Dance glanced around, half expecting to see her mother. Then she got directions from reception and hurried down a corridor to the room where she'd find the witness in the Roadside Cross Case.

When she stepped into the open doorway, the blond teenage girl inside, lying in the elaborate hospital bed, looked up.

"Hi, Tammy. I'm Kathryn Dance." Smiling at the girl. "You mind if I come in?"

Chapter 5

Although Tammy Foster had been left to drown in the trunk, the attacker had made a miscalculation.

Had he parked farther from shore the tide would have been high enough to engulf the entire car, dooming the poor girl to a terrible death. But, as it happened, the car had gotten bogged down in loose sand not far out, and the flowing tide had filled the Camry's trunk with only six inches of water.

At about 4:00 a.m. an airline employee on his way to work saw the glint from the car. Rescue workers got to the girl, half conscious from exposure, bordering on hypothermia, and raced her to the hospital.

"So," Dance now asked, "how you feeling?"

"Okay, I guess."

She was athletic and pretty but pale. Tammy had an equine face, straight, perfectly tinted blond hair and a pert nose that Dance guessed had started life with a somewhat different slope. Her quick glance at a small cosmetic bag suggested to Dance that she rarely went out in public without makeup.

Dance's badge appeared.

Tammy glanced at it.

"You're looking pretty good, all things considered."

"It was so cold," Tammy said. "I've never been so cold in my life. I'm still pretty freaked."

"I'm sure you are."

The girl's attention swerved to the TV screen. A soap opera was on. Dance and Maggie watched them from time to time, usually when the girl was home sick from school. You could miss months and still come back and figure out the story perfectly.

Dance sat down and looked at the balloons and flowers on a nearby table, instinctively searching for red roses or religious gifts or cards emblazoned with crosses. There were none.

"How long are you going to be in the hospital?"

"I'm getting out today, probably. Maybe tomorrow, they said."

"How're the doctors? Cute?"

A laugh.

"Where do you go to school?"

"Robert Louis Stevenson."

"Senior?"

"Yeah, in the fall."

To put the girl at ease, Dance made small talk: asking about whether she was in summer school, if she'd thought about what college she wanted to attend, her family, sports. "You have any vacations plans?"

"We do now," she said. "After this. My mom and sister and me are going to visit my grandmother in Florida next week." There was exasperation in her voice and Dance could tell that the last thing the girl wanted to do was go to Florida with the family.

"Tammy, you can imagine, we really want to find whoever did this to you."

"Asshole."

Dance lifted an agreeing eyebrow. "Tell me what happened."

Tammy explained about being at a club and leaving just after midnight. She was in the parking lot when somebody came up from behind, taped her mouth, hands and feet, threw her in the trunk and then drove to the beach.

"He just left me there to, like, drown." The girl's eyes were hollow. Dance, empathetic by nature-a gift from her mother-could feel the horror herself, a hurting tickle down her spine.

"Did you know the attacker?"

The girl shook her head. "But I know what happened."

"What's that?"

"Gangs."

"He was in a gang?"

"Yeah, everybody knows about it. To get into a gang, you have to kill somebody. And if you're in a Latino gang you have to kill a white girl. Those're the rules."

"You think the perp was Latino?"

"Yeah, I'm sure he was. I didn't see his face but got a look at his hand. It was darker, you know. Not black. But he definitely wasn't a white guy."

"How big was he?"

"Not tall. About five-six. But really, really strong. Oh, something else. I think last night I said it was just one guy. But I remembered this morning. There were two of them."

"You saw two of them?"

"More, I could feel somebody else nearby, you know how that happens?"

"Could it have been a woman?"

"Oh, yeah, maybe. I don't know. Like I was saying, I was pretty freaked out."

"Did anybody touch you?"

"No, not that way. Just to put tape on me and throw me in the trunk." Her eyes flashed with anger.

"Do you remember anything about the drive?"

"No, I was too scared. I think I heard some clanks or something, some noise from inside the car."

"Not the trunk?"

"No. Like metal or something, I thought. He put it in the car after he got me in the trunk. I saw this movie, one of the Saw movies. And I thought maybe he was going to use whatever it was to torture me."

The bike, Dance was thinking, recalling the tread marks at the beach. He'd brought a bicycle with him for his escape. She suggested this, but Tammy said that wasn't it; there was no way to get a bike in the backseat. She added gravely. "And it didn't sound like a bike."

"Okay, Tammy." Dance adjusted her glasses and kept looking at the girl, who glanced at the flowers and cards and stuffed animals. The girl added, "Look at everything people gave me. That bear there, isn't he the best?"

"He's cute, yep… So you're thinking it was some Latino kids in a gang."

"Yeah. But…well, you know, like now, it's kind of over with."

"Over with?"

"I mean, I didn't get killed. Just a little wet." A laugh as she avoided Dance's eyes. "They're definitely freaking. It's all over the news. I'll bet they're gone. I mean, maybe even left town."

It was certainly true that gangs had initiation rites. And some involved murder. But killings were rarely outside the race or ethnicity of the gang and were most often directed at rival gang members or informants. Besides, what had happened to Tammy was too elaborate. Dance knew from running gang crimes that they were business first; time is money and the less spent on extracurricular activities the better.

Dance had already decided that Tammy didn't think her attacker was a Latino gangbanger at all. Nor did she believe there were two of them.

In fact, Tammy knew more about the perp than she was letting on.

It was time to get to the truth.

The process of kinesic analysis in interviewing and interrogation is first to establish a baseline-a catalog of behaviors that subjects exhibit when telling the truth: Where do they put their hands, where do they look and how often, do they swallow or clear their throats often, do they lace their speech with "Uhm," do they tap their feet, do they slouch or sit forward, do they hesitate before answering?

Once the truthful baseline is determined, the kinesic expert will note any deviations from it when the subject is asked questions to which he or she might have reason to answer falsely. When most people lie, they feel stress and anxiety and try to relieve those unpleasant sensations with gestures or speech patterns that differ from the baseline. One of Dance's favorite quotes came from a man who predated the coining of the term "kinesics" by a hundred years: Charles Darwin, who said, "Repressed emotion almost always comes to the surface in some form of body motion."

When the subject of the attacker's identity had arisen, Dance observed that the girl's body language changed from her baseline: She shifted her hips uneasily and a foot bobbed. Arms and hands are fairly easy for liars to control but we're much less aware of the rest of our body, especially toes and feet.

Dance also noted other changes: in the pitch of the girl's voice, fingers flipping her hair and "blocking gestures," touching her mouth and nose. Tammy also offered unnecessary digressions, she rambled and she made overgeneralized statements ("Everybody knows about it"), typical of someone who's lying.

Convinced that the girl was withholding information, Kathryn Dance now slipped into her analytic mode. Her approach to getting a subject to be honest consisted of four parts. First, she asked: What's the subject's role in the incident? Here, Tammy was a victim and a witness only, Dance concluded. She wasn't a participant-either involved in another crime or staging her own abduction.

Second, what's the motive to lie? The answer, it was pretty clear, was that the poor girl was terrified of reprisal. This was common, and made Dance's job easier than if Tammy's motive were to cover up her own criminal behavior.

The third question: What's the subject's general personality type? This determination would suggest what approach Dance should adopt in pursuing the interrogation-should she, for instance, be aggressive or gentle; work toward problem solving or offer emotional support; behave in a friendly manner or detached? Dance categorized her subjects according to attributes in the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator, which assesses whether someone is an extravert or introvert, thinking or feeling, sensing or intuitive.

The distinction between extravert and introvert is about attitude. Does the subject act first and then assess the results (an extravert), or reflect before acting (introvert)? Information gathering is carried out either by trusting the five senses and verifying data (sensing) or relying on hunches (intuitive). Decision making occurs by either objective, logical analysis (thinking) or by making choices based on empathy (feeling).

Although Tammy was pretty, athletic and apparently a popular girl, her insecurities-and, Dance had learned, an unstable home life-had made her an introvert, and one who was intuitive and feeling. This meant Dance couldn't use a blunt approach with the girl. Tammy would simply stonewall-and be traumatized by harsh questioning.

Finally, the fourth question an interrogator must ask is: What kind of liar's personality does the subject have?

There are several types. Manipulators, or "High Machiavellians" (after the Italian political philosopher who, literally, wrote the book on ruthlessness), see absolutely nothing wrong with lying; they use deceit as a tool to achieve their goals in love, business, politics or crime and are very, very good at deception. Other types include social liars, who lie to entertain; adaptors, insecure people who lie to make positive impressions; and actors, who lie for control.

Dance decided Tammy was a combination of adaptor and actor. Her insecurities would make her lie to boost her fragile ego, and she would lie to get her way.

Once a kinesic analyst answers these four questions, the rest of the process is straightforward: She continues questioning the subject, noting carefully those queries that elicit stress reactions-indicators of deception. Then she keeps returning to those questions, and related ones, probing further, closing in on the lie, and noting how the subject is handling the increasing levels of stress. Is she angry, in denial, depressed or trying to bargain her way out of the situation? Each of these states requires different tools to force or trick or encourage the subject to finally tell the truth.

This is what Dance did now, sitting forward a bit to put herself in a close but not invasive "proxemic zone"-about three feet away from Tammy. This would make her uneasy, but not overly threatened. Dance kept a faint smile on her face and decided not to exchange her gray-rimmed glasses for her black frames-her "predator specs"-which she wore to intimidate High Mach subjects.

"That's very helpful, Tammy, everything you've said. I really appreciate your cooperation."

The girl smiled. But she also glanced at the door. Dance read: guilt.

"But one thing," the agent added, "we have some reports from the crime scene. Like on CSI, you know?"

"Sure. I watch it."

"Which one do you like?"

"The original. You know, Las Vegas."

"That's the best, I hear." Dance had never seen the show. "But from the evidence it doesn't seem like there were two people. Either in the parking lot or at the beach."

"Oh. Well, like I said, it was just a, like, feeling."

"And one question I had. That clanking you heard? See, we didn't find any other car wheel tread marks either. So we're real curious how he got away. Let's go back to the bicycle. I know you didn't think that was the sound in the car, the clanking, but any way it could have been, you think?"

"A bicycle?"

Repeating a question is often a sign of deception. The subject is trying to buy time to consider the implications of an answer and to make up something credible.

"No, it couldn't. How could he get it inside?" Tammy's denial was too fast and too adamant. She'd considered a bicycle too but didn't want to admit the possibility, for some reason.

Dance lifted an eyebrow. "Oh, I don't know. One of my neighbors has a Camry. It's a pretty big car."

The girl blinked; she was surprised, it seemed, that Dance knew the make of her car. That the agent had done her homework was making Tammy uneasy. She looked at the window. Subconsciously, she was seeking a route of escape from the unpleasant anxiety. Dance was on to something. She felt her own pulse tap harder.

"Maybe. I don't know," Tammy said.

"So, he could've had a bike. That might mean he was somebody your age, a little younger. Adults ride bikes, sure, but you see teenagers with them more. Hey, what do you think about it being somebody in school with you?"

"School? No way. Nobody I know would do something like that."

"Anybody ever threaten you? Have any fights with anybody at Stevenson?"

"I mean, Brianna Crenshaw was pissed when I beat her for cheerleader. But she started going out with Davey Wilcox. Who I had a crush on. So it kind of evened out." A choked laugh.

Dance smiled too.

"No, it was this gang guy. I'm sure of it." Her eyes grew wide. "Wait, I remember now. He made a call. Probably to the gang leader. I could hear him open his phone and he said, 'Ella esta en el coche.'"

She's in the car, Dance translated to herself. She asked Tammy, "You know what that means?"

"Something like 'I've got her in the car.'"

"You're studying Spanish?"

"Yeah." This was all very breathless and told in a voice with a higher pitch than normal. Her eyes locked onto Dance's but her hand flicked her hair away and paused to scratch her lip.

The Spanish quotation was a complete lie.

"What I'm thinking," Dance began reasonably, "is that he was just pretending to be a gangbanger. To cover up his identity. That means there was another reason to attack you."

"Like, why?"

"That's what I'm hoping you can help me with. You get any look at him at all?"

"Not really. He was behind me the whole time. And it was really, really dark in the parking lot. They ought to put lights in. I think I'm going to sue the club. My father's a lawyer in San Mateo."

The angry posturing was meant to deflect Dance's questioning; Tammy had seen something.

"Maybe as he came up toward you, you saw a reflection in the windows."

The girl was shaking her head no. But Dance persisted. "Just a glimpse. Think back. It's always cold at night here. He wouldn't've been in shirtsleeves. Was he wearing a jacket? A leather one, cloth? A sweater? Maybe a sweatshirt. A hoodie?"

Tammy said no to all of them, but some no's were different from others.

Dance then noticed the girl's eyes zip to a bouquet of flowers on the table. Beside it the get-well card read: Yo, girl, get your a** out of there soon! Love J, P, and the Beasty Girl.

Kathryn Dance looked at herself as a journeyman law enforcer who succeeded largely because of doing her homework and not taking no for an answer. Occasionally, though, her mind did a curious jump. She'd pack in the facts and impressions and suddenly there'd be an unexpected leap-a deduction or conclusion that seemed to arise as if by magic.

A to B to X…

This happened now, seeing Tammy look at the flowers, eyes troubled.

The agent took a chance.

"See, Tammy, we know that whoever attacked you also left a roadside cross-as a message of some sort."

The girl's eyes grew wide.

Gotcha, Dance thought. She does know about the cross.

She continued her improvised script, "And messages like that are always sent by people who know the victims."

"I…I heard him speaking Spanish."

Dance knew this was a lie, but she'd learned that with subjects who had a personality type like Tammy's, she needed to leave them an escape route, or they'd shut down completely. She said agreeably, "Oh, I'm sure you did. But I think he was trying to cover up his identity. He wanted to fool you."

Tammy was miserable, the poor thing.

Who terrified her so much?

"First of all, Tammy, let me reassure you that we'll protect you. Whoever did this won't get near you again. I'm going to have a policeman stay outside your door here. And we'll have one at your house too until we catch the person who did this."

Relief in her eyes.

"Here's a thought: What about a stalker? You're very beautiful. I'll bet you have to be pretty careful."

A smile-very cautious, but pleased nonetheless at the compliment.

"Anybody been hassling you?"

The young patient hesitated.

We're close. We're really close.

But Tammy backed away. "No."

Dance did too. "Have you had any problems with people in your family?" This was a possibility. She'd checked. Her parents were divorced-after a tough courtroom battle-and her older brother lived away from home. An uncle had a domestic abuse charge.

But Tammy's eyes made it clear that relatives probably weren't behind the attack.

Dance continued to fish. "You have any trouble with anybody you've been e-mailing? Maybe somebody you know online, through Facebook or MySpace? That happens a lot nowadays."

"No, really. I'm not online that much." She was flicking fingernail against fingernail, the equivalent of wringing hands.

"I'm sorry to push, Tammy. It's just so important to make sure this doesn't happen again."

Then Dance saw something that struck her like a slap. In the girl's eyes was a recognition response-a faint lifting of the brows and lids. It meant that Tammy was afraid that this would happen again-but, since she'd have her police guard, the implication was that the attacker was a threat to others too.

The girl swallowed. She was clearly in the denial phase of stress reaction, which meant she was hunkered down, defenses raised high.

"It was somebody I didn't know. I swear to God."

A deception flag: "I swear." The deity reference too. It was as if she were shouting, I'm lying! I want to tell the truth but I'm afraid.

Dance said, "Okay, Tammy. I believe you."

"Look, I'm really, really tired. I think maybe I don't want to say anything else until my mom gets here."

Dance smiled. "Of course, Tammy." She rose and handed the girl one of her business cards. "If you could think about it a bit more and let us know anything that occurs to you."

"I'm sorry I'm, like, not all that helpful." Eyes down. Contrite. Dance could see that the girl had used pouting and insincere self-deprecation in the past. The technique, mixed with a bit of flirt, would work with boys and her father; women wouldn't let her get away with it.

Still, Dance played to her. "No, no, you've been very helpful. Gosh, honey, look at all you've been through. Get some rest. And put on some sitcoms." A nod at the TV. "They're good for the soul."

Walking out the door, Dance reflected: another few hours and she might have gotten the girl to tell the truth, though she wasn't sure; Tammy was clearly terrified. Besides, however talented the interrogator, sometimes subjects simply would not tell what they knew.

Not that it mattered. Kathryn Dance believed she'd learned all the information she needed.

A to B to X…

Chapter 6

In the lobby of the hospital Dance used a pay phone-no mobiles allowed-and called in a deputy to guard Tammy Foster's room. She then went to reception and had her mother paged.

Three minutes later Edie Dance surprised her daughter by approaching not from her station at Cardiac Care but from the intensive care wing.

"Hi, Mom."

"Katie," said the stocky woman with short gray hair and round glasses. Around her neck was an abalone and jade pendant that she'd made herself. "I heard about the attack-that girl in the car. She's upstairs."

"I know. I just interviewed her."

"She'll be okay, I think. That's the word. How did your meeting go this morning?"

Dance grimaced. "A setback, it looks like. The defense is trying to get the case dismissed on immunity."

"Doesn't surprise me" was the cold response. Edie Dance was never hesitant to state her opinions. She had met the suspect, and when she learned what he'd done, she'd grown furious-an emotion evident to Dance in the woman's calm visage and faint smile. Never raising her voice. But eyes of steel.

If looks could kill, Dance remembered thinking about her mother when she was young.

"But Ernie Seybold's a bulldog."

"How's Michael?" Edie Dance had always liked O'Neil.

"Fine. We're running this case together." She explained about the roadside cross.

"No, Katie! Leaving a cross before somebody dies? As a message?"

Dance nodded. But she noted that her mother's attention continued to be drawn outside. Her face was troubled.

"You'd think they'd have more important things to do. That reverend gave a speech the other day. Fire and brimstone. And the hatred in their faces. It's vile."

"Have you seen Juan's parents?"

Edie Dance had spent some time comforting the burned officer's family, his mother in particular. She had known that Juan Millar probably wouldn't survive, but she'd done everything she could to make the shocked and bewildered couple understand that he was getting the best care possible. Edie had told her daughter that the woman's emotional pain was as great as her son's physical agony.

"No, they haven't been back. Julio has. He was here this morning."

"He was? Why?"

"Maybe collecting his brother's personal effects. I don't know…" Her voice faded. "He was just staring at the room where Juan died."

"Has there been an inquiry?"

"Our board of ethics was looking into it. And a few policemen have been here. Some county deputies. But when they look at the report-and see the pictures of his injuries-nobody's actually that upset that he died. It really was merciful."

"Did Julio say anything to you when he was here today?"

"No, he didn't talk to anybody. You ask me, he's a bit scary. And I couldn't help but remember what he did to you."

"He was temporarily insane," Dance said.

"Well, that's no excuse for attacking my daughter," Edie said with a staunch smile. Then her eyes slipped out the glass doors and examined the protesters once more. A dark look. She said, "I better get back to my station."

"If it's okay, could Dad bring Wes and Maggie over here later? He's got a meeting at the aquarium. I'll pick them up."

"Of course, honey. I'll park 'em in the kids' play area."

Edie Dance headed off once more, glancing outside. Her visage was angry and troubled. It seemed to say: You've got no business being here, disrupting our work.

Dance left the hospital with a glance toward Reverend R. Samuel Fisk and his bodyguard or whoever the big man was. They'd joined several other protesters, clasped hands and lowered their heads in prayer.

"TAMMY'S COMPUTER," DANCE said to Michael O'Neil.

He lifted an eyebrow.

"It's got the answer. Well, maybe not the answer. But an answer. To who attacked her."

They were sipping coffee as they sat outside at Whole Foods in Del Monte Center, an outdoor plaza anchored by Macy's. She once calculated that she'd bought at least fifty pairs of shoes here-footwear, her tranquilizer. In fairness, though, that otherwise embarrassing number of purchases had taken place over a few years. Often, but not always, on sale.

"Online stalker?" O'Neil asked. The food they ate wasn't poached eggs with delicate hollandaise sauce and parsley garnish, but a shared raisin bagel with low-fat cream cheese in a little foil envelope.

"Maybe. Or a former boyfriend who threatened her, or somebody she met on a social networking site. But I'm sure she knows his identity, if not him personally. I'm leaning toward somebody from her school. Stevenson."

"She wouldn't say, though?"

"Nope, claimed it was a Latino gangbanger."

O'Neil laughed. A lot of fake insurance claims started with, "A Hispanic in a mask broke into my jewelry store." Or "Two African-Americans wearing masks pulled guns and stole my Rolex."

"No description, but I think he was wearing a sweatshirt, a hoodie. She gave a different negation response when I mentioned that."

"Her computer," O'Neil mused, hefting his heavy briefcase onto the table and opening it. He consulted a printout. "The good news: We've got it in evidence. A laptop. It was in the backseat of her car."

"And the bad news is it went for a swim in the Pacific Ocean?"

"'Significant seawater damage,'" he quoted.

Dance was discouraged. "We'll have to send it to Sacramento or the FBI up in San Jose. It'll take weeks to get back."

They watched a hummingbird brave the crowds to hover for breakfast at a red hanging plant. O'Neil said, "Here's a thought. I was talking to a friend of mine in the Bureau up there. He'd just been to a presentation on computer crime. One of the speakers was local-a professor in Santa Cruz."

"UC?"

"Right."

One of Dance's alma maters.

"He said the guy was pretty sharp. And he volunteered to help if they ever needed him."

"What's his background?"

"All I know is he got out of Silicon Valley and started to teach."

"At least there're no bursting bubbles in education."

"You want me to see if I can get his name?"

"Sure."

O'Neil lifted a stack of business cards from his attaché case, which was as neatly organized as his boat. He found one and made a call. In three minutes he'd tracked down his friend and had a brief conversation. The attack had already attracted the FBI's attention, Dance deduced. O'Neil jotted down a name and thanked the agent. Hanging up, he handed the slip to Dance. Dr. Jonathan Boling. Below it was a number.

"What can it hurt?…Who's got the laptop itself?"

"In our evidence locker. I'll call and tell them to release it."

Dance unholstered her cell phone and called Boling, got his voice mail and left a message.

She continued to tell O'Neil about Tammy, mentioning that much of the girl's emotional response was from her fear that the attacker would strike again-and maybe target others.

"Just what we were worried about," O'Neil said, running a thick hand through his salt-and-pepper hair.

"She also was giving off signals of guilt," Dance said.

"Because she might've been partly responsible for what happened?"

"That's what I'm thinking. In any case, I really want to get inside that computer." A glance at her watch. Unreasonably, she was irritated that this Jonathan Boling hadn't returned her call of three minutes before.

She asked O'Neil, "Any more leads on the evidence?"

"Nope." He told her what Peter Bennington had reported about the crime scene: that the wood in the cross was from oak trees, of which there were about a million or two on the Peninsula. The green florist wire binding the two branches was common and untraceable. The cardboard was cut from the back of a pad of cheap notebook paper sold in thousands of stores. The ink couldn't be sourced either. The roses couldn't be traced to a particular store or other location.

Dance told him the theory of the bicycle. O'Neil was one step ahead, though. He added that they'd reexamined the lot where the girl had been kidnapped and the beach where the car was left, and found more bicycle tread marks, none identifiable, but they were fresh, suggesting that this was the perp's likely means of transport. But the tread marks weren't distinctive enough to trace.

Dance's phone rang-the Warner Brothers' Looney Tunes theme, which her children had programmed in as a practical joke. O'Neil smiled.

Dance glanced at the Caller ID screen. It read J. Boling. She lifted an eyebrow, thinking-again unreasonably-it was about time.

Chapter 7

The noise outside, a snap from behind the house, brought back an old fear.

That she was being watched.

Not like at the mall or the beach. She wasn't afraid of leering kids or perverts. (That was irritating or flattering-depending, naturally, on the kid or the perv.) No, what terrified Kelley Morgan was some thing staring at her from outside the window of her bedroom.

Snap…

A second sound. Sitting at the desk in her room, Kelley felt a shivering so sudden and intense that her skin stung. Her fingers were frozen, pausing above the computer keyboard. Look, she told herself. Then: No, don't.

Finally: Jesus, you're seventeen. Get over it!

Kelley forced herself to turn around and risk a peek out the window. She saw gray sky above green and brown plants and rocks and sand. Nobody.

And no-thing.

Forget about it.

The girl, physique slim and brunette hair dense, would be a senior in high school next fall. She had a driver's license. She'd surfed Maverick Beach. She was going skydiving on her eighteenth birthday with her boyfriend.

No, Kelley Morgan didn't spook easily.

But she had one intense fear.

Windows.

The terror was from when she was a little girl, maybe nine or ten and living in this same house. Her mother read all these overpriced home design magazines and thought curtains were totally out and would mess up the clean lines of their modern house. Not a big deal, really, except that Kelley had seen some stupid TV show about the Abominable Snowman or some monster like that. It showed this CG animation of the creature as it walked up to a cabin and peered through the window, scaring the hell out of the people in bed.

Didn't matter that it was cheesy computer graphics, or that she knew there wasn't any such thing in real life. That was all it took, one TV show. For years afterward, Kelley would lie in bed, sweating, head covered by her blanket, afraid to look for fear of what she'd see. Afraid not to, for fear she'd have no warning of it-whatever it was-climbing through the window.

Ghosts, zombies, vampires and werewolves didn't exist, she told herself. But all she'd need to do was read a Stephenie Meyer's Twilight book and, bang, the fear would come back.

And Stephen King? Forget about it.

Now, older and not putting up with as much of her parents' weirdness as she used to, she'd gone to Home Depot and bought curtains for her room and installed them herself. Screw her mother's taste in décor. Kelley kept the curtains drawn at night. But they were open at the moment, it being daytime, with pale light and a cool summer breeze wafting in.

Then another snap outside. Was it closer?

That image of the effing creature from the TV show just never went away, and neither did the fear it injected into her veins. The yeti, the Abominable Snowman, at her window, staring, staring. A churning now gripped her in the belly, like the time she'd tried that liquid fast then gone back to solid foods.

Snap…

She risked another peek.

The blank window yawned at her.

Enough!

She returned to her computer, reading some comments on the OurWorld social networking site about that poor girl from Stevenson High, Tammy, who'd been attacked last night-Jesus, thrown into a trunk and left to drown. Raped or at least molested, everybody was saying.

Most of the postings were sympathetic. But some were cruel and those totally pissed Kelley off. She was staring at one now.

Okay Tammy's going to be all right and thank God. But I have to say one thing. IMHO, she brought it on herself. she has GOT to learn not to walk around like a slutcat from the eighties with the eyeliner and where does she get those dresses? she KNOWS what the guys are thinking, what did she expect????

– AnonGurl

Kelley banged out a response.

OMG, how can you say that? She was almost killed. And anybody who says a woman ASKS to be raped is a mindless l00ser. u should be ashamed!!! -BellaKelley

She wondered if the original poster would reply, hitting back.

Leaning toward the computer, Kelley heard yet another noise outside.

"That's it," she said aloud. She rose, but didn't go to the window. Instead she walked out of her room and into the kitchen, peeking outside. Didn't see anything…or did she? Was there a shadow in the canyon behind the shrubs at the back of the property.

None of her family was home, her parents working, her brother at practice.

Laughing uneasily to herself: It was less scary for her to go outside and meet a hulking pervert face-to-face than to see him looking into her window. Kelley glanced at the magnetic knife rack. The blades were totally sharp. Debated. But she left the weapons where they were. Instead she held her iPhone up to her ear and walked outside. "Hi, Ginny, yeah, I heard something outside. I'm just going to go see."

The conversation was pretend, but he-or it-wouldn't know that.

"No, I'll keep talking. Just in case there's some asshole out there." Talking loud.

The door opened onto the side yard. She headed toward the back, then, approaching the corner, she slowed. Finally she stepped tentatively into the backyard. Empty. At the end of the property, beyond a thick barrier of plants, the ground dropped away steeply into county land-a shallow canyon filled with brush and some jogging trails.

"So, how's it going? Yeah…yeah? Sweet. Way sweet."

Okay. Don't overdo it, she thought. Your acting sucks.

Kelley eased to the row of foliage and peered through it into the canyon. She thought she saw someone moving away from the house.

Then, not too far away, she saw some kid in sweats on a bike, taking one of the trails that was a shortcut between Pacific Grove and Monterey. He turned left and vanished behind a hill.

Kelley put the phone away. She started to return to the house when she noticed something out of place in the back planting beds. A little dot of color. Red. She walked over to it and picked up the flower petal. A rose. Kelley let the crescent flutter back to the ground.

She returned to the house.

A pause, looking back. No one, no animals. Not a single Abominable Snowman or werewolf.

She stepped inside. And froze, gasping.

In front of her, ten feet away, a human silhouette was approaching, features indistinct because of the backlighting from the living room.

"Who-?"

The figure stopped. A laugh. "Jesus, Kel. You are so freaked. You look…gimme your phone. I want a picture."

Her brother, Ricky, reached for her iPhone.

"Get out!" Kelley said, grimacing and twisting away from his outstretched hand. "Thought you had practice."

"Needed my sweats. Hey, you hear about that girl in the trunk? She goes to Stevenson."

"Yeah, I've seen her. Tammy Foster."

"She hot?" The lanky sixteen-year-old, with a mop of brown hair that matched her own, headed for the refrigerator and grabbed a power drink.

"Ricky, you're so gross."

"Uh-huh. So? Is she?"

Oh, she hated brothers. "When you leave, lock the door."

Ricky screwed his face into a huge frown. "Why? Who'd wanna molest you?"

"Lock it!"

"Like, okay."

She shot him a dark look, which he missed completely.

Kelley continued to her room and sat down at the computer again. Yep, AnonGurl had posted an attack on Kelley for defending Tammy Foster.

Okay, bitch, you're going down. I am gonna own you so bad.

Kelley Morgan began to type.

PROFESSOR JONATHAN BOLING was in his forties, Dance estimated. Not tall, a few inches over her height, with a frame that suggested either a tolerance for exercise or a disdain for junk food. Straight brownish hair similar to Dance's, though she suspected that he didn't sneak a box of Clairol into his shopping cart at Safeway every couple of weeks.

"Well," he said, looking around the halls as she escorted him from the lobby to her office at the California Bureau of Investigation. "This isn't quite what I pictured. Not like CSI."

Did everybody in the universe watch that show?

Boling wore a digital Timex on one wrist and a braided bracelet on the other-perhaps symbolizing support for something or another. (Dance thought about her children, who would cover their wrists with so many colored bands she was never sure what the latest causes were.) In jeans and a black polo shirt, he was handsome in a subdued, National Public Radio kind of way. His brown eyes were steady, and he seemed fast with a smile.

Dance decided he could have any grad student he set his sights on.

She asked, "You ever been in a law enforcement office before?"

"Well, sure," he said, clearing his throat and giving off odd kinesic signals. Then a smile. "But they dropped the charges. I mean, what else could they do when Jimmy Hoffa's body never turned up?"

She couldn't help but laugh. Oh, you poor grad students. Beware.

"I thought you consulted with police."

"I've offered to, at the end of my lectures to law enforcement agencies and security companies. But nobody's taken me up on it. Until now. You're my maiden voyage. I'll try not to disappoint."

They arrived in her office and sat across from each other at her battered coffee table.

Boling said, "I'm happy to help however I can but I'm not sure exactly what I can do." A bolt of sunlight fell across his loafers and he glanced down, noticed that one sock was black and one navy blue. He laughed without embarrassment. In another era Dance would have deduced that he was single; nowadays, with two busy working partners, fashion glitches like this were inadmissible evidence. He didn't, however, wear a wedding ring.

"I have a hardware and software background but for serious technical advice, I'm afraid I'm over the legal age limit and I don't speak Hindi."

He told her that he'd gotten joint degrees in literature and engineering at Stanford, admittedly an odd combination, and after a bit of "bumming around the world" had ended up in Silicon Valley, doing systems design for some of the big computer companies.

"Exciting time," he said. But, he added, eventually he'd been turned off by the greed. "It was like an oil rush. Everybody was asking how could they get rich by convincing people they had these needs that computers could fill. I thought maybe we should look at it the other way: find out what needs people actually had and then ask how computers could help them." A cocked head. "As between their position and mine. I lost big-time. So I took some stock money, quit, bummed around again. I ended up in Santa Cruz, met somebody, decided to stay and tried teaching. Loved it. That was almost ten years ago. I'm still there."

Dance told him that after a stint as a reporter she'd gone back to college-the same school where he taught. She studied communications and psychology. Their time had coincided, briefly, but they didn't know anyone in common.

He taught several courses, including the Literature of Science Fiction, as well as a class called Computers and Society. And in the grad school Boling taught what he described as some boring technical courses. "Sort of math, sort of engineering." He also consulted for corporations.

Dance interviewed people in many different professions. The majority radioed clear signals of stress when speaking of their jobs, which indicated either anxiety because of the demands of the work, or, more often, depression about it-as Boling had earlier when speaking about Silicon Valley. But his kinesic behavior now, when discussing his present career, was stress free.

He continued to downplay his technical skill, though, and Dance was disappointed. He seemed smart and more than willing to help-he'd driven down here on a moment's notice-and she would have liked to use his services, but to get into Tammy Foster's computer it sounded like they'd need more of a hands-on tech person. At least, she hoped, he could recommend someone.

Maryellen Kresbach came in with a tray of coffee and cookies. Attractive, she resembled a country-western singer, with her coiffed brown hair and red Kevlar fingernails. "The guard desk called. Somebody's got a computer from Michael's office."

"Good. You can bring it up."

Maryellen paused for a moment and Dance had an amusing idea that the woman was checking out Boling as romantic fodder. Her assistant had been waging a none-too-subtle campaign to find Dance a husband. When the woman eyed Boling's naked left ring finger and lifted her brow at Dance, the agent flashed her an exasperated glance, which was duly noted and summarily ignored.

Boling called his thanks and, after pouring three sugars into his coffee, dug into the cookies and ate two. "Good. No, better than good."

"She bakes them herself."

"Really? People do that? They don't all come out of a Keebler bag?"

Dance went for half a cookie and enjoyed a sip of coffee, though she was caffeinated enough from her earlier meeting with Michael O'Neil.

"Let me tell you what's going on." She explained to Boling about the attack on Tammy Foster. Then said, "And we have to get into her laptop."

Boling nodded understandingly. "Ah, the one that went for a swim in the Pacific Ocean."

"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."

Chapter 8

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.

THE CHILTON REPORT™

THE MORAL VOICE OF AMERICA. 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.

For that is what journalism is all about. -James Chilton

Below that was: "Mission Statement."

OUR MISSION STATEMENT

We can't make judgments in a vacuum. Will business, will government, will corrupt politicians and criminal and debauched individuals be honest about what they're up to? Of course not. It's our job in The Report to shine the light of truth into the shadows of deceit and greed-to give you the facts you need to make informed decisions about the pressing issues of the day.

Dance also found a brief biography of Chilton, then a section about personal news. She glanced over the listings.

ON THE HOME FRONT

GO TEAM!

I'm happy to say that after this weekend's game the Older Boy's team is 4-0! Go, Jayhawks! Now, parents: listen to me. Your youngsters should give up baseball and football for soccer, which is the safest and healthiest team sport there is. (See The Chilton Report of April 12 for my comments about sports injuries among children. And by the way, make sure you call it "soccer," not "football," the way the foreigners do. When in America, do as Americans!)

A PATRIOT

Yesterday the Younger Boy knocked the socks off the audience in his day camp recital by singing " America the Beautiful." All by himself! Makes a dad swell up with pride.

SUGGESTIONS, ANYONE?

We're coming up on our nineteenth anniversary, Pat and I. And I need ideas for presents! (Out of self-interest I've decided against getting her a high-speed fiber optic upgrade for the computer!) You ladies out there, send me your ideas. And, no, Tiffany's is not out of the question.

WE'RE GOING GLOBAL!

Am pleased to report that The Report has been getting raves from around the world. It's been selected as one of the lead blogs in a new RSS feed (we'll call it "Really Simple Syndication") that will link thousands of other blogs, websites and bulletin boards throughout the world. Kudos to you, my readers, for making The Report as popular as it is.

WELCOME HOME

Heard some news that made me smile. Those of you who've followed The Report may remember glowing comments over the years about this humble reporter's dear friend Donald Hawken-we were pioneers in this crazy computer world so many years ago I don't like to think about it. Donald escaped the Peninsula for greener pastures in San Diego. But I'm delighted to say that he's come to his senses and is returning, along with his bride, Lily, and his two wonderful children. Welcome home, Donald!

HEROES

Hats off to the brave firefighters of Monterey County… Pat and I happened to be downtown on Alvarado last Tuesday when calls for help rang out and smoke sprouted from a construction site. Flames blocked the exit…with two construction workers trapped on the upper floors. Within minutes two dozen firemen and-women were on the scene and a fire truck had stretched its ladder to the roof. The men were plucked from harm's way, and the flames were extinguished. No injuries, minimal damage.

In most of our lives bravery involves little more than arguing politics or, at the most physical, snorkeling at fancy resorts or mountain biking.

How rarely are we called on to exhibit true courage-the way the men and women of Monterey County Fire and Rescue do every single day, without a moment's hesitation or complaint.

Bravo to you all!

Accompanying this posting was a dramatic photo of a fire truck in downtown Monterey.

"Typical of blogs," Boling said. "Personal information, gossip. People like to read that."

Dance also clicked on a link called " Monterey."

She was taken to a page that extolled "Our Home: The Beautiful and Historic Monterey Peninsula," featuring artistic photos of the shoreline and boats near Cannery Row and Fisherman's Wharf. There were a number of links to local sights.

Another link led them to maps of the area, including one that depicted her town: Pacific Grove.

Boling said, "This is all gingerbread. Let's look at the content of the blog…that's where we'll find the clues." He frowned. "Do you call them 'clues'? Or 'evidence'?"

"You can call 'em broccoli if it helps us find the perp."

"Let's see what the veggies reveal." He gave her another URL.

http://www.thechiltonreport.com/html/june26.html

This was the crux of the blog: Chilton's mini-essays.

Boling explained, "Chilton's the 'OP,' the original poster. Which, if you're interested, is derived from 'OG,' Original Gangsta, for the leaders of gangs, like Bloods and Crips. Anyway, he uploads his commentary and then leaves it there for people to respond to. They agree or disagree. Sometimes they go off on tangents."

The original comment by Chilton, Dance noticed, remained at the top, and below were the replies. Mostly people replied directly to the blogger's comment, but sometimes they responded to other posters.

"Each separate article and all the related posts are called a 'thread,' " Boling explained. "Sometimes the threads can go on for months or years."

Dance began skimming. Under the clever heading "HypoCHRISTcy," Chilton attacked the very man Dance had just seen at the hospital, the Reverend Fisk, and the Life First movement. Fisk, it seemed, had once said that murdering abortion doctors was justified. Chilton wrote that he was adamantly against abortion, but condemned Fisk for the statement. Two of Fisk's defenders, CrimsoninChrist and LukeB1734, viciously attacked Chilton. The former said the blogger himself should be crucified. With the reference to the color in his name, Dance wondered if CrimsoninChrist was the minister's large, redheaded bodyguard she'd seen earlier at the hospital protest.

The "Power to the People" thread was an exposé about a California state representative-Brandon Klevinger, who was head of the Nuclear Facilities Planning Committee. Chilton had found out that Klevinger had gone on a golfing junket with a developer who was proposing a new nuclear plant near Mendocino, when it would have been cheaper and more efficient to build it closer to Sacramento.

In "Desalinate…and Devastate" the blogger took on a plan to build a desalination plant near the Carmel River. The comment included a personal attack on the man behind the project, Arnold Brubaker, painted by Chilton as an interloper from Scottsdale, Arizona, a man with a sketchy past and possible underworld connections.

Two of the postings represented the citizens' two positions on the desalination issue.

Reply to Chilton, posted by Lyndon Strickland.

I have to say you've opened my eyes on this issue. Had no idea that somebody's ramrodding this through. I reviewed the filed proposal at the County Planning Office and must say that, though I am an attorney familiar with environmental issues, it was one of the most obfuscatory documents I've ever tried to wade through. I think we need considerably more transparency in order to have meaningful debate on this matter.

Reply to Chilton, posted by Howard Skelton.

Do you know that America will run out of freshwater by 2023? And 97 percent of the earth's water is salt water. Only an idiot would not take advantage of that. We need desalination for our survival, if we're to continue to maintain our position as the most productive and efficient country in the world.

In the " Yellow Brick Road " thread Chilton talked about a project by the state Department of Transportation-Caltrans. A new highway was being built from Highway 1 through Salinas and on to Hollister, through farm country. Chilton was questioning the lightning speed with which the project had been approved, as well as the meandering route, which would benefit some farmers far more than others. He hinted at payoffs.

Chilton's social conservative side shone through in "Just Say No," a thread condemning a proposal for increased sex education in middle schools. (Chilton called for abstinence.) A similar message could be found in "Caught in the Act…NOT," about a married state court judge caught leaving a motel with a young clerk, half his age. Chilton was incensed at the recent development that the judge had received a wrist slap from the judicial ethics committee. He felt the man should have been removed from the bench and disbarred.

Kathryn Dance then came to the crucial thread, beneath a sad picture of crosses, flowers and a stuffed animal.

ROADSIDE CROSSES

Posted by Chilton.

I recently drove past the spot on Highway 1 where two roadside crosses, and some bright bouquets, sit. They marked the site of that terrible accident on June 9, where two girls died following a graduation party. Lives ended…and lives of loved ones and friends changed forever.

I realized that I hadn't heard much about any police investigation into the crash. I made some calls and found there'd been no arrests. No citations were even issued.

That struck me as odd. Now, no ticket means a determination that the driver-a high school student, so no names-was not to blame. So then what was the cause of the accident? As I drove along the road I noticed it was windswept and sandy and had no lights or guardrails near the spot where the car veered off the road. A caution sign was weathered and would have been hard to see in the dark (the accident occurred around midnight). There was no drainage; I could see pools of standing water on the shoulder and on the highway itself.

Why didn't the police do a thorough accident reconstruction (they have people on staff who do that, I've learned)? Why didn't Caltrans immediately send a team to examine the surface of the road, the grading, the markings? I could find no record of any such examination.

Maybe the road is as safe as can be expected.

But is it fair to us-whose children regularly drive that stretch of highway-for the authorities to dismiss the tragedy so quickly? It seems to me that their attention has faded quicker than the flowers sitting sorrowfully beneath those roadside crosses.

Reply to Chilton, posted by Ronald Kestler.

If you look at the budget situation in Monterey County and in the state in general, you will find that one area taking the brunt of our economic woes is adequate warning measures along high-risk highways. My son was killed in an accident along Highway 1 because the Curve sign had become covered with mud. It would have been an easy thing for state workers to find and clean it, but did they do this? No. Their neglect was inexcusable. Thank you, Mr. Chilton, for calling attention to this problem.

Reply to Chilton, posted by A Concerned Citizen.

Highway workers make obscene amounts of money and sit on their fat [deleted] all day long. you've seen them, everybody has, standing by the road not doing anything when they could be fixing dangerous highways and making sure we're safe. another example of our tax dollars NOT at work.

Reply to Chilton, posted by Robert Garfield, California Department of Transportation.

I wish to assure you and your readers that the safety of our citizens is Caltrans's number one priority. We make every effort to maintain the highways of our state in good repair. The portion of road where the accident you're referring to occurred is, like all highways under state control, regularly inspected. No violations or unsafe conditions were found. We urge all drivers to remember that highway safety in California is everyone's responsibility.

Reply to Chilton, posted by Tim Concord.

Your comment is EPIC WIN, Chilton! The police will get away with murder if we let them! I was pulled over on Sixty-eight because I'm African-American. The police made me sit on the ground for half an hour before they let me go and they wouldn't tell me what I'd done wrong, except for a light that was out. The government should be protecting lives not dissing innocent citizens.

Thank you.

Reply to Chilton, posted by Ariel.

On Friday me and my friend went to see the place where it happened and we were crying when we saw the crosses and flowers there. We were sitting there and we looked all over the highway and there were no police there, I mean, none! Just after it happened! Where were the police? And maybe it was there were no warning signs or the road was slippery, but it looked pretty safe to me, even tho it was sandy, that's true.

Reply to Chilton, posted by SimStud.

I drive that stretch of highway all the time and it's not the most dangerous place in the world, so what I'm wondering is, did the police really look at who was behind the wheel, I know [the driver] from school and I don't think he's the best driver in the world.

Reply to SimStud, posted by Footballrulz.

Dude, not the BEST driver in the world???? H8 to break it to you but [the driver] is a total fr33k and a luser, he CANT drive. I don't even think he has a license. Why didn't the cops find THAT out? Too busy going for dounuts and coffee. LOL.

Reply to Chilton, posted by MitchT.

Chilton, You're always trashing the government which is total win but in this case forget the road. It's fine. That guy from Caltrans said so. I've drove down there a hundred times and if you missed that curve because your drunk or stoned. If the police [deleted] up its because they didn't look at [the driver] close enough. He's a n00b and scary too. SimStud OWNS this thread.

Reply to Chilton, posted by Amydancer44.

This is weird cause my parents read The Report but I don't usually so it's weird that I'm here. But I heard around school what you'd posted about the accident and so I logged on. I read everything and I think you're one hundred percent right, and what that other poster said too. Everybody is innocent until proven guilty but I don't understand why the police just dropped the investigation.

Somebody who knows [the driver] was telling me that he was up all night before the party, I mean 24 hours, playing computer games. IMHO, he fell asleep driving, And another thing-those gamers think they're hot [deleted] behind the wheel b/c they play those driving games in the arcades but it's not the same thing.

Reply to Chilton, posted by Arthur Standish.

Federal funds for road maintenance have decreased consistently over the years, while the budget for U.S. military operations and foreign aid has quadrupled. Perhaps we should be more concerned about the lives of our citizens than those of people in other countries.

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.

Reply to Chilton, posted by BoardtoDeath.

i heard somebody who knows a dude was at the party that night and he saw [the driver] before he got in the car and he was walking around all [deleted] up. And that's why they crashed. It was the POLICE lost the breathaliser results and it was embarrassing, so they had to let him go. And that's WORD.

Reply to Chilton, posted by SarafromCarmel.

I don't think it's fair what everybody in this thread is saying. We don't know the facts. The crash was a terrible tragedy and the police didn't press charges, so we have to go with that. Think what [the driver]'s going through. He was in my chemistry class and he never bothered anybody. He was pretty smart and helped our Table Team a lot. I'll bet he feels real bad about those girls. He's got to live with that for the rest of his life. I feel sorry for him.

Reply to SarafromCarmel, posted by Anonymous.

Sara U R a lame [deleted]. if he was driving the car then he DID something that made those girls die. How can you say he didn't? Jesus its people like you who let hitler gas the jews and bush go into Iraq. why dont you call [the driver] up and have him take you for a nice ride? i'll come put a cross at your [deleted]ing grave, you [deleted].

Reply to Chilton, posted by Legend666.

[The driver]'s brother is retarded and it might look bad for the police to arrest [the driver], cause of all this political correct stuff which makes me sick. Also they should check out the girls purses, I mean the girls in the crash, because I heard he ripped them off before the ambulances got there. His families so poor that they can't even afford a washer and drier. I've seen him and his mom and his [deleted]-up little brother at the laundromat on Billings all the time. Who goes to laundromats? Lusers that's who.

Reply to Chilton, posted by SexyGurl362.

My best friend is a junior at [deleted] with [the driver] and she was talking to somebody who was at the party where the girls who died were. [The driver] was sitting in a corner with his sweats hood up staring at everybody and talking to himself and somebody found him in the kitchen just looking at the knives. Everybody was like, what the hells he doing here? Why did he come?

Reply to Chilton, posted by Jake42.

U totally OWN it, Chilton!! Yeah [the driver] [deleted]ed up. Look at the luser, his life is epic FAIL!!! He's always faking he's sick in PE class to get out of working out. He only goes to the gym to hang around in the locker room and stare at everybody's [deleted]. He is totally gay, somebody told me that.

Reply to Chilton, posted by CurlyJen.

Me and my friends were talking and last week somebody saw [the driver] on Lighthouse doing donuts in a car he stole from his grandmother without permission. He was trying to get [deleted] to show her thong. (like she'd care, LOL!!!). And when she ignored him he started wacking off right in front of her, right there on Lighthouse at the same time he was driving. he definitely was doing the same thing that night he crashed.

Reply to Chilton, posted by Anonymous.

I go to [deleted], I'm a sophomore, and I know him and everybody knows about him. IMHO, I mean, he's all right. He games a lot, but so what? I play soccer a lot, that doesn't make me a killer.

Reply to Anonymous, posted by BillVan.

[Deleted] you, [deleted]. if you know so much whats your sauce oh genius? You don't even have the balls to post under your real name. Afraid he'd come and [deleted] you up the [deleted]?

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.

Reply to Chilton, posted by Anonymous.

Somebody goes into Columbine or Virginia Tech with a gun and they're criminals but when [the driver] kills somebody with a car nobody does anything about it. Something is very messed up here.

Reply to Chilton, posted by WizardOne.

I think we need a time out. Some poster dissed [the driver] because he didn't like sports and he played games. What's the BFD? There are millions of people who don't play sports but like games. I don't know [the driver] real good but we're in the same class at [deleted]. He isn't a bad dude at all. Everybody's dissing him but does anybody here actually KNOW him? Whatever happened, he didn't hurt anybody on purpose and we all know people who do, everyday. IMHO, he feels bad about what happened. The police didn't arrest him because, duh, he didn't do anything illegal.

Reply to WizardOne, posted by Halfpipe22.

Another gamer-lamer. Look at the name. L00ZR!!! FOAD wizard!

Reply to Chilton, posted by Archenemy.

[The driver] is a total phr33k. In his locker at school, he has pictures of the d00ds from Columbine and Virginia Tech, and those dead bodies from the concentration camps. He walks around in some ch33p ass hoodie trying to look kewl but hes a luser on roids, thats all he'll ever be.

[The driver] if your reading this, d00d, and not hanging with the elves and fairies, remember: we OWN U. Why don't you U just do us all a favor and blow you're [deleted]ing brains out. Your death = EPIC WIN!

Chapter 9

Kathryn Dance sat back, shaking her head. "A lot of hormones there," she said to Jon Boling.

She was troubled by the viciousness of the blog posts-and most of them written by young people.

Boling scrolled back to the original post. "Look what happened. Chilton makes a simple observation about a fatal accident. All he does is question whether the road was safely maintained. But look at how the responding posts arc. They go from discussing what Chilton brought up-highway safety-then move on to government finances and then to the kid who was driving, even though he apparently didn't do anything wrong. The posters get more and more agitated as they attack him and finally the blog turns into a barroom brawl among the posters themselves."

"Like the game of Telephone. By the time the message moves along, it's distorted. 'I heard…' 'Somebody knows somebody who…' 'A friend of mine told me…' " She scanned the pages again. "One thing I noticed, Chilton doesn't fight back. Look at the post about Reverend Fisk and the right-to-life group."

Reply to Chilton, posted by CrimsoninChrist.

You are a sinner who cannot comprehend the goodness within the heart of Rev. R. Samuel Fisk. He has devoted his life to Christ and all of His works, while you do nothing but pander to the masses for your own pleasure and profit. Your misreading of the great Reverend's views is pathetic and libelous. You should be nailed up on a cross yourself.

Boling told her, "No, the serious bloggers don't argue back. Chilton will give a reasoned response, but flame wars-attacks among posters-get out of control and become personal. The postings become about the attack, not the substance of the topic. That's one of the problems with blogs. In person, people would never feud like this. The anonymity of the blogs mean the fights go on for days or weeks."

Dance looked through the text. "So the boy is a student." She recalled her deduction from the interview with Tammy Foster. "Chilton deleted his name and the name of the school but it's got to be Robert Louis Stevenson. Where Tammy goes."

Boling tapped the screen. "And there's her post. She was one of the first to say something about the boy. And everyone else jumped on board after that."

Maybe the post was the source of the guilt Dance had picked up on during the interview. If this boy was behind the attack, then Tammy, as Dance and O'Neil had speculated, would feel partly responsible for the assault on her; she'd brought it on herself. And perhaps guilty too if he went on to hurt someone else. This explained why Tammy wouldn't like the suggestion that her abductor had a bike in the car: that would lead Dance to consider a younger suspect-a student whose identity the girl didn't want to reveal because she still considered him a threat.

"It's all so vicious," Dance said, nodding at the screen.

"Did you hear about the Litter Boy?"

"Who?"

"Happened in Kyoto a few years ago. Japan. A teenage boy tossed a fast food wrapper and soda cup on the ground in a park. Somebody shot a picture of the kid doing it on their cell phone and uploaded it to his friends. Next thing, it started appearing on blogs and social networking sites all over the country. Cybervigilantes tracked him down. They got his name and address and posted the info online. It spread to thousands of blogs. The whole thing became a witch hunt. People began showing up at his house-throwing trash in the yard. He nearly killed himself-that kind of dishonor is significant in Japan." Boling's tonal quality and body language revealed anger. "Critics say, oh, it's just words or pictures. But they can be weapons too. They can cause just as much damage as fists. And, frankly, I think the scars last longer."

Dance said, "I don't get some of the vocabulary in the posts."

He laughed. "Oh, in blogs and bulletin boards and social networking sites, it's in to misspell, abbreviate and make up words. 'Sauce' for 'source.' 'Moar' for 'more.' 'IMHO' is 'in my humble opinion.'"

"Do I dare ask? 'FOAD.'"

"Oh," he said, "a polite valediction to your note. It means 'Fuck off and die.' All caps, of course, is the same as shouting."

"And what is 'p-h-r-3-3-k'?"

"That's leetspeak for 'freak.'"

"Leetspeak?"

"It's a sort of language that's been created by teens over the past few years. You only see it with keyboarded text. Numbers and symbols take the place of letters. And spellings are altered. Leetspeak comes from 'elite,' as in the best and the choicest. It can be incomprehensible to us old folks. But anybody who's mastered it can write and read it as fast as we do English."

"Why do kids use it?"

"Because it's creative and unconventional…and cool. Which, by the way, you should spell 'K-E-W-L.' "

"The spelling and grammar are awful."

"True, but it doesn't mean the posters are necessarily stupid or uneducated. It's just the convention nowadays. And speed is important. As long as the reader can understand what you're saying, you can be as careless as you want."

Dance said, "I wonder who the boy is. I guess I could call CHP about the accident Chilton refers to."

"Oh, I'll find it. The online world is huge but it's also small. I've got Tammy's social networking site here. She spends most of her time in one called OurWorld. It's bigger than Facebook and MySpace. It's got a hundred thirty million members."

"A hundred thirty million?"

"Yep. Bigger than most countries." Boling was squinting as he typed. "Okay, I'm in her account, just do a little cross-referencing… There. Got him."

"That fast?"

"Yep. His name's Travis Brigham. You're right. He's a junior at Robert Louis Stevenson High in Monterey. Going to be a senior this fall. Lives in Pacific Grove."

Where Dance and her children lived.

"I'm looking over some of the postings in OurWorld about the accident. Looks like he was driving a car back from a party and lost control. Two girls were killed, another one ended up in the hospital. He wasn't badly injured. No charges were filed-there was some question about the condition of the road. It'd been raining."

"That! Sure. I remember it." Parents always recall fatal car crashes involving youngsters. And, of course, she felt a sting of memory from several years ago: the highway patrol officer calling her at home, asking if she was FBI Agent Bill Swenson's wife. Why was he asking? she'd wondered.

I'm sorry to tell you, Agent Dance…I'm afraid there's been an accident.

She now pushed the thought away and said, "Innocent but he's still getting vilified."

"But innocence is boring," Boling said wryly. "It's no fun to post about that." He indicated the blog. "What you've got here are Vengeful Angels."

"What's that?"

"A category of cyberbullies. Vengeful Angels are vigilantes. They're attacking Travis because they think he got away with something-since he wasn't arrested after the accident. They don't believe, or trust, the police. Another category is the Power Hungry-they're closest to typical school-yard bullies. They need to control others by pushing them around. Then there are the Mean Girls. They bully because, well, they're little shits. Girls, mostly, who're bored and post cruel things for the fun of it. It borders on sadism." A tinge of anger again in Boling's voice. "Bullying…it's a real problem. And it's getting worse. The latest statistics are that thirty-five percent of kids have been bullied or threatened online, most of them multiple times." He fell silent and his eyes narrowed.

"What, Jon?"

"Interesting that there's one thing we don't see."

"What's that?"

"Travis fighting back in the blog, flaming the people who attacked him."

"Maybe he doesn't know about it."

Boling gave a thin laugh. "Oh, believe me, he would've known about the attacks five minutes after the first post in the Chilton thread."

"Why's it significant he's not posting?"

"One of the most persistent categories of cyberbullying is called Revenge of the Nerds, or the Victims of Retaliators. Those are people who've been bullied and are fighting back. The social stigma of being outed or bullied or humiliated at that age is overwhelming. I guarantee he's furious and he's hurt and he wants to get even. Those feelings have to come out somehow. You get the implication?"

Dance understood. "It suggests that he is the one who attacked Tammy."

"If he's not going after them online, it's all the more likely he'd be inclined to get them in real life." A troubled glance at the screen. "Ariel, BellaKelley, SexyGurl362, Legend666, Archenemy-they all posted attacks on him. Which means they're all at risk-if he's the one."

"Would it be hard for him to get their names and addresses?"

"Some, sure, short of hacking into routers and servers. The 'Anonymous' postings, of course. But a lot of them would be as easy to find as my getting his name. All he'd need would be a few high school yearbooks or class directories, access to OurWorld, Facebook or MySpace. Oh, and everybody's favorite-Google."

Dance noted a shadow had fallen over them and Jonathan Boling was looking past her.

Michael O'Neil stepped into the office. Dance was relieved to see him. They shared smiles. The professor stood. Dance introduced them. The two men shook hands.

Boling said, "So, I have you to thank for my first outing as a cop."

"If 'thank' is the right word," O'Neil said with a wry smile.

They all sat at the coffee table, and Dance told the deputy what they'd found…and what they suspected: that Tammy might have been attacked because she'd posted a comment on a blog about a high school student who'd been responsible for a car crash.

"Was that the accident on One a couple of weeks ago? About five miles south of Carmel?"

"Right."

Boling said, "The boy's name is Travis Brigham and he's a student at Robert Louis Stevenson, where the victims went."

"So he's a person of interest, at least. And it's possible-what we were afraid of?" O'Neil asked Dance. "He wants to keep going?"

"Very likely. "Cyberbullying pushes people over the edge. I've seen it happen dozens of times."

O'Neil put his feet on the coffee table and rocked back in the chair. Two years ago she'd bet him ten dollars that someday he'd fall over backward. So far she had yet to collect. He asked Dance, "Anything more on witnesses?"

Dance explained that TJ hadn't reported back yet about the security camera near the highway where the first cross had been left, nor had Rey responded about witnesses near the club where Tammy had been abducted.

O'Neil said that there hadn't been any breakthroughs with the physical evidence. "Only one thing-Crime Scene found a gray fiber, cotton, on the cross." He added that the lab in Salinas couldn't match it to a specific database, other than to report that it was probably from clothing, not from carpet or furniture.

"That's all, nothing else? No prints, tread marks?"

O'Neil shrugged. "The perp's either very smart or very lucky."

Dance walked to her desk and went into the state databases of warrants and records. She squinted over the screen and read, "Travis Alan Brigham, age seventeen. Driver's license puts him at four oh eight Henderson Road." She pushed her glasses up on her nose as she read. "Interesting. He's got a record." Then she shook her head. "No, sorry. My mistake. It's not him. It's Samuel Brigham, at the same address. He's fifteen. Juvie record. Arrested twice on peeping, once on misdemeanor assault. Both dismissed, subject to psych treatment. Looks like he's a brother. But Travis? No, he's clean."

She called Travis's DMV picture up on the screen. A dark-haired boy with eyes closely set together, beneath thick brows, stared at the camera. He wasn't smiling.

"I'd like to find out more about the accident," O'Neil said.

Dance placed a call to the local office of the Highway Patrol, the official name for California 's state police. After a few minutes of being transferred around she ended up with a Sergeant Brodsky, put the call on speaker and asked about the accident.

Brodsky slipped immediately into the tone you hear when police take the stand at trial. Emotionally flat, precise. "It was just before midnight on Saturday, June nine. Four juveniles, three female, one male, were heading north on Highway One about three miles south of Carmel Highlands, near Garrapata State Beach Reserve. The male was driving. The vehicle was a late-model Nissan Altima. It appears that the car was traveling at about forty-five. He missed a curve, skidded and went over a cliff. The girls in the back weren't wearing their seat belts. They died instantly. The girl in the passenger seat had a concussion. She was in the hospital for a few days. The driver was admitted, examined and released."

"What'd Travis say happened?" Dance asked.

"Just lost control. It'd rained earlier. There was water on the highway. He changed lanes and went into a skid. It was one of the girls' cars and the tires weren't the best. He wasn't speeding, and he tested negative for alcohol and controlled substances. The girl who survived corroborated his story." A defensive echo sounded in his voice. "There was a reason we didn't charge him, you know. Whatever anybody said about the investigation."

So he'd read the blog too, Dance deduced.

"You going to reopen the investigation?" Brodsky asked warily.

"No, this is about that attack Monday night. The girl in the trunk."

"Oh, that. The boy did it, you think?"

"Possibly."

"Wouldn't surprise me. Not one bit."

"Why do you say that?"

"Sometimes you get a feeling. Travis was dangerous. Had eyes just like the kids at Columbine."

How could he possibly know the visage of the killers in that horrific 1999 murder spree?

Then Brodsky added, "He was a fan of theirs, you know, the shooters. Had pictures up in his locker."

Did he know that independently, or from the blog? Dance recalled that someone had mentioned it in the "Roadside Crosses" thread.

"Did you think he was a threat?" O'Neil asked Brodsky. "When you interviewed him?"

"Yes, sir. Kept my cuffs handy the whole time. He's a big kid. And wore this hooded sweatshirt. Just stared at me. Freaky."

At this reference to the garment, Dance recalled what Tammy had given away about the attacker wearing a hoodie.

She thanked the officer and they hung up. After a moment she looked over at Boling. "Jon, any insights you can give us about Travis? From the postings?"

Boling reflected for a moment. "I do have a thought. If he's a gamer, like they're saying, that fact could be significant."

O'Neil asked, "You mean by playing those games he's programmed to be violent? We saw something on Discovery Channel about that the other night."

But Jon Boling shook his head. "That's a popular theme in the media. But if he's gone through relatively normal childhood developmental stages, then I wouldn't worry too much about that. Yes, some children can become numb to the consequences of violence if they're continually exposed in certain ways-generally visual-too early. But at the worst that just desensitizes you; it doesn't make you dangerous. The tendency to violence in young people almost always comes from rage, not watching movies or TV.

"No, I'm speaking of something else when I say that gaming probably affects Travis fundamentally. It's a change we're seeing throughout society now among young people. He could be losing the distinction between the synthetic world and the real world."

"Synthetic world?"

"It's a term I got from Edward Castronova's book on the subject. The synthetic world is the life of online games and alternative reality websites, like Second Life. They're fantasy worlds you enter through your computer-or PDA or some other digital device. People in our generation usually draw a clear distinction between the synthetic world and the real one. The real world is where you have dinner with your family or play softball or go out on a date after you log out of the synthetic world and turn off the computer. But younger people-and nowadays I mean people in their twenties and even early thirties-don't see that distinction. More and more, the synth worlds are becoming real to them. In fact, there was a study recently that showed nearly a fifth of the players in one online game felt that the real world was only a place to eat and sleep, that the synthetic world was their true residence."

This surprised Dance.

Boling smiled at her apparently naive expression. "Oh, an average gamer can easily spend thirty hours a week in the synth world, and it's not unusual for people to spend twice that. There are hundreds of millions of people who have some involvement in the synth world, and tens of millions who spend much of their day there. And we're not talking Pac-Man or Pong. The level of realism in the synthetic world is astonishing. You-through an avatar, a character that represents you-inhabit a world that's as complex as what we're living in right now. Child psychologists have studied how people create avatars; players actually use parenting skills subconsciously to form their characters. Economists have studied games too. You have to learn skills to support yourself or you'll starve to death. In most of the games you earn money, payable in game currency. But that currency actually trades against the dollar or pound or euro on eBay-in their gaming category. You can buy and sell virtual items-like magic wands, weapons, or clothing or houses or even avatars themselves-in real-world money. In Japan, not too long ago, some gamers sued hackers who stole virtual items from their synth world homes. They won the case."

Boling leaned forward, and Dance again noticed the sparkle in his eyes, the enthusiasm in his voice. "One of the best examples of the synth and real worlds coinciding is in a famous online game, World of Warcraft. The designers created a disease as a debuffer-that's a condition that reduces the health or power of characters. It was called Corrupted Blood. It would weaken powerful characters and kill the ones who weren't so strong. But something odd happened. Nobody's quite sure how, but the disease got out of control and spread on its own. It became a virtual black plague. The designers never intended that to happen. It could be stopped only when the infected characters died out or adapted to it. The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta heard about it and had a team study the spread of the virus. They used it as a model for real-world epidemiology."

Boling sat back. "I could go on and on about the synth world. It's a fascinating subject, but my point is that whether or not Travis is desensitized to violence, the real question is which world does he inhabit most, the synth or the real? If it's synth, then he runs his life according to a whole different set of rules. And we don't know what those are. Revenge against cyberbullies-or anyone who humiliates him-could be perfectly accepted. It could be encouraged. Maybe even required.

"The comparison is to a paranoid schizophrenic who kills someone because he genuinely believes that the victim is a threat to the world. He isn't doing anything wrong. In fact, to him, killing you is heroic. Travis? Who knows what he's thinking? Just remember it's possible that attacking a cyberbully like Tammy Foster meant no more to him than swatting a fly."

Dance considered this and said to O'Neil, "Do we go talk to him or not?"

Deciding when to initially interview a suspect was always tricky. Travis would probably not yet think he was a suspect. Speaking to him now would catch him off guard and might make him blurt out statements that could be used against him; he might even confess. On the other hand, he could destroy evidence or flee.

Debating.

What finally decided it for her was a simple memory. The look in Tammy Foster's eyes-the fear of reprisal. And the fear that the perp would attack someone else.

She knew they had to move fast.

"Yep. Let's go see him."

Chapter 10

The Brigham family lived in a scabby bungalow whose yard was strewn with car parts and old appliances, half dismantled. Green garbage bags, out of which flowed trash and rotting leaves, sat amid broken toys and tools. A scruffy cat stared cautiously out from a nest of vines beneath an overgrown hedgerow. It was too lazy or full to care about a pudgy gray rat that skittered past. O'Neil parked in the gravel drive, forty feet or so away from the house, and he and Dance climbed out of his unmarked MCSO car.

They studied the area.

It was like a scene from the rural South, vegetation thick, no other houses in sight, dereliction. The debilitated state of the house and the pungent aroma suggesting a nearby, and inefficient, sewer or a swamp explained how the family could afford such secluded property in this high-priced part of the state.

As they started toward the house she found her hand dangling near her pistol butt, her jacket unbuttoned.

She was spooked, alert.

Still, it was a shock when the boy attacked them.

They had just passed a patch of anemic, reedy grass beside the lopsided detached garage when she turned to O'Neil and found the deputy stiffen as he looked past her. His arm rose and gripped her jacket, pulling her forward to the ground.

"Michael!" she cried.

The rock sailed over her head, missing her by inches, and crashed through a garage window. Another followed a moment later. O'Neil had to duck fast to avoid getting hit. He crashed into a narrow tree.

"You all right?" he asked quickly.

A nod. "You see where it was from?"

"No."

They were scanning the thicket of woods bordering the property.

"There!" she called, pointing at the boy, in sweats and a stocking cap, who was staring at them. He turned and fled.

Dance debated only a moment. Neither of them had radios; this hadn't been planned as a tactical mission. And to return to O'Neil's car to call in a pursuit to Dispatch would have taken too long. They had a chance to catch Travis now and instinctively they went after him, sprinting forward.

CBI agents learn basic hand-to-hand combat skills-though most, Dance included, had never been in a fistfight. They also are required to have physical fitness checkups every so often. Dance was in fair shape, though not thanks to the CBI's regimen but to her treks into the wilderness to track down music for her website. Despite the impractical outfit-black skirt suit and blouse-she now eased ahead of Michael O'Neil as they pushed fast into the woods in pursuit of the boy.

Who was moving just a little faster.

O'Neil had his cell phone out and was breathlessly calling in a request for backup.

They were both gasping hard and Dance wondered how Dispatch could understand him.

The boy vanished for a moment and the officers slowed. Then Dance cried, "Look," spotting him emerge from bushes about fifty feet away. "Weapon?" she gasped. He held something dark in his hand.

"Can't tell."

Could have been a gun, though maybe a pipe or a knife.

Either way…

He vanished into a dense part of the woods, beyond which Dance could just see a glimmer of a green pond. Probably the source of the stench.

O'Neil glanced at her.

She sighed and nodded. Simultaneously they drew their Glocks.

They pushed forward again.

Dance and O'Neil had worked a number of cases together and fell instinctively into a symbiotic mode on an investigation. But they were at their best when solving intellectual puzzles, not playing soldier.

She had to remind herself: finger off the trigger, never cross in front of your partner's weapon and lift your muzzle if he crosses in front of you, fire only if threatened, check your backdrop, shoot in bursts of three, count your rounds.

Dance hated this.

Yet it was a chance to stop the Roadside Cross attacker. Picturing Tammy Foster's terrified eyes, Dance rushed through the woods.

The boy vanished again, and she and O'Neil pulled up, where two paths diverged. Travis had probably taken one-the vegetation was very thick here, impassible in parts. O'Neil silently pointed left, then right, raising an eyebrow.

Flip a coin, she thought, angry and unsettled that she'd have to separate from O'Neil. She nodded toward the left.

They began easing carefully down their respective routes.

Dance was moving through the thickets, thinking how unsuited she was to this role. Her world was one of words and expressions and nuances of gesture. Not tactical work, like this.

She knew how people got hurt, how they died, stepping out of the zones they were in harmony with. A sense of foreboding filled her.

Stop, she told herself. Find Michael, go back to the car and wait for backup.

Too late.

Just then Dance heard a rustling at her feet, and glanced down to see that the boy, hiding in the bushes next to her, had flung a large branch in her way. It caught her foot as she tried to jump over it and she went down hard. Struggling to keep from falling, Dance rolled onto her side.

Which had the effect of saving her wrist.

And another consequence: the boxy, black Glock flew from her hand and vanished into the bushes.

Only seconds later, Dance heard the rustle of bushes once more as the boy, apparently waiting to make certain she was alone, charged out of the bushes.

CARELESS, MICHAEL O'NEIL thought angrily.

He was running in the direction of Dance's cry, but realized now he had no idea where she was.

They should have stayed together. Careless to split up. Yes, it made sense-to cover as much ground as they could-but while he'd been in several firefights and a couple of street pursuits, Kathryn Dance had not.

If anything happened to her…

In the distance sirens sounded, growing louder. The backup was getting closer. O'Neil slowed to a walk, listening carefully. Maybe the rustle of bushes nearby. Maybe not.

Careless too because Travis would know this area perfectly. It was, literally, his backyard. He'd know where to hide, what paths to escape down.

The gun, weighing nothing in his large hand, swung ahead of O'Neil, as he looked for the attacker.

Frantic.

Pushing ahead another twenty feet. Finally he had to risk some noise. "Kathryn?" he called in a whisper.

Nothing.

Louder: "Kathryn?"

The wind rustled brush and trees.

Then: "Michael, here!" A choked sound. From nearby. He raced toward her words. Then he found her ahead of him on a path, on her hands and knees. Her head down. He heard gasping. Was she wounded? Had Travis struck her with a pipe? Stabbed her?

O'Neil had to suppress his overwhelming urge to tend to her, see how badly hurt she was. He knew procedures. He ran closer, stood over her, his eyes scanning, swiveling around, looking for a target.

At last, some distance away, he saw Travis's back vanish.

"He's gone," Dance said, pulling her weapon from a thicket of bushes and rising to her feet. "Headed that way."

"You hurt?"

"Sore, that's all."

She did seem to be unharmed, but she was dusting at her suit in a way that was troubling to him. She was uncharacteristically shaken, disoriented. He could hardly blame her. But Kathryn Dance had always been a bulwark he could count on, a standard he measured his own behavior against. Her gestures reminded him that they were out of their element here, that this case wasn't a typical gangbanger hit or a weapons smuggling ring cruising up and down the 101.

"What happened?" he asked.

"Tripped me, then took off. Michael, it wasn't Travis."

"What?"

"I got a fast look at him. He was blond." Dance grimaced at a tear in her skirt, then gave up on the clothing. She started scanning the ground. "He dropped something… Okay, there." She picked it up. A can of spray paint.

"What's this all about?" he wondered aloud.

She tucked the gun away in her hip holster and turned back toward the house. "Let's go find out."

THEY ARRIVED BACK at the Brigham house simultaneously with the backup-two Pacific Grove town police cars. A longtime resident, Dance knew the officers and waved hello.

They joined her and O'Neil.

"You all right, Kathryn?" one cop asked, noting her disheveled hair and dusty skirt.

"Fine." She filled them in on the attack and pursuit. One officer used his shoulder-mounted Motorola to report the incident.

Dance and O'Neil had no sooner gotten to the house when a woman's voice called out from behind the screen, "Did you get him?" The door opened and the speaker stepped out on the porch. In her forties, Dance guessed, she had a round figure and her face was moonish. She wore painfully taut jeans and a billowy gray blouse with a triangle of stain on the belly. Kathryn Dance noted that the woman's cream pumps were hopelessly limp and scuffed from bearing her weight. From inattention too.

Dance and O'Neil identified themselves. The woman was Sonia Brigham and she was Travis's mother.

"Did you get him?" she persisted.

"Do you know who he was, why he attacked us?"

"He wasn't attacking you," Sonia said. "He probably didn't even see you. He was going for the windows. They've already got three of 'em."

One of the Pacific Grove officers explained, "The Brighams've been the target of vandalism lately."

"You said 'he'," Dance said. "Do you know who he was?"

"Not that particular one. There's a bunch of them."

"Bunch?" O'Neil asked.

"They're coming by all the time. Throwing rocks, bricks, painting stuff on the house and garage. That's what we've been living with." A contemptuous wave of the hand, presumably toward where the vandal had disappeared. "After everybody started saying those bad things about Travis. The other day, somebody threw a brick through the living room window, nearly hit my younger son. And look." She pointed to green spray paint graffiti on the side of a large lopsided shed in the side yard, about fifty feet away

KILL3R!!

Leetspeak, Dance noted.

Dance handed the spray paint to one of the Pacific Grove officers, who said they'd follow up on it. She described the boy-who looked like one of five hundred high school students in the area. They took a brief statement from both Dance and O'Neil, as well as Travis's mother, then climbed back into their cars and left.

"They're after my boy. And he didn't do anything! It's like the goddamn Ku Klux Klan! That brick nearly hit Sammy. He's a little troubled. He went crazy. Had an episode."

Vengeful Angels, Dance reflected. Though the bullying was no longer cyber; it had moved from the synth world into the real.

A round-faced teenager appeared on the porch. His wary smile made him look slow, but his eyes seemed fully comprehending as he took them in. "What is it, what is it?" His voice was urgent.

"It's okay, Sammy. Go back inside. You go to your room."

"Who're they?"

"You go on back to your room. You stay inside. Don't go to the pond."

"I want to go to the pond."

"Not now. Somebody was out there."

He ambled off into the house.

Michael O'Neil said, "Mrs. Brigham, there was a crime last night, an attempted murder. The victim was someone who'd posted a comment against Travis on a blog."

"Oh, that Chilton crap!" Sonia spat out between yellow teeth that had aged even faster than the woman's face. "That's what started it all. Somebody should throw a brick through his window. Now everybody's ganging up on our boy. And he didn't do anything. Why does everybody think he did? They said he stole my mother's car and was driving it on Lighthouse, you know, exposing himself. Well, my mother sold her car four years ago. That's how much they know." Then Sonia had a thought and the seesaw returned to the side of wariness. "Oh, wait, that girl in the trunk, going to be drowned?"

"That's right."

"Well, I'll tell you right now, my boy wouldn'ta done anything like that. I swear to God! You're not going to arrest him, are you?" She looked panicked.

Dance wondered: too panicked? Did she in fact suspect her son?

"We'd just like to talk to him."

The woman was suddenly uneasy. "My husband isn't home."

"You alone is fine. Both parents aren't necessary." But Dance could see that the problem was that she didn't want the responsibility.

"Well, Trav isn't here either."

"Will he be back soon?"

"He works part-time, at Bagel Express, for pocket money. His shift's in a little while. He'll have to come back here to pick up his uniform."

"Where is he now?"

A shrug. "Sometimes he goes to this video game place." She fell silent, probably thinking she shouldn't be saying anything. "My husband will be back soon."

Dance noted again the tone with which Sonia delivered those words. My husband.

"Was Travis out last night? Around midnight?"

"No." Offered fast.

"Are you sure?" Dance asked with a crisp tone. Sonia had just exhibited aversion-looking away-and blocking, touching her nose, a gesture Dance had not observed earlier.

Sonia swallowed. "Probably he was here. I'm not exactly sure. I went to bed early. Travis stays up till all hours. He might've gone out. But I didn't hear anything."

"And your husband?" She'd noted the singular pronoun regarding her bedtime. "Was he here around that time?"

"He plays poker some. I think he was at a game."

O'Neil was saying, "We really need to-"

His words braked to a halt as a tall, lanky teenager, shoulders and stance wide, appeared from the side yard. His black jeans were faded, patches of gray showing, and an olive-drab combat jacket covered a black sweatshirt. It didn't have a hood, Dance noted. He stopped suddenly, blinking in surprise at the visitors. A glance at the unmarked CBI car, which any viewer of a cop show on TV in the last ten years would instantly recognize for what it was.

Dance noted in the boy's posture and expression the typical reaction of someone spotting law enforcers, whether they were guilty or innocent: caution…and thinking quickly.

"Travis, honey, come over here."

He remained where he was, and Dance sensed O'Neil tensing.

But a second foot pursuit wasn't needed. Expressionless, the boy slouched forward to join them.

"These're police officers," his mother said. "They want to talk to you."

"I guess. What about?" His voice was casual, agreeable. He stood with his long arms dangling at his side. His hands were dirty and there was grit under his nails. His hair seemed washed, though; she supposed he did this regularly to combat the sprinkling of acne on his face.

She and O'Neil said hello to the boy and offered their IDs. He studied them for a long moment.

Buying time? Dance wondered.

"Somebody else was here," Sonia said to her son. She nodded at the graffiti. "Broke a couple more windows."

Travis took this news from his mother without emotion. He asked, "Sammy?"

"He didn't see."

O'Neil asked, "You mind if we go inside?"

He shrugged and they walked into the house, which smelled of mold and cigarette smoke. The place was ordered but grimy. The mismatched furniture seemed secondhand, slipcovers worn and pine legs sloughing off varnish. Dim pictures covered the walls, mostly decorative. Dance could see part of a National Geographic magazine logo just below the frame of a picture of Venice. A few were of the family. The two boys, and one or two of Sonia when she was younger.

Sammy appeared, as before, big, moving quickly, grinning again.

"Travis!" He charged toward his sibling. "Did you bring me M's?"

"Here you go." Travis dug into his pocket and handed the boy a packet of M &M's.

"Yea!" Sammy opened the package carefully, looked inside. Then gazed at his brother. "The pond was nice today."

"Was it?"

"Yeah." Sammy returned to his room, clutching the candy in his hand.

Travis said, "He doesn't look good. Did he take his pills?"

His mother looked away. "They…"

"Dad wouldn't get the prescription refilled because the price went up. Right?"

"He doesn't think they do that much good."

"They do a lot of good, Mom. You know how he gets when he doesn't take them."

Dance glanced into Sammy's room and saw that the boy's desk was covered with complicated electronic components, parts of computers and tools-along with toys for children much younger. He was reading a Japanese graphic novel as he slouched in a chair. The boy glanced up and stared at Dance intently, studying her. He gave a faint smile and nodded toward the book. Dance smiled back at the cryptic gesture. He returned to reading. His lips moved.

She noticed on a hall table a laundry basket filled with clothes. She tapped O'Neil's arm and glanced at a gray sweatshirt sitting on the top. It was a hoodie.

O'Neil nodded.

"How are you feeling?" Dance asked Travis. "After the accident?"

"Okay, I guess."

"It must've been terrible."

"Yeah."

"But you weren't hurt bad?"

"Not really. The airbag, you know. And I wasn't going that fast… Trish and Van." A grimace. "If they'd had their seat belts on they would've been fine."

Sonia repeated, "His father should be home anytime now."

O'Neil continued evenly, "Just have a few questions." Then he stepped back to the corner of the living room, leaving the questioning to Dance.

She asked, "What grade are you in?"

"Just finished junior year."

"Robert Louis Stevenson, right?"

"Yeah."

"What're you studying?"

"I don't know, stuff. I like computer science and math. Spanish. Just, you know, what everybody's taking."

"How's Stevenson?"

"It's okay. Better than Monterey Public or Junipero." He was answering agreeably, looking directly into her eyes.

At Junipero Serra School, uniforms were required. Dance supposed that more than stern Jesuits and long homework assignments, the dress code was the most hated aspect of the place.

"How're the gangs?"

"He's not in a gang," his mother said. Almost as if she wished he were.

They all ignored her.

"Not bad," Travis responded. "They leave us alone. Not like Salinas."

The point of these questions wasn't social. Dance was asking them to determine the boy's baseline behavior. After a few minutes of these harmless inquiries, Dance had a good feel for the boy's nondeceptive mode. Now she was ready to ask about the assault.

"Travis, you know Tammy Foster, don't you?"

"The girl in the trunk. It was on the news. She goes to Stevenson. She and me don't talk or anything. Maybe we had a class together freshman year." He then looked Dance straight in the eye. His hand occasionally strayed across his face but she wasn't sure whether it was a blocking gesture, signifying deception, or because he was ashamed of the acne. "She posted some stuff about me in The Chilton Report. It wasn't true."

"What did she say?" Dance asked, though she recalled the post, about his trying to take pictures of the girls' locker room after cheerleading practice.

The boy hesitated, as if wondering if she was trying to trap him. "She said I was taking pictures. You know, of the girls." His face grew dark. "But I was just on the phone, you know, talking."

"Really," his mother interjected. "Bob'll be home any minute now. I might rather wait."

But Dance felt a certain urgency to keep going. She knew without doubt that if Sonia wanted to wait for her husband, the man would put a fast end to the interview.

Travis asked, "Is she going to be okay? Tammy?"

"Looks like it."

He glanced at the scarred coffee table, where an empty but smudged ashtray rested. Dance didn't think she'd seen an ashtray in a living room for years. "You think I did it? Tried to hurt her?" How easily his dark eyes, set deep beneath those brows, held hers.

"No. We're just talking to everybody who might have information about the situation."

"Situation?" he asked.

"Where were you last night? Between eleven and one?"

Another sweep of the hair. "I went to the Game Shed about ten-thirty."

"What's that?"

"This place where you can play video games. Like an arcade. I kind of hang there some. You know where it is? It's by Kinko's. It used to be that old movie theater but that got torn down and they put it in. It's not the best, the connections aren't so good, but it's the only one that's open late."

Dance noted the rambling. She asked, "You were alone?"

"There were, like, other kids there. But I was playing alone."

"I thought you were here," Sonia said.

A shrug. "I was here. I went out. I couldn't sleep."

"At the Game Shed were you online?" Dance asked.

"Like, no. I was playing pinball, not RPG."

"Not what?"

"Role-playing games. For shooter and pinball and driving games you don't go online."

He said this patiently, though he seemed surprised she didn't know the distinction.

"So you weren't logged on?"

"That's what I'm saying."

"How long were you there?" His mother had taken on the interrogation.

"I don't know, an hour, two."

"What do those games cost? Fifty cents, a dollar every few minutes?"

So that was Sonia's agenda. Money.

"If you play good, it lets you keep on going. Cost me three dollars for the whole night. I used money I made. And I got some food too and a couple of Red Bulls."

"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."

Chapter 11

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 Overby'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.

"What brings you to Monterey?" she asked.

"Caseload evaluations." Offering nothing more.

Robert Harper seemed to be one of those people who, if he had nothing to say, was comfortable with silence. Dance believed too she recognized in his face an intensity, a sense of devotion to his mission, akin to what she'd seen in the Reverend Fisk's face at the hospital protest. Though how much of a mission caseload analysis would entail was a mystery to her.

He turned his attention to her briefly. She was used to being looked over, but usually by suspects; Harper's perusal was unsettling. It was as if she held the key to an important mystery for him.

Then he said to Overby, "I'm going to be outside for a few minutes, Charles. If you could keep the door to the conference room locked, I'd appreciate it."

"Sure. Anything else you need, just let me know."

A chilly nod. Then Harper was gone, fishing a phone from his pocket.

"What's the story with him?" Dance asked.

"Special prosecutor from Sacramento. Had a call from upstairs-"

The attorney general.

"-to cooperate. He wants to know about our caseload. Maybe something big's going down and he needs to see how busy we are. He spent some time at the sheriff's office too. Wish he'd go back and bug them. Fellow's a cold fish. Don't know what to say to him. Tried some jokes. They fell flat."

But Dance was thinking about the Tammy Foster case; Robert Harper was gone from her mind.

She and Boling returned to her office and she'd just sat down at her desk when O'Neil called. She was pleased. She guessed he'd have the results of the analysis of the bike tread dirt and the gray fiber from the sweatshirt.

"Kathryn, we have a problem." His voice was troubled.

"Go on."

"Well, first, Peter says the gray fiber they found in the cross? It matches what we found at Travis's."

"So he is the one. What'd the magistrate say about the warrant?"

"Didn't get that far. Travis's on the run."

"What?"

"He didn't show up for work. Or, he did show up-there were fresh bike tread marks behind the place. He snuck into the back room, stole some bagels and some cash from the purse of one of the workers…and a butcher's knife. Then he disappeared. I called his parents, but they haven't heard from him and claim they don't have any idea where he might go."

"Where are you?"

"In my office. I'm going to put out a detain alert on him. Us, Salinas, San Benito, surrounding counties."

Dance rocked back, furious with herself. Why hadn't she planned better and had somebody follow the boy when he left his house? She'd managed to establish his guilt-and simultaneously let him slip through her fingers.

And, hell, now she'd have to tell Overby what had happened.

But you didn't bring him in?

"There's something else. When I was at the bagel place, I looked up the alley. There's that deli near Safeway."

"Sure, I know it."

"They have a flower stand on the side of the building."

"Roses!" she said.

"Exactly. I talked to the owner." O'Neil's voice went flat. "Yesterday, somebody snuck up to the place and stole all the bouquets of red roses."

She understood now why he was sounding so grave. "All?…How many did he take?"

A slight pause. "A dozen. It looks like he's just getting started."

Chapter 12

Dance's phone rang. A glance at Caller ID.

"TJ. Was just about to call you."

"Didn't have any luck with security cameras but there's a sale on Blue Mountain Jamaican coffee at Java House. Three pounds for the price of two. Still sets you back close to fifty bucks. But that coffee is the best."

She made no response to his banter. He noticed it. "What's up, boss?"

"Change of plans, TJ." She told him about Travis Brigham, the forensics match and the dozen stolen bouquets.

"He's on the run, boss? He's planning more?"

"Yep. I want you to get to Bagel Express, talk to his friends, anybody who knows him, find out where he might go. People he might be staying with. Favorite places."

"Sure, I'll get right on it."

Dance then called Rey Carraneo, who was having no luck in his search for witnesses near the parking lot where Tammy Foster had been abducted. She briefed him as well and told him to head over to the Game Shed to find any leads to where the boy might've gone.

After hanging up, Dance sat back. A frustrating sense of helplessness came over her. She needed witnesses, people to interview. This was a skill she was born to, one she enjoyed and was good at. But now the case slogged along in the world of evidence and speculation.

She glanced at the printouts of The Chilton Report.

"I think we better start contacting the potential victims and warning them. Are people attacking him in the social sites too, MySpace, Facebook, OurWorld?" she asked Boling

"It's not as big a story in those; they're international sites. The Chilton Report is local, so that's where ninety percent of the attacks on Travis are. I'll tell you one thing that would help: getting the Internet addresses of the posters. If we could get those, we can contact their service providers and find their physical addresses. It would save a lot of time."

"How?"

"Have to be from Chilton himself or his webmaster."

"Jon, can you tell me anything about him that'll help me persuade him to cooperate, if he balks?"

"I know about his blog," Boling responded, "but not much about him personally. Other than the bio in The Report itself. But I'd be happy to do some detective work." His eyes had taken on the sparkle she'd seen earlier. He turned back to his computer.

Puzzles…

While the professor was lost in his homework assignment Dance took a call from O'Neil. A Crime Scene team had searched the alley behind Bagel Express and found traces of sand and dirt where the tread marks showed Travis had left his bike; they matched the sandy soil where Tammy's car had been left on the beach. He added that an MCSO team had canvassed the area but nobody had seen him.

O'Neil told her too that he'd gotten a half dozen other officers from Highway Patrol to join in the manhunt. They were coming in from Watsonville.

They disconnected and Dance slumped back in her chair.

After a few minutes, Boling said that he'd gotten some background on Chilton from the blog itself and from other research. He called up the homepage again, which had the bio Chilton himself had written.

http://www.thechiltonreport.com

Scrolling down, Dance began to skim the blog while Boling offered, "James David Chilton, forty-three years old. Married to Patrizia Brisbane, two boys, ten and twelve. Lives in Carmel. But he also has property in Hollister, vacation house, it looks like, and some income property around San Jose. They inherited it when the wife's father died a few years ago. Now, the most interesting thing I found out about Chilton is that he's always had a quirky habit. He'd write letters."

"Letters?"

"Letters to the editor, letters to his congressmen, op ed pieces. He started with snail mail-before the Internet really took off-then emails. He's written thousands of them. Rants, criticism, praise, compliments, political commentary. You name it. He was quoted as saying one of his favorite books was Herzog, the Saul Bellow novel about a man obsessed with writing letters. Basically Chilton's message was about upholding moral values, exposing corruption, extolling politicians who do good, trashing the ones who don't-exactly what his blog does now. I found a lot of them online. Then, it seems, he found out about the blogosphere. He started The Chilton Report about five years ago. Now before I go on, it might be helpful to know a little history of blogs."

"Sure."

"The term comes from 'weblog,' which was coined by a computer guru in nineteen ninety-seven, Jorn Barger. He wrote an online diary about his travels and what he'd been looking at on the Web. Now, people'd been recording their thoughts online for years but what made blogs distinctive was the concept of links. That's the key to a blog. You're reading something and you come to that underlined or boldface reference in the text and click on it and that takes you someplace else.

"Linking is called 'hypertext.' The H-T-T-P in a website address? It stands for 'hypertext transfer protocol.' That's the software that lets you create links. In my opinion it was one of the most significant aspects of the Internet. Maybe the most significant.

"Well, once hypertext became common, blogs started to take off. People who could write code in HTML-hypertext markup language, the computer language of links-could create their own blogs pretty easily. But more and more people wanted in and not everybody was tech savvy. So companies came up with programs that anybody, well, almost anybody, could use to create linked blogs with-Pitas, Blogger and Groksoup were the early ones. Dozens of others followed. And now all you have to do is have an account with Google or Yahoo and, poof, you can make a blog. Combine that with the bargain price of data storage nowadays-and getting cheaper every minute-and you've got the blogosphere."

Boling's narrative was animated and ordered. He'd be a great professor, she reflected.

"Now, before Nine-eleven," Boling explained, "blogs were mostly computer-oriented. They were written by tech people for tech people. After September Eleventh, though, a new type of blog appeared. They were called war blogs, after the attacks and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Those bloggers weren't interested in technology. They were interested in politics, economics, society, the world. I describe the distinction this way: While pre-Nine-eleven blogs were inner-directed-toward the Internet itself-the war blogs are outer-directed. Those bloggers look at themselves as journalists, part of what's known as the New Media. They want press credentials, just like CNN and Washington Post reporters, and they want to be taken seriously.

"Jim Chilton is the quintessential war blogger. He doesn't care about the Internet per se or the tech world, except to the extent it lets him get his message out. He writes about the real world. Now the two sides-the original bloggers and the war bloggers-constantly battle for the number-one spot in the blogosphere."

"It's a contest?" she asked, amused.

"To them it is."

"They can't coexist?"

"Sure, but it's an ego-driven world and they'll do anything they can to be top of the heap. And that means two things. One, having as many subscribers as possible. And two, more important-having as many other blogs as possible include links to yours."

"Incestuous."

"Very. Now, you asked what could I tell you to get Chilton's cooperation. Well, you have to remember that The Chilton Report is the real thing. It's important and influential. You notice that one of the early posts in the 'Roadside Crosses' thread was from an executive at Caltrans? He wanted to defend their inspection of the highway. That tells me that government officials and CEOs read the blog regularly. And get pretty damn upset if Chilton says anything bad about them.

"The Report leans toward local issues but local in this case is California, which isn't really local at all. Everybody in the world keeps an eye on us. They either love or hate the state, but they all read about it. Also, Chilton himself's emerged as a serious journalist. He works his sources, he writes well. He's reasonable and he picks real issues-he's not sensationalist. I searched for Britney Spears and Paris Hilton in his blog, going back four years, and neither name came up."

Dance had to be impressed with that.

"He's not a part-timer, either. Three years ago he began to work on the report full-time. And he campaigns it hard."

"What does that mean, 'campaign'?"

Boling scrolled down to the "On the Home Front" thread on the homepage.

http://www.thechiltonreport.com

WE'RE GOING GLOBAL!

Am pleased to report that The Report has been getting raves from around the world. It's been selected as one of the lead blogs in a new RSS feed (we'll call it "Really Simple Syndication") that will link thousands of other blogs, websites and bulletin boards throughout the world. Kudos to you, my readers, for making The Report as popular as it is.

"RSS is another next big thing. It actually stands for RDF Site Syndication-'RDF' is Resource Description Framework, if you're interested, and there's no reason for you to be. RSS is a way of customizing and consolidating updated material from blogs and websites and podcasts. Look at your browser. At the top is a little orange square with a dot in the corner and two curved lines."

"I've seen it."

"That's your RSS feeds. Chilton is trying hard to get picked up by other bloggers and websites. That's important to him. And it's important to you too. Because it tells us something about him."

"He's got an ego I can stroke?"

"Yep. That's one thing to remember. I'm also thinking of something else you can try with him, something more nefarious."

"I like nefarious."

"You'll want to somehow hint that his helping you will be good publicity for the blog. It'll get the name of The Report around in the mainstream media. Also, you could hint that you or somebody at CBI could be a source for information in the future." Boling nodded at the screen, where the blog glowed. "I mean, first and foremost, he's an investigative reporter. He appreciates sources."

"Okay. Good idea. I'll try it."

A smile. "Of course, the other thing he might do is consider your request an invasion of journalistic ethics. In which case he'll slam the door in your face."

Dance looked at the screen. "These blogs-they're a whole different world."

"Oh, that they are. And we're just beginning to comprehend the power they have-how they're changing the way we get information and form opinions. There are probably sixty million of them now."

"That many?"

"Yep. And they do great things-they prefilter information so you don't have to Google your way through millions of sites, they're a community of like-minded people, they can be funny, creative. And, like The Chilton Report, they police society and keep us honest. But there's a dark side too."

"Propagating rumors," Dance said.

"That's one thing, yes. And another problem is what I said earlier about Tammy: They encourage people to be careless. People feel protected online and in the synth world. Life seems anonymous, posting under a nym or nic-a screen name-so you give away all sorts of information about yourself. But remember: Every single fact about you-or lie-that you post, or somebody posts about you, is there forever. It will never, ever go away."

Boling continued, "But I feel the biggest problem is that people tend not to question the accuracy of the reporting. Blogs give an impression of authenticity-the information's more democratic and honest because it comes from the people, not from big media. But my point-and it's earned me plenty of black eyes in academia and in the blogosphere-is that that's bullshit. The New York Times is a for-profit corporation but is a thousand times more objective than most blogs. There's very little accountability online. Holocaust denials, Nine-eleven conspiracies, racism, they all thrive, thanks to blogs. They take on an authenticity some weirdo at a cocktail party doesn't have when he spouts off that Israel and the CIA were behind the Trade Towers attack."

Dance returned to her desk and lifted her phone. "I think I'll put all your research to use, Jon. Let's see what happens."

JAMES CHILTON'S HOUSE was in an upscale area of Carmel, the yard close to an acre, and filled with trimmed but hodgepodge gardens, which suggested that husband, wife or both spent plenty of weekend hours extracting weeds and inserting plants, rather than paying pros to do it.

Dance gazed at the outside décor enviously. Gardening, though much appreciated, wasn't one of her skills. Maggie said that if plants didn't have roots they'd run when her mother stepped into the garden.

The house was an expansive ranch, about forty years old, and squatted at the back of the property. Dance estimated six bedrooms. Their cars were a Lexus sedan and a Nissan Quest, sitting in a large garage filled with plenty of sports equipment, which unlike similar articles in Dance's garage, actually appeared well used.

She had to laugh at the bumper stickers on Chilton's vehicles. They echoed headlines from his blog: one against the desalination plant and one against the sex education proposal. Left and right, Democrat and Republican.

He's more cut-and-paste…

There was another car here too, in the drive; a visitor, probably, since the Taurus bore the subtle decal of a rental car company. Dance parked and walked to the front door, rang the bell.

Footsteps grew louder, and she was greeted by a brunette woman in her early forties, slender, wearing designer jeans and a white blouse, the collar turned up. A thick Daniel Yurman knotted necklace, in silver, was at her throat.

The shoes, Dance couldn't help but identify, came from Italy and were knockouts.

The agent identified herself, proffering her ID. "I called earlier. To see Mr. Chilton."

The woman's face eased into the hint of a frown that typically forms when one meets law enforcers. Her name was Patrizia-she pronounced it Pa-treet-sia.

"Jim's just finishing up a meeting. I'll go tell him you're here."

"Thank you."

"Come on in."

She led Dance to a homey den, the walls covered with pictures of family, then disappeared into the house for a moment. Patrizia returned. "He'll be just a moment."

"Thank you. These are your boys?" Dance was pointing at a picture of Patrizia, a lanky balding man she took to be Chilton and two dark-haired boys, who reminded her of Wes. They were all smiling at the camera. The woman proudly said, "Jim and Chet."

Chilton's wife continued through the photos. From the pictures of the woman in her youth-at Carmel Beach, Point Lobos, the Mission -Dance guessed she was a native. Patrizia explained that, yes, she was; in fact, she'd grown up in this very house. "My father had been living here alone for years. When he passed, about three years ago, Jim and I moved in."

Dance liked the idea of a family home, passed down from generation to generation. She reflected that Michael O'Neil's parents still lived in the oceanview house where he and his siblings had grown up. With his father suffering from senility, his mother was thinking of selling the place and moving into a retirement community. But O'Neil was determined to keep the property in the family.

As Patrizia was pointing out photos that displayed the family's exhausting athletic accomplishments-golf, soccer, tennis, triathlons-Dance heard voices in the front hall.

She turned to see two men. Chilton-she recognized him from the pictures-wore a baseball cap, green polo shirt and chinos. Blondish hair eased in tufts from under the hat. He was tall and apparently in good shape, with only a bit of belly swelling above his belt. He was speaking to another man, sandy-haired, wearing jeans, a white shirt and a brown sports coat. Dance started toward them but Chilton quickly ushered the man out of the door. Her kinesic reading was that he didn't want the visitor, whoever he was, to know that a law enforcement agent had come to see him.

Patrizia repeated, "He'll just be a minute."

But Dance sidestepped her and continued into the hall, sensing the wife stiffen, protective of her husband. Still, an interviewer has to take immediate charge of the situation; subjects can't set the rules. But by the time Dance got to the front door Chilton was back and the rental car heading off, gravel crunching under tires.

His green eyes-similar to her shade-turned their attention her way. They shook hands and she read in the blogger's face, tanned and freckled, curiosity and a certain defiance, more than wariness.

Another flash of the ID. "Could we talk somewhere for a few minutes, Mr. Chilton?"

"My office, sure."

He led her up the hall. The room they entered was modest and a mess, filled with towers of magazines and clippings and computer printouts. Underscoring what she'd learned from Jon Boling, the officer revealed that indeed the reporter's game was changing: small rooms in houses and apartments just like this were replacing city-desk rooms of newspapers. Dance was amused to see a cup of tea beside his computer-the scent of chamomile filled the room. No cigarettes, coffee or whisky for today's hard-edged journalists, apparently.

They sat and he lifted his eyebrow. "So he's been complaining, has he? But I'm curious. Why the police, why not a civil suit?"

"How's that?" Dance was confused.

Chilton rocked back in his chair, removed his cap, rubbed his balding head and slipped the hat back on. He was irritated. "Oh, he bitches about libel. But it's not defamation if it's true. Besides, even if what I wrote was false, which it isn't, libel's not a crime in this country. Would be in Stalinist Russia, but it's not here yet. So why're you involved?" His eyes were keen and probing, his mannerisms intense; Dance could imagine how it might soon get tiring to spend much time in his presence.

"I'm not sure what you mean."

"Aren't you here because of Arnie Brubaker?"

"No. Who's that?"

"He's the man who wants to destroy our shoreline by putting in that desalination plant."

She recalled the blog postings in The Chilton Report critical of the plant. And the bumper sticker.

"No, this has nothing to do with that."

Chilton's forehead crinkled. "He'd love to stop me. I thought maybe he'd trumped up some criminal complaint. But sorry. I was making assumptions." The defensiveness in his face relaxed. "It's just, well, Brubaker's really a…pain."

Dance wondered what the intended descriptive of the developer was going to have been.

"Excuse me." Patrizia appeared in the doorway and brought her husband a fresh cup of tea. She asked Dance if she'd like anything. She was smiling now but still eyed the agent suspiciously.

"Thanks, no."

Chilton nodded at the tea and charmingly winked his thanks to his wife. She left and closed the door behind her.

"So, what can I do for you?"

"Your blog about the roadside crosses."

"Oh, the car accident?" He regarded Dance closely. Some of the defensiveness was back; she could read the stress in his posture. "I've been following the news. That girl was attacked, the press is saying, because she posted something on the blog. The posters are starting to say the same thing. You want the boy's name."

"No. We have it."

"Is he the one who tried to drown her?"

"It seems so."

Chilton said quickly, "I didn't attack him. My point was, did the police drop the ball on the investigation and did Caltrans adequately maintain the road? I said up front that he wasn't to blame. And I censored his name."

"It didn't take long for a mob to form and find out who he is."

Chilton's mouth twisted. He'd taken the comment as criticism of him or the blog, which it wasn't. But he conceded. "That does happen. Well, what can I do for you?"

"We have reason to believe that Travis Brigham may be considering attacking other people who posted comments against him."

"Are you sure?"

"No, but we have to consider it's a possibility."

Chilton grimaced. "I mean, can't you arrest him?"

"We're looking for him now. We aren't sure where he is."

"I see." Chilton said this slowly and Dance could see from his lifted shoulders and the tension in his neck he was wondering what exactly she wanted. The agent considered Jon Boling's advice and said, "Now, your blog is known all over the world. It's very respected. That's one of the reasons so many people are posting on it."

The flash of pleasure in his eyes was faint but obvious to Dance; it told her that even obvious flattery went down very well with James Chilton.

"But the problem is that all the posters attacking Travis are potential targets. And the number's increasing every hour."

"The Report has one of the highest hit ratings in the country. It's the most-read blog in California."

"I'm not surprised. I really enjoy it." Keeping an eye on her own mannerisms, so as not to telegraph the deception.

"Thank you." A full smile joined the eye crinkle.

"But see what we're facing: Every time somebody posts to the 'Roadside Crosses' thread they become a possible target. Some of those people are completely anonymous, some are out of the area. But some are nearby and we're afraid Travis will find out their identities. And then he'll go after them too."

"Oh," Chilton said, his smile vanishing. His quick mind made the leap. "And you're here for their Internet addresses."

"For their protection."

"I can't give those out."

"But these people are at risk."

"This country operates on the principle of separation of media and state." As if this flippant recitation skewered her argument.

"That girl was thrown into a trunk and left to drown. Travis could be planning another attack right now."

Chilton held up a finger, shushing her like a schoolteacher. "It's a slippery slope. Agent Dance, who do you work for? Your ultimate boss?"

"The attorney general."

"Okay, well, say I give you the addresses of posters on the 'Roadside Crosses' thread. Then next month you come back and ask for the address of a whistleblower who was fired by the attorney general for, oh, let's pick harassment. Or maybe you want the address of somebody who posted a comment critical of the governor. Or the president. Or-how 'bout this-someone who says something favorable about al-Qaeda? You say to me: 'You gave me the information last time. Why not again?' "

"There won't be an again."

"You say that but…" As if government employees lied with every breath. "Does this boy know you're after him?"

"Yes."

"Then he's run off somewhere, wouldn't you think? He's not going to show himself by attacking somebody else. Not if the police are looking for him." His voice was stern.

Hers was reasonable as she continued slowly, "Still. You know, Mr. Chilton, sometimes life is about compromises."

She let this comment linger.

He cocked an eyebrow, waiting.

"If you gave us the addresses-just of the locals who wrote the most vicious posts about Travis-we'd really appreciate it. Maybe…well, maybe we could do something to help you, if you ever needed a hand."

"Like what?"

Thinking again about Boling's suggestions, she said, "We'd be happy to issue a statement about your cooperation. Good publicity."

Chilton considered this. But then frowned. "No. if I were to help you it'd probably be best not to mention it."

She was pleased; he was negotiating. "Okay, I can understand that. But maybe there's something else we could do."

"Really? What?"

Thinking about another suggestion the professor had made, she said, "Maybe, well, if you need any contacts in the California law enforcement agencies… Sources. High-up ones."

He leaned forward, eyes flaring. "So you are trying to bribe me. I thought so. Just had to draw you out a little. Got you, Agent Dance."

She sat back as if she'd been slapped.

Chilton continued, "Appealing to my public spirit is one thing. This…" He waved his hand at her. "…is distasteful. And corrupt, if you ask me. It's the kind of maneuvering I expose in my blog every day."

Of course, the other thing he might do is consider your request an invasion of journalistic ethics. In which case he'll slam the door in your face.

"Tammy Foster was almost killed. There could be others."

"I'm very sorry for that. But The Report is too important to jeopardize. And if people think they can't post anonymously it'll change the integrity of the entire blog."

"I'd like you to reconsider."

The blogger's strident facade faded. "That man I was meeting with when you got here?"

She nodded.

"Gregory Ashton." He said this with some intensity, the way people will when speaking about someone significant to them, but who have no meaning to you. Chilton noted the blank expression. He continued, "He's starting a new network of blogs and websites, one of the biggest in the world. I'll be at the flagship level. He's spending millions to promote it."

This was the issue that Boling had explained to her. Ashton must have been the one behind the RSS feed Chilton was referring to in the "We're Going Global" posting.

"That expands the scope of The Report exponentially. I can take on problems around the world. AIDS in Africa, human rights violations in Indonesia, atrocities in Kashmir, environmental disasters in Brazil. But if word were to get out that I gave away the Internet address of my posters, that could put the sanctity of The Report at risk."

Dance was frustrated, though part of her, as a former journalist, grudgingly understood. Chilton wasn't resisting out of greed or ego, but from a genuine passion for his readers.

Though that hardly helped her out.

"People could die," she persisted.

"This question has come up before, Agent Dance. The responsibility of bloggers." He stiffened slightly. "A few years ago I did an exclusive post about a well-known writer who I found out had plagiarized some passages from another novelist. He claimed it was an accident, and begged me not to run the story. But I ran it anyway. He started drinking again and his life fell apart. Was that my goal? God, no. But either the rules exist or they don't. Why should he get away with cheating when you and I don't?

"I did a blog about a deacon from San Francisco who was head of an antigay movement-and, it turned out, a closet homosexual. I had to expose the hypocrisy." He looked right into Dance's eyes. "And the man killed himself. Because of what I wrote. Killed himself. I live with that every day. But did I do the right thing? Yes. If Travis attacks somebody else, then I'll feel terrible about that too. But we're dealing with bigger issues here, Agent Dance."

"I was a reporter too," she said.

"You were?"

"Crime reporter. I'm against censorship completely. We're not talking about the same thing. I'm not telling you to change your postings. I just want to know the names of people who've posted so we can protect them."

"Can't do it." The flint was back in his voice. He looked at his watch. She knew the interview was over. He rose.

Still, one last shot. "No one will ever know. We'll say we found out through other means."

Escorting her to the door, Chilton gave a genuine laugh. "Secrets in the blogosphere, Agent Dance? Do you know how fast word spreads in today's world?…At the speed of light."

Chapter 13

As she drove along the highway, Kathryn Dance called Jon Boling.

"How did it go?" he asked brightly.

"What was that phrase that was in the blog about Travis? One of the kids posted it. 'Epic' something…"

"Oh." Less cheer now. "Epic fail."

"Yeah, that describes it pretty well. I tried for the good-publicity approach but he went for door number two: the fascists trammeling free press. With a touch of 'the world needs me.' "

"Ouch. Sorry about that. Bad call."

"It was worth a shot. But I think you'd better start trying to get as many names as you can on your own."

"I already have. Just in case Chilton gave you the boot. I should have some names soon. Oh, did he say he'd get even in a blog posting about you for suggesting it?"

She chuckled. "Came close. The headline would've been 'CBI agent in attempted bribe.' "

"I doubt he will-you're small potatoes. Nothing personal. But with hundreds of thousands of people reading what he writes, he sure does have the power to make you worry." Then Boling's voice grew somber. "I should tell you the postings are getting worse. Some of the posters are saying they've seen Travis doing devil worship, sacrificing animals. And there are stories about him groping other students, girls and boys. All sounds bogus to me, though. It's like they're trying to one-up each other. The stories are getting more outlandish."

Rumors…

"The one thing that's a recurring reference, which makes me think there's some truth in it, is the online role-playing games. They're talking about the kid being obsessed with fighting and death. Especially with swords and knives and slashing his victims."

"He's slipped into the synthetic world."

"Seems that way."

After they disconnected, Dance turned up the volume on her iPod Touch-she was listening to Badi Assad, the beautiful Brazilian guitarist and singer. It was illegal to listen through the ear buds while driving, but running the music through the speakers in a cop car didn't produce the most faithful sound quality.

And she needed a serious dose of soul-comforting music.

Dance felt the urgency to pursue the case, but she was a mother too and she'd always balanced her two worlds. She'd now pick up her children from her mother's care at the hospital, spend a little time with them and drop them off at her parents' house, where Stuart Dance would resume baby-sitting, after he returned from his meeting at the aquarium. And she would head back to the CBI to continue the hunt for Travis Brigham.

She continued the drive in the big, unmarked CVPI-her Police Interceptor Ford. It handled like a combination race car and tank. Not that Dance had ever pushed the vehicle to its limits. She wasn't a natural driver and, though she'd taken the required high-speed-pursuit course in Sacramento, couldn't picture herself actually chasing another driver along the winding roads of central California. With this thought, an image from the blog came to mind-the photo of the roadside crosses at the site of the terrible accident on Highway 1 on June 9, the tragedy that had set all of this subsequent horror in motion.

She now pulled up in the hospital lot and noticed several California Highway Patrol cars, and two unmarkeds, parked in front of the hospital. She couldn't remember a report about any police action involving injuries. Climbing from the car, she observed a change in the protesters. For one thing, there were more of them. Three dozen or so. And they'd been joined by two more news crews.

Also, she noticed, they were boisterous, waving their placards and crosses like sports fans. Smiling, chanting. Dance noticed that the Reverend Fisk was being approached by several men, shaking his hands in sequence. His red-haired minder was carefully scanning the parking lot.

And then Dance froze, gasping.

Walking out the front door of the hospital were Wes and Maggie-faces grim-accompanied by an African-American woman in a navy blue suit. She was directing them to one of the unmarked sedans.

Robert Harper, the special prosecutor she'd met outside Charles Overby's office, emerged.

And behind him walked Dance's mother. Edie Dance was flanked by two large uniformed CHP troopers, and she was in handcuffs.

DANCE JOGGED FORWARD.

"Mom!" twelve-year-old Wes shouted and ran across the parking lot, pulling his sister after him.

"Wait, you can't do that!" shouted the woman who'd been accompanying them. She started forward, fast.

Dance knelt, embracing her son and daughter.

The woman's stern voice resounded across the parking lot. "We're taking the children-"

"You're not taking anybody," Dance growled, then turned again to her children: "Are you all right?"

"They arrested Grandma!" Maggie said, tears welling. Her chestnut braid hung limply over her shoulder, where it had jumped in the run.

"I'll talk to them in a minute." Dance rose. "You're not hurt, are you?"

"No." Lean Wes, nearly as tall as his mother, said in a shaky voice, "They just, that woman and the police, they just came and got us and said they're taking us someplace, I don't know where."

"I don't want to leave you, Mommy!" Maggie clung to her tightly.

Dance reassured her daughter, "Nobody's taking you anywhere. Okay, go get in the car."

The woman in the blue suit approached and said in a low tone, "Ma'am, I'm afraid-" And found herself talking to Dance's CBI identification card and shield, thrust close to her face. "The children are going with me," Dance said.

The woman read the ID, unimpressed. "It's procedure. You understand. It's for their own good. We'll get it all sorted out and if everything checks out-"

"The children are going with me."

"I'm a social worker with Monterey County Child Services." Her own ID appeared.

Dance was thinking that there were probably negotiations that should be going on at the moment but still she pulled her handcuffs out of her back holster in a smooth motion and swung them open like a large crab claw. "Listen to me. I'm their mother. You know my identity. You know theirs. Now back off, or I'm arresting you under California Penal Code section two-oh-seven."

Observing this, the TV reporters seemed to stiffen as one, like a lizard sensing the approach of an oblivious beetle. Cameras swung their way.

The woman turned toward Robert Harper, who seemed to debate. He glanced at the reporters and apparently decided that, in this situation, bad publicity was worse than no publicity. He nodded.

Dance smiled to her children, hitching the cuffs away, and walked them to her car. "It's going to be okay. Don't worry. This is just a big mix-up." She closed the door, locking it with the remote. She stormed past the social worker, who was glaring back with sleek, defiant eyes, and approached her mother, who was being eased into the back of a squad car.

"Honey!" Edie Dance exclaimed.

"Mom, what's-"

"You can't talk to the prisoner," Harper said.

She whirled and faced Harper, who was exactly her height. "Don't play games with me. What's this all about?"

He regarded her calmly. "She's being taken to the county lockup for processing and a bail hearing. She's been arrested and informed of her rights. I have no obligation to say anything to you."

The cameras continued to pick up every second of the drama.

Edie Dance called, "They said I killed Juan Millar!"

"Please be quiet, Mrs. Dance."

The agent raged at Harper, "That 'caseload evaluation'? It was just bullshit, right?"

Harper easily ignored her.

Dance's cell phone rang and she stepped aside to answer it. "Dad."

"Katie, I just got home and found the police here. State police. They're searching everything. Mrs. Kensington next door said they took away a couple of boxes of things."

"Dad, Mom's been arrested…"

"What?"

"That mercy killing. Juan Millar."

"Oh, Katie."

"I'm taking the kids to Martine's, then meet me at the courthouse in Salinas. She's going to be booked and there'll be a bond hearing."

"Sure. I…I don't know what to do, honey." His voice broke.

It cut her deeply to hear her own father-normally unflappable and in control-sounding so helpless.

"We'll get it worked out," she said, trying to sound confident but feeling just as uncertain and confused as he would be. "I'll call later, Dad." They disconnected.

"Mom," she called through the car window, looking down at her mother's grim face. "It'll be all right. I'll see you at the courthouse."

The prosecutor said sternly, "Agent Dance, I don't want to remind you again. No talking to the prisoner."

She ignored Harper. "And don't say a word to anyone," she warned her mother.

"I hope we're not going to have a security problem here," the prosecutor said stiffly.

Dance glared back, silently defying him to make good on his threat, whatever it might be. Then she glanced at the CHP troopers nearby, one of whom she'd worked with. His eyes avoided hers. Everybody was in Harper's pocket on this one.

She turned and strode back toward her car, but diverted to the woman social worker.

Dance stood close. "Those children have cell phones. I'm number two on speed dial, right after nine-one-one. And I guarantee they told you I'm a law enforcement officer. Why the fuck didn't you call me?"

The woman blinked and reared back. "You can't talk to me that way."

"Why the fuck didn't you call?"

"I was following procedures."

"Procedures are the welfare of the child comes first. You contact the parent or guardian in circumstances like this."

"Well, I was doing what I was told."

"How long've you had this job?"

"That's none of your business."

"Well, I'll tell you, miss. There're two answers: either not long enough, or way too long."

"You can't-"

But Dance was gone by then and climbing back into her car, grinding the starter; she'd never shut the engine off when she'd arrived.

"Mom," Maggie asked, weeping with heartbreaking whimpers. "What's going to happen to Grandma?"

Dance wasn't going to put on a false facade for the children; she'd learned as a parent that in the end it was better to confront pain and fear, rather than to deny or defer them. But she had to struggle to keep panic from her voice. "Your grandmother's going to see a judge and I hope she'll be home soon. Then we're going to find out what's happened. We just don't know yet."

She'd take the children to the home of her best friend, Martine Christensen, with whom she operated her music website.

"I don't like that man," Wes said.

"Who?"

"Mr. Harper."

"I don't like him either," Dance said.

"I want to go to the courthouse with you," Maggie said.

"No, Mags. I don't know how long I'm going to be there."

Dance glanced back and gave a reassuring smile to the children.

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 lawyer 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.

Dance lifted her eyes to her mother as she was brought in. It broke her heart to see the woman in handcuffs. She wasn't in a jumpsuit. But her hair, normally perfectly done, was in a shambles. Her homemade necklace had been taken from her upon processing. Her wedding and engagement rings too. Her eyes were red.

Lawyers milled about, some not much spiffier than their clients; only Edie Dance's attorney was in a suit that had been shaped by a tailor after purchase. George Sheedy had been practicing criminal law on the Central Coast for two decades. He had abundant gray hair, a trapezoidal figure with broad shoulders and a bass voice that would have done a stunning version of "Old Man River."

After the brief phone conversation with Sheedy from the car, Dance had immediately called Michael O'Neil, who'd been shocked at the news. She then called the Monterey County prosecutor, Alonzo "Sandy" Sandoval.

"I just heard about it, Kathryn," Sandoval muttered angrily. "I'm being straight with you: We've had MCSO looking into the Millar death, sure, but I had no idea that's what Harper was in town for. And a public arrest." He was bitter. "That was inexcusable. If the AG insisted on a prosecution, I would've had her surrender with you bringing her in."

Dance believed him. She and Sandy had worked together for years and had put a lot of bad people in jail, thanks in part to mutual trust.

"But I'm sorry, Kathryn. Monterey has nothing to do with the case. It's in Harper's and Sacramento 's hands now."

She'd thanked him and hung up. But at least she had been able to get her mother's bail hearing handled quickly. Under California law the time of the hearing is at the magistrate's discretion. In some places, like Riverside and Los Angeles, prisoners are often in a cell for twelve hours before they appear in front of the magistrate. Since the case was murder it was possible the magistrate might not set bail at all, leaving that to the discretion of the judge at the arraignment, which in California would have to occur within a few days.

The door to the outer hallway kept opening and Dance noticed that many of the recent arrivals were wearing media identification cards around their necks. No cameras were allowed, but there were plenty of pads of paper.

A circus…

The clerk called out, "Edith Barbara Dance," and, somber and red-eyed and still cuffed, her mother rose. Sheedy joined her. A jailor was beside them. This session was devoted exclusively to the bail; pleas were entered later, at the arraignment. Harper asked that Edie be held without bail, which didn't surprise Dance. Her father stiffened at the prosecutor's harsh words, which made Edie out to be a dangerous Jack Kevorkian, who, if released on bail, would target other patients for death and then flee to Canada.

Stuart gasped, hearing his wife spoken about in this way.

"It's okay, Dad," his daughter whispered. "That's just the way they talk." Though the words broke her heart too.

George Sheedy argued articulately for an OR release-on Edie's own recognizance, pointing to her lack of a criminal record and to her roots in the community.

The magistrate, a quick-eyed Latino who had met Kathryn Dance, exuded considerable stress, which she could easily read in his posture and facial expressions. He wouldn't want this case at all; he'd have loyalty to Dance, who was a reasonable law officer, cooperative. But he would also be aware that Harper was a big name from the big city. And the magistrate would be very aware of the media too.

The arguments continued.

Dance the law enforcer found herself looking back to earlier that month, reliving the circumstances of the officer's death. Trying to match facts with facts. Whom had she seen in the hospital around the time Juan Millar died? What exactly were the means of death? Where had her mother been?

She now glanced up and found Edie staring at her. Dance gave a pale smile. Edie's face was expressionless. The woman turned back to Sheedy.

In the end the magistrate compromised. He set the bail at a half million dollars, which wasn't atypical for a murder, but also wasn't overly burdensome. Edie and Stuart weren't wealthy but they owned their house outright; since it was in Carmel, not far from the beach, it had to be worth two million. They could put it up as security.

Harper took the news stoically-his face unsmiling, his posture upright but relaxed. Dance's reading was that he was completely stress free, despite the setback. He reminded her of the killer in Los Angeles, J. Doe. One of the reasons she'd had such a hard time spotting that perp's deception was that a highly driven, focused person reveals, and feels, little distress when lying in the name of his cause. This certainly defined Robert Harper.

Edie was hustled back to the cell and Stuart rose and went to see the clerk to arrange for the bail.

As Harper buttoned his jacket and walked toward the door, his face a mask, Dance intercepted him. "Why are you doing this?"

He regarded her coolly, said nothing.

She continued, "You could've let Monterey County handle the case. Why'd you come down from San Francisco? What's your agenda?" She was speaking loudly enough for the reporters nearby to hear.

Harper said evenly, "I can't discuss this with you."

"Why my mother?"

"I have nothing to say." And he pushed through the door and onto the steps of the courthouse, where he paused to address the press-to whom he apparently had plenty to say.

Dance returned to a hard bench to await her father and mother.

Ten minutes later, George Sheedy and Stuart Dance joined her.

She asked her father, "It went okay?"

"Yes," he answered in a hollow voice.

"How soon will she be out?"

Stuart looked at Sheedy, who said, "Ten minutes, maybe less."

"Thank you." He shook the lawyer's hand. Dance nodded her gratitude to Sheedy, who told them he was returning to the office and would get started on the defense immediately.

After he'd gone, Dance asked her father, "What did they take from the house, Dad?"

"I don't know. The neighbor said they seemed most interested in the garage. Let's get out of here. I hate this place."

They walked out into the hallway. Several reporters saw Dance and approached. "Agent Dance," one woman asked, "is it troubling to know your mother's been arrested for murder?"

Well, there's some cutting-edge interviewing. She wanted to fire back with something sarcastic, but she remembered the number-one rule in media relations: Assume everything you say in a reporter's presence will appear on the six o'clock news or on tomorrow's front page. She smiled. "There's no doubt in my mind that this is a terrible misunderstanding. My mother has been a nurse for years. She's devoted herself to saving lives, not taking them."

"Did you know that she signed a petition supporting Jack Kevorkian and assisted suicide?"

No, Dance didn't know that. And, she wondered, how had the press come by the information so fast? Her reply: "You'll have to ask her about that. But petitioning to change the law isn't the same as breaking it."

It was then that her phone sounded. It was O'Neil. She stepped away to take the call. "Michael, she's getting out on bail," she told him.

There was a moment's pause. "Good. Thank God."

Dance realized he was calling about something else, and something that was serious. "What is it, Michael?"

"They've found another cross."

"A real memorial, or with a future date?"

"Today. And it's identical to the first one. Branches and florist wire."

Her eyes closed in despair. Not again.

Then O'Neil said, "But, listen. We've got a witness. A guy who saw Travis leave it. He might've seen where he went or saw something about him that'll tell us where he's hiding. Can you interview him?"

Another pause. Then: "I'll be there in ten minutes."

O'Neil gave her the address. They disconnected.

Dance turned to her father. "Dad, I can't stay. I'm so sorry."

He turned his handsome, distraught face toward his daughter. "What?"

"They found another cross. The boy's going after somebody else, it looks like. Today. But there's a witness. I have to interview them."

"Of course you do." Yet he sounded uncertain. He was going through a nightmare at the moment-nearly as bad as her mother's-and he'd want his daughter, with her expertise and her connections, nearby.

But she couldn't get images of Tammy Foster out of her mind, lying in the trunk, the water rising higher.

Images of Travis Brigham's eyes too, cold and dark beneath their abundant brows, as he gazed at his father, as if his character in a game, armed with knife or sword, was debating stepping out of the synth world and into the real, to slaughter the man.

She had to go. And now. "I'm sorry." She hugged her father.

"Your mother will understand."

Dance ran to her car and started the engine. As she was pulling out of the parking lot she glanced in the rearview mirror and saw her mother emerge from the door to the lockup. Edie stared at her daughter's departure. The woman's eyes were still, her face revealing no emotion.

Dance's foot slipped to the brake. But then she pressed down once more on the accelerator and hit the grille flashers.

Your mother will understand…

No, she won't, Dance thought. She absolutely won't.

Chapter 14

After all these years in the area Kathryn Dance had never quite grown used to the Peninsula fog. It was like a shape-shifter-a character out of the fantasy books that Wes liked. Sometimes it was wisps that hugged the ground and swept past you like ghosts. Other times it was smoke squatting in depressions of land and highway, obscuring everything.

Most often it was a thick cotton bedspread floating several hundred feet in the air, mimicking cloud and ominously darkening everything below it.

This was the breed of fog today.

The gloom thickened as Dance, listening to Raquy and the Cavemen, a North African group known for their percussion, drove along a quiet road running through state land between Carmel and Pacific Grove. The landscape was mostly woods, untended, filled with pine, scrub oak, eucalyptus and maple, joined by tangles of brush. She drove through the police line, ignoring the reporters and camera crews. Were they here for the crime, or because of her mother? Dance wondered cynically.

She parked, greeted the deputies nearby and joined Michael O'Neil. They began walking toward the cordoned-off shoulder, where the second cross had been found.

"How's your mother doing?" O'Neil asked.

"Not good."

Dance was so glad he was here. Emotion swelled like a balloon within her, and she couldn't speak for a moment, as the image of her mother in handcuffs, and the run-in with the social worker about her children, surfaced.

The senior deputy couldn't help but give a faint smile. "Saw you on TV."

"TV?"

"Who was the woman, the one who looked like Oprah? You were about to arrest her."

Dance sighed. "They got that on camera?"

"You looked"-he searched for a word-"imposing."

"She was taking the kids to Social Services."

O'Neil looked shocked. "It was Harper. Tactics. He nearly got his flunky collared, though. Oh, I would've pushed the button on that one." She added, "I've got Sheedy on the case."

"George? Good. Tough. You need tough."

"Oh, and then Overby let Harper into CBI. To go through my files."

"No!"

"I think he was looking to see if I suppressed evidence or tinkered with the files about the Juan Millar case. Overby said he went through your office's files too."

"MCSO?" he asked. Dance could read his anger like a red highway flare. "Did Overby know Harper was making a case against Edie?"

"I don't know. At the least he should've thought: What the hell is this guy from San Francisco prowling around in our files for? 'Caseload evaluations.' Ridiculous." Her own fury swelled again and, with effort, she finally managed to bank it.

They approached the spot where the cross was planted, on the shoulder of the road. The memorial was like the earlier one: broken-off branches bound with wire, and a cardboard disk with today's date on it.

At the base was another bouquet of red roses.

She couldn't help but think: Whose murder would this one represent?

And ten more waiting.

This cross had been left on a deserted stretch of barely paved road about a mile from the water. Not highly traveled, this route was a little-known shortcut to Highway 68. Ironically, this was one of the roads that would lead to that new highway that Chilton had written about in his blog.

Standing on a side road near the cross was the witness, a businessman in his forties, to look at him, into real estate or insurance, Dance guessed. He was round, his belly carrying his blue dress shirt well over a tired belt. His hair had receded and she saw sun freckles on his round forehead and balding crown. He stood beside a Honda Accord that had seen better days.

They approached and O'Neil said to her, "This is Ken Pfister."

She shook his hand. The deputy said he was going to supervise the crime scene search and headed across the street.

"Tell me what you saw, Mr. Pfister."

"Travis. Travis Brigham."

"Did you know it was him?"

A nod. "I saw his picture online when I was at lunch about a half hour ago. That's how I recognized him."

"Could you tell me exactly what you saw?" she asked. "And when?"

"Okay, it was around eleven this morning. I had a meeting in Carmel. I run an Allstate agency." He said this proudly.

Got that one right, she thought.

"I left about ten-forty and was driving back to Monterey. Took this shortcut. It'll be nice when that new highway's open, won't it?"

She smiled noncommittally, not a smile really.

"And I pulled off onto that side road"-he gestured-"to make some phone calls." He gave a broad smile. "Never drive and talk. That's my rule."

Dance's lifted eyebrow prodded him to continue.

"I looked out my windshield and I saw him walking along the shoulder. From that direction. He didn't see me. He was kind of shuffling his feet. It seemed like he was talking to himself."

"What was he wearing?"

"One of those hooded sweatshirts like the kids have."

Ah, the hoodie.

"What color was it?"

"I don't remember."

"Jacket, slacks?"

"Sorry. I wasn't paying much attention. I didn't know who he was at that point-I hadn't heard about the Roadside Cross stuff. All I knew was that he was weird and scary. He was carrying that cross, and he had a dead animal."

"An animal?"

A nod. "Yeah, a squirrel or groundhog or something. It had its throat cut." He gestured with his finger at his own neck.

Dance hated any atrocities committed against animals. Still, she kept her voice even as she asked, "Had he just killed it?"

"I don't think so. There wasn't much blood."

"Okay, then what happened?"

"Then he looks up and down the road and when he doesn't see anybody he opens his backpack and-"

"Oh, he had a backpack?"

"That's right."

"What color was it?"

"Uhm, black, I'm pretty sure. And he takes a shovel out, a little one. The sort that you'd use on a camping trip. And he opens it up and digs a hole and then puts the cross in the ground. Then…this is really weird. He goes through this ritual. He walks around the cross three times, and it looks like he's chanting."

"Chanting?"

"That's right. Muttering things. I can't hear what."

"And then?"

"He picks up the squirrel and walks around the cross again five times-I was counting. Three and five…Maybe it was a message, a clue, if somebody could figure it out."

After The Da Vinci Code, Dance had observed, a lot of witnesses tended to decrypt their observations rather than just say what they'd seen.

"Anyway, he opened his backpack again and pulled out this stone and a knife. He used the stone to sharpen the blade. Then he held the knife over the squirrel. I thought he was going to cut it up, but he didn't. I saw his lips moving again, then he wrapped the body up in some kind of weird yellow paper, like parchment, and put it in the backpack. Then it looked like he said one last thing and went up the road the way he came. Loping, you know. Like an animal."

"And what did you do then?"

"I left and went on to a few more meetings. I went back to the office. That's when I went online and saw the news about the boy. I saw his picture. I freaked out. I called nine-one-one right away."

Dance gestured Michael O'Neil over.

"Michael, this is interesting. Mr. Pfister's been real helpful."

O'Neil nodded his thanks.

"Now could you tell Deputy O'Neil here what you saw?"

"Sure." Pfister explained again about pulling over to make calls. "The boy had a dead animal of some sort. A squirrel, I think. He walked around in a circle three times without the body. Then he plants the cross and walks around it five times. He was talking to himself. It was weird. Like a different language."

"And then?"

"He wrapped the squirrel up in this parchment paper and held the knife over it. He said something else in that weird language again. Then he left."

"Interesting," O'Neil said. "You're right, Kathryn."

It was then that Dance pulled off her pale-pink-framed glasses and polished them. And subtly swapped them for a pair with severe black frames.

O'Neil caught on immediately that she was putting on her predator specs and stepped back. Dance moved closer to Pfister, well into his personal proxemic zone. Immediately, she could see, he felt a sense of threat.

Good.

"Now, Ken, I know you're lying. And I need you to tell me the truth."

"Lying?" He blinked in shock.

"That's right."

Pfister'd been pretty good at his deception, but certain comments and behaviors had tipped her off. Her suspicions arose initially because of content-based analysis: considering what he said rather than how he said it. Some of his explanations sounded too incredible to be true. Claiming he didn't know who the boy was and that he'd never heard about the Roadside Cross attack-when he seemed to go online regularly to get news. Claiming Travis was wearing a hoodie, which several of the posters to The Chilton Report had said, but not remembering the color-people tend to remember the hues of clothing far better than the garments themselves.

Pfister had also paused frequently-liars often do this as they try to craft credible deceptive lines. And he'd used at least one "illustrator" gesture-the finger at the throat; people use these subconsciously to reinforce spurious statements.

So, suspicious, Dance had then used a shorthand technique to test for deception: In determining if somebody's lying, an interviewer will ask to hear his story several times. One who's telling the truth may edit the narrative some and remember things forgotten the first time through, but the chronology of events will always be the same. A liar, though, often forgets the sequence of occurrences within his fictional narrative. This happened with Pfister in retelling the story to O'Neil; he'd mixed up when the boy had planted the cross.

Also, while honest witnesses may recall new facts during the second telling, they'll rarely contradict the first version. Initially Pfister had said that Travis was whispering and that he couldn't hear the words. The second version included the detail that he couldn't understand the words, which were "weird," implying that he had heard them.

Dance concluded without a doubt that Pfister was fabricating.

In other circumstances Dance would have handled the interrogation more subtly, tricked the witness into revealing the truth. But this was a man whose liar's personality-she assessed him as a social deceiver-and slippery personal attitude would mean a long bout of tough interviewing to get to the truth. She didn't have time. The second cross, containing today's date, meant that Travis might be planning the next attack right now.

"So, Ken, you're real close to going to jail."

"What? No!"

Dance didn't mind a bit of double teaming. She glanced at O'Neil, who said, "You sure are. And we need the truth."

"Oh, please. Look…" But he offered nothing for their examination. "I didn't lie! Really. Everything I told you is true."

This was different from assuring her that he'd actually seen what he said he had. Why did the guilty always think they were so clever? She asked, "Did you witness what you told me?"

Under her laser gaze, Pfister looked away. His shoulders slumped. "No. But it's all true. I know it!"

"How can you?" she asked.

"Because I read that somebody saw him doing what I told you. On this blog. The Chilton Report."

Her eyes slipped to O'Neil's. His expression matched hers. She asked, "Why did you lie?"

He lifted his hands. "I wanted to make people aware of the danger. I thought people should be more careful with this psycho out there. They should take more precautions, especially with their children. We have to be careful with our children, you know."

Dance noted the hand gesture, heard the slight hitch in his throat. She knew his liar's mannerisms by now. "Ken? We have no time for this."

O'Neil unleashed his handcuffs.

"No, no. I…" The head dropped in complete surrender. "I made some bad business deals. My loans got called and I can't pay them. So I…" He sighed.

"So you lied to be a hero? Get some publicity?" O'Neil's face registered disgust as he glanced at the news crews, cordoned off, fifty yards away.

Pfister began to protest. Then his hand drooped. "Yes. I'm sorry."

O'Neil jotted something in his notebook. "I'll have to speak to the prosecutor about this."

"Oh, please…I'm sorry."

"So you didn't see him at all, but you knew somebody had just left the cross and you knew who it was."

"Okay, I had an idea. I mean, yes, I knew."

"Why did you wait hours before telling us?" she snapped.

"I…I was afraid. Maybe he was still waiting around here."

O'Neil asked in a low, ominous voice, "It didn't occur to you that telling all that crap about ritual sacrifices might've sent us in the wrong direction?"

"I thought you knew all those things anyway. The stories were in that blog. They have to be true, don't they?"

Dance said patiently, "Okay, Ken. Let's start over."

"Sure. Anything."

"Were you really in that meeting?"

"Yes, ma'am."

He was so deeply into the last stage of emotional response in interrogation-acceptance and confession-that she nearly laughed. He was now the epitome of cooperation.

"And what happened then?"

"Okay, I was driving along and I pulled off on the side road here." He pointed emphatically at his feet. "When I made the turn there wasn't any cross. I made a couple of phone calls, then turned around and drove back to the intersection. I waited for traffic and looked up the road. There it was." He pointed again. This time at the cross. "I didn't see him at all. The hoodie and everything? I got that from the blog. All I can say is that I didn't pass anybody on the shoulder, so he must've come out of the woods. And, yeah, I knew what it meant. The cross. And it scared the shit out of me. The killer had just been there, right in front of me!" A sour laugh. "I locked the doors so fast… I've never done anything brave in my life. Not like my father. He was a fireman, volunteer."

This happened often with Kathryn Dance. The most important aspect of interrogation and interviewing is to be a good listener, nonjudgmental and aware. Because she honed this skill daily, witnesses-and suspects too-tended to look at her as a therapist. Poor Ken Pfister was confessing.

But he'd have to lie down on somebody else's couch. It wasn't her job to explore his demons.

O'Neil was looking into the trees. Based on what Pfister had originally told them the officers were searching the shoulder. "We better check out the woods." An ominous glance at Pfister. "At least that might be helpful." He called several deputies after him and they headed across the road to search in the forest.

"The traffic you waited for?" she asked Pfister. "Could the driver have seen anything?"

"I don't know. Maybe, if Travis was still there. They'd have a better view than me."

"You get a license number, make?"

"No, it was dark, a van or truck. But I remember it was official."

"Official?"

"Yeah, it said 'state' on the back."

"Which organization?"

"I didn't see. Honest."

That could be helpful. They'd contact all the California agencies that might've had vehicles in the area. "Good."

He seemed ecstatic at the faint praise.

"All right. You're free to go now, Ken. But remember there's still an open complaint against you."

"Yes, sure, absolutely. Look, I'm really sorry. I didn't mean anything bad." He scurried off.

As she crossed the road to join O'Neil and the team searching the woods, she watched the pathetic businessman climb into his dinged car.

The stories were in that blog. They have to be true, don't they?

SHE WANTED TO die.

Kelley Morgan was silently asking that her prayers be answered. The fumes were choking her. Her vision was going. Her lungs stung, eyes and nose were inflamed.

The pain…

But more horrifying than that was the thought of what was happening to her, the terrible changes to her skin and face from the chemicals.

Her thoughts were fuzzy. She had no memory of Travis dragging her down the stairs. She'd come back to consciousness here, in her father's darkened wine cellar in the basement, chained to a pipe. Her mouth taped, her neck aching from where he'd half strangled her.

And choking fiercely from whatever he'd poured onto the floor, the chemical now burning her eyes, her nose, her throat.

Choking, choking…

Kelley tried to scream. It was pointless, with the tape covering her face. Besides, there was nobody to hear. Her family was out, wouldn't be back till much later.

The pain…

Raging, she'd tried to kick the copper pipe away from the wall. But the metal wouldn't give.

Kill me!

Kelley understood what Travis Brigham was doing. He could've strangled her to death-just kept going another few minutes. Or shot her. But that wasn't good enough for him. No, the luser and perv was getting even by destroying her looks.

The fumes would eat away her eyelashes and brows, destroy her smooth skin, probably even make her hair fall out. He didn't want her to die; no, he wanted to turn her into a monster.

The geeky kid, face all broken out, the luser, the perv…He wanted to turn her into what he was.

Kill me, Travis. Why didn't you just kill me?

She thought of the mask. That's why he'd left it. It was a message about what she'd look like when the chemicals were done.

Her head drooped, her arms. She slumped against the wall.

I want to die.

She began to inhale deeply, through her stinging nose. Everything began to fade. The pain was going, her thoughts, the choking, the stinging in her eyes, the tears.

Drifting away. Light going dark.

Deeper, breathe deeper.

Breathe the poison in.

And, yeah, it was working!

Thank you.

The pain was growing less, the worry less.

Warm relief replaced vanishing consciousness, and her last thought before the darkness grew complete was that at last she was going to be safe from her fears forever.

AS SHE STOOD beside the roadside cross, staring down at the flowers, Dance was startled by her trilling phone-no cartoon music now; she'd put the ringer back on default. A glance at Caller ID.

"TJ."

"Boss. Another cross? I just heard."

"Yeah, today's date too."

"Oh, man. Today?"

"Yep. What'd you find?"

"I'm at Bagel Express. Weird, but nobody here really knows anything about Travis. They said he showed up for work, but kept to himself. Didn't socialize, didn't say much, just left. He talked to one kid here about online games some. But that's it. And nobody's got any idea where he might go. Oh, and his boss said that he was going to fire Travis anyway. Ever since the blog postings he's been getting threats himself. Business is down. Customers're afraid to come in."

"All right, get back to the office. I need you to call all the state agencies who might've had vehicles in the area this morning. No make or tag. Probably dark, but search for anything." She told him what Pfister had seen. "Check with Parks, Caltrans, Fisheries, Environment, everybody you can think of. And find out if Travis has a cell phone and who the provider is. See if they can trace it. I meant to do that earlier."

They disconnected. Dance called her mother. No answer. She tried her father and the man picked up on the second ring.

"Katie."

"She's okay?"

"Yes. We're at the house, but we're packing up."

"What?"

Stuart said, "The protesters from the hospital? They found out where we live. They're picketing outside."

"No!" Dance was furious.

He said grimly, "Interesting to watch your neighbors leave for work and find a dozen people with signs calling you a murderer. One of the posters was quite clever. It said, 'Dance of Death.' You have to give them credit."

"Oh, Dad."

"And somebody taped a poster of Jesus on the front door. He was being crucified. I think they're blaming Edie for that too."

"I can get you a room anonymously at the inn we use for witnesses."

"George Sheedy's already gotten us a room under a fake name," Stuart said. "I don't know how you feel about it, honey, but I think your mom'd love to see the kids. She's worried about how scared they got when the police came into the hospital."

"That's a great idea. I'll pick them up from Martine's and bring them to you. When're you checking in?"

"Twenty minutes." He gave her the address.

"Can I talk to her?"

"She's on the phone, honey, with Betsey. You can see her when you drop the kids off. Sheedy's coming over about the case."

They disconnected. O'Neil returned from the woods. She asked, "You find anything?"

"Some footprints that aren't helpful, a little bit of trace-a gray fiber, like the one we found earlier, and a shred of brown paper. An oat flake or grain of some kind. Could be from a bagel, I was thinking. Peter's waiting for it now. He'll get us the analysis as soon as he can."

"That's great for the case against him. But what we need now is something to tell us where he's hiding."

And the other question: Who's he about to attack next?

As Dance lifted her phone to call Jon Boling, the ring tone sounded. She gave a faint smile at the coincidence. His name showed in Caller ID.

"Jon," she answered.

As she listened to his words, her smile quickly faded.

Chapter 15

Kathryn Dance climbed out of her Crown Vic in front of Kelley Morgan's house.

The Monterey County Crime Scene people were here, along with a dozen other state and town law enforcement officers.

Reporters too, plenty of them, most asking about the whereabouts of Travis Brigham. Why exactly hadn't the CBI or the MCSO or the Monterey city police or anybody arrested him yet? How hard could it be to find a seventeen-year-old who paraded around dressed like the Columbine and Virginia Tech killers? Who carried knives and machetes, sacrificed animals in bizarre rituals and left roadside crosses on public highways.

He's very active in computer games. Young people who are good at them learn very sophisticated combat and evasion techniques…

Dance ignored them all and pushed on, under the police cordon. She arrived at one of the ambulances, the one nearest the house. A young, intense medic with slicked-back dark hair climbed out of the back door. He closed it and then pounded on the side.

The boxy vehicle, containing Kelley, her mother and brother, raced off to the emergency room.

Dance joined Michael O'Neil and the tech. "How is she?"

"Still unconscious. We've got her on a portable ventilator." A shrug. "She's unresponsive. We'll just have to wait and see."

It was a near miracle that they'd saved Kelley at all.

And Jonathan Boling was to thank. At the news that a second cross had been located, the professor had gone into a frenzy of work to identify the posters critical of Travis in The Chilton Report, by correlating posting nics-nicknames-and information from social networking sites and other sources. He'd even compared grammar, word choice and spelling styles in the Report posts to those in networking sites and comments in high school yearbooks to identify anonymous posters. He'd enlisted his students too. They'd finally managed to find a dozen names of people in the area who'd posted the blog replies most critical of Travis.

His call a half hour ago was to give Dance their names. She'd immediately ordered TJ, Rey Carraneo and big Al Stemple to start calling and warning them they might be at risk. One of the posters, BellaKelley, the screen name for Kelley Morgan, was unaccounted for. Her mother said she was supposed to be meeting with friends, but hadn't shown up.

Stemple had led a tactical team to her house.

Dance glanced at him now, sitting on the front steps. The huge, shaved-headed man, hovering around forty, was the closest thing that the CBI had to a cowboy. He knew his weaponry, he loved tactical situations and he was pathologically quiet, except when it came to talking about fishing and hunting (accordingly he and Dance had had very few social conversations). Stemple's bulky frame was leaning against the banister of the front porch, as he breathed into an oxygen mask attached to a green tank.

The tech nodded Stemple's way. "He's okay. Did his good deed for the year. Travis had her chained to a water pipe. Al ripped the pipe out with his bare hands. Problem was, it took him ten minutes. He sucked in a lot of fumes."

"You okay, Al?" Dance called.

Stemple said something through the mask. Mostly he looked bored. Dance also read irritation in his eyes-probably that he hadn't gotten to shoot the perp.

The tech then said to O'Neil and Dance, "There's something you oughta know. Kelley was conscious for a minute or two when we got her out. She told me that Travis has a gun."

"Gun? He's armed?" Dance and O'Neil shared a troubled gaze.

"That's what she said. I lost her after that. Didn't say anything else."

Oh, no. An unstable adolescent with a firearm. Nothing was worse, in Dance's opinion.

O'Neil called in the information about the weapon to MCSO, who in turn would relay it to all the officers involved in the search for Travis.

"What was the gas?" Dance asked the tech as they walked to another ambulance.

"We aren't sure. It was definitely toxic."

The Crime Scene Unit was searching carefully for evidence while a team canvassed the neighborhood for witnesses. Everyone on the block was concerned, everyone was sympathetic. But they were also terrified; no accounts were forthcoming.

But perhaps there simply were no witnesses. Bike tread marks in the canyon behind the house suggested how the boy might have snuck up unnoticed to attack Kelley Morgan.

One Crime Scene officer arrived, carrying what turned out to be an eerie mask in a clear evidence bag.

"What the hell's that?" O'Neil asked.

"It was tied to a tree outside her bedroom window, pointing in."

It was hand-made from papier-mâché, painted white and gray. Bony spikes, like horns, extended from the skull. The eyes were huge and black. The narrow lips were sewn shut, bloody.

"To freak her out, the poor thing. Imagine looking out your window and seeing that." Dance actually shivered.

As O'Neil took a call, Dance phoned Boling. "Jon."

"How is she?" the professor asked eagerly.

"In a coma. We don't know how she'll be. But at least we saved her life…you saved her life. Thank you."

"It was Rey too. And my students."

"Still, I mean it. We can't thank you enough."

"Any leads to Travis?"

"Some." She declined to tell him about the eerie mask. Her phone buzzed, call waiting. "I've got to go. Keep looking for names, Jon."

"I'm on the case," he said.

Smiling, she rang off the line with Boling and answered, "TJ."

"How's the girl doing?"

"We don't know. Not good. What'd you find?"

"No luck, boss. About eighteen vans, trucks, SUVS or cars registered to the state were in the area this morning. But the ones I've been able to track down, they weren't near where the cross was left. And Travis's phone? The cell provider says he's taken out the battery. Or destroyed it. They can't trace it."

"Thanks. I've got a couple more jobs. There's a mask the perp left here."

"Mask? Ski mask?"

"No. It's ritual, looks like. I'm going to have Crime Scene upload a picture of it before they take it to Salinas. See if you can source it. And get the word out to everybody: He's armed."

"Oh, man, boss. Keeps gettin' better and better."

"I want to know if there've been any reports of stolen weapons in the county. And find out if the father or any relatives have registered firearms. Check the database. Maybe we can ID the weapon."

"Sure…Oh, wanta say: Heard about your mother." The young man's voice had grown even more sober. "Anything I can do?"

"Thanks, TJ. Just find out about the mask and the gun."

After they hung up she examined the mask, thinking: Could the rumors have been true? Was Travis into some type of ritualistic practice? Here she'd been skeptical of the posters on the blog, but maybe she'd been making a mistake by not paying attention to them.

TJ called back within minutes. There'd been no stolen guns reported in the past two weeks. He'd also looked through the state's firearms database. California liberally allows the purchase of pistols, but all sales must be through a licensed dealer and recorded. Robert Brigham, Travis's father, owned a Colt revolver,.38 caliber.

After she disconnected, Dance noticed O'Neil, his face still, looking into the distance.

She walked up to him. "Michael, what is it?"

"Got to get back to the office. Something urgent on another case."

"The Homeland Security thing?" she asked, referring to the Indonesian container case.

He nodded. "I've got to get in right away. I'll call you as soon as I know more." His face was grave.

"Okay. Good luck."

He grimaced, then turned quickly and walked to his car.

Dance felt concern-and emptiness-watching him go. What was so urgent? And why, she thought bitterly, had it struck now, just when she needed him with her?

She called Rey Carraneo. "Thanks for the work with Jon Boling. What did you find at the Game Shed?"

"Well, he wasn't there last night. He lied about that, like you were saying. But as for friends…he doesn't really hang out with people there. He'd just go, play games and then leave."

"Anybody covering for him?"

"That's not my impression."

Dance then told the young agent to meet her at Kelley Morgan's house.

"Sure."

"Oh, and Rey, one thing?"

"Yes, ma'am?"

"I need you to pick up something from the supply room at HQ."

"Sure. What?"

"Body armor. For both of us."

APPROACHING THE BRIGHAM house, Carraneo beside her, Kathryn Dance wiped her palm on her dark slacks. Touched the grip of her Glock.

I don't want to use it, she thought. Not on a boy.

It wasn't likely that Travis was here; MCSO had been running surveillance on the place since the boy had vanished from the bagel shop. Still, he could have snuck back in. And, Dance was reflecting, if it came to a firefight, she'd shoot if she had to. The rationale was simple. She'd kill another human being for the sake of her own children. She wouldn't let them grow up without any parent at all.

The body armor chafed but gave her some confidence. She forced herself to stop patting the Velcro tabs.

With two county deputies behind them, they stepped onto the spongy front porch, keeping as far from the windows as possible. The family car was in the driveway. The landscape service truck too, a pickup with hollies and rose bushes in the bed.

In a whisper, she briefed Carraneo and the other officers about the younger brother, Sammy. "He's big and he'll seem unstable, but he probably isn't dangerous. Use nonlethal if it comes down to it."

"Yes, ma'am."

Carraneo was wary but calm.

She sent the deputies to the back of the property, and the CBI agents flanked the front door. "Let's do it." She banged on the rotting wood. "Bureau of Investigation. We have a warrant. Open the door, please."

Another pounding. "Bureau of Investigation. Open up!"

Hands near their weapons.

An interminable moment later, as she was about to knock again, the door opened and Sonia Brigham stood there staring with eyes wide. She'd been crying.

"Mrs. Brigham, is Travis here?"

"I…"

"Please. Is Travis home? It's important that you tell us."

"No. Really."

"We have a warrant to collect his belongings." Handing her the blue-backed document, Dance entered, Carraneo behind her. The living room was empty. She noticed both boys' doors were open. She saw no sign of Sammy and glanced into his room, noting elaborate charts, filled with hand-drawn pictures. She wondered if he was trying to write his own comic or Japanese manga.

"Is your other son here? Sammy?"

"He's out playing. Down by the pond. Please, do you know anything about Travis? Has anybody seen him?"

A creak from the kitchen. Her hand dropped to her gun.

Bob Brigham appeared in the kitchen doorway. He was holding a can of beer. "Back again," he muttered. "With…" His voice faded as he snatched the warrant away from his wife and made a pretense of reading it.

He looked at Rey Carraneo as if he were a busboy.

Dance asked, "Have you heard from Travis?" Eyes swiveling around the house.

"Nope. But you can't be blaming us for what he's up to."

Sonia snapped, "He didn't do anything!"

Dance said, "I'm afraid that the girl today who was attacked identified him."

Sonia began to protest but fell silent and futilely fought tears.

Dance and Carraneo searched the house carefully. It didn't take long. No sign the boy had been here recently.

"We know you own a pistol, Mr. Brigham. Could you check to see if it's missing?"

His eyes narrowed as if he were considering the implications of this. "It's in my glove compartment. In a lockbox."

Which California law required in a household where children under eighteen lived.

"Loaded?"

"Uh-huh." He looked defensive. "We do a lot of landscaping in Salinas. The gangs, you know."

"Could you see if it's still there?"

"He's not going to take my gun. He wouldn't dare. He'd get a whipping like he wouldn't believe."

"Could you check, please?"

The man gave her a look of disbelief. Then he stepped outside. Dance motioned Carraneo to follow him.

Dance looked at the wall and noticed a few pictures of the family. She was struck by a much happier-looking, and much younger, Sonia Brigham, standing behind the counter at a booth at the Monterey County Fair-grounds. She was thin and pretty. Maybe she'd run the concession before she'd gotten married. Maybe that's where she and Brigham had met.

The woman asked, "Is the girl all right? The one who got attacked?"

"We don't know."

Tears dotted her eyes. "He's got problems. He gets mad some. But…this has to be a terrible mistake. I know it!"

Denial was the most intractable of emotional responses to hardship. Tough as a walnut shell.

Travis's father, accompanied by the young agent, returned to the living room. Bob Brigham's ruddy face was troubled. "It's gone."

Dance sighed. "And you wouldn't have it anyplace else?"

He shook his head, avoided Sonia's face.

Timidly she said, "What good comes of a gun?"

He ignored her.

Dance asked, "When Travis was younger, were there places he'd go?"

"No," the father said. "He was always disappearing. But who knows where he went?"

"How about his friends?"

Brigham snapped, "Doesn't have any. He's always online. With that computer of his…"

"All the time," echoed his wife softly. "All the time."

"Call us if he contacts you. Don't try to get him to surrender, don't take the gun away. Just call us. It's for his own good."

"Sure," she said. "We will."

"He'll do what I say. Exactly what I say."

"Bob…"

"Shhhh."

"We're going through his room now," Dance said.

"Is that all right?" Sonia was nodding at the warrant.

"They can take whatever the fuck they want. Anything that'll help find him before he gets us into more trouble." Brigham lit a cigarette and dropped the match into the ashtray, a smoking arc. Sonia's face sank as she realized she'd become her son's sole advocate.

Dance pulled her radio off her hip, called the deputies outside. One of them radioed back that he'd found something. The young officer arrived. He held up a lockbox in a latex-gloved hand. It had been smashed open. "Was in some bushes behind the house. And this too." An empty box of Remington.38 Special rounds.

"That's it," the father muttered. "Mine."

The house was eerily quiet.

The agents walked into Travis's room. Pulling on her gloves, Dance said to Carraneo, "I want to see if we can find anything about friends, addresses, places he might like to hang out."

They searched through the effluence of a teenager's room-clothes, comics, DVDs, manga, anime, games, computer parts, notebooks, sketchpads. She noticed there was little music and nothing at all about sports.

Dance blinked as she looked through a notebook. The boy had done a drawing of a mask identical to the one outside Kelley Morgan's window.

Even the small sketch chilled her.

Hidden away in a drawer were tubes of Clearasil and books about remedies for acne, diet and medication and even dermabrasion to remove scarring. Though Travis's problem was less serious than with many teens, it was probably what he saw as a major reason he was an outcast.

Dance continued to search. Under the bed she found a strongbox. It was locked but she had seen a key in the top desk drawer. It worked in the box. Expecting drugs or porn, she was surprised at the contents: stacks of cash.

Carraneo was looking over her shoulder. "Hmm."

About four thousand dollars. The bills were crisp and ordered, as if he'd gotten them from a bank or an ATM, not from buyers in drug deals. Dance added the box to the evidence they'd take back. Not only did she not want to fund Travis's escape, if he came back for it, but she didn't doubt that his father would pilfer the money in an instant, if he found the stash.

"There's this," Carraneo said. He was holding up printouts of pictures, mostly candids, of pretty girls about high school age, taken around Robert Louis Stevenson High School. None obscene or taken up the girls' skirts, though, or of locker rooms or bathrooms.

Stepping outside the room, Dance asked Sonia, "Do you know who they are?"

Neither parent did.

She turned back to the pictures. She realized that she'd seen one of the girls before-in a news story about the June 9 crash. Caitlin Gardner, the girl who'd survived. The photo was more formal than the others-the pretty girl looking off to the side, smiling blandly. Dance turned the thin, glossy rectangle of paper over and noted a portion of a picture of a sports team on the other side. Travis had cut the picture out of a yearbook.

Had he asked Caitlin for a picture and been refused? Or had he been too shy even to ask?

The agents searched for a half hour but found no clues as to where Travis might be, no phone numbers, email addresses or friends' names. He kept no address book or calendar.

Dance wanted to see what was on his laptop. She opened the lid. It was in hibernate mode and booted up immediately. She wasn't surprised when it asked for a password. Dance asked the boy's father, "Do you have any idea what the code is?"

"Like he'd tell us." He gestured at the computer. "Now, that's the problem right there, you know. That's what went wrong, playing all those games. All the violence. They shoot people and cut them up, do all kinds of shit."

Sonia seemed to reach a breaking point. "Well, you played soldier when you were growing up, I know you did. All boys play games like that. It doesn't mean they turn into killers!"

"That was a different time," he muttered. "It was better, healthier. We only played killing Indians and Viet Cong. Not normal people."

Carrying the laptop, notebooks, strongbox and hundreds of pages of printouts and notes and pictures, Dance and Carraneo walked to the door.

"Did you ever think about one thing?" Sonia asked.

Dance paused, turned.

"That even if he did it, went after those girls, that maybe it wasn't his fault. All those terrible things that they said about him just pushed him over the edge. They attacked him, with those words, those hateful words. And my Travis never said a single word against any one of them." She controlled her tears. "He's the victim here."

Chapter 16

On the highway to Salinas, not far from beautiful Laguna Seca race-course, Kathryn Dance braked her unmarked Ford to a halt in front of a construction worker holding a portable stop sign. Two large bulldozers slowly traversed the highway in front of her, shooting ruddy dust into the air.

She was on the phone with Deputy David Reinhold, the young officer who'd delivered Tammy Foster's computer to her and Boling. Rey Carraneo had sped to the MCSO Crime Scene Unit in Salinas and dropped Travis's Dell off for processing into evidence.

"I've logged it in," Reinhold told her. "And run it for prints and other trace. Oh, and it probably wasn't necessary, Agent Dance, but I ran a nitrate swab for explosives too."

Computers were occasionally booby-trapped-not as IED weapons, but to destroy compromising data contained in the files.

"Good, Deputy."

The officer certainly had initiative. She recalled his quick blue eyes and his smart decision to pull out the battery of Tammy's computer.

"Some of the prints are Travis's," the young deputy said. "But there are others too. I ran them. A half dozen were from Samuel Brigham."

"The boy's brother."

"Right. And a few others. No match in AIFIS. But I can tell you they're larger, probably male."

Dance wondered if the boy's father had tried to get inside.

Reinhold said, "I'm happy to try to crack into the system, if you want. I've taken some courses."

"Appreciate it, but I'm having Jonathan Boling-you met him in my office-handle that."

"Sure, Agent Dance. Whatever you'd like. Where are you?"

"I'm out now, but you can have it delivered to the CBI. Have Agent Scanlon take custody. He'll sign the card and receipt."

"I'll do it right now, Kathryn."

They disconnected and she looked around impatiently, waiting for the construction flagman to allow her through. She was surprised to see the area dug up so completely-dozens of trucks and road-grading equipment were tearing apart the ground. She'd driven here just last week and the work hadn't yet begun.

This was the big highway project that Chilton had written about in the blog, the shortcut to Highway 101, in the thread titled "Yellow Brick Road," suggesting gold-and wondering if somebody was profiting illegally on the project.

She noted that the equipment belonged to Clint Avery Construction, one of the largest companies on the Peninsula. The workers here were large men, working hard, sweaty. They were mostly white, which was unusual. Much of the labor on the Peninsula was performed by Latino workers.

One of them looked at her solemnly-recognizing her car for an unmarked law enforcement vehicle-but he made no special effort to speed her through.

Finally, at his leisure, he waved the traffic on, his eyes looking over Dance closely, it seemed to her.

She left the extensive roadwork behind and cruised down the highway and onto side streets until she came to Central Coast College, where summer session was under way. A student pointed out Caitlin Gardner sitting at a picnic bench with several other girls, who hovered around her protectively. Caitlin was pretty and blond and sported a ponytail. Tasteful studs and hoops decorated both ears. She resembled any one of the hundreds of coeds here.

After leaving the Brighams, Dance had called the Gardner house and learned from Caitlin's mother that the girl was taking some college courses here for credit at Robert Louis Stevenson High, where she'd start her senior year in a few months.

Caitlin's eyes, Dance noticed, were focused away and then her gaze shifted to Dance. Not knowing who she was-probably thinking she was another reporter-she began to gather her books. Two of the other girls followed their friend's troubled eyes and rose in a phalanx to give cover so Caitlin could escape.

But they then noticed Dance's body armor and weapon. And grew cautious, pausing.

"Caitlin," Dance called.

The girl stopped.

Dance approached and showed her ID, introduced herself. "I'd like to talk to you."

"She's pretty tired," a friend said.

"And upset."

Dance smiled. To Caitlin she said, "I'm sure you are. But it's important that I talk to you. If you don't mind."

"She shouldn't even be in school," another girl said. "But she's taking classes out of respect to Trish and Vanessa."

"That's good of you." Dance wondered how attending summer school honored the dead.

The curious icons of adolescents…

The first friend said firmly, "Caitlin's, like, really, really-"

Dance turned to the frizzy-haired brunette, her personality brittle, lost the smile and said bluntly, "I'm speaking to Caitlin."

The girl fell silent.

Caitlin mumbled, "I guess."

"Come on over here," Dance said pleasantly. Caitlin followed her across the lawn and they sat at another picnic table. She clutched her book bag to her chest and was looking around the campus nervously. Her foot bobbed and she tugged at an earlobe.

She appeared terrified, even more so than Tammy.

Dance tried to put her at ease. "So, summer school."

"Yeah. My friends and me. Better than working, or sitting home."

The last word has been delivered in a tone that suggested a fair amount of parental hassle.

"What're you studying?"

"Chemistry and biology."

"That's a good way to ruin your summer."

She laughed. "It's not so bad. I'm kinda good at science."

"Headed for med school?"

"I'm hoping."

"Where?"

"Oh, I don't know yet. Probably Berkeley undergrad. Then I'll see."

"I spent time up there. Great town."

"Yeah? What'd you study?"

Dance smiled and said, "Music."

In fact she hadn't taken a single class on that campus of the University of California. She'd been a busker-a musician playing guitar and singing for money on the streets of Berkeley -very little money, in her case.

"So, how you doing with all of this?"

Caitlin's eyes went flat. She muttered, "Not so great. I mean, it's so terrible. The accident, that was one thing. But then, what happened to Tammy and Kelley…that was awful. How is she?"

"Kelley? We don't know yet. Still in a coma."

One of the friends had overheard and called, "Travis bought this poison gas online. Like from neo-Nazis."

True? Or rumor?

Dance said, "Caitlin, he's disappeared. He's hiding somewhere and we have to find him before he causes more harm. How well did you know him?"

"Not too good. We had a class or two together. I'd see him in the halls sometimes. That's all."

Suddenly she started in panic and her eyes jumped to a nearby stand of bushes. A boy was pushing his way through them. He looked around, retrieved a football and then returned into the foliage for the field on the other side.

"Travis had a crush on you, right?" Dance pressed on.

"No!" she said. And Dance deduced that the girl did in fact think this; she could tell from the rise in the pitch of her voice, one of the few indicators of deception that can be read without the benefit of doing a prior baseline.

"Not just a little?"

"Maybe he did. But a lot of boys…You know what it's like." Her eyes did a sweep of Dance-meaning: boys might've had a crush on you too. Even if it was a long, long time ago.

"Did you two talk?"

"Sometimes about assignments. That's all."

"Did he ever mention anyplace he liked to hang out at?"

"Not really. Nothing, like, specific. He said there were some neat places he liked to go. Near the water, mostly. The shore reminded him of some places in this game he played."

This was something, that he liked the ocean. He could be hiding out in one of the shorefront parks. Maybe Point Lobos. In this land of temperate climate he could easily survive with a waterproof sleeping bag.

"Does he have any friends he might be staying with?"

"Really, I don't know him real well. But he didn't have any friends I ever saw, not like my girlfriends and me. He was, like, online all the time. He was smart and everything. But he wasn't into school. Even at lunch or study period, he'd just sit outside with his computer and if he could hack into a signal he'd go online."

"Are you scared of him, Caitlin?"

"Well, yeah." As if it was obvious.

"But you haven't said anything bad about him on The Chilton Report or social networking sites, have you?"

"No."

What was the girl so upset about? Dance couldn't read her emotions, which were extreme. More than just fear. "Why haven't you posted anything about him?"

"Like, I don't go there. It's bullshit."

"Because you feel sorry for him."

"Yeah." Caitlin frantically played with one of the four studs in her left ear. "Because…"

"What?"

The girl was very upset now. Tension bursting. Tears dotted her eyes. She whispered, "Because it's my fault what happened."

"What do you mean?"

"The accident. It's my fault."

"Go on, Caitlin."

"See, there was this guy at the party? A guy I kind of like. Mike D'Angelo."

"At the party?"

"Right. And he was totally ignoring me. Hanging out with this other girl, Brianna, rubbing her back, you know. Right in front of me. I wanted to make him jealous, so I walked up to Travis and was hanging out with him. I gave him my car keys right in front of Mike and asked him to take me home. I was, like, oh, let's drop Trish and Vanessa off and then you and me can hang out."

"And you thought it would make Mike feel bad?"

She nodded tearfully. "It was so stupid! But he was acting like such a shit, flirting with Brianna." Her shoulders were arched in tension. "I shouldn't've. But I was so hurt. If I hadn't done that, nothing would've happened."

This explained why Travis had been driving that night.

All to make another boy jealous.

The girl's explanation also suggested a whole new scenario. Maybe on the drive back Travis had realized that he was being used by Caitlin, or maybe he was angry at her for having a crush on Mike. Had he intentionally crashed the car? Murder/suicide-an impulsive gesture, not unheard of when it came to young love.

"So he's got to be mad at me."

"What I'm going to do is put an officer outside your house."

"Really?"

"Sure. It's still early at summer school, right? You don't have any tests coming up, do you?"

"No. We just started."

"Well, why don't you head home now?"

"You think?"

"Yeah. And stay there until we find him." Dance took down the girl's address. "If you can think of anything more-about where he might be-please let me know."

"Sure." The girl took Dance's card. Together they walked back to her crew.

FLOATING THROUGH HER ears was the haunting quena flute of Jorge Cumbo, with the South American group Urubamba. The music calmed her, and it was with some regret that Dance pulled into the Monterey Bay Hospital parking lot, parked and paused the music.

Of the protesters, only about half remained. The Reverend Fisk and his redheaded bodyguard were absent.

Probably trying to track down her mother.

Dance walked inside.

Several nurses and doctors came up to express their sympathy-two nurses wept openly when they saw their coworker's daughter.

She walked downstairs to the office of the head of security. The room was empty. She glanced up the hall toward the intensive care unit. She headed in that direction and pushed through the door.

Dance blinked as she turned to the room where Juan Millar had died. It was cordoned off with yellow police tape. Signs read Do Not Enter. Crime Scene. It was Harper's doing, she reflected angrily. This was idiocy. There were only five intensive care rooms down here-three were occupied-and the prosecutor had sealed one of them? What if two more patients were admitted? And what's more, she thought, the crime had taken place nearly a month ago, the room occupied by presumably a dozen patients since then, not to mention cleaned by fastidious crews. There couldn't possibly be more evidence to collect.

Grandstanding and public relations.

She started away.

And nearly ran right into Juan Millar's brother, Julio, the man who had attacked her earlier in the month.

The dark, compact man, in a dark suit, pulled up short, eyes fixed on her. He was carrying a folder of papers, which sagged in his hand, as he stared at Dance, only four or five feet away.

Dance tensed and stepped back slightly, to give her time to get to her pepper spray or cuffs. If he came at her again she was prepared to defend herself, though she could imagine what the media would do with the story of the daughter of a suspected mercy killer Macing the brother of the euthanized victim.

But Julio simply stared at her with a curious look-not of anger or hate, but almost amusement at the coincidence of running into her. He whispered, "Your mother…how could she?"

The words sounded rehearsed, as if he'd been waiting for the chance to recite them.

Dance began to speak, but Julio clearly expected no response. He walked slowly out of the door that led to the back exit.

And that was it.

No harsh words, no threats, no violence.

How could she?

Her heart pounding furiously from the bewildering confrontation, she recalled that her mother had said Julio had been here earlier. Dance wondered why he was back now.

With a last glance at the police tape, Dance left the ICU and walked to the office of the head of security.

"Oh, Agent Dance," Henry Bascomb said, blinking.

She smiled a greeting. "They've got the room taped off?"

"You were back there?" he asked.

Dance immediately noted the stress in the man's posture and voice. He was thinking quickly and he was uneasy. What was that about? Dance wondered.

"Sealed off?" she repeated.

"Yeah, that's right, ma'am."

Ma'am? Dance nearly laughed at the formal word. She, O'Neil, Bascomb and some of his former deputy buddies had shared beer and quesadillas down on Fisherman's Wharf a few months ago. She decided to get to the nut of it: "I've only got a minute or two, Henry. It's about my mother's case."

"How's she doing?"

Dance was thinking: I don't know any better than you do, Henry. She said, "Not great."

"Give her my best."

"I'll do that. Now, I'd like to see the employee and front desk logs of who was at the hospital when Juan died."

"Sure." Only he didn't mean sure at all. He meant what he said next: "But the thing is, I can't."

"Why's that, Henry?"

"I've been told I can't let you see anything. No paperwork. We're not even supposed to be talking to you."

"Whose orders?"

"The board," Bascomb said tentatively.

"And?" Dance continued, prodding.

"Well, it was Mr. Harper, that prosecutor. He talked to the board. And the chief of staff."

"But that's discoverable information. The defense attorney has a right to it."

"Oh, I know that. But he said that's how you'll have to get it."

"I don't want to take it. Just look through it, Henry."

There was absolutely nothing illegal about her looking through the material, and it wouldn't ultimately affect the case because what was contained in the logs and sign-in sheets would come out eventually.

Bascomb's face revealed how torn he was. "I understand. But I can't. Not unless there's a subpoena."

Harper had spoken to the security chief for one purpose only: to bully Dance and her family.

"I'm sorry," he said sheepishly.

"No, that's okay, Henry. Did he give you a reason?"

"No." He said this too quickly, and Dance could easily see eye aversion that differed from what she knew of the man's baseline behavior.

"What did he say, Henry?"

A pause.

She leaned toward him.

The guard looked down. "He said…he said he didn't trust you. And he didn't like you."

Dance stoked her smile as best she could. "Well, that's the good news, I suppose. He's the last person in the world I'd want a thumbs-up from."

THE TIME WAS now 5:00 p.m.

From the hospital lot, Dance called the office and learned there'd been no significant developments in the hunt for Travis Brigham. The Highway Patrol and sheriff's office were running a manhunt, focusing on the traditional locales and sources for information about runaways and juvenile fugitives: his school and classmates and the shopping malls. That his transportation was limited to a bike was helpful, in theory, but hadn't led to any sightings.

Rey Carraneo had learned little from Travis's rambling notes and drawings, but was still sifting through them for leads to the boy's whereabouts. TJ was trying to track down the source of the mask, and calling the potential victims from the blog. Since Dance had learned from Caitlin that Travis liked the shore, she gave him the added task of contacting the parks department and alerting them that the boy might be hiding out somewhere in the thousands of square acres of state land in the area.

"Okay, boss," he said wearily, revealing not fatigue but the same hopelessness that she felt.

She then spoke to Jon Boling.

"I got the boy's computer. That deputy dropped it off, Reinhold. He sure knows his stuff when it comes to computers."

"He shows initiative. He'll go places. You having any luck?"

"No. Travis is smart. He's not relying on your basic password protection alone. He's got some proprietary encryption programs that have locked his drive. We may not be able to crack it, but I've called an associate at school. If anybody can get inside, they can."

Hmm, Dance thought, how gender-neutral: "associate" and "they." Dance translated the words as "young, gorgeous female grad student, probably blond and voluptuous."

Boling added in techspeak that a brute force attack was under way via an uplink to a supercomputer at UC-Santa Cruz. "The system might crack the code within the next hour-"

"Really?" she asked brightly.

"Or, I was going to say, within the next two or three hundred years. It depends."

Dance thanked him and told him to head home for the evening. He sounded disappointed and, after explaining that he had no plans for that night, said he'd continue to search for the names of posters who might be at risk.

She then collected the children from Martine's and they all drove to the inn where her parents were hiding out.

As she drove, she was recalling the incidents surrounding young Juan Millar's death, but in truth she hadn't focused on them much at the time. The manhunt had demanded all her attention: Daniel Pell-the cult leader, killer and vicious manipulator-and his partner, a woman equally dangerous, had remained on the Peninsula after his escape, to stalk and murder new victims. Dance and O'Neil had worked nonstop pursuing them, and Juan Millar's death had not occupied her thoughts, other than to engender a piercing remorse for the part, though small, she'd played in it.

If she'd guessed that her mother might have become entwined in the case, she would have been much more attentive.

Ten minutes later Dance parked the car in the gravel lot of the inn. Maggie offered, "Wow," bouncing on the seat as she examined the place.

"Yeah, neat." Though Wes was more subdued.

The quaint cottage-part of the luxurious Carmel Inn-was one of a dozen stand-alone cabins separate from the main building.

"There's a pool!" Maggie cried. "I want to go swimming."

"Sorry, I forgot your suits." Dance nearly suggested Edie and Stuart could take them shopping for swimwear, but then recalled that her mother shouldn't be out in public-not with Reverend Fisk and his birds of prey on the loose. "I'll bring them by tomorrow. And, hey, Wes, there's a tennis court. You can practice with Grandpa."

"Okay."

They climbed out, Dance collecting their suitcases, which she'd packed earlier. The children would be staying here tonight with their grandparents.

They walked along the path bordered with vines and low, green chick-and-hen succulents.

"Which one's theirs?" Maggie asked, bouncing along the trail.

Dance pointed it out and the girl launched herself forward fast. She hit the buzzer and a moment later, just as Dance and Wes arrived, the door opened and Edie smiled at her grandchildren and let them inside.

"Grandma," Maggie called. "This is cool!"

"It's very nice. Come on in."

Edie gave a smile to Dance, who tried to read it. But the expression was as informative as a blank page.

Stuart hugged the children.

Wes asked, "You okay, Grandma?"

"I'm absolutely fine. How're Martine and Steve?"

"Okay," the boy said.

"The twins and I built a mountain out of pillows," Maggie said. "With caves."

"You'll have to tell me all about it."

Dance saw they had a visitor. Distinguished defense attorney George Sheedy rose and stepped forward, shaking Dance's hand and saying hello in his basso profundo voice. A briefcase was open on the coffee table in the sitting area of the suite, and yellow pads and printouts sat in cluttered stacks. The lawyer said hello to the children. He was courteous, but from his posture and expression Dance could tell immediately that the conversation she'd interrupted was a hard one. Wes regarded Sheedy suspiciously.

After Edie dispensed treats to the children, they headed outside to a playground.

"Stay with your sister," Dance commanded.

"Okay. Come on," the boy said to Maggie and, juggling juice boxes and cookies, they left. Dance glanced out the window and noted that she could see the playground from here. The pool was behind a locked gate. With children, you could never be too vigilant.

Edie and Stuart returned to the couch. Three cups of coffee rested, largely untouched, on a low driftwood table. Her mother would have instinctively prepared them the moment Sheedy arrived.

The lawyer asked about the case and the hunt for Travis Brigham.

Dance gave sketchy answers-which, in fact, were the best she could offer.

"And that girl, Kelley Morgan?"

"Still unconscious, it seems."

Stuart shook his head.

The subject of the Roadside Cross attacks was tucked away and Sheedy glanced at Edie and Stuart, eyebrow raised. Dance's father said, "You can tell her. Go ahead. Everything."

Sheedy explained, "We're tipping to what Harper's game plan seems to be. He's very conservative, he's very religious and he's on record as opposing the Death with Dignity Act."

The proposal cropped up every so often in California; it was a statute, like Oregon 's, that would allow physicians to assist people who wished to end their lives. Like abortion, it was a controversial topic and the pros and cons were highly polarized. Presently in California if somebody helped a person commit suicide, that assistance was considered a felony.

"So he wants to make an example of Edie. The case isn't about assisted suicide-your mother tells me that Juan was too badly injured to administer the drugs to himself. But Harper wants to send a message that the state will seek tough penalties against anybody who helps with a suicide. His meaning: Don't support the law because DAs will be looking real closely at each case. One step out of line and doctors or anybody helping someone die will get prosecuted. Hard."

The distinguished voice continued grimly, speaking to Dance, "That means he's not interested in plea bargains. He wants to go to trial and run a big, splashy, public relations-driven contest. Now, in this instance, because somebody killed Juan, that makes it murder."

"First degree," Dance said. She knew the penal code the way some people knew the Joy of Cooking.

Sheedy nodded. "Because it's premeditated and Millar was a law enforcement officer."

"But not special circumstances," Dance said, looking at her mother's pale face. Special circumstances would allow for the death penalty. But for that punishment to apply, Millar would have had to've been on duty at the time he was killed.

But Sheedy said, scoffing, "Believe it or not, he's considering that."

"How? How can he possibly be?" Dance asked heatedly.

"Because Millar was never officially signed out of his tour."

"He's playing a technicality like that?" Dance snapped in disgust.

"Is Harper mad?" Stuart muttered.

"No, he's driven and he's self-righteous. Which is scarier than being mad. He'll get better publicity with a capital case. And that's what he wants. Don't worry, there is no way you'd be convicted of special circumstance murder," he said, turning toward Edie. "But I think he's going to start there."

Still, Murder One was harrowing enough. That could mean twenty-five years in prison for Edie.

The lawyer continued, "Now, for our defense, justification doesn't apply, or mistake or self-defense. Ending the man's pain and suffering would be relevant at sentencing. But if the jury believed you intended to end his life, however merciful your motive, they would have to find you guilty of first-degree murder."

"The defense, then," Dance said, "is on the facts."

"Exactly. First, we attack the autopsy and the cause of death. The coroner's conclusion was that Millar died because the morphine drip was open too far and that an antihistamine had been added to the solution. That led to respiratory, and then cardiac, failure. We'll get experts to say that this was wrong. He died of natural causes as a result of the fire. The drugs were irrelevant.

"Second, we assert that Edie didn't do it at all. Somebody else administered the drugs either intentionally to kill him, or by mistake. We want to try to find people who might've been around-somebody who might've seen the killer. Or somebody who might be the killer. What about it, Edie? Was anybody near ICU around the time Juan died?"

The woman replied, "There were some nurses down on that wing. But that was all. His family was gone. And there were no visitors."

"Well, I'll keep looking into it." Sheedy's face was growing grave. "Now, we come to the big problem. The medication that was added to the IV was diphenhydramine."

"The antihistamine," Edie said.

"In the police raid on your house, they recovered a bottle of a brand-name version of diphenhydramine. The bottle was empty."

"What?" Stuart gasped.

"It was found in the garage, hidden under some rags."

"Impossible."

"And a syringe with a small bit of dried morphine on it. The same brand of morphine that was in Juan Millar's IV drip."

Edie muttered, "I didn't put it there. Of course I didn't."

"We know that, Mom."

The lawyer added, "Apparently no fingerprints or significant trace."

Dance said, "The perp planted it."

"Which is what we'll try to prove. Either he or she intended to kill Millar, or did it by mistake. In either case, they hid the bottle and syringe in your garage to shift the blame."

Edie was frowning. She looked at her daughter. "Remember earlier in the month, just after Juan died, I told you I heard a noise outside. It was coming from the garage. I'll bet somebody was there."

"That's right," Dance agreed, though she couldn't actually recall it-the manhunt for Daniel Pell had occupied all her thoughts then.

"Of course…" Dance fell silent.

"What?"

"Well, one thing we'll have to work around. I'd stationed a deputy outside their house-for security. Harper will want to know why he didn't see anything."

"Or," Edie said, "we should find out if he did see the intruder."

"Right," Dance said quickly. She gave Sheedy the name of the deputy.

"I'll check that out too." He added, "The only other thing we have is a report that the patient told you, 'Kill me.' And you told several people that. There are witnesses."

"Right," Edie said, sounding defensive, her eyes slipping to Dance.

The agent suddenly had a terrible thought: Would she be called to testify against her mother? She felt physically ill at this idea. She said, "But she wouldn't tell anybody that if she were really intent on killing somebody."

"True. But remember, Harper is going for splash. Not for logic. A quote like that…well, let's hope Harper doesn't find out about it." He rose. "When I hear from the experts and get details of the autopsy report, I'll let you know. Are there any questions?"

Edie's face revealed that, yes, she had about a thousand. But she merely shook her head.

"It's not hopeless, Edie. The evidence in the garage is troublesome but we'll do the best we can with that." Sheedy gathered up his papers, organized them and put them into his briefcase. He shook everyone's hand and gave reassuring smiles to them all. Stuart saw him to the door, the floor creaking under his solid weight.

Dance too rose. She said to her mother, "Are you sure the kids won't be too much? I can take them back to Martine's."

"No, no. I've been looking forward to seeing them." She pulled on a sweater. "In fact, I think I'll go outside and visit."

Dance briefly embraced her, feeling stiffness in her mother's shoulders. For an awkward moment the women held each other's eyes. Then Edie stepped outside.

Dance hugged her father too. "Why don't you come over for dinner tomorrow?" she asked him.

"We'll see."

"Really. It'd be good. For Mom. For you, everybody."

"I'll talk to her about it."

Dance headed back to the office where she spent the next few hours coordinating stakeouts of the possible victims' houses and of the Brighams' residence, deploying the manpower as best she could. And running the frustratingly hopeless search for the boy, who was proving to be as invisible as the electrons making up the vicious messages that had sent him on his deadly quest.

COMFORT.

Pulling up to her house in Pacific Grove at 11:00 p.m., Dance felt a tiny shiver of relief. After this long, long day she was so glad to be home.

The classic Victorian was dark green with gray banisters, shutters and trim-it was in the northwestern part of Pacific Grove; if the time of year, the wind and your attitude about leaning over a shaky railing coincided, you could see the ocean.

Walking into the small entryway, she flicked the light on and locked the door behind her. The dogs charged up to greet her. Dylan, a black-and-tan German shepherd, and Patsy, a dainty flat-coat retriever. They were named respectively for the greatest folk-rock songwriter and for the greatest country-western vocalist in the past hundred years.

Dance reviewed emails but there were no new developments in the case. In the kitchen, spacious but equipped with appliances from a different decade, she poured a glass of wine and foraged for some leftovers, settling on half a turkey sandwich that hadn't been resident in the fridge for too long.

She fed the dogs and then let them out into the back. But as she was about to return to her computer she jumped at the raucous fuss they made, barking and charging down the stairs. They did this sometimes when a squirrel or cat had had the poor judgment to come for a visit. But that was rare at this time of night. Dance set the wineglass down and, tapping the butt of her Glock, walked out onto the deck.

She gasped.

A cross lay on the ground about forty feet away from the house.

No!

Drawing the gun, she grabbed a flashlight, called the dogs to her and swept the beam into the backyard. It was a narrow space, but extended for fifty feet behind the house and was filled with monkey flowers, scrub oak and maple trees, asters, lupine, potato vines, clover and renegade grass. The only flora that did well here thrived on sandy soil and shade.

She saw no one, though there were places where an intruder could remain hidden from the deck.

Dance hurried down the stairs into the dimness and looked around at the dozen of unsettling shadows cast by branches rocking in the wind.

Pausing, then moving slowly, her eyes on the paths and the dogs, which tracked around the yard, edgy, wary.

Their tense gait and Dylan's raised hackles were unsettling.

She approached the corner of the yard slowly. Looking for movement, listening for footsteps. When she heard and saw no signs of an intruder, she shined the flashlight onto the ground.

It seemed to be a cross, but up close Dance couldn't tell if it had been left intentionally or been created by falling branches. It wasn't bound with wire and there were no flowers. But the back gate was a few feet away, which, though locked, could easily have been vaulted by a seventeen-year-old boy.

Travis Brigham, she recalled, knew her name. And could easily find where she lived.

She walked in a slow circle around the cross. Were those footsteps beside it in the trampled grass? She couldn't tell.

The uncertainty was almost more troubling than if the cross had been left as a threat.

Dance returned to the house, stuffing her weapon in the holster.

She locked up and stepped into the living room, filled with furniture as mismatched as that in Travis Brigham's house, but nicer and homier, no leather or chrome. Mostly overstuffed, upholstered in rusts and earth colors. All purchased during shopping trips with her late husband. Dropping onto the sofa, Dance noticed a missed call. She flipped eagerly to the log. It was from Jon Boling, not her mother.

Boling was reporting that the "associate" had had no luck as yet with cracking the pass code. The supercomputer would be running all night, and he'd let Dance know the progress in the morning. Or, if she wanted, she could call back. He'd be up late.

Dance debated about calling-felt an urge to-but then decided to keep the line free in case her mother called. She then phoned the MCSO, got the senior deputy on duty and requested a Crime Scene run to collect the cross. She told him where it was located. He said he'd get somebody there in the morning.

She then showered; despite the steamy water, she kept shivering, as an unfortunately persistent image lodged in her thoughts: the mask from Kelley Morgan's house, the black eyes, the sewn-shut mouth.

When she climbed into bed, her Glock was three feet away, on the bedside table, unholstered and loaded with a full clip and one "in the bedroom"-the chamber.

She closed her eyes but, as exhausted as she was, she couldn't sleep.

And it wasn't the pursuit of Travis Brigham that was keeping her awake, nor the scare earlier. Not even the image of that damn mask.

No, the source of her keen restlessness was a simple comment that kept looping over and over in her mind.

Her mother's response to Sheedy's question about witnesses in the ICU the night that Juan Millar was killed.

There were some nurses down on that wing. But that was all. His family was gone. And there were no visitors.

Dance couldn't recall for certain, but she was almost positive that when she'd mentioned the deputy's death to her mother just after it happened, Edie had acted surprised by the news; she'd told her daughter that she'd been so busy on her own wing that she hadn't gone down to the ICU that night.

If Edie hadn't been in intensive care that night, as she'd claimed, then how could she be so certain it was deserted?