Roadside Crosses Read online

  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.

  https://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.

  https://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 decor 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 David 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 b
elly 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 office 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."