Roadside Crosses Read online

  "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 ca
r.

  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.