Roadside Crosses Read online

  "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 brot
her 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 sawhorse 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 semiconscious 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 celebre 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. "Killers. Killers!" 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 vacation 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?"