Roadside Crosses Read online

  "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 attache 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 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 decor. 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."