Roadside Crosses: A Kathryn Dance Novel

by Jeffery Deaver

  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 sides. 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 te
n-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.