“Great. We try to keep it secret and we get outed by a teenage girl named Brittany.”
“Did you see him?” Boling asked.
“Yes.”
“You think he’s the one?”
“I wish I could say. I’m leaning toward it.” She explained her theory that it was hard to read Travis because he was living more in the synth world than the real, and he was masking his kinesic responses. “I will say there’s a huge amount of anger there. How ’bout we take a walk, Jon? There’s somebody I want you to meet.”
A few minutes later they arrived at Charles Over by’s office. On the phone, as he often was, her boss gestured Dance and Boling in, with a glance of curiosity at the professor.
The agent-in-charge hung up. “They made the connection, the press did. He’s now the ‘Roadside Cross Killer.’ ”
BrittanyM . . .
Dance said, “Charles, this is Professor Jonathan Boling. He’s been helping us.”
A hearty handshake. “Have you now? What area?”
“Computers.”
“That’s your profession? Consultant?” Overby let this hang like a balsa-wood glider over the trio for a moment. Dance spotted her cue and was about to say that Boling was volunteering his time when the professor said, “I teach mostly, but, yes, I do some consulting, Agent Overby. It’s really how I make most of my money. You know, academia pays next to nothing. But as a consultant I can charge up to three hundred an hour.”
“Ah.” Overby looked stricken. “Per hour. Really?”
Boling held a straight face for exactly the right length of time before adding, “But I get a real kick out of volunteering for free to help organizations like yours. So I’m tearing up my bill in your case.”
Dance nearly had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing. Boling, she decided, could have been a good psychologist; he’d deduced Overby’s prissy frugality in ten seconds flat, defused it—and slipped in a joke. For her benefit, Dance noted—since she was the only member of the audience.
“It’s getting hysterical, Kathryn. We’ve had a dozen reports of killers wandering around in backyards. A couple of people’ve already taken some shots at intruders, thinking it’s him. Oh, and there’ve been a couple more reports of crosses.”
Dance was alarmed. “More?”
Overby held up a hand. “They were all real memorials, apparently. Accidents that had happened in the past few weeks. None with prospective dates on them. But the press is all over it. Even Sacramento’s heard.” He nodded at the phone, presumably indicating a call from their boss—the director of the CBI. Possibly even his boss, the attorney general.
“So where are we?”
Dance brought him up to date on Travis, the incidents at his parents’ house, her take on the boy. “Definitely a person of interest.”
“But you didn’t bring him in?” Overby asked.
“No probable cause. Michael’s checking out some physical evidence right now to link him to the scene.”
“And no other suspects?”
“No.”
“How the hell is a kid doing this, a kid riding around on a bicycle?”
Dance pointed out that local gangs, centered primarily in and around Salinas, had terrorized people for years, and many of them had members much younger than Travis.
Boling added, “And one thing we’ve found out about him. He’s very active in computer games. Young people who are good at them learn very sophisticated combat and evasion techniques. One of the things military recruiters always ask is how much the applicants game; everything else being equal they’d take a gamer over another kid any day.”
Overby asked, “Motive?”
Dance then explained to her boss that if Travis was the killer, his motive was probably revenge based on cyberbullying.
“Cyberbullying,” Overby said, gravely. “I was just reading up on that.”
“You were?” Dance asked.
“Yep. There was a good article in USA Today last weekend.”
“It’s become a popular topic,” Boling said. Did Dance detect slight dismay about the sources that informed the head of a regional office of the CBI?
“That’s enough to turn him to violence?” Overby asked.
Boling continued, nodding, “He’s being pushed over the edge. The postings and the rumors have spread. And it’s become physical bullying too. Somebody’s put up a YouTube video about him. They got him in a happy slap vid.”
“A what?”
“It’s a cyberbullying technique. Somebody came up to Travis at Burger King and pushed him. He stumbled—it was embarrassing—and one of the other kids was waiting to record it on a cell phone. Then they uploaded it. It’s been viewed two hundred thousand times so far.”
It was then that a slightly built, unsmiling man stepped out of the conference room across the hall and into the doorway of Overby’s office. He noted the visitors and ignored them.
“Charles,” he said in a baritone.
“Oh . . . Kathryn, this is Robert Harper,” Overby said. “From the AG’s office in San Francisco. Special Agent Dance.”
The man walked into the room and shook her hand firmly, but kept a distance, as if she’d think he was coming on to her.
“And Jon . . .” Overby tried to recall.
“Boling.”
Harper gave the professor a distracted glance. Said nothing to him.
The man from San Francisco had an unrevealing face and perfectly trimmed black hair. He wore a conservative navy blue suit and white shirt, a red-and-blue striped tie. On his lapel was an American flag pin. His cuffs were perfectly starched, though she noticed a few stray gray threads at the ends. A professional state’s attorney, long after his colleagues had gone into private practice and were making buckets of money. She put him in his early fifties.
“What brings you to Monterey?” she asked.
“Caseload evaluations.” Offering nothing more.
Robert Harper seemed to be one of those people who, if he had nothing to say, was comfortable with silence. Dance believed too she recognized in his face an intensity, a sense of devotion to his mission, akin to what she’d seen in the Reverend Fisk’s face at the hospital protest. Though how much of a mission caseload analysis would entail was a mystery to her.
He turned his attention to her briefly. She was used to being looked over, but usually by suspects; Harper’s perusal was unsettling. It was as if she held the key to an important mystery for him.
Then he said to Overby, “I’m going to be outside for a few minutes, Charles. If you could keep the door to the conference room locked, I’d appreciate it.”
“Sure. Anything else you need, just let me know.”
A chilly nod. Then Harper was gone, fishing a phone from his pocket.
“What’s the story with him?” Dance asked.
“Special prosecutor from Sacramento. Had a call from upstairs—”
The attorney general.
“—to cooperate. He wants to know about our caseload. Maybe something big’s going down and he needs to see how busy we are. He spent some time at the sheriff’s office too. Wish he’d go back and bug them. Fellow’s a cold fish. Don’t know what to say to him. Tried some jokes. They fell flat.”
But Dance was thinking about the Tammy Foster case; Robert Harper was gone from her mind.
She and Boling returned to her office and she’d just sat down at her desk when O’Neil called. She was pleased. She guessed he’d have the results of the analysis of the bike tread dirt and the gray fiber from the sweatshirt.
“Kathryn, we have a problem.” His voice was troubled.
“Go on.”
“Well, first, Peter says the gray fiber they found in the cross? It matches what we found at Travis’s.”
“So he is the one. What’d the magistrate say about the warrant?”
“Didn’t get that far. Travis’s on the run.”
“What?”
“He didn’t show up for w
ork. Or, he did show up—there were fresh bike tread marks behind the place. He snuck into the back room, stole some bagels and some cash from the purse of one of the workers . . . and a butcher’s knife. Then he disappeared. I called his parents, but they haven’t heard from him and claim they don’t have any idea where he might go.”
“Where are you?”
“In my office. I’m going to put out a detain alert on him. Us, Salinas, San Benito, surrounding counties.”
Dance rocked back, furious with herself. Why hadn’t she planned better and had somebody follow the boy when he left his house? She’d managed to establish his guilt—and simultaneously let him slip through her fingers.
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.
Http://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.
Http://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.
Roadside Crosses: A Kathryn Dance Novel Page 11