Roadside Crosses: A Kathryn Dance Novel

by Jeffery Deaver

  And though Dance felt an instinct to slam an arrow key or slide the touchpad to lift an arm and protect herself, there was no time.

  Travis’s avatar moved in fast. He swung his sword again and again, striking her. In the upper left-hand corner of the screen a box popped up showing two figures, solid white: the heading “Stryker” was above the one on the left, and “Greenleaf” on the right.

  “No!” she whispered, as Travis slashed away.

  The white filling the Greenleaf outline began to empty. Boling said, “That’s your life force bleeding out. Fight back. You have a sword. There!” He tapped the screen. “Put the cursor on it and left click with the mouse.”

  Filled with unreasonable but feverish panic, she began clicking.

  Stryker easily deflected her avatar’s wild blows.

  As Greenleaf’s power slipped away on the gauge, the avatar dropped to her knees. Soon the sword fell to the ground. She was on her back, arms and legs splayed. Helpless.

  Dance felt as vulnerable as she ever had in real life.

  “You don’t have much power left,” Boling said. “There’s nothing you can do.” The gauge was nearly drained.

  Stryker stopped hacking at Greenleaf’s body. He moved closer and looked into the computer monitor.

  “who r u?” came the words popping up in the instant message.

  “i am greenleaf. Y did U kill me?”

  “WHO R U?”

  Boling said, “All caps. He’s shouting. He’s mad.”

  “pleez?” Dance’s hands were shaking and her chest was constricted. It was as if these weren’t bits of electronic data but real people; she’d plunged wholly into the synth world.

  Travis then directed Stryker to step forward and drive his sword into Greenleaf’s abdomen. Blood spurted, and the gauge in the upper left-hand corner was replaced with a message: “YOU ARE DEAD.”

  “Oh,” Dance cried. Her sweaty hands quivered and her breath stuttered in and out, over her dry lips. Travis’s avatar stared at the screen chillingly, then turned and began to run into the forest. Without a pause, he swiped his sword across the neck of an avatar whose back was turned and lopped off the creature’s head.

  He then vanished.

  “He didn’t wait to loot the corpse. He’s escaping. He wants to get away fast. He thinks something’s up.” Boling moved closer to Dance—now it was their legs that brushed. “I want to see something.” He began to type. Another box appeared. It said, “Stryker is not online.”

  Dance felt a painful chill rattling through her, ice along her spine.

  Sitting back, her shoulder against Jon Boling’s, she was thinking: If Travis had logged off, maybe he’d left the location where he’d been online.

  And where was he going?

  Into hiding?

  Or was he intent on continuing his hunt in the real world?

  LYING IN BED, the hour closing in on midnight.

  Two sounds confused: the wind stroking the trees outside her bedroom window and surf on rocks a mile away at Asilomar and along the road to Lovers Point.

  Beside her, she felt warmth against her leg, and exhaled breath, soft in sleep, tickled her neck.

  She was unable to join in the bliss of unconsciousness, however. Kathryn Dance was as awake as if it were noon.

  In her mind a series of thoughts spun past. One would rise to the top for a time, then roll on, like on Wheel of Fortune. The subject the clicker settled on most frequently was Travis Brigham of course. In her years of being a crime reporter and a jury consultant and a law enforcement agent, Dance had come to believe that the tendency toward evil could be found in the genes—like Daniel Pell, the cult leader and killer she’d pursued recently—or could be acquired: J. Doe in Los Angeles, for instance, whose murderous inclinations had come later in life.

  Dance wondered where Travis fell on the spectrum.

  He was a troubled, dangerous young man, but he was also someone else, a teenager yearning to be normal—to have clear skin, to have a popular girl like him. Was it inevitable from birth that he’d slip into this life of rage? Or had he begun like any other boy yet been so battered by circumstance—his abusive father, troubled brother, gawky physique, solitary nature, bad complexion—that his anger couldn’t burn away as it did in most of us, like midmorning fog?

  For a long, thick moment, pity and loathing were balanced within her.

  Then she saw Travis’s avatar staring her down and lifting his sword.

  like really w4nt to learn, what can u t33ch me?

  2 die . . .

  Next to her the warm body shifted slightly, and she wondered if she was giving off minuscule tensions that disturbed sleep. She was trying to remain motionless, but that, as a kinesics expert, she knew was impossible. Asleep or waking, if our brain functioned, our bodies moved.

  The wheel spun on.

  Her mother, and the euthanasia case, now paused at the top. Though she’d asked Edie to call when they got back to the inn, she hadn’t. This hurt, but didn’t surprise, Dance.

  Then the wheel spun again and the J. Doe case in Los Angeles paused at the apogee. What would come of the immunity hearing? Would it be delayed again? And the ultimate outcome? Ernie Seybold was good. But was he good enough?

  Dance honestly didn’t know.

  This musing in turn led to thoughts of Michael O’Neil. She understood there were reasons that he hadn’t been able to be here tonight. But his not calling? That was unusual.

  The Other Case . . .

  Dance laughed at the jealousy.

  She occasionally tried to picture herself and O’Neil together, had he not been married to svelte and exotic Anne. On the one hand, it was too easy. They’d spent days together on cases, and the hours moved by seamlessly. The conversation flowed, the humor. Yet they also disagreed, sometimes to the point of anger. But she believed their passionate disagreements only added to what they had together.

  Whatever that was.

  Her thoughts wheeled on, unstoppable.

  Click, click, click . . .

  At least until they stopped at Professor Jonathan Boling.

  And beside her the soft breathing became a soft rattle.

  “Okay, that’s it,” Dance said, rolling onto her other side. “Patsy!”

  The flat-coat retriever stopped snoring as she awoke and lifted her head off the pillow.

  “On the floor,” Dance commanded.

  The dog stood, assessed that no food or ball playing figured in the deal and leapt off the bed to join her companion, Dylan, on the shabby rug they used as a futon, leaving Dance once more alone in bed.

  Jon Boling, she reflected. Then decided perhaps it was better not to spend much time on him.

  Not just yet.

  In any case, at that moment, her musings vanished as the mobile phone by the bed, sitting next to her weapon, trilled.

  Instantly, she flipped the light on, shoved her glasses on her nose and laughed, seeing the Caller ID.

  “Jon,” she said.

  “Kathryn,” Boling said. “I’m sorry to call so late.”

  “It’s okay. I wasn’t asleep. What’s up? Stryker?”

  “No. But there’s something you have to see. The blog—The Chilton Report. You better go online now.”

  IN HER SWEATS, the dogs nearby, Dance was sitting in the living room, all the lights off, though moonlight and a shaft of streetlight painted iridescent swatches of blue-white on the pine floor. Her Glock pressed against her spine, the heavy gun tugging down the limp elastic waistband of her sweats.

  The computer finished its interminable loading of the software.

  “Okay.”

  He said, “Look over the latest posting of the blog.” He gave her the URL.

  Http://www.thechiltonreport.com/html/june 27update.html

  She blinked in surprise. “What . . . ?”

  Bolling told her, “Travis hacked The Report.”

  “How?”

  The professor gave a cold laugh. “He�
��s a teenager, that’s how.”

  Dance shivered as she read. Travis had posted a message over the beginning of the June 27 blog. To the left was a crude drawing of the creature Qetzal from DimensionQuest. Around the eerie face, its lips sewn shut and bloody, were cryptic numbers and words. Beside it was a text posting in large, bold letters. It was even more troubling than the picture. Half English, half leetspeak.

  I will OWN u all!

  i = win, u = fail!!

  u r d3ad

  3v3ry 1 of u

  —post3d by TravisDQ

  She didn’t need a translator for this one.

  Below this was another picture. The awkward color rendering showed a teenage girl or woman lying on her back, mouth open in a scream, as a hand plunged a sword into her chest. Blood spurted skyward.

  “That picture . . . it’s disgusting, Jon.”

  After a pause: “Kathryn,” he said in a soft voice. “Do you notice anything about it?”

  As she studied the awkward drawing, Dance gave a gasp. The victim had brownish hair, pulled back in a ponytail, and was wearing a white blouse and black skirt. On her belt was a darkened area on the hip, which could have been a weapon holster. The outfit was similar to what Dance had been wearing when she’d met Travis yesterday.

  “It’s me?” she whispered to Boling.

  The professor said nothing.

  Was the picture old, maybe a fantasy about the death of a girl or woman who’d slighted Travis somehow in the past?

  Or had he drawn it today, despite the fact he was on the run from the police?

  Dance had a chilling image of the boy, hovering over the paper with pencil and crayon, creating this crude depiction of a synth world death he hoped to make real.

  THE WIND IS a persistent aspect of the Monterey Peninsula. Usually bracing, sometimes weak or tentative but never absent. Day and night, it churns the blue-gray ocean, which false to its name is never calm.

  One of the windiest places for miles around is China Cove, at the south end of Point Lobos State Park. The chill, steady breath from the ocean numbs the skin of hikers, and picnics are a dicey proposition if paper plates and cups figure as the dishware. Sea-birds here labor even to stay in place if they aim into the breeze.

  Now, nearly midnight, the wind is fickle, surging and vanishing, and at its strongest, it kicks up towering gray spumes of seawater.

  It rustles the scrub oak.

  It bends the pine.

  It flattens the grasses.

  But one thing that’s immune to the wind tonight is a small artifact on the seaside shoulder of Highway 1.

  It’s a cross, about two feet high and made of black branches. In the middle is a torn cardboard disk with tomorrow’s date penned in blue. Sitting at the base, weighted down by stones, is a bouquet of red roses. At times petals fly off and skitter across the highway. But the cross itself doesn’t flutter or bend. Clearly it was driven deep into the sandy dirt by the roadside with powerful blows, its creator adamant that it remain upright and visible for all to see.

  THURSDAY

  Chapter 25

  KATHRYN DANCE, TJ SCANLON and Jon Boling were in her office. The time was 9:00 a.m. and they’d been there for close to two hours.

  Chilton had removed Travis’s threat and the two pictures from the thread.

  But Boling had downloaded them and made copies.

  u r d3ad.

  3v3ry 1 of u.

  And the pictures, too.

  Jon Boling said, “It might be possible to trace the posting.” A grimace. “But only if Chilton cooperates.”

  “Is there anything in the picture of Qetzal—those numbers and codes and words? Anything that might help?”

  Boling said that they were mostly about the game and had probably been made a long time ago. In any case, even the puzzlemaster could find no clues in the weird notations.

  The others in the room scrupulously avoided commenting that the second picture, of the stabbing, bore a resemblance to Dance herself.

  She was about to phone the blogger, when she got a call. Barking a laugh as she looked at Caller ID, she picked up. “Yes, Mr. Chilton?”

  Boling looked at her with an ironic gaze.

  “I don’t know if you saw . . . ?”

  “We did. Your blog got hacked.”

  “The server had good security. The boy’s got to be smart.” A pause. Then the blogger continued, “I wanted to let you know, we tried to trace the hack. He’s using a proxy site somewhere in Scandinavia. I’ve called some friends over there, and they’re pretty certain they know what the company is. I have the name and their address. Phone number too. It’s outside of Stockholm.”

  “Will they cooperate?”

  Chilton said, “Proxy services rarely do unless there’s a warrant. That’s why people use them, of course.”

  An international warrant would be a nightmare procedurally and Dance had never known one to be served earlier than two or three weeks after it was issued. Sometimes the foreign authorities ignored them altogether. But it was something. “Give me the information. I’ll try.”

  Chilton did.

  “I appreciate your doing this.”

  “And there’s something else.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Are you in the blog now?”

  “I can be.”

  “Read what I just posted a few minutes ago.”

  She logged on.

  Http://www.thechiltonreport.com/html/june28.html

  First was an apology to the readers, surprising Dance with its humility. Then came:

  An Open Letter to Travis Brigham

  This is a personal plea, Travis. Now that your name is public, I hope you won’t mind my using it.

  My job is to report the news, to ask questions, not to get involved in the stories I report on. But I have to get involved now.

  Please, Travis, there’s been enough trouble. Don’t make it worse for yourself. It’s not too late to put an end to this terrible situation. Think of your family, think of your future. Please . . . call the police, give yourself up. There are people who want to help you.

  Dance said, “That’s brilliant, James. Travis might even contact you about surrendering.”

  “And I’ve frozen the thread. Nobody else can post to it.” He was silent for a moment. “That picture . . . it was terrible.”

  Welcome to the real world, Chilton.

  She thanked him and they hung up. She scrolled to the end of the “Roadside Crosses” thread and read the most recent—and apparently last—posts. Although some seemed to have been posted from overseas, she once again couldn’t help wondering if they contained clues that might help her find Travis or anticipate his next moves. But she could draw no conclusions from the cryptic postings.

  Dance logged off and told TJ and Boling about what Chilton had written.

  Boling wasn’t sure it would have much effect—the boy, in his assessment, was past reasoning with. “But we’ll hope.”

  Dance doled out assignments; TJ retreated to his chair at the coffee table to contact the Scandinavian proxy, and Boling to his corner to check out the names of possible victims from a new batch of Internet addresses—including those who’d posted to threads other than “Roadside Crosses.” He’d identified thirteen more.

  Charles Overby, in a politician’s blue suit and white shirt, stepped into Dance’s office. His greeting: “Kathryn . . . say, Kathryn, what’s this about the kid posting threats?”

  “Right, Charles. We’re trying to find out where he hacked in from.”

  “Six reporters have already called me. And a couple of them got my home phone number. I’ve put them off but I can’t wait anymore. I’m holding a press conference in twenty minutes. What can I tell them?”

  “That the investigation is continuing. We’re getting some manpower help from San Benito for the search. There’ve been sightings but nothing’s panned out.”

  “Hamilton called me too. He’s pretty upset.”

>   Sacramento’s Hamilton Royce, of the too-blue suit, the quick eyes and the ruddy complexion.

  Agent in Charge Overby had had a rather eventful morning, it seemed.

  “Anything more?”

  “Chilton’s stopped the posts on the thread and asked Travis to surrender.”

  “Anything tech, I mean?”

  “Well, he’s helping us trace the boy’s uploads.”

  “Good. So we’re doing something.”

  He meant: something the viewers of prime-time TV would appreciate. As opposed to the sweaty, unstylish police work they’d been engaged in the last forty-eight hours. Dance caught Boling’s eye, which said he too was taken aback by the comment. They looked away from each other immediately before a shared look of shock bloomed.

  Overby glanced at his watch. “All right. My turn in the barrel.” He wandered off to the press conference.

  “Does he know what that expression means?” Boling asked her.

  “About the barrel? I don’t know, myself.”

  TJ gave a chortling laugh but said nothing. He smiled at Boling, who said, “It’s a joke I won’t repeat. It involves horny sailors out to sea for a long time.”

  “Thanks for not sharing.” Dance dropped into her desk chair, sipped the coffee that had materialized and, what the hell, went for half of the doughnut that also had appeared as a gift from the gods.

  “Has Travis—well, Stryker—been back online?” she called to Jon Boling.

  “Nope. Haven’t heard from Irv. But he’ll be sure to let us know. I don’t think he’s ever slept. He’s got Red Bull in his veins.”

  Dance picked up the phone and called Peter Bennington at MCSO forensics for the latest information on the evidence. The gist was that while there was by now plenty of evidence to get a murder conviction against Travis, there were no leads as to where he might be hiding out, except those traces of soil they’d found earlier—a location different from that where the cross had been left. David Reinhold, that eager young deputy from the sheriff’s office, had taken it on himself to collect samples from around Travis’s house; the dirt didn’t match.

  Sandy soil . . . So helpful, Dance reflected cynically, in an area that boasted more than fifteen miles of the most beautiful beaches and dunes in the state.