Roadside Crosses: A Kathryn Dance Novel (23 page)

Sonia began to protest but fell silent and futilely fought tears.

Dance and Carraneo searched the house carefully. It didn’t take long. No sign the boy had been here recently.

“We know you own a pistol, Mr. Brigham. Could you check to see if it’s missing?”

His eyes narrowed as if he were considering the implications of this. “It’s in my glove compartment. In a lockbox.”

Which California law required in a household where children under eighteen lived.

“Loaded?”

“Uh-huh.” He looked defensive. “We do a lot of landscaping in Salinas. The gangs, you know.”

“Could you see if it’s still there?”

“He’s not going to take my gun. He wouldn’t dare. He’d get a whipping like he wouldn’t believe.”

“Could you check, please?”

The man gave her a look of disbelief. Then he stepped outside. Dance motioned Carraneo to follow him.

Dance looked at the wall and noticed a few pictures of the family. She was struck by a much happier-looking, and much younger, Sonia Brigham, standing
behind the counter at a booth at the Monterey County Fairgrounds. She was thin and pretty. Maybe she’d run the concession before she’d gotten married. Maybe that’s where she and Brigham had met.

The woman asked, “Is the girl all right? The one who got attacked?”

“We don’t know.”

Tears dotted her eyes. “He’s got problems. He gets mad some. But . . . this has to be a terrible mistake. I know it!”

Denial was the most intractable of emotional responses to hardship. Tough as a walnut shell.

Travis’s father, accompanied by the young agent, returned to the living room. Bob Brigham’s ruddy face was troubled. “It’s gone.”

Dance sighed. “And you wouldn’t have it anyplace else?”

He shook his head, avoided Sonia’s face.

Timidly she said, “What good comes of a gun?”

He ignored her.

Dance asked, “When Travis was younger, were there places he’d go?”

“No,” the father said. “He was always disappearing. But who knows where he went?”

“How about his friends?”

Brigham snapped, “Doesn’t have any. He’s always online. With that computer of his . . .”

“All the time,” echoed his wife softly. “All the time.”

“Call us if he contacts you. Don’t try to get him to surrender, don’t take the gun away. Just call us. It’s for his own good.”

“Sure,” she said. “We will.”

“He’ll do what I say. Exactly what I say.”

“Bob . . .”

“Shhhh.”

“We’re going through his room now,” Dance said.

“Is that all right?” Sonia was nodding at the warrant.

“They can take whatever the fuck they want. Anything that’ll help find him before he gets us into more trouble.” Brigham lit a cigarette and dropped the match into the ashtray, a smoking arc. Sonia’s face sank as she realized she’d become her son’s sole advocate.

Dance pulled her radio off her hip, called the deputies outside. One of them radioed back that he’d found something. The young officer arrived. He held up a lockbox in a latex-gloved hand. It had been smashed open. “Was in some bushes behind the house. And this too.” An empty box of Remington .38 Special rounds.

“That’s it,” the father muttered. “Mine.”

The house was eerily quiet.

The agents walked into Travis’s room. Pulling on her gloves, Dance said to Carraneo, “I want to see if we can find anything about friends, addresses, places he might like to hang out.”

They searched through the effluence of a teenager’s room—clothes, comics, DVDs, manga, anime, games, computer parts, notebooks, sketchpads. She noticed there was little music and nothing at all about sports.

Dance blinked as she looked through a notebook. The boy had done a drawing of a mask identical to the one outside Kelley Morgan’s window.

Even the small sketch chilled her.

Hidden away in a drawer were tubes of Clearasil and books about remedies for acne, diet and medication and even dermabrasion to remove scarring. Though Travis’s problem was less serious than with many teens, it was probably what he saw as a major reason he was an outcast.

Dance continued to search. Under the bed she found a strongbox. It was locked but she had seen a key in the top desk drawer. It worked in the box. Expecting drugs or porn, she was surprised at the contents: stacks of cash.

Carraneo was looking over her shoulder. “Hmm.”

About four thousand dollars. The bills were crisp and ordered, as if he’d gotten them from a bank or an ATM, not from buyers in drug deals. Dance added the box to the evidence they’d take back. Not only did she not want to fund Travis’s escape, if he came back for it, but she didn’t doubt that his father would pilfer the money in an instant, if he found the stash.

“There’s this,” Carraneo said. He was holding up printouts of pictures, mostly candids, of pretty girls about high school age, taken around Robert Louis Stevenson High School. None obscene or taken up the girls’ skirts, though, or of locker rooms or bathrooms.

Stepping outside the room, Dance asked Sonia, “Do you know who they are?”

Neither parent did.

She turned back to the pictures. She realized that she’d seen one of the girls before—in a news story about the June 9 crash. Caitlin Gardner, the girl who’d survived. The photo was more formal than the others—the pretty girl looking off to the side, smiling
blandly. Dance turned the thin, glossy rectangle of paper over and noted a portion of a picture of a sports team on the other side. Travis had cut the picture out of a yearbook.

Had he asked Caitlin for a picture and been refused? Or had he been too shy even to ask?

The agents searched for a half hour but found no clues as to where Travis might be, no phone numbers, email addresses or friends’ names. He kept no address book or calendar.

Dance wanted to see what was on his laptop. She opened the lid. It was in hibernate mode and booted up immediately. She wasn’t surprised when it asked for a password. Dance asked the boy’s father, “Do you have any idea what the code is?”

“Like he’d tell us.” He gestured at the computer. “Now, that’s the problem right there, you know. That’s what went wrong, playing all those games. All the violence. They shoot people and cut them up, do all kinds of shit.”

Sonia seemed to reach a breaking point. “Well, you played soldier when you were growing up, I know you did. All boys play games like that. It doesn’t mean they turn into killers!”

“That was a different time,” he muttered. “It was better, healthier. We only played killing Indians and Viet Cong. Not normal people.”

Carrying the laptop, notebooks, strongbox and hundreds of pages of printouts and notes and pictures, Dance and Carraneo walked to the door.

“Did you ever think about one thing?” Sonia asked.

Dance paused, turned.

“That even if he did it, went after those girls, that maybe it wasn’t his fault. All those terrible things that they said about him just pushed him over the edge. They attacked
him,
with those words, those hateful words. And my Travis never said a single word against any one of them.” She controlled her tears. “
He
’s the victim here.”

ON THE HIGHWAY
to Salinas, not far from beautiful Laguna Seca racecourse, Kathryn Dance braked her unmarked Ford to a halt in front of a construction worker holding a portable stop sign. Two large bulldozers slowly traversed the highway in front of her, shooting ruddy dust into the air.

She was on the phone with Deputy David Reinhold, the young officer who’d delivered Tammy Foster’s computer to her and Boling. Rey Carraneo had sped to the MCSO Crime Scene Unit in Salinas and dropped Travis’s Dell off for processing into evidence.

“I’ve logged it in,” Reinhold told her. “And run it for prints and other trace. Oh, and it probably wasn’t necessary, Agent Dance, but I ran a nitrate swab for explosives too.”

Computers were occasionally booby-trapped—not as IED weapons, but to destroy compromising data contained in the files.

“Good, Deputy.”

The officer certainly had initiative. She recalled his quick blue eyes and his smart decision to pull out the battery of Tammy’s computer.

“Some of the prints are Travis’s,” the young deputy
said. “But there are others too. I ran them. A half dozen were from Samuel Brigham.”

“The boy’s brother.”

“Right. And a few others. No match in AIFIS. But I can tell you they’re larger, probably male.”

Dance wondered if the boy’s father had tried to get inside.

Reinhold said, “I’m happy to try to crack into the system, if you want. I’ve taken some courses.”

“Appreciate it, but I’m having Jonathan Boling—you met him in my office—handle that.”

“Sure, Agent Dance. Whatever you’d like. Where are you?”

“I’m out now, but you can have it delivered to the CBI. Have Agent Scanlon take custody. He’ll sign the card and receipt.”

“I’ll do it right now, Kathryn.”

They disconnected and she looked around impatiently, waiting for the construction flagman to allow her through. She was surprised to see the area dug up so completely—dozens of trucks and road-grading equipment were tearing apart the ground. She’d driven here just last week and the work hadn’t yet begun.

This was the big highway project that Chilton had written about in the blog, the shortcut to Highway 101, in the thread titled “Yellow Brick Road,” suggesting gold—and wondering if somebody was profiting illegally on the project.

She noted that the equipment belonged to Clint Avery Construction, one of the largest companies on the Peninsula. The workers here were large men, working hard, sweaty. They were mostly white, which was
unusual. Much of the labor on the Peninsula was performed by Latino workers.

One of them looked at her solemnly—recognizing her car for an unmarked law enforcement vehicle—but he made no special effort to speed her through.

Finally, at his leisure, he waved the traffic on, his eyes looking over Dance closely, it seemed to her.

She left the extensive roadwork behind and cruised down the highway and onto side streets until she came to Central Coast College, where summer session was under way. A student pointed out Caitlin Gardner sitting at a picnic bench with several other girls, who hovered around her protectively. Caitlin was pretty and blond and sported a ponytail. Tasteful studs and hoops decorated both ears. She resembled any one of the hundreds of coeds here.

After leaving the Brighams, Dance had called the Gardner house and learned from Caitlin’s mother that the girl was taking some college courses here for credit at Robert Louis Stevenson High, where she’d start her senior year in a few months.

Caitlin’s eyes, Dance noticed, were focused away and then her gaze shifted to Dance. Not knowing who she was—probably thinking she was another reporter—she began to gather her books. Two of the other girls followed their friend’s troubled eyes and rose in a phalanx to give cover so Caitlin could escape.

But they then noticed Dance’s body armor and weapon. And grew cautious, pausing.

“Caitlin,” Dance called.

The girl stopped.

Dance approached and showed her ID, introduced herself. “I’d like to talk to you.”

“She’s pretty tired,” a friend said.

“And upset.”

Dance smiled. To Caitlin she said, “I’m sure you are. But it’s important that I talk to you. If you don’t mind.”

“She shouldn’t even be in school,” another girl said. “But she’s taking classes out of respect to Trish and Vanessa.”

“That’s good of you.” Dance wondered how attending summer school honored the dead.

The curious icons of adolescents . . .

The first friend said firmly, “Caitlin’s, like, really, really—”

Dance turned to the frizzy-haired brunette, her personality brittle, lost the smile and said bluntly, “I’m speaking to Caitlin.”

The girl fell silent.

Caitlin mumbled, “I guess.”

“Come on over here,” Dance said pleasantly. Caitlin followed her across the lawn and they sat at another picnic table. She clutched her book bag to her chest and was looking around the campus nervously. Her foot bobbed and she tugged at an earlobe.

She appeared terrified, even more so than Tammy.

Dance tried to put her at ease. “So, summer school.”

“Yeah. My friends and me. Better than working, or sitting home.”

The last word has been delivered in a tone that suggested a fair amount of parental hassle.

“What’re you studying?”

“Chemistry and biology.”

“That’s a good way to ruin your summer.”

She laughed. “It’s not so bad. I’m kinda good at science.”

“Headed for med school?”

“I’m hoping.”

“Where?”

“Oh, I don’t know yet. Probably Berkeley undergrad. Then I’ll see.”

“I spent time up there. Great town.”

“Yeah? What’d you study?”

Dance smiled and said, “Music.”

In fact she hadn’t taken a single class on that campus of the University of California. She’d been a busker—a musician playing guitar and singing for money on the streets of Berkeley—very little money, in her case.

“So, how you doing with all of this?”

Caitlin’s eyes went flat. She muttered, “Not so great. I mean, it’s so terrible. The accident, that was one thing. But then, what happened to Tammy and Kelley . . . that was awful. How is she?”

“Kelley? We don’t know yet. Still in a coma.”

One of the friends had overheard and called, “Travis bought this poison gas online. Like from neo-Nazis.”

True? Or rumor?

Dance said, “Caitlin, he’s disappeared. He’s hiding somewhere and we have to find him before he causes more harm. How well did you know him?”

“Not too good. We had a class or two together. I’d see him in the halls sometimes. That’s all.”

Suddenly she started in panic and her eyes jumped to a nearby stand of bushes. A boy was pushing his way through them. He looked around, retrieved a football
and then returned into the foliage for the field on the other side.

“Travis had a crush on you, right?” Dance pressed on.

“No!” she said. And Dance deduced that the girl did in fact think this; she could tell from the rise in the pitch of her voice, one of the few indicators of deception that can be read without the benefit of doing a prior baseline.