Roadside Crosses: A Kathryn Dance Novel (46 page)

As she stepped into the cafeteria she blinked. Ah, luck.

On a paper plate full of crumbs sat two oatmeal raisin cookies.

More of a miracle, the coffee was relatively fresh.

She poured a cup, added 2 percent milk and snagged a cookie. Exhausted, she plunked herself down at a table. She stretched and fished her iPod out of her pocket, mounting the ear buds and scrolling through the screen to find solace in more of Badi Assad’s arresting Brazilian guitar.

She hit “Play,” took a bite of cookie and was reaching for the coffee when a shadow hovered.

Hamilton Royce was looking down at her. His temporary ID was pinned to his shirt. The big man’s arms hung at his sides.

Just what I need. If thoughts could sigh, hers would have been clearly audible.

“Agent Dance. Can I join you?”

She gestured to an empty chair, trying not to look too invitational. But she did pull out the ear buds.

He sat, the chair squeaking, plastic and metal in tension under his frame, and leaned forward, elbows on the table, hands clasped in front of him. This position generally signifies directness. She noted his suit again. The blue didn’t work. Not dark enough. Or, alternatively, she thought unkindly, he should be wearing a sailor’s hat with a shiny brim.

“I heard. The case is over, correct?”

“We’ve got the perp. We’re still searching for the boy.”

“For Travis?” Royce asked, surprised.

“That’s right.”

“But he’s dead, don’t you think?”

“No.”

“Oh.” A pause. “That’s the one thing I regret,” Royce said. “That’s the worst of it all. That innocent boy.”

Dance noted that this reaction, at least, was honest.

She said nothing more.

Royce offered, “I’ll be headed back to Sacramento in a day or two. Look, I know we had some problems earlier. . . . Well, disagreements. I wanted to apologize.”

Decent of him, though she remained skeptical. She said, “We saw things differently. I didn’t take any offense. Not personally.”

But, professionally, she thought, I was totally pissed you tried to flank me.

“There was a lot of pressure from Sacramento. I mean, a
lot.
I got carried away in the heat of the moment.” He looked away, partly embarrassed. And partly deceptive too; he
didn’t
feel that bad, Dance noticed. But she gave him credit for trying to make nice. He continued, “Not often that you’re in a situation like this, is it? Where you have to protect somebody as unpopular as Chilton.” He didn’t seem to expect an answer. He gave a hollow laugh. “You know something? In a funny way I’ve come to admire him.”

“Chilton?”

A nod. “I don’t agree with much of what he says.
But he’s got moral character. And not a lot of people do nowadays. Even in the face of a murder threat, he stayed the course. And he’ll probably keep right on going. Don’t you think?”

“I assume so.” She said nothing about the possible termination of
The Chilton Report.

That wasn’t her business, or Royce’s.

“You know what I’d like to do? Apologize to
him
too.”

“Would you?”

“I tried his house. Nobody was answering. Do you know where he is?”

“He and his family’re going to their vacation home in Hollister tomorrow. Tonight, they’re staying at a hotel. I don’t know where. Their house is a crime scene.”

“Well, I suppose I could email him at his blog.”

She was wondering if this would ever happen.

Then, silence. Time for my exit, Dance thought. She snagged the last cookie, wrapped it in a napkin and headed for the lunchroom door. “Have a safe drive, Mr. Royce.”

“Again, I’m truly sorry, Agent Dance. I look forward to working with you in the future.”

Her kinesic skills easily fired off a message that his comment had contained two lies.

JONATHAN BOLING, LOOKING
pleased, was walking up to Dance in the lobby of the CBI. She handed him a temporary pass.

“Thanks for coming in.”

“I was beginning to miss the place. I thought I’d been fired.”

She smiled. When she’d called him in Santa Cruz she’d interrupted a paper-grading session for one of his summer school courses (she’d wondered if she would catch him prepping for a date) and Boling had been delighted to abandon the job and drive back to Monterey.

In her office, she handed him his last assignment: Greg Schaeffer’s laptop. “I’m really desperate to find Travis, or his body. Can you go through it, look for any references to local locations, driving directions, maps . . . anything like that?”

“Sure.” He indicated the Toshiba. “Passworded?”

“Not this time.”

“Good.”

He opened the lid and began to type. “I’ll search for everything with a file access or creation date in the past two weeks. Does that sound good?”

“Sure.”

Dance tried not to smile once more, watching him lean forward enthusiastically. His fingers played over the keys like a concert pianist’s. After a few moments he sat back. “Well, it doesn’t look like he used it for much of his mission here, other than to research for blogs and RSS feeds, and emails to friends and business associates—and none of them have anything to do with his plot to kill Chilton. But those are just the undeleted records. He’s been deleting files and websites regularly for the past week. Those, I’d guess, might be more what you’re interested in.”

“Yep. Can you reconstruct them?”

“I’ll go online and download one of Irv’s bots. That’ll roam the free space on his C: drive and put back together anything he’s deleted recently. Some of it will be only partial and some will be distorted. But most of the files should be ninety percent readable.”

“That’d be great, Jon.”

Five minutes later Irv’s bot was silently roaming through Schaeffer’s computer, looking for fragments of deleted files, reassembling them and storing them in a new folder that Boling had created.

“How long?” she asked.

“A couple of hours, I’d guess.” Boling looked at his watch and suggested they get a bite of dinner. They climbed into his Audi and headed to a restaurant not far from CBI headquarters, on a rise overlooking the airport and, beyond that, the city of Monterey and the bay. They got a table on the deck, warmed with overhead propane heaters, and sipped a Viognier white wine. The sun was now melting into the Pacific, spreading out and growing violently orange.
They watched it in silence as tourists nearby snapped pictures that would have to be Photoshopped to even approximate the grandeur of the real event.

They talked about her children, about their own childhoods. Where they were from originally. Boling commented that he believed only twenty percent of the Central Coast population comprised native Californians.

Silence flowed between them again. Dance sensed his shoulders rising and was expecting what came next.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.” She meant it, no reservations.

“When did your husband die?”

“About two years ago.”

Two years, two months, three weeks. She could give him the days and hours too.

“I’ve never lost anybody. Not like that.” Though there was a wistfulness in his voice, and his eyelids flickered like venetian blinds troubled by the wind. “What happened, you mind if I ask?”

“Not at all. Bill was an FBI agent, assigned to the local resident agency. But it wasn’t work-related. An accident on Highway One. A truck. The driver fell asleep.” A wisp of a laugh. “You know, I never thought about it until just now. But his fellow agents and friends put flowers by the roadside for about a year after it happened.”

“A cross?”

“No, just flowers.” She shook her head. “God, I hated that. The reminder. I’d drive miles out of my way to avoid the place.”

“Must’ve been terrible.”

Dance tried not to practice her skills as a kinesics expert when she was out socially. Sometimes she’d read the kids, sometimes she’d read a date. But she remembered when she’d caught Wes in some minor lie and he grumbled, “It’s like you’re Superman, Mom. You’ve got X-ray word vision.” Now she was aware that, although Boling’s face kept its sympathetic smile, his body language had subtly changed. The grip on his wineglass stem tightened. On his free hand, fingers rubbed compulsively. Behaviors she knew he wasn’t even aware of.

Dance just needed to prime the pump. “Come on, Jon. Your turn to spill. What’s your story? You’ve been pretty vague on the bachelor topic.”

“Oh, nothing like your situation.”

He was minimizing something that hurt, she could see that. She wasn’t even a therapist, let alone his. But they’d spent some time under fire and she wanted to know what was troubling him. She touched his arm briefly. “Come on. Remember, I interrogate people for a living. I’ll get it out of you sooner or later.”

“I never go out with somebody who wants to water board me on the first date. Well, depending.”

Jon Boling, Dance had come to realize, was a man who used clever quips as armor.

He continued, “This is the worst soap opera you’ll ever hear. . . . The girl I met after leaving Silicon Valley? She ran a bookstore in Santa Cruz. Bay Beach Books?”

“I think I’ve been there.”

“We hit it off real well, Cassie and I. Did a lot of outdoor things together. Had some great times traveling. She even survived some visits to my family—well,
actually it’s only me who has trouble surviving those.” He thought for a minute. “I think the thing is that we laughed a lot. That’s a clue. What kind of movies do you like best? We watched comedies mostly. Okay, she was separated, not divorced. Legal separation. Cassie was completely honest about it. I knew it all up front. She was getting the paperwork together.”

“Children?”

“She had two, yes. Boy and girl like you. Great kids. Split the time between her and her ex.”

You mean, her not-quite-ex, Dance corrected silently, and, of course, knew the arc of the story.

He sipped some more of the cold, crisp wine. A breeze had come up and as the sun melted, the temperature fell. “Her ex was abusive. Not physically; he never hurt her or the kids, but he’d insult her, put her down.” He gave an astonished laugh. “
This
wasn’t right,
that
wasn’t right. She was smart, kind, thoughtful. But he just kept dumping on her. I was thinking about this last night.” His voice faded at that comment, having just given away a bit of data he wished he hadn’t. “He was an emotional serial killer.”

“That’s a good way to put it.”

“And naturally she went back to him.” His face was still for a moment as he relived a specific incident, she supposed. Our hearts rarely respond to the abstract; it’s the tiny slivers of sharp memory that sting so. Then the facade returned in the form of a tight-lipped smile. “He got transferred to China, and they went with him, Cassie and the kids. She said she was sorry, she’d always love me, but she
had
to go back to him. . . . Never quite got the obligatory part in relationships. Like, you
have
to breathe, you
have
to eat . . . but staying with a jerk? I don’t get the
necessary.
But here I am going on about . . . oh, shall we say an ‘epic’ bad call on my part, and
you
had a real tragedy.”

Dance shrugged. “In my line of work, whether it’s murder or manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide, a death’s still a death. Just like love; when it goes away, for whatever reason, it hurts all the same.”

“I guess. But all I’ll say is it’s a real bad idea to fall in love with somebody who’s married.”

Amen, thought Kathryn Dance again, and nearly laughed out loud. She tipped a touch more wine into her glass.

“How ’bout that,” he said.

“What?”

“We’ve managed to bring up two extremely personal
and
depressing topics in a very short period of time. Good thing we’re not on a date,” he added with a grin.

Dance opened the menu. “Let’s get some food. They have—”

“—the best calamari burgers in town here,” Boling said.

She laughed. She’d been about to say exactly the same.

THE COMPUTER SEARCH
was a bust.

She and the professor returned from their squid and salads to her office, both eager to see what Irv’s bot had found. Boling sat down, scrolled through the file and announced with a sigh, “Zip.”

“Nothing?”

“He just deleted those emails and files and
research to save space. Nothing secretive, and nothing local at all.”

The frustration was keen, but there was nothing more to do. “Thanks, Jon. At least I got a nice dinner out of it.”

“Sorry.” He looked truly disappointed that he couldn’t be of more help. “I guess I better finish up grading those papers. And pack.”

“That’s right, your family reunion’s this weekend.”

He nodded. A tight smile and he said, “Woooo-hoooo,” with forced enthusiasm.

Dance laughed.

He hovered near her. “I’ll call you when I get back. I want to know how things work out. And good luck with Travis. I hope he’s okay.”

“Thanks, Jon. For everything.” She took his hand and gripped it firmly. “And I especially appreciate your not getting stabbed to death.”

A smile. He squeezed her hand and turned away.

As she watched him walk down the corridor a woman’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “Hey, K.”

Dance turned to see Connie Ramirez, walking down the hallway toward her.

“Con.”

The other senior agent looked around and nodded toward Dance’s office. Then stepped inside, closing the door. “Found a few things I thought you might be interested in. From the hospital.”

“Oh, thanks, Con. How’d you do it?”

Ramirez considered this. “I was deceptively honest.”

“I like that.”

“I flashed my shield and gave them some details of
another case I’m running. That medical fraud case.”

The CBI investigated financial crimes too. And the case Ramirez was referring to was a major insurance scam—the perps used identification numbers of doctors who were deceased to file bogus claims in their names.

It was the sort of thing, Dance reflected, that Chilton himself might write about in his blog. And it was a brilliant choice for Connie; staffers at the hospital were among the victims, and would have an interest in helping investigators.