Roadside Crosses: A Kathryn Dance Novel

by Jeffery Deaver

  He headed into the living room and offered the bowl to Wes and Stu. “Emergency rations to keep our strength up.”

  “Yea!” the boy cried, grabbing a handful. Then said, “Grand pa, go back to that fumble so Mr. Boling can see it.”

  DANCE HELPED HER mother and daughter finish setting out the food, buffet style, on the island in the kitchen.

  She and Edie talked about the weather, about the dogs, about the children, about Stuart. Which led to the aquarium, which led to a water referendum, which led to a half dozen other trivial subjects, all of which had one thing in common: They were as far away from the subject of the arrest of Edie Dance as could be.

  She watched Wes, Jon Boling and her father sitting together in the living room, with the sports show on the screen. They all laughed hard when a receiver crashed into a Gatorade tank and drenched a cameraman, and were digging into the pretzels and dip as if dinner were an empty promise. Dance had to smile at the homey, comforting scene.

  Then she glanced down at her cell phone, disappointed that Michael O’Neil hadn’t called.

  As she was setting the table on the Deck, the other guests arrived: Martine Christensen and her husband, Steven Cahill, climbed the stairs, their nine-year-old twin boys in tow. Delighting Wes and Maggie, they also brought with them a long-haired tawny puppy, a briard named Raye.

  The couple greeted Edie Dance warmly, avoiding any mention of the cases; either the Roadside Cross attacks or the one involving Edie.

  “Hey, girlfriend,” long-haired Martine said to Dance, winking, and passed her a dangerous-looking homemade chocolate cake.

  Dance and Martine had been best friends ever since the woman had decided to single-handedly wrest Dance from the addictive lethargy of widowhood and force her back into life.

  As if moving from the synth world back to the real, Dance now reflected.

  She hugged Steven, who promptly vanished into the den to join the menfolk, his Birkenstocks flapping in time to his long ponytail.

  The adults had wine while the children held an impromptu dog show in the backyard. Raye had apparently been doing his homework and was, literally, running circles around Patsy and Dylan, doing tricks and leaping over benches. Martine said he was a star in his obedience and agility classes.

  Maggie appeared and said she wanted to take their dogs to school too.

  “We’ll see,” Dance told her.

  Soon candles were lit, sweaters distributed and everybody was sitting around the table, food steaming in the false autumn of a Monterey evening. Conversation was whirling as fast as the wine flowed. Wes was whispering jokes to the twins, who giggled not because of the punch lines but because an older boy was spending time whispering jokes to them.

  Edie was laughing at something Martine said.

  And for the first time in two days, Kathryn Dance felt the gloom fade.

  Travis Brigham, Hamilton Royce, James Chilton . . . and the Dark Knight—Robert Harper—slipped from the forefront of her thoughts and she began to think that life might eventually right itself.

  Jon Boling turned out to be quite social and fit right in, though he hadn’t known a single soul there before today. He and Steven, the computer programmer, had much to talk about, though Wes kept injecting himself into the conversation.

  Everyone studiously avoided talking about Edie’s problem, which meant that current affairs and politics took center stage. Dance was amused to note that the first subjects to come up were ones Chilton had written about: the desalination plant and the new highway to Salinas.

  Steve, Martine and Edie were adamantly opposed to the plant.

  “I suppose,” Dance said. “But we’ve all lived here for a long time.” A glance at her parents. “Aren’t you tired of the droughts?”

  Martine said she doubted the water produced by the desalination plant would benefit them. “It’ll be sold to rich cities in Arizona and Nevada. Somebody’ll make billions and we won’t see a drop.”

  After that they debated the highway. The group was divided on this, as well. Dance said, “It’d come in handy for the CBI and sheriff’s office if we’re running cases in the fields north of Salinas. But that cost-overrun issue is a problem.”

  “What overrun?” Stuart asked.

  Dance was surprised to see everyone looking at her blankly. She explained what she’d learned by reading The Chilton Report: that the blogger had uncovered some possible malfeasance.

  “I hadn’t heard about that,” Martine said. “I was so busy reading about the roadside crosses that I didn’t pay much attention. . . . But I’m sure going to look into it now, I’ll tell you.” She was the most political of Dance’s friends. “I’ll check out the blog.”

  After dinner Dance asked Maggie to bring out her keyboard for a brief concert.

  The group retired to the living room, more wine was passed around. Boling lounged back in a deep armchair, joined by Raye the briard. Martine laughed—Raye was a bit bigger than a lapdog—but the professor insisted the puppy stay.

  Maggie plugged in and, with the gravity of a recital pianist, sat down and played four songs from her Suzuki Book Three, simple arrangements of pieces by Mozart, Beethoven and Clementi. She hardly missed a note.

  Everyone applauded and then went for cake, coffee and more wine.

  Finally around 9:30, Steve and Martine said they wanted to get the twins to bed, and they headed out the door with the children. Maggie was already making plans to enter Dylan and Patsy in Raye’s dog classes.

  Edie gave a distant smile. “We should go too. It’s been a long day.”

  “Mom, stay for a while. Have another glass of wine.”

  “No, no, I’m exhausted, Katie. Come on, Stu. I want to go home.”

  Dance received a distracted embrace from her mother, and her comfort from earlier diminished. “Call me later.” Disappointed at their quick retreat, she watched the taillights disappear up the road. Then she told the children to say good night to Boling. The professor smiled and shook their hands, and Dance sent them off to wash up.

  Wes appeared a few minutes later with a DVD. Ghost in the Shell, a Japanese anime science fiction tale involving computers.

  “Here, Mr. Boling. This is pretty sweet. You can borrow it if you want.”

  Dance was astonished that her son was behaving so well with a man. Probably he recognized Boling as a business associate of his mother’s, not a love interest; still, he’d been known to grow defensive even around her coworkers.

  “Well, thanks, Wes. I’ve written about anime. But I’ve never seen this one.”

  “Really?”

  “Nope. I’ll bring it back in good shape.”

  “Whenever. ’Night.”

  The boy hurried back to his room, leaving the two of them together.

  But only for a moment. A second later Maggie appeared with a gift of her own. “This is my recital.” She handed him a CD in a jewel box.

  “The one you were talking about at dinner?” Boling asked. “Where Mr. Stone burped during the Mozart?”

  “Yeah!”

  “Can I borrow it?”

  “You can have it. I have about a million of them. Mom made them.”

  “Well, thanks, Maggie. I’ll burn it on my iPod.”

  The girl actually blushed. Unusual for her. She charged off.

  “You don’t have to,” Dance whispered.

  “Oh, no. I will. She’s a great girl.”

  He slipped the disk into his computer bag and looked over the anime that Wes had lent him.

  Dance lowered her voice again, “How many times have you seen it?”

  He chuckled. “Ghost in the Shell? Twenty, thirty times . . . along with the two sequels. Damn, you can even spot the white lies.”

  “Appreciate your doing that. It means a lot to him.”

  “I could tell he was excited.”

  “I’m surprised you don’t have children. You seem to understand them.”

  “No, that never worked out. But if you
want children, it definitely helps to have a woman in your life. I’m one of those men you have to be careful of. Don’t you say that, all you girls?”

  “Careful of? Why’s that?”

  “Never date a man over forty who’s never been married.”

  “I think nowadays whatever works, works.”

  “I just never met anybody I wanted to settle down with.”

  Dance noted the flicker of an eyebrow and a faint fluctuation of pitch. She let those observations float away.

  Boling began, “You’re . . . ?” His eyes dipped to her left hand, where a gray pearl ring encircled the heart finger.

  “I’m a widow,” Dance said.

  “Oh, gosh. I’m sorry.”

  “Car crash,” she said, feeling only a hint of the familiar sorrow.

  “Terrible.”

  And Kathryn Dance said nothing more about her husband and the accident for no reason other than she preferred not to talk about them any longer. “So, you’re a real bachelor, hmm?”

  “I guess I am. Now there’s a word you haven’t heard for . . . about a century.”

  She went to the kitchen to retrieve more wine, instinctively grabbing a red—since that was Michael O’Neil’s favorite—then remembered that Boling liked white. She filled their glasses halfway up.

  They chatted about life on the Peninsula—his mountain-biking trips and hikes. His professional life was far too sedentary for him so Boling would often jump into his old pickup truck and head out to the mountains or a state park.

  “I’ll do some biking this weekend. It’ll be some sanity in an island of madness.” He then told her more about the family get-together he’d mentioned earlier.

  “Napa?”

  “Right.” His brow wrinkled in a cute and charming way. “My family is . . . how do I put this?”

  “A family.”

  “Hit the nail on the head,” he said, laughing. “Two parents healthy. Two siblings I get along with a majority of the time, though I like their children better. Assorted uncles and aunts. It’ll be fine. Lot of wine, lot of food. Sunsets—but not a lot of those, thank goodness. Two, tops. That’s sort of the way weekends work.”

  Again, a silence fell between them. Comfortable. Dance felt no rush to fill it.

  But the peace was broken just then as Boling’s cell phone hiccuped. He looked at the screen. Immediately his body language had shifted to high alert.

  “Travis is online. Let’s go.”

  Chapter 24

  UNDER BOLING’S KEYSTROKES, the DimensionQuest homepage loaded almost instantly.

  The screen dissolved and a welcome box appeared. Below it was apparently the rating of the game by an organization referred to as ERSB.

  Teen

  Blood

  Suggestive Themes

  Alcohol

  Violence

  Then, with his self-assured typing, Jon Boling took them to Aetheria.

  It was an odd experience. Avatars—some fantastical creatures, some human—wandered around a clearing in a forest of massive trees. Their names were in balloons above the characters. Most of them were fighting, but some just walked, ran or rode horses or other creatures. Some flew on their own. Dance was surprised to see that everyone moved nimbly and that the facial expressions were true to life. The graphics were astonishing, nearly movie quality.

  Which made the combat and its vicious, excessive bloodletting all the more harrowing.

  Dance found herself sitting forward, knee bobbing—a classic indication of stress. She gasped when one warrior beheaded another right in front of them.

  “There are real people guiding them?”

  “One or two are NPC—those’re ‘nonplayer characters’ that the game itself creates. But nearly all of the others are avatars of people who could be anywhere. Cape Town, Mexico, New York, Russia. The majority of the players are men, but there’re a lot of women too. And the average age isn’t as young as you’d think. Teenage to late twenties mostly but plenty of older players. They could be boys or girls or middle-aged men, black, white, disabled, athletes, lawyers, dishwashers. . . . In the synth world, you can be whoever you want to be.”

  In front of them another warrior easily killed his opponent. Blood spurted in a geyser. Boling grunted. “They’re not all equal, though. Survival depends on who practices the most and who has the most power—power you earn by fighting and killing. It’s a vicious cycle, literally.”

  Dance tapped the screen and pointed to the back of a woman avatar in the foreground. “That’s you?”

  “One of my student’s avatars. I’m logging in through her account.”

  The name above her was “Greenleaf.”

  “There he is!” Boling said, his shoulder brushing hers as he leaned forward. He was pointing at Travis’s avatar, Stryker, who was about a hundred feet away from Greenleaf.

  Stryker was a tough, muscular man. Dance couldn’t help but notice that while many other characters had beards or ruddy, leathery skin, Travis’s avatar was unblemished and his skin as smooth as a baby’s. She thought of the boy’s concerns about acne.

  You can be whoever you want to be . . .

  Stryker—a “Thunderer,” she recalled—was clearly the dominant warrior here. People would look his way and turn and leave. Several people engaged him—once two at the same time. He easily killed them both. One time he stunned a huge avatar, a troll or similar beast, with a ray. Then, as it lay shaking on the ground, Travis directed his avatar to plunge a knife into its chest.

  Dance gasped.

  Stryker bent down and seemed to reach inside the body.

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Looting the corpse.” Boling noted Dance’s furrowed brow and added, “Everyone does it. You have to. The bodies might have something valuable. And if you’ve defeated them, you’ve earned the right.”

  If these were the values that Travis had learned in the synth world, it was a wonder he hadn’t snapped sooner.

  She couldn’t help but wonder: And where was the boy now in the real world? At a Starbucks Wi-Fi location, with the hood over his head and sunglasses on, so he wouldn’t be recognized? Ten miles from here? One mile?

  He wasn’t at the Game Shed. She knew that. After learning that he spent time there, Dance had ordered surveillance on the place.

  As she watched Travis’s avatar engage and easily kill dozens of creatures—women and men and animals—she found herself instinctively drawing on her skills as a kinesics expert.

  She knew, of course, that computer software was controlling the boy’s movement and posture. Yet she was already seeing that his avatar moved with more grace and fluidity than most. In combat he didn’t flail away randomly, as some of the characters did. He took his time, he withdrew a bit and then struck when his opponents were disoriented. Several fast blows or stabs later—and the character was dead. He stayed alert, always looking around him.

  This was a clue, perhaps, to the boy’s strategy of life. Planning the attacks out carefully, learning all he could about his victims, attacking fast.

  Analyzing the body language of a computer avatar, she reflected. What an odd case this was.

  “I want to talk to him.”

  “To Travis? I mean, to Stryker?”

  “Right. Get closer.”

  Boling hesitated. “I don’t know the navigation commands very well. But I think I can walk all right.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Using the keypad, Boling maneuvered Greenleaf closer to where Stryker was hunched over the body of the creature he’d just killed, looting it.

  As soon as she was within attack distance Stryker sensed Dance’s avatar’s approach and leapt up, his sword in one hand, an elaborate shield in the other. Stryker’s eyes gazed out of the screen.

  Eyes dark as the demon Qetzal’s.

  “How do I send a message?”

  Boling clicked on a button at the bottom of the screen and a box opened. “Just like any instant message now. Type your messa
ge and hit ‘Return.’ Remember, use abbreviations and leetspeak if you can. The easiest thing to do is just substitute the number three for e and four for a.”

  Dance took a deep breath. Her hands were shaking as she stared at the animated face of the killer.

  “Stryker, U R g00d.” The words appeared in a balloon over Greenleaf’s head as the avatar approached.

  “who r u?” Stryker stood back, gripping a sword.

  “I’m just some lus3r.”

  Boling told her, “Not bad, but forget grammar and punctuation. No caps, no periods. Question marks are okay.”

  Dance continued, “saw u fight u r el33t.” Her breath was coming fast; tension rose within her.

  “Excellent,” Boling whispered.

  “what is your realm?”

  “What’s he mean?” Dance asked, feeling a sprinkle of panic.

  “I think he’s asking for your country or the guild you’re in. There’d be hundreds of them. I don’t know any in this game. Tell him you’re a newbie.” He spelled it. “That’s somebody new to a game, but who wants to learn.”

  “just newbie, play for fun, thought u could t33ch”

  There was a pause.

  “u mean u r sum n00b”

  “What’s that?” Dance asked.

  “Newbie’s just a beginner. A n00b is a loser, somebody who’s egotistical and incompetent. It’s an insult. Travis has been called a n00b a lot online. LOL him but say you’re not. You really want to learn from him.”

  “lol, but no d00d, i w4nt to learn”

  “R U hot?”

  Dance asked Boling, “Is he coming on to me?”

  “I don’t know. It’s an odd question under the circumstances.”

  “sorta people tell me”

  “u board funny”

  “Shit, he’s catching on that there’s a delay in your keyboarding. He’s suspicious. Change the subject back to him.”

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

  A pause. Then: “1 thing”

  Dance typed, “whats that?”

  Another hesitation.

  Then words appeared in the balloon above Travis’s avatar. “2 die”