Roadside Crosses: A Kathryn Dance Novel

by Jeffery Deaver

  “Oh, God, no!” Patrizia gasped, dissolving into tears. “Please!”

  And now, at last, there was real fear in Chilton’s face. “No, don’t hurt my family! Please, please . . . I’ll do whatever you want. Just don’t hurt them.”

  “Read the statement and sound like you mean it,” Schaeffer warned, “then I’ll leave them alone. I’ll tell you, Chilton, I’ve got nothing but sympathy for them. They deserve a better life than being with a piece of shit like you.”

  “I’ll read it,” the blogger said. “But who are you? Why are you doing this? You owe me an answer.”

  Schaeffer was seized by a wave of fury. “Owe you?” he growled. “Owe you? You arrogant asshole!” He slammed his fist into Chilton’s cheek once more, leaving the man stunned. “I owe you nothing.” He leaned forward and snapped, “Who am I, who am I? Do you know anybody whose lives you destroy? No, of course not. Because you sit in that fucking chair, a million miles away from real life, and you say whatever you want to say. You type some shit on your keyboard, send it out into the world and then you’re on to something else. Does the concept of consequences mean anything to you? Accountability?”

  “I try to be accurate. If I got something wrong—”

  Schaeffer burned. “You are so fucking blind. You don’t understand you can be factually right and still be wrong. Do you have to tell every secret in the world? Do you have to destroy lives for no reason—except your ratings?”

  “Please!”

  “Does the name Anthony Schaeffer mean anything to you?”

  Chilton’s eyes closed momentarily. “Oh.” When he opened them again they were filled with understanding, and perhaps remorse. But that didn’t move Schaeffer one bit.

  At least Chilton remembered the man he’d destroyed.

  Patrizia asked, “Who’s that? Who does he mean, Jim?”

  “Tell her, Chilton.”

  The blogger sighed. “He was a gay man who killed himself after I outed him a few years ago. And he was . . . ?”

  “My brother.” His voice cracked.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry,” Schaeffer scoffed.

  “I apologized for what happened. I never wanted him to die! You must know that. I felt terrible.”

  Schaeffer turned to Patrizia, “Your husband, the voice of the moral and just universe, didn’t like it that a deacon in a church could also be gay.”

  Chilton snapped back, “That wasn’t the reason. He headed a big anti–gay marriage campaign in California. I was attacking his hypocrisy, not his sexual orientation. And his immorality. He was married, he had children . . . but when he was on business trips he’d call up gay prostitutes. He was cheating on his wife, sometimes with three men a night!”

  The blogger’s defiance was back and Schaeffer wanted to hit him once more, so he did, hard and fast.

  “Tony was struggling to find God’s path. He slipped a few times. And you made it sound like he was a monster! You never even gave him a chance to explain. God was helping him find the way.”

  “Well, God wasn’t doing a very good job. Not if—”

  The fist struck again.

  “Jim, don’t argue with him. Please!”

  Chilton lowered his head. Finally he looked desperate and filled with sorrow and fear.

  Schaeffer enjoyed the delicious sense of the man’s despair. “Read the statement.”

  “All right. I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll read it. But my family . . . please.” The agony in Chilton’s face was like fine wine to Schaeffer.

  “You have my word on it.” He said this sincerely, though he was reflecting that Patrizia would outlive her husband by no more than two seconds—a humane act, in the end. She wouldn’t want to go on without him. Besides, she was a witness.

  As for the children, no, he wouldn’t kill them. For one thing they weren’t due home for nearly an hour and he’d be long gone by then. Also, he wanted the sympathy of the world. Killing the blogger and his wife was one thing. The children were something else.

  Beneath the camera Schaeffer taped a piece of the paper containing the statement he’d written that morning. It was a moving piece—and had been drafted in a way to make sure that nobody would associate the crime with him.

  Chilton cleared his throat and looked down. He began to read. “This is a statement—” His voice broke.

  Beautiful! Schaeffer kept the camera running.

  Chilton started over. “This is a statement to those who’ve been reading my blog, The Chilton Report, over the years. There is nothing more precious in the world than a man’s reputation and I have devoted my life to needlessly and randomly destroying the reputations of many fine, upstanding citizens.”

  He was doing a good job.

  “It’s easy to buy a cheap computer and a website and some blog software and in five minutes you’ve got a venue for your personal opinions—a venue that will be seen by millions of people around the world. This leads to an intoxicating sense of power. But it’s a power that isn’t earned. It’s a power that’s stolen.

  “I’ve written many things about people that were merely rumors. Those rumors spread and they became accepted as the truth, even though they were total lies. Because of my blog the life of a young man, Travis Brigham, has been destroyed. He has nothing more to live for. And neither do I. He has sought justice against the people who attacked him, people who were my friends. And now he’s rendering justice against me. I’m ultimately responsible for destroying his life.”

  Glorious tears were streaking down his face. Schaeffer was in purest heaven.

  “I now accept responsibility for destroying Travis’s reputation and those of the others I’ve carelessly written about. The sentence that Travis now serves on me will stand as a warning to others: The truth is sacred. Rumors are not the truth. . . . Now, good-bye.”

  He inhaled deeply and looked at his wife.

  Schaeffer was satisfied. The man had done a good job. He paused the webcam and checked the screen. Only Chilton was in the image. The wife wasn’t. He didn’t want an image of her death, just the blogger’s. He pulled back a bit so the man’s entire torso was visible. He’d shoot him once, in the heart, and let him die on camera, then upload the post to a number of social networking sites and to other blogs. Schaeffer estimated it would take two minutes for the video to appear on YouTube and would be viewed by several million people before the company took it down. By then, though, the pirate software that allowed the downloading of streaming videos would have captured it and the footage would spread throughout the world like cancer cells.

  “They’ll find you,” Chilton muttered. “The police.”

  “But they won’t be looking for me. They’ll be looking for Travis Brigham. And, frankly, I don’t think anybody’s going to be looking very hard. You’ve got a lot of enemies, Chilton.”

  He cocked the gun.

  “No!” Patrizia Chilton wailed desperately, frantic. Schaeffer resisted a tempting impulse to shoot her first.

  He kept the gun steady on his target and noted a resigned and, it seemed, ironic smile crossing James Chilton’s face.

  Schaeffer hit the “Record” button on the camera again and began to pull the trigger.

  When he heard, “Freeze!”

  The voice was coming from the open office doorway. “Drop the weapon. Now!”

  Jolted, Schaeffer glanced back, at a slim young Latino man in a white shirt, sleeves rolled up. Pointing a weapon his way. A badge on his hip.

  No! How had they found him?

  Schaeffer kept the gun steadily on the blogger’s chest and snapped to the cop, “You drop it!”

  “Lower the weapon,” was the officer’s measured reply. “This is your only warning.”

  Schaeffer growled, “If you shoot me, I’ll—”

  He saw a yellow flash, sensed a tap to his head and then the universe went black.

  Chapter 36

  THE DEAD ROLLED, the living walked.

  The bo
dy of Greg Ashton—it was really Greg Schaeffer, Dance had learned—was wheeled down the stairs and over the lawn on the rickety gurney to the coroner’s bus, while James and Patrizia Chilton walked slowly to an ambulance.

  Another casualty, everyone was horrified to learn, was the MCSO deputy who’d been guarding the Chiltons, Miguel Herrera.

  Schaeffer, as Ashton, had stopped at Herrera’s car. The guard had called Patrizia and been told that the man was expected. Then Schaeffer had apparently shoved the gun against Herrera’s jacket and fired twice, the proximity to the body muting the sound.

  The deputy’s supervisor from the MCSO was present, along with a dozen other deputies, shaken, furious at the murder.

  As for the walking wounded, the Chiltons didn’t seem too badly hurt.

  Dance was, however, keeping an eye on Rey Carraneo—who’d been the first on the scene, spotted the dead deputy, and raced into the house after calling for backup. He’d seen Schaeffer about to shoot Chilton. Carraneo gave the killer a by-the-book warning, but when the man had tried to negotiate, the agent had simply fired two very efficient rounds into his head. Discussions with gun-toting suspects only occur in movies and TV shows—and bad ones, at that. Police never lower or set down their weapons. And they never hesitate to take out a target if one presents itself.

  Rules number one, two and three are: shoot.

  And he had. Superficially the young agent seemed fine, his body language unchanged from the professional, upright posture he wore like a rented tux. But his eyes told a different story, revealing the words looping through his mind at the moment: I just killed a man. I just killed a man.

  She’d make sure he took some time off with pay.

  A car pulled up and Michael O’Neil climbed out. He spotted Dance and joined her. The quiet deputy wasn’t smiling.

  “I’m sorry, Michael.” She gripped his arm. O’Neil had known Miguel Herrera for several years.

  “Just shot him down?”

  “That’s right.”

  His eyes closed briefly. “Jesus.”

  “Wife?”

  “No. Divorced. But he’s got a grown son. He’s already been notified.” O’Neil, otherwise so calm, with a facade that revealed so little, looked with chilling hatred at the green bag containing Greg Schaeffer’s body

  Another voice intruded, weak, unsteady. “Thank you.”

  They turned to face the man who’d spoken: James Chilton. Wearing dark slacks, a white T-shirt and a navy blue V-neck sweater, the blogger seemed like a chaplain humbled by battlefront carnage. His wife was at his side.

  “Are you all right?” Dance asked them.

  “I’m fine, yes. Thank you. Just beat up a bit. Cuts and bruises.”

  Patrizia Chilton said she too wasn’t seriously injured.

  O’Neil nodded to them and asked Chilton, “Who was he?”

  Dance answered, “Anthony Schaeffer’s brother.”

  Chilton gave a blink of surprise. “You figured it out?”

  She explained to O’Neil about Ashton’s real name. “That’s the interesting thing about the Internet—those role-playing games and sites. Like Second Life. You can create whole new identities for yourself. Schaeffer’s been spending the past few months seeding the name ‘Greg Ashton’ around online as this blogging and RSS maven. He did that to seduce his way into Chilton’s life.”

  “I outed his brother Anthony in a blog several years ago,” Chilton explained. “He was the one I told Agent Dance about when I first met her—one of the things I regretted about the blog—that he killed himself.”

  O’Neil asked Dance, “How did you find out about him?”

  “TJ and I were checking out the suspects. It wasn’t likely that Arnold Brubaker was the killer. I was still suspicious of Clint Avery—the guy behind the highway project—but we didn’t have anything specific yet. So I was working on the list of people who’d sent James threats.”

  The small list . . .

  Chilton said, “Anthony Schaeffer’s wife was on the list. Sure. She’d threatened me a few years ago.”

  Dance continued, “I went online to find out as many details about her as I could. I found her wedding pictures. The best man at their wedding was Greg, Anthony’s brother. I recognized him from when I came to your house the other day. I checked him out. He traveled here on an open ticket about two weeks ago.” As soon as she’d learned this she’d called Miguel Herrera but couldn’t get through, so she sent Rey Carraneo here. The agent, following Clint Avery, was not far from Chilton’s house.

  O’Neil asked, “Did Schaeffer say anything about Travis?”

  Dance showed him the plastic envelope containing the handwritten note, with the references to Travis, making it seem that the boy was the one about to shoot Chilton.

  “He’s dead, you think?”

  O’Neil’s and Dance’s eyes met. She said, “I’m not going on that assumption. Ultimately, sure, Schaeffer’d have to kill the boy. But he might not have done it yet. He might want to make it look like Travis killed himself after he’d finished with Chilton. Make the case tidier. That means he could still be alive.”

  The senior deputy took a phone call. He stepped away, eyes straying to the MCSO car where Herrera had been so ruthlessly killed. He disconnected after a moment. “Got to head off. Have to interview a witness.”

  “You? Interviewing?” she chided. Michael O’Neil’s technique at interviewing involved gazing unsmilingly at the subject and asking him over and over again to tell O’Neil what he knew. It could be effective, but it wasn’t efficient. And O’Neil didn’t really enjoy it.

  He consulted his watch. “Any chance you could do me a favor?”

  “Name it.”

  “Anne’s flight from San Francisco was delayed. I can’t miss this interview. Can you pick up the kids at day care?”

  “Sure. I’m going to get Wes and Maggie after camp anyway.”

  “Meet me at Fisherman’s Wharf at five?”

  “Sure.”

  O’Neil headed off, with yet another dark glance at Herrera’s car.

  Chilton gripped his wife’s hand. Dance recognized postures that bespoke a graze with mortality. She thought back to the arrogant, self-righteous crusader Chilton had been when she first met him. Very different now. She recalled that something about him seemed to have softened earlier—when he’d learned that his friend Don Hawken and his wife had nearly been killed. Now, there’d been another shift, away from the stony visage of a missionary.

  The man gave a bitter smile. “Oh, did he sucker me in. . . . He played right to my fucking ego.”

  “Jim—”

  “No, honey. He did. You know, this’s all my fault. Schaeffer picked Travis. He read through the blog, found somebody who’d be a good candidate to be a fall guy and set up a seventeen-year-old boy as my killer. If I hadn’t started the ‘Roadside Crosses’ thread and mentioned the accident, Schaeffer wouldn’t have any incentive to go after him.”

  He was right. But Kathryn Dance tended to avoid the what-if game. The playing field was far too soupy. “He would’ve picked somebody else,” she pointed out. “He was determined to get revenge against you.”

  But Chilton didn’t seem to hear. “I should just shut the fucking blog down altogether.”

  Dance saw resolve in his eyes, frustration, anger. Fear, too, she believed. Speaking to both of them, he said firmly, “I’m going to.”

  “To what?” his wife asked.

  “Shut it down. The Report’s finished. I’m not destroying anybody else’s life.”

  “Jim,” Patrizia said softly. She brushed some dirt off her sleeve. “When our son had pneumonia, you sat beside his bed for two days and didn’t get a bit of sleep. When Don’s wife died, you walked right out of that meeting at Microsoft headquarters to be there for him—you gave up a hundred-thousand-dollar contract. When my dad was dying, you were with him more than the hospice people. You do good things, Jim. That’s what you’re about. And your blog does good thing
s too.”

  “I—”

  “Shhh. Let me finish. Donald Hawken needed you and you were there. Our children needed you and you were there. Well, the world needs you too, honey. You can’t turn your back on that.”

  “Patty, people died.”

  “Just promise me you won’t make any decisions too fast. This has been a terrible couple of days. Nobody’s thinking clearly.”

  A lengthy pause. “I’ll see. I’ll see.” Then he hugged his wife. “But one thing I do know is that I can go on hiatus for a few days. And we’re going to get away from here.” Chilton said to his wife, “Let’s go up to Hollister tomorrow. We’ll spend a long weekend with Donald and Lily. You still haven’t met her. We’ll bring the boys, cook out . . . do some hiking.”

  Patrizia’s face blossomed into a smile. She rested her head against his shoulders. “I’d like that.”

  He’d turned his attention to Dance. “There’s something I’ve been thinking about.”

  She cocked an eyebrow.

  “A lot of people would’ve thrown me to the wolves. And I probably deserved to be thrown. But you didn’t. You didn’t like me, you didn’t approve, but you stood up for me. That’s intellectual honesty. You don’t see that much. Thank you.”

  Dance gave a faint, embarrassed laugh, acknowledging the compliment—even as she thought of the times when she had wanted to throw him to the wolves.

  The Chiltons returned to the house to finish packing and arrange for a motel that night—Patrizia didn’t want to stay in the house until the office had been scrubbed clean of every trace of Schaeffer’s blood. Dance could hardly blame her.

  The agent now joined the MCSO Crime Scene chief, an easygoing middle-aged officer she’d worked with for several years. She explained that there was a possibility that Travis might still be alive, stashed in a hideout somewhere. Which meant he’d have a dwindling supply of food and water. She had to locate him. And soon.