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 things 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.
“You find a room key on the body?”
“Yep. Cyprus Grove Inn.”
“I want the room, and Schaeffer’s clothes and his car gone over with a microscope. Look for anything that might give us a clue where he might’ve put the boy.”
“You bet, Kathryn.”
She returned to her car, phoning TJ. “You got him, boss. I heard.”
“Yep. But now I want to find the boy. If he’s alive, we may only have a day or two until he starves to death or dies of thirst. All-out on this one. MCSO’s running the scenes at Chilton’s house and at the Cyprus Grove—where Schaeffer was staying. Call Peter Bennington and ride herd on the reports. Call Michael if you need to. Oh, and find me witnesses in nearby rooms at the Cyprus Grove.”
“Sure, boss.”
“And contact CHP, county and city police. I want to find the last roadside cross—the one Schaeffer left to announce Chilton’s death. Peter should go over it with every bit of equipment they’ve got.” Another thought occurred to her. “Did you ever hear back about that state vehicle?”
“Oh, that Pfister saw, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Nobody’s called. I don’t think we’re prioritized.”
“Try again. And make it a priority.”
“You coming in, boss? Overbearing wants to see you.”
“TJ.”
“Sorry.”
“I’ll be in later. I’ve got to follow up on one thing.”
“You need help?”
She said she didn’t, though the truth was she sure as hell didn’t want to do this one solo.
Chapter 37
SITTING IN HER car, parked in the driveway, Dance gazed at the Brighams’ small house: the sad lean of the gutters and curl of the shingles, the dismembered toys and tools in the front and side yards. The garage so filled with discards that you couldn’t get more than half a car hood under its roof.
Dance was sitting in the driver’s seat of her Crown Vic, the door shut. Listening to a CD she and Martine had been sent from a group in Los Angeles. The musicians were Costa Rican. She found the music both cheerful and mysterious, and wanted to know more about them. She’d hoped that when she and Michael were in L.A. on the J. Doe murder case she’d have a chance to meet with them and do some more recordings.
But she couldn’t think about that now.
She heard the rumble of rubber on gravel and looked into the rearview mirror to see Sonia Brigham’s car pause as it turned past the hedge of boxwood.
The woman was alone in the front seat. Sammy sat in the back.
The car didn’t move for a long moment and Dance could see the woman staring desperately at the police cruiser. Finally Sonia teased her battered car forward again and drove past Dance to the front of the house, braked and shut the engine off.
With a fast look Dance’s way, the woman climbed out and strode to the back of the car and lifted out the laundry baskets, and a large bottle of Tide.
His families so poor that they can’t even afford a washer and drier. . . . Who goes to laundromats? Lusers that’s who. . . .
The blog post that told Schaeffer where to find a sweatshirt to steal to help him frame Travis.
Dance climbed out of her own vehicle.
Sammy looked at her with a probing expression. The curiosity of their first meeting was gone; now he was uneasy. His eyes were eerily adult.
“You know something about Travis?” he asked, and didn’t sound as odd as he had earlier.
But before Dance could say anything, his mother shooed him off to play in the backyard.
He hesitated, still staring at Dance, then wandered off, uncomfortable, fishing in his pockets.
“Don’t go far, Sammy.”
Dance took the bottle of detergent from under Sonja’s pale arm and followed her toward the house. Sonia’s jaw was firm, eyes straight forward.
“Mrs.—”
“I have to put this away,” Sonia Brigham said in a clipped tone.
Dance opened the unlocked door for her. She followed Sonia inside. The woman moved straight into the kitchen and separated the baskets. “If you let them sit . . . the wrinkles, you know what it’s like.” She smoothed a T-shirt.
Woman to woman.
“I washed it thinking I could give it to him.”
“Mrs. Brigham, there are some things you should know. Travis wasn’t driving the car on June 9. He took the blame.”
“What?” She stopped fussing with her laundry.
“He had a crush on the girl who was driving. She’d been drinking. He tried to get her to pull over and let him drive. She crashed before that happened.”
“Oh, heavens!” Sonia lifted the shirt to her face, as if it could ward off the impending tears.
“And he wasn’t the killer, leaving the crosses. Someone set it up to make it seem like he’d left them and caused those deaths. A man with a grudge against James Chilton. We stopped him.”
“And Travis?” Sonia asked desperately, fingers white as they gri
pped the shirt.
“We don’t know where he is. We’re looking everywhere, but we haven’t found any leads yet.” Dance explained briefly about Greg Schaeffer and his plan for revenge.
Sonia wiped her round cheeks. There was prettiness still in her face, though obscured. The remnants of the prettiness evident in the picture of her in the state fair stall taken years earlier. Sonia whispered, “I knew Travis wouldn’t hurt those people. I told you that.”
Yes, you did, Dance thought. And your body language told me that you were telling the truth. I didn’t listen to you. I listened to logic when I should have listened to intuition. Long ago Dance had done a Myers-Briggs analysis of herself. She got into trouble when she strayed too far from her nature.
She replaced the shirt, smoothed the cotton again. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“We have no evidence he is. Absolutely none.”
“But you think so.”
“It’d be logical for Schaeffer to keep him alive. I’m doing everything we can to save him. That’s one of the reasons I’m here.” She displayed a picture of Greg Schaeffer, a copy from his DMV picture. “Have you ever seen him? Maybe following you? Talking to neighbors?”
Sonia pulled on battered glasses and looked at the face for a long time. “No. I can’t say I have. So he’s him. The one done it, took my boy?”
“Yes.”
“I told you no good would come of that blog.”
Her eyes slipped toward the side yard, where Sammy was disappearing into the ramshackle shed. She sighed. “If Travis is gone, telling Sammy . . . oh, that’ll destroy him. I’ll be losing two sons at once. Now, I’ve got to put the laundry away. Please go now.”
DANCE AND O’NEIL stood next to each other on the pier, leaning against the railing. The fog was gone, but the wind was steady. Around Monterey Bay you always had one or the other.
“Travis’s mother,” O’Neil said, speaking loudly. “That was tough, I’ll bet.”
“Hardest part of it all,” she said, her hair flying. Then asked him, “How was the interview?” Thinking of the Indonesian investigation.
The Other Case.
“Good.”
She was glad O’Neil was running the case, regretted her jealousy. Terrorism kept all law enforcers up nights. “If you need anything from me let me know.”
His eyes on the bay, he said, “I think we’ll wrap it in the next twenty-four hours.”
Below them were their children, the four of them, on the sand at water’s edge. Maggie and Wes led the expedition; being grandchildren of a marine biologist, they had some authority.
Pelicans flew solemnly nearby, gulls were everywhere, and not far offshore, a brown curl of sea otter floated easily on its back, inverted elegance. It happily smashed open mollusks against a rock balanced on its chest. Dinner. O’Neil’s daughter, Amanda, and Maggie stared at it gleefully, as if trying to figure out how to get it home as a pet.
Dance touched O’Neil’s arm and pointed at ten-year-old Tyler, who was crouching beside a long whip of kelp and poking it cautiously, ready to flee if the alien creature came to life. Wes stood protectively near in case it did.
O’Neil smiled but she sensed from his stance and the tension in his arm that something was bothering him.
Only a moment later he explained, calling over the blast of wind, “I heard from Los Angeles. The defense is trying to move the immunity hearing back again. Two weeks.”
“Oh, no,” Dance muttered. “Two weeks? The grand jury’s scheduled for then.”
“Seybold’s going all-out to fight it. He didn’t sound optimistic.”
“Hell.” Dance grimaced. “War of attrition? Keep stalling and hope it all goes away?”
“Probably.”
“We won’t,” she said firmly. “You and me, we won’t go away. But will Seybold and the others?”
O’Neil considered this. “If it takes much more time, maybe. It’s an important case. But they have a lot of important cases.”
Dance sighed. She shivered.
“You cold?”
Her forearm was docked against his.
She shook her head. The involuntary ripple had come from thinking of Travis. As she’d been looking over the water, she’d wondered if she was also gazing at his grave.
A gull hovered directly in front of them. The angle of attack of his wings adjusted perfectly for the velocity of the wind. He was immobile, twenty feet above the beach.
Dance said, “All along, you know, even when we thought he was the killer, I felt sorry for Travis. His home life, the fact he’s a misfit. Getting cyberbullied like that. And Jon was telling me the blog was just the tip of the iceberg. People were attacking him in instant messages, emails, on other bulletin boards. It’s just so sad it’s turned out this way. He was innocent. Completely innocent.”
O’Neil said nothing for a moment. Then: “He seems sharp. Boling, I mean.”
“He is. Getting the names of the victims. And tracking down Travis’s avatar.”
O’Neil laughed. “Sorry, but I keep picturing you going to Overby about a warrant for a character in a computer game.”
“Oh, he’d do the paperwork in a minute if he thought there was a press conference and a good photo op involved. I could’ve beaned Jon, though, for going to that arcade alone.”
“Playing hero?”
“Yep. Save us from amateurs.”
“He married, have a family?”
“Jon? No.” She laughed. “He’s a bachelor.”
Now there’s a word you haven’t heard for . . . about a century.
They fell silent, watching the children, who were totally lost in their seaside exploration. Maggie was holding her hand out and pointing to something, probably explaining to O’Neil’s children the name of a shell she’d found.
Wes, Dance noted, was by himself, standing on a damp flat, the water easing up close to his feet in foamy lines.
And as she often did, Dance wondered if her children would be better off if she had a husband, and they had a home with a father. Well, of course they would.
Depending on the man, of course.
There was always that.
A woman’s voice behind them. “Excuse me. Are those your children?”
They turned to see a tourist, to judge by the bag she held from a nearby souvenir shop.
“That’s right,” Dance said.
“I just wanted to say that it’s so nice to see a happily married couple with such lovely children. How long have you been married?”
A millisecond pause. Dance answered, “Oh, for some time.”
“Well, bless you. Stay happy.” The woman joined an elderly man leaving a gift shop. She took his arm and they headed toward a large tour bus, parked nearby.
Dance and O’Neil laughed. Then she noticed a silver Lexus pull up in a nearby parking lot. As the door opened, she was aware that O’Neil had eased away from her slightly, so that their arms no longer touched.
The deputy smiled and waved to his wife as she climbed from the Lexus.
Tall, blond Anne O’Neil, wearing a leather jacket, peasant blouse, long skirt and belt of dangly metal, smiled as she approached. “Hello, honey,” she said to O’Neil and hugged him, kissed his cheek. Her eyes lit on Dance. “Kathryn.”
“Hi, Anne. Welcome home.”
“The flight was awful. I got tied up at the gallery and didn’t make it in time to check my bag. I was right on the borderline.”
“I was in an interview,” O’Neil told her. “Kathryn picked up Tyler and Ammie.”
“Oh, thanks. Mike said you’ve closed the case. That one about the roadside crosses.”
“A few hours ago. Lot of paperwork, but, yeah, it’s done.” Not wanting to talk about it any longer, Dance said, “How’s the photo exhibition going?”
“Getting ready,” said Anne O’Neil, whose hair brought to mind the word “lioness.” “Curating’s more work than taking the pictures.”
“Which gallery?”<
br />
“Oh, just Gerry Mitchell’s. South of Market.” The tone was dismissive, but Dance guessed the gallery was well known. Whatever else, Anne never flaunted ego.
“Congratulations.”
“We’ll see what happens at the opening. Then there are the reviews afterward.” Her sleek face grew solemn. In a low voice: “I’m sorry about your mother, Kathryn. It’s all crazy. How’s she holding up?”
“Pretty upset.”
“It’s like a circus. The newspaper stories. It made the news up there.”
A hundred and thirty miles away? Well, Dance shouldn’t ’ve been surprised. Not with the prosecutor Robert Harper playing the media game.
“We’ve got a good attorney.”
“If there’s anything I can do . . .” The ends of Anne’s metal belt tinkled like a wind chime in the breeze.
O’Neil called down to the beach, “Hey, guys, your mother’s here. Come on!”
“Can’t we stay, Dad?” Tyler pleaded.
“Nope. Time to get home. Come on.”
Reluctantly the children trudged toward the adults. Maggie was dispensing shells. Dance was sure she’d be giving the good ones to the O’Neil children and her brother.
Wes and Maggie piled into Dance’s Pathfinder for the short ride to the inn where her parents were staying. Once again, they’d spend the night with Edie and Stuart. The perp was dead, so the threat to her personally was gone, but Dance was adamant about finding Travis alive. She’d possibly be working late into the night.
They were halfway to the inn when Dance noticed that Wes had grown quiet.
“Hey, young man, what’s up?”
“Just wondering.”
Dance knew how to reel in details from reluctant children. The trick was patience. “About what?”
She was sure it had to do with his grandmother.
But it didn’t.
“Is Mr. Boling coming over again?”
“Jon? Why?”
“Just, The Matrix’s on TNT tomorrow. Maybe he hasn’t seen it.”
“I’ll bet he has.” Dance was always amused by the way children assumed that they’re the first to experience something and that prior generations lived in sorrowful ignorance and deprivation. Mostly, though, she was surprised that the boy had even asked the question. “You like Mr. Boling?” she ventured.
Kathryn Dance Ebook Boxed Set : Roadside Crosses, Sleeping Doll, Cold Moon (9781451674217) Page 34
