Roadside Crosses: A Kathryn Dance Novel (16 page)

“What brings you to Monterey?” she asked.

“Caseload evaluations.” Offering nothing more.

Robert Harper seemed to be one of those people who, if he had nothing to say, was comfortable with silence. Dance believed too she recognized in his face
an intensity, a sense of devotion to his mission, akin to what she’d seen in the Reverend Fisk’s face at the hospital protest. Though how much of a mission caseload analysis would entail was a mystery to her.

He turned his attention to her briefly. She was used to being looked over, but usually by suspects; Harper’s perusal was unsettling. It was as if she held the key to an important mystery for him.

Then he said to Overby, “I’m going to be outside for a few minutes, Charles. If you could keep the door to the conference room locked, I’d appreciate it.”

“Sure. Anything else you need, just let me know.”

A chilly nod. Then Harper was gone, fishing a phone from his pocket.

“What’s the story with
him
?” Dance asked.

“Special prosecutor from Sacramento. Had a call from upstairs—”

The attorney general.

“—to cooperate. He wants to know about our caseload. Maybe something big’s going down and he needs to see how busy we are. He spent some time at the sheriff’s office too. Wish he’d go back and bug them. Fellow’s a cold fish. Don’t know what to say to him. Tried some jokes. They fell flat.”

But Dance was thinking about the Tammy Foster case; Robert Harper was gone from her mind.

She and Boling returned to her office and she’d just sat down at her desk when O’Neil called. She was pleased. She guessed he’d have the results of the analysis of the bike tread dirt and the gray fiber from the sweatshirt.

“Kathryn, we have a problem.” His voice was troubled.

“Go on.”

“Well, first, Peter says the gray fiber they found in the cross? It matches what we found at Travis’s.”

“So he
is
the one. What’d the magistrate say about the warrant?”

“Didn’t get that far. Travis’s on the run.”

“What?”

“He didn’t show up for work. Or, he did show up—there were fresh bike tread marks behind the place. He snuck into the back room, stole some bagels and some cash from the purse of one of the workers . . . and a butcher’s knife. Then he disappeared. I called his parents, but they haven’t heard from him and claim they don’t have any idea where he might go.”

“Where are you?”

“In my office. I’m going to put out a detain alert on him. Us, Salinas, San Benito, surrounding counties.”

Dance rocked back, furious with herself. Why hadn’t she planned better and had somebody follow the boy when he left his house? She’d managed to establish his guilt—and simultaneously let him slip through her fingers.

And, hell, now she’d have to tell Overby what had happened.

But you didn’t bring him in?

“There’s something else. When I was at the bagel place, I looked up the alley. There’s that deli near Safeway.”

“Sure, I know it.”

“They have a flower stand on the side of the building.”

“Roses!” she said.

“Exactly. I talked to the owner.” O’Neil’s voice went flat. “Yesterday, somebody snuck up to the place and stole all the bouquets of red roses.”

She understood now why he was sounding so grave. “All? . . . How many did he take?”

A slight pause. “A dozen. It looks like he’s just getting started.”

DANCE’S PHONE RANG
. A glance at Caller ID.

“TJ. Was just about to call you.”

“Didn’t have any luck with security cameras but there’s a sale on Blue Mountain Jamaican coffee at Java House. Three pounds for the price of two. Still sets you back close to fifty bucks. But that coffee is the best.”

She made no response to his banter. He noticed it. “What’s up, boss?”

“Change of plans, TJ.” She told him about Travis Brigham, the forensics match and the dozen stolen bouquets.

“He’s on the run, boss? He’s planning
more
?”

“Yep. I want you to get to Bagel Express, talk to his friends, anybody who knows him, find out where he might go. People he might be staying with. Favorite places.”

“Sure, I’ll get right on it.”

Dance then called Rey Carraneo, who was having no luck in his search for witnesses near the parking lot where Tammy Foster had been abducted. She briefed him as well and told him to head over to the Game Shed to find any leads to where the boy might’ve gone.

After hanging up, Dance sat back. A frustrating sense of helplessness came over her. She needed witnesses, people to interview. This was a skill she was born to, one she enjoyed and was good at. But now the case slogged along in the world of evidence and speculation.

She glanced at the printouts of
The Chilton Report.

“I think we better start contacting the potential victims and warning them. Are people attacking him in the social sites too, MySpace, Facebook, OurWorld?” she asked Boling

“It’s not as big a story in those; they’re international sites.
The Chilton Report
is local, so that’s where ninety percent of the attacks on Travis are. I’ll tell you one thing that would help: getting the Internet addresses of the posters. If we could get those, we can contact their service providers and find their physical addresses. It would save a lot of time.”

“How?”

“Have to be from Chilton himself or his webmaster.”

“Jon, can you tell me anything about him that’ll help me persuade him to cooperate, if he balks?”

“I know about his blog,” Boling responded, “but not much about him personally. Other than the bio in
The Report
itself. But I’d be happy to do some detective work.” His eyes had taken on the sparkle she’d seen earlier. He turned back to his computer.

Puzzles . . .

While the professor was lost in his homework assignment Dance took a call from O’Neil. A Crime Scene team had searched the alley behind Bagel Express and found traces of sand and dirt where the
tread marks showed Travis had left his bike; they matched the sandy soil where Tammy’s car had been left on the beach. He added that an MCSO team had canvassed the area but nobody had seen him.

O’Neil told her too that he’d gotten a half dozen other officers from Highway Patrol to join in the manhunt. They were coming in from Watsonville.

They disconnected and Dance slumped back in her chair.

After a few minutes, Boling said that he’d gotten some background on Chilton from the blog itself and from other research. He called up the homepage again, which had the bio Chilton himself had written.

Http://www.thechiltonreport.com

Scrolling down, Dance began to skim the blog while Boling offered, “James David Chilton, forty-three years old. Married to Patrizia Brisbane, two boys, ten and twelve. Lives in Carmel. But he also has property in Hollister, vacation house, it looks like, and some income property around San Jose. They inherited it when the wife’s father died a few years ago. Now, the most interesting thing I found out about Chilton is that he’s always had a quirky habit. He’d write letters.”

“Letters?”

“Letters to the editor, letters to his congressmen, op ed pieces. He started with snail mail—before the Internet really took off—then emails. He’s written thousands of them. Rants, criticism, praise, compliments, political commentary. You name it. He was quoted as saying one of his favorite books was
Herzog,
the Saul Bellow novel about a man obsessed with writing letters. Basically Chilton’s message was about upholding moral values, exposing corruption, extolling politicians who do good, trashing the ones who don’t—exactly what his blog does now. I found a lot of them online. Then, it seems, he found out about the blogosphere. He started
The Chilton Report
about five years ago. Now before I go on, it might be helpful to know a little history of blogs.”

“Sure.”

“The term comes from ‘weblog,’ which was coined by a computer guru in nineteen ninety-seven, Jorn Barger. He wrote an online diary about his travels and what he’d been looking at on the Web. Now, people’d been recording their thoughts online for years but what made blogs distinctive was the concept of
links.
That’s the key to a blog. You’re reading something and you come to that underlined or boldface reference in the text and click on it and that takes you someplace else.

“Linking is called ‘hypertext.’ The
H-T-T-P
in a website address? It stands for ‘hypertext transfer protocol.’ That’s the software that lets you create links. In my opinion it was one of the most significant aspects of the Internet. Maybe the most significant.

“Well, once hypertext became common, blogs started to take off. People who could write code in HTML—hypertext markup language, the computer language of links—could create their own blogs pretty easily. But more and more people wanted in and not everybody was tech savvy. So companies came up with programs that anybody, well, almost anybody, could use to create linked blogs with—Pitas, Blogger and
Groksoup were the early ones. Dozens of others followed. And now all you have to do is have an account with Google or Yahoo and, poof, you can make a blog. Combine that with the bargain price of data storage nowadays—and getting cheaper every minute—and you’ve got the blogosphere.”

Boling’s narrative was animated and ordered. He’d be a great professor, she reflected.

“Now, before Nine-eleven,” Boling explained, “blogs were mostly computer-oriented. They were written by tech people for tech people. After September Eleventh, though, a new type of blog appeared. They were called war blogs, after the attacks and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Those bloggers weren’t interested in technology. They were interested in politics, economics, society, the world. I describe the distinction this way: While pre-Nine-eleven blogs were inner-directed—toward the Internet itself—the war blogs are outer-directed. Those bloggers look at themselves as journalists, part of what’s known as the New Media. They want press credentials, just like CNN and
Washington Post
reporters, and they want to be taken seriously.

“Jim Chilton is the quintessential war blogger. He doesn’t care about the Internet per se or the tech world, except to the extent it lets him get his message out. He writes about the real world. Now the two sides—the original bloggers and the war bloggers—constantly battle for the number-one spot in the blogosphere.”

“It’s a contest?” she asked, amused.

“To them it is.”

“They can’t coexist?”

“Sure, but it’s an ego-driven world and they’ll do anything they can to be top of the heap. And that means two things. One, having as many subscribers as possible. And two, more important—having as many other blogs as possible include links to yours.”

“Incestuous.”

“Very. Now, you asked what could I tell you to get Chilton’s cooperation. Well, you have to remember that
The Chilton Report
is the real thing. It’s important and influential. You notice that one of the early posts in the ‘Roadside Crosses’ thread was from an executive at Caltrans? He wanted to defend their inspection of the highway. That tells me that government officials and CEOs read the blog regularly. And get pretty damn upset if Chilton says anything bad about them.

“The
Report
leans toward local issues but local in this case is California, which isn’t really local at all. Everybody in the world keeps an eye on us. They either love or hate the state, but they
all
read about it. Also, Chilton himself’s emerged as a serious journalist. He works his sources, he writes well. He’s reasonable and he picks real issues—he’s not sensationalist. I searched for Britney Spears and Paris Hilton in his blog, going back four years, and neither name came up.”

Dance had to be impressed with that.

“He’s not a part-timer, either. Three years ago he began to work on the report full-time. And he campaigns it hard.”

“What does that mean, ‘campaign’?”

Boling scrolled down to the “On the Home Front” thread on the homepage.

Http://www.thechiltonreport.com

W
E’RE
G
OING
G
LOBAL
!

Am pleased to report that
The Report
has been getting raves from around the world. It’s been selected as one of the lead blogs in a new RSS feed (we’ll call it “Really Simple Syndication”) that will link thousands of other blogs, websites and bulletin boards throughout the world. Kudos to you, my readers, for making
The Report
as popular as it is.

“RSS is another next big thing. It actually stands for RDF Site Syndication—‘RDF’ is Resource Description Framework, if you’re interested, and there’s no reason for you to be. RSS is a way of customizing and consolidating updated material from blogs and websites and podcasts. Look at your browser. At the top is a little orange square with a dot in the corner and two curved lines.”

“I’ve seen it.”

“That’s your RSS feeds. Chilton is trying hard to get picked up by other bloggers and websites. That’s important to him. And it’s important to you too. Because it tells us something about him.”

“He’s got an ego I can stroke?”

“Yep. That’s one thing to remember. I’m also thinking of something else you can try with him, something more nefarious.”

“I like nefarious.”

“You’ll want to somehow hint that his helping you will be good publicity for the blog. It’ll get the name of
The Report
around in the mainstream media. Also,
you could hint that you or somebody at CBI could be a source for information in the future.” Boling nodded at the screen, where the blog glowed. “I mean, first and foremost, he’s an investigative reporter. He appreciates sources.”

“Okay. Good idea. I’ll try it.”

A smile. “Of course, the other thing he might do is consider your request an invasion of journalistic ethics. In which case he’ll slam the door in your face.”

Dance looked at the screen. “These blogs—they’re a whole different world.”