Roadside Crosses

aquarium but assured his daughter that he’d drop the children off with their grandmother after camp. Dance would pick them up from her later.
    Every day Dance thanked fate or the gods that she had loving family nearby. Her heart went out to single mothers with little support.
    She slowed, turned at the light and pulled into the parking lot of Monterey Bay Hospital, studying a crowd of people behind a row of blue sawhorse barriers.
    More protesters than yesterday.
    And yesterday had seen more than the day before.
    MBH was a famed institution, one of the best medical centers in the region, and one of the most idyllic, set in a pine forest. Dance knew the place well. She’d given birth to her children here, sat with her father as he recovered from major surgery. She’d identified her husband’s body in the hospital’s morgue.
    And she herself had recently been attacked here—an incident related to the protest Dance was now watching.
    As part of the Daniel Pell case, Dance had sent a young Monterey County deputy to guard the prisoner in the county courthouse in Salinas. The convict had escaped and, in the process, had attacked and severely burned the deputy, Juan Millar, who’d been brought here to intensive care. That had been such a hard time—for his confused, sorrowful family, for Michael O’Neil, and for his fellow officers at the MCSO. For Dance too.
    It was while she was visiting Juan that his distraught brother, Julio, had assaulted her, enraged that she was trying to take a statement from his semiconscious sibling. Dance had been more startled than hurt by the attack and had chosen not to pursue a case against the hysterical brother.
    A few days after Juan was admitted, he’d died. At first, it seemed that the death was a result of the extensive burns. But then it was discovered that somebody had taken his life—a mercy killing.
    Dance was saddened by the death, but Juan’s injuries were so severe that his future would have been nothing but pain and medical procedures. Juan’s condition had also troubled Dance’s mother, Edie, a nurse at the hospital. Dance recalled standing in her kitchen, her mother nearby, gazing into the distance. Something was troubling her deeply, and she soon told Dance what: She’d been checking on Juan when the man had swum to consciousness and looked at her with imploring eyes.
    He’d whispered, “Kill me.”
    Presumably he’d delivered this plea to anybody who’d come to visit or tend to him.
    Soon after that, someone had fulfilled his wish.
    No one knew the identity of the person who had combined the drugs in the IV drip to end Juan’s life. The death was now officially a criminal investigation—being handled by the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office. But it wasn’t being investigated very hard; doctors reported that it would have been highly unlikely for the deputy to live for more than a month or two. The death was clearly a humane act, even if criminal.
    But the case had become a cause célèbre for pro-lifers. The protesters that Dance was now watching in the parking lot held posters emblazoned with crosses and pictures of Jesus and of Terry Schiavo, the comatose woman in Florida, whose right-to-die case the U.S. Congress itself became entwined in.
    The placards being waved about in front of Monterey Bay Hospital decried the horrors of euthanasia and, apparently because everyone was already assembled and in a protesting mood, abortion. They were mostly members of Life First, based in Phoenix. They’d arrived within days of the young officer’s death.
    Dance wondered if any of them caught on to the irony of protesting death outside a hospital. Probably not. They didn’t seem like folks with a sense of humor.
    Dance greeted the head of security, a tall African-American, standing outside the main entrance. “Morning, Henry. They keep coming, it looks like.”
    “Morning, Agent Dance.” A former cop, Henry Bascomb liked using departmental titles. He gave a smirk, nodding their way. “Like rabbits.”
    “Who’s the ringleader?” In the center of the crowdwas a scrawny balding man with wattles beneath his pointy chin. He was in clerical garb.
    “That’s the head, the minister,” Bascomb told her. “Reverend R. Samuel Fisk. He’s pretty famous. Came all the way from Arizona.”
    “R. Samuel Fisk. Very ministerial-sounding name,” she commented.
    Beside the reverend stood a burly man with curly red hair and a buttoned dark suit. A bodyguard, Dance