Roadside Crosses

him completely incommunicado.
    “Hey.” He sounded tired.
    “Michael.”
    “What’s wrong?” He’d grown alert; apparently her tone told stories too.
    “I know you’re swamped, but any chance I could come by? I need to brainstorm. I’ve found something.”
    “Sure. What?”
    “Travis Brigham isn’t the Roadside Cross Killer.”
    DANCE AND O’NEIL were in his office in the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office in Salinas.
    The windows looked out on the courthouse, in front of which were two dozen of the Life First protesters, along with the wattle-necked Reverend Fisk. Apparently bored with protesting in front of Stuart and Edie Dance’s empty house, they’d moved to where they stood a chance of getting some publicity. Fisk was talking to the associate she’d seen earlier: the brawny redheaded bodyguard.
    Dance turned away from the window and joined O’Neil at his unsteady conference table. The place was filled with ordered stacks of files. She wondered which were related to the Indonesian container case. O’Neil rocked back on two legs of a wooden chair. “So, let’s hear it.”
    She explained quickly about how the investigation had led to Jason and then into the DimensionQuest game and ultimately to Caitlin Gardner and the confession that Travis had taken the fall for her.
    “Infatuation?” he asked.
    But Dance said, “Sure, that’s part of it. But there’s something else going on. She wants to go to medical school. That’s important to Travis.”
    “Medical school?”
    “Medicine, healing. In that game he plays, DimensionQuest, Travis is a famous healer. I’m thinking one of the reasons he protected her was because of that. His avatar is Medicus. A doctor. He feels a connection to her.”
    “That’s a little farfetched, don’t you think? After all, it’s just a game.”
    “No, Michael, it’s more than a game. The real world and the synth world are getting closer and closer, and people like Travis are living in both. If he’s a respected healer in DimensionQuest he’s not going to be a vindictive killer in the real world.”
    “So he takes the fall for Caitlin’s crash, and whatever people say about him in the blog, the last thing in the world he wants is to draw attention to himself by attacking anybody.”
    “Exactly.”
    “But Kelley . . . before she passed out she told the medic that it was Travis who attacked her.”
    Dance shook her head. “I’m not sure she actually saw him. She assumed it was him, maybe because she knew she’d posted about him and the mask at her window was from the DimensionQuest game. And the rumors were he was behind the attacks. But I think the real killer was wearing a mask or got her from behind.”
    “How do you deal with the physical evidence? Planted?”
    “Right. It’d be easy to read up online about Travis,to follow him, learn about his job at the bagel place, his bicycle, the fact that he plays DQ all the time. The killer could have made one of those masks, stolen the gun from Bob Brigham’s truck, planted the trace evidence at the bagel shop and stolen the knife when the employees weren’t looking. Oh, and something else: the M&M’s? The flecks of wrapper at the crime scene?”
    “Right.”
    “Had to be planted. Travis wouldn’t eat chocolate. He bought packets for his brother. He was worried about his acne. He had books in his room about what foods to avoid. The real killer didn’t know that. He must’ve seen Travis buy M&M’s at some point and assumed they were a favorite candy, so he left some trace of the wrapper at the scene.”
    “And the sweatshirt fibers?”
    “There was a posting in The Report about the Brigham family being so poor that they couldn’t afford a washer and dryer. And it mentioned which laundromat they went to. I’m sure the real perp read that and staked the place out.”
    O’Neil nodded. “And stole a hooded sweatshirt when the mother was out or wasn’t looking.”
    “Yep. And there were some pictures posted in the blog under Travis’s name.” O’Neil hadn’t seen the drawings and she described them briefly, omitting the fact that the last one bore a resemblance to her. Dance continued, “They were crude, what an adult would think of a teenager’s drawing. But I saw some pictures that Travis had done—of surgery. He’s a great artist. Somebody else drew them.”
    “It would explain why nobody’s been able to findthe real killer, despite the manhunt. He pulls on a hoodie for the