Roadside Crosses

“Thank you.”
    They turned to face the man who’d spoken: James Chilton. Wearing dark slacks, a white T-shirt and anavy 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 gazingunsmilingly 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 mykiller. If I