Roadside Crosses

anything to do with his plot to kill Chilton. But those are just the undeleted records. He’s been deleting files and websites regularly for the past week. Those, I’d guess, might be more what you’re interested in.”
    “Yep. Can you reconstruct them?”
    “I’ll go online and download one of Irv’s bots. That’ll roam the free space on his C: drive and put back together anything he’s deleted recently. Some of it will be only partial and some will be distorted. But most of the files should be ninety percent readable.”
    “That’d be great, Jon.”
    Five minutes later Irv’s bot was silently roaming through Schaeffer’s computer, looking for fragments of deleted files, reassembling them and storing them in a new folder that Boling had created.
    “How long?” she asked.
    “A couple of hours, I’d guess.” Boling looked at his watch and suggested they get a bite of dinner. They climbed into his Audi and headed to a restaurant not far from CBI headquarters, on a rise overlooking the airport and, beyond that, the city of Monterey and the bay. They got a table on the deck, warmed with overhead propane heaters, and sipped a Viognier white wine. The sun was now melting into the Pacific, spreading out and growing violently orange.They watched it in silence as tourists nearby snapped pictures that would have to be Photoshopped to even approximate the grandeur of the real event.
    They talked about her children, about their own childhoods. Where they were from originally. Boling commented that he believed only twenty percent of the Central Coast population comprised native Californians.
    Silence flowed between them again. Dance sensed his shoulders rising and was expecting what came next.
    “Can I ask you something?”
    “Sure.” She meant it, no reservations.
    “When did your husband die?”
    “About two years ago.”
    Two years, two months, three weeks. She could give him the days and hours too.
    “I’ve never lost anybody. Not like that.” Though there was a wistfulness in his voice, and his eyelids flickered like venetian blinds troubled by the wind. “What happened, you mind if I ask?”
    “Not at all. Bill was an FBI agent, assigned to the local resident agency. But it wasn’t work-related. An accident on Highway One. A truck. The driver fell asleep.” A wisp of a laugh. “You know, I never thought about it until just now. But his fellow agents and friends put flowers by the roadside for about a year after it happened.”
    “A cross?”
    “No, just flowers.” She shook her head. “God, I hated that. The reminder. I’d drive miles out of my way to avoid the place.”
    “Must’ve been terrible.”
    Dance tried not to practice her skills as a kinesics expert when she was out socially. Sometimes she’d read the kids, sometimes she’d read a date. But she remembered when she’d caught Wes in some minor lie and he grumbled, “It’s like you’re Superman, Mom. You’ve got X-ray word vision.” Now she was aware that, although Boling’s face kept its sympathetic smile, his body language had subtly changed. The grip on his wineglass stem tightened. On his free hand, fingers rubbed compulsively. Behaviors she knew he wasn’t even aware of.
    Dance just needed to prime the pump. “Come on, Jon. Your turn to spill. What’s your story? You’ve been pretty vague on the bachelor topic.”
    “Oh, nothing like your situation.”
    He was minimizing something that hurt, she could see that. She wasn’t even a therapist, let alone his. But they’d spent some time under fire and she wanted to know what was troubling him. She touched his arm briefly. “Come on. Remember, I interrogate people for a living. I’ll get it out of you sooner or later.”
    “I never go out with somebody who wants to water board me on the first date. Well, depending.”
    Jon Boling, Dance had come to realize, was a man who used clever quips as armor.
    He continued, “This is the worst soap opera you’ll ever hear. . . . The girl I met after leaving Silicon Valley? She ran a bookstore in Santa Cruz. Bay Beach Books?”
    “I think I’ve been there.”
    “We hit it off real well, Cassie and I. Did a lot of outdoor things together. Had some great times traveling. She even survived some visits to my family—well,actually it’s only me who has trouble surviving those.” He thought for a minute. “I think the thing is that we laughed a lot. That’s a clue. What kind of movies do you like best? We watched