Roadside Crosses

paid to shut down the blog because of what Chilton was posting about the Nuclear Facilities Planning Committee. It was agood theory, but the more she’d thought about it, the less likely it seemed. Royce was too obvious a suspect, since he’d already tried to get the blog closed down—and very publicly—by using the state police.
    Clint Avery, the construction boss, was a possibility too. But she’d learned that Avery’s mysterious meetings after Dance had left his company were with a lawyer specializing in equal employment law and two men who ran a day-labor service. In an area where most employers worried about hiring too many undocumented aliens, Avery was worried about getting sued for hiring too few minorities. He was uneasy with Dance, it seemed, because he was afraid she was really there investigating a civil rights complaint that he was discriminating against Latinos.
    Dance had also fleetingly considered Travis’s father as the perp, actually wondering if there was some psychological connection between the branches and roses and Bob Brigham’s job as a landscaper. She’d even considered that the perp might be Sammy—troubled, but maybe a savant, cunning, and possibly filled with resentment against his older brother.
    But even though the family had its problems, those were pretty much the same problems all families had. And both father and son were accounted for during some of the attacks.
    With a shrug Dance said to the Hawkens, “Finally I ran out of suspects. And came to James Chilton himself.”
    “Why?” he asked.
    A to B to X . . .
    “I was thinking about something a consultant of ours told me about blogs—about how dangerous theywere. And I asked myself: What if Chilton wanted to kill someone? What a great weapon The Report was. Start a rumor, then let the cybermob take over. Nobody would be surprised when the bullied victim snapped. There’s your perpetrator.”
    Hawken pointed out, “But Jim didn’t say anything about Travis in the blog.”
    “And that’s what was so brilliant; it made Chilton seem completely innocent. But he didn’t need to mention Travis. He knew how the Internet works. The merest hint he’d done something wrong and the Vengeful Angels would take over.
    “If Chilton was the perp, I wondered then who was the intended victim. There was nothing about the two girls, Tammy or Kelley, to suggest he wanted to kill them. Or Lyndon Strickland or Mark Watson. You were the other potential victims, of course. I thought back to everything I’d learned about the case. I remembered something odd. You told me that Chilton had hurried to your house in San Diego to be with you and the children the day your wife died. He was there within the hour.”
    “Right. He’d been in L.A. at a meeting. He got the next commuter flight down.”
    Dance said, “But he’d told his wife he was in Seattle when he heard that Sarah had died.”
    “Seattle?” Hawken appeared confused.
    “In a meeting at Microsoft headquarters. But, no, he was actually in San Diego. He’d been there all along. He never left town after drowning Sarah. He was waiting to hear from you and to get to your house. He needed to.”
    “Needed to? Why?”
    “You said he stayed with you, even helped you with the cleaning?”
    “That’s right.”
    “I think he wanted to go through the house and destroy anything among Sarah’s possessions that suggested they were having an affair.”
    “Jesus,” Hawken muttered.
    She explained a few of the other connections between Chilton and the crimes: He was a triathlon competitor, which meant he biked. Dance recalled seeing all the sports equipment in Chilton’s garage, among them several bicycles.
    “Then, the soil.” She explained about finding the mismatched dirt near one of the roadside crosses. “Crime Scene found identical trace on Greg Schaeffer’s shoes. But the ultimate source was the gardens in Chilton’s front yard. That’s where Schaeffer picked it up.”
    Dance reflected that she’d actually gazed right at the source of the dirt when she’d first been to the blogger’s house, as she examined the landscaping.
    “And then there was his van, the Nissan Quest.” She told them about the witness Ken Pfister seeing the state vehicle near one of the crosses. Then she gave a wry smile. “But it was actually Chilton himself who was driving—after planting the second cross.”
    She pointed to the blogger’s van, parked nearby. It bore the bumper sticker