Roadside Crosses

“It’s all yours. Just plug it in and read to your heart’s content.” He shrugged. “My first assignment for the police . . . short but sweet.”
    With a good friend, Kathryn Dance owned and operated a website devoted to homemade and traditional music. The site was pretty sophisticated technically but Dance knew little of the hardware and software; her friend’s husband handled that side of the business. She now said to Boling, “You know, if you’re not too busy, any chance you could stay around for a little? Help me search it?”
    Boling hesitated.
    “Well, if you have plans . . .”
    “How much time are we talking? I’ve got to be in Napa on Friday night. Family reunion sort of thing.”
    Dance said, “Oh, nothing that long. A few hours. A day at the most.”
    Eyes brightening again. “I’d love to. Puzzles are an important food group to me. . . . Now, what would I be looking for?”
    “Any clues as to the identity of Tammy’s attacker.”
    “Oh, Da Vinci Code. ”
    “Let’s hope it’s not as tricky and that whatever we find won’t get us excommunicated. . . . I’m interested in any communications that seem threatening. Disputes, fights, comments about stalkers. Would instant messages be there?”
    “Fragments. We can probably reconstruct a lot of them.” Boling plugged the drive back into his computer and leaned forward.
    “Then social networking sites,” Dance said. “Anything to do with roadside memorials or crosses.”
    “Memorials?”
    She explained, “We think he left a roadside cross to announce the attack.”
    “That’s pretty sick.” The professor’s fingers snapped over the keys. As he typed, he asked, “Why do you think her computer’s the answer?”
    Dance explained about the interview with Tammy Foster.
    “You picked up all that just from her body language?”
    “That’s right.”
    She told him about the three ways humans communicate: First, through verbal content— what we say. “That’s the meaning of the words themselves.But content is not only the least reliable and most easily faked, it’s actually only a small portion of the way we send messages to each other. The second and third are much more important: verbal quality— how we say the words. That would be things like pitch of voice, how fast we talk, whether we pause and use ‘uhm’ frequently. And then, third, kinesics—our body’s behavior. Gestures, glances, breathing, posture, mannerisms. The last two are what interviewers are most interested in, since they’re much more revealing than speech content.”
    He was smiling. Dance lifted an eyebrow.
    Boling explained, “You sound as excited about your work as—”
    “You and your flash memory.”
    A nod. “Yep. They’re amazing little guys . . . even the pink ones.”
    Boling continued to type and scroll through page after page of the guts of Tammy’s computer, speaking softly. “Typical rambling of a teenage girl. Boys, clothes, makeup, parties, a little bit about school, movies and music . . . no threats.”
    He scrolled quickly through various screens. “So far, negative on the emails, at least the ones for the past two weeks. I can go back and check the earlier ones if I need to. Now, Tammy’s in all the big social networking sites—Facebook, MySpace, OurWorld, Second Life.” Though Boling was offline, he could pull up and view recent pages Tammy had read. “Wait, wait. . . . Okay.” He was sitting forward, tense.
    “What is it?”
    “She was almost drowned?”
    “That’s right.”
    “A few weeks ago she and some of her friends started a discussion in OurWorld about what scared them the most. One of Tammy’s big fears was drowning.”
    Dance’s mouth tightened. “Maybe he picked the means of death specifically for her.”
    In a surprisingly vehement tone, Boling said, “We give away too much information about ourselves online. Way too much. You know the term ‘escribitionist’?”
    “Nope.”
    “A term for blogging about yourself.” A grimacing smile. “Tells it pretty well, doesn’t it? And then there’s ‘dooce.’”
    “That’s new too.”
    “A verb. As in ‘I’ve been dooced.’ It means getting fired because of what you posted on your blog—whether facts about yourself or your boss or job. A woman in Utah coined it. She posted some things about her employer and got laid off. ‘Dooce’ comes from a misspelling of ‘dude,’ by the way. Oh, and then there’s