Roadside Crosses

in Travis’s mind.
    The boy returned, carrying a brown-and-beige-striped uniform jacket on a hanger. He rolled it up and stuffed it into his backpack.
    “No,” Brigham barked. “Your mother ironed it. Put it on. Don’t crumple it up like that.”
    “I don’t want to wear it now.”
    “Show some respect to your mother, after all her work.”
    “It’s a bagel shop. Who cares?”
    “That’s not the point. Put it on. Do what I’m telling you.”
    The boy stiffened. Dance gave an audible gasp seeing Travis’s face. Eyes widening, shoulders rising. His lips drew back like those of a snarling animal. Travis raged to his father, “It’s a stupid fucking uniform. I wear it on the street and they laugh at me!”
    The father leaned forward. “You do not ever talk to me that way, and never in front of other people!”
    “I get laughed at enough. I’m not going to wear it! You don’t have any fucking idea!” Dance saw the boy’s frantic eyes flicker around the room and settle on the ashtray, a possible weapon. O’Neil noticed this too and tensed, in case a fight was about to break out.
    Travis had become somebody else entirely, possessed with anger.
    The tendency to violence in young people almost always comes from rage, not watching movies or TV. . . .
    “I didn’t do anything wrong!” Travis growled, wheeled around and pushed through the screen door, letting it snap back loudly. He hurried into the side yard, grabbed his bike, which was leaning against a broken fence, and walked it down a path through the woods bordering the backyard.
    “You two, thanks for fucking up our day. Now get out.”
    With neutral-toned good-byes, Dance and O’Neil headed for the door, Sonia offering a timid glance of apology. Travis’s father strode into the kitchen.Dance heard the refrigerator door open; a bottle fizzed open.
    Outside, she asked, “How’d you do?”
    “Not bad, I think,” O’Neil offered and held up a tiny tuft of gray. He’d tugged it off the sweatshirt in the laundry basket when he’d stepped away to let Dance take over the questioning.
    They sat in the front seat of O’Neil’s cruiser. The doors slammed simultaneously. “I’ll drop the fiber off with Peter Bennington.”
    It wouldn’t be admissible—they had no warrant—but it would at least tell them that Travis was the likely suspect.
    “If it matches, put him under surveillance?” she asked.
    A nod. “I’ll stop by the bagel shop. If his bike’s outside, I can get a soil sample from the treads. I think a magistrate’d go with a warrant if the dirt matches the beach scene.” He looked Dance’s way. “Gut feeling? You think he did it?”
    Dance debated. “All I can say is that I only got clear deception signals twice.”
    “When?”
    “First when he said he was at the Game Shed last night.”
    “And the second time?”
    “When he said he didn’t do anything wrong.”

Chapter 11
    DANCE RETURNED TO her office at the CBI. She smiled at Jon Boling. He reciprocated, but then his face grew grim. He nodded at his computer. “More postings about Travis on The Chilton Report. Attacking him. And then other posts, attacking the attackers. It’s an all-out flame war. And I know you wanted to keep the connection between the Roadside Cross Case and the attack secret, but somebody caught on.”
    “How on earth?” Dance asked angrily.
    Boling shrugged. He nodded to a recent posting.
    Reply to Chilton, posted by BrittanyM.
    Is anybody watching the news???? Somebody left a cross and then went out and attacked that girl. What’s that all about? OMG, I’ll bet it’s [the driver]!
    Subsequent postings suggested Tammy was attacked by Travis because she’d posted a critical comment in The Chilton Report. And he had become the “Roadside Cross Killer,” even though Tammy had survived.
    “Great. We try to keep it secret and we get outed by a teenage girl named Brittany.”
    “Did you see him?” Boling asked.
    “Yes.”
    “You think he’s the one?”
    “I wish I could say. I’m leaning toward it.” She explained her theory that it was hard to read Travis because he was living more in the synth world than the real, and he was masking his kinesic responses. “I will say there’s a huge amount of anger there. How ’bout we take a walk, Jon? There’s somebody I want you to meet.”
    A few minutes later they arrived at Charles Over by’s office. On the phone, as he often was, her boss gestured Dance and Boling in, with a