Roadside Crosses

parents—of the danger and to insist bluntly that she stop posting to The Report and to tell her friends to stop too.
    How’s that , Chilton?
    Boling was studying the computer screen in front of him. Dance looked over and saw that he was frowning.
    “What is it?” she asked.
    “The first posts responding in the ‘Roadside Crosses’ thread were mostly local, classmates and people around the Peninsula. Now people from all over the country—hell, from all over the world—arechiming in. They’re really going after him—and the Highway Patrol or the police too—for not following up on the accident. And they’re dissing the CBI too.”
    “Us?”
    “Yep. Somebody reported that a CBI agent went to interview Travis at home but didn’t detain him.”
    “How do they even know Michael and I were there?”
    He gestured at the computer. “The nature of the beast. Information spreads. People in Warsaw, Buenos Aires, New Zealand.”
    Dance returned to the crime scene report of the most recent roadside cross on a quiet road in a lightly inhabited part of north Monterey. No witnesses. And little had been found at the scene, aside from the same sort of trace discovered at the earlier scenes, linking Travis to the crime. But there was one discovery that might prove helpful. Soil samples revealed some sand that wasn’t generally found in the immediate vicinity of the cross. It couldn’t, however, be sourced to a particular location.
    And all the while she reviewed these details, she couldn’t help but think, who is the next victim?
    Is Travis getting close?
    And what terrible technique is he going to use this time to frighten and to kill? He seemed to favor lingering deaths, as if in compensation for prolonged suffering he’d been through at the hands of the cyberbullies.
    Boling said, “I’ve got another name.” He called it out to Dance, who jotted it down.
    “Thanks,” she said, smiling.
    “You owe me a Junior G-Man badge.”
    As Boling cocked his head and bent toward his notes once more, he said something else softly. Perhaps it was her imagination but it almost sounded as if he’d started to say, “Or maybe dinner,” but swallowed the words before they fully escaped.
    Imagination, she decided. And turned back to her phone.
    Boling sat back. “That’s all of them for now. The other posters aren’t in the area or they have untraceable addresses. But if we can’t find them, Travis can’t either.”
    He stretched and leaned back.
    “Not your typical day in the world of academia, is it?” Dance asked.
    “Not exactly.” He cast a wry look her way. “Is this a typical day in the world of law enforcement?”
    “Uhm, no, it’s not.”
    “I guess that’s the good news.”
    Her phone buzzed. She noted the internal CBI extension.
    “TJ.”
    “Boss . . .” As had happened on more than one occasion recently, the young agent’s typically irreverent attitude was absent. “Have you heard?”
    DANCE’S HEART GAVE a bit of a flip when she saw Michael O’Neil at the crime scene.
    “Hey,” she said. “Thought I’d lost you.”
    He gave a faint startle reaction to that. Then said, “Juggling both cases. But a crime scene”—he nodded toward a fluttering ribbon of police tape—“has priority.”
    “Thanks.”
    Jon Boling joined them. Dance had asked the professor to accompany her. She’d supposed there were several ways in which he could be helpful. Mostly she wanted him here to bounce ideas off of, since Michael O’Neil, she’d believed, wouldn’t be present.
    “What happened?” she asked the senior deputy.
    “Left a little diorama to scare him,” a glance up the trail, “and then chased him down here. And shot him.” It seemed to Dance that O’Neil was going to give more details but pulled back, probably because of Boling’s presence.
    “Where?”
    The deputy pointed. The body wasn’t visible from here.
    “I’ll show you the initial scene.” He led them along the jogging path. About two hundred yards up a shallow hill, they found a short trail that led to a clearing. They ducked under yellow tape and saw rose petals on the ground and a cross carved in the sandy dirt. There were bits of flesh scattered around and bloodstains too. A bone. Claw marks in the dirt, from vultures and crows, it seemed.
    O’Neil said, “It’s animal, the Crime Scene people say. Probably beef, store-bought. My guess is the vic was jogging up the trail back there, saw the fuss and then took a