ANCE WALKED ACROSS the yard to Donald and Lily Hawken, her Aldo shoes gathering dust and plant flecks. Crisp grasshoppers fled from her transit.

The couple sat on the front porch steps of Chilton’s vacation house. Hawken’s face was harrowing to see. The betrayal had clearly affected him to his core.

“Jim did this?” he whispered.

“I’m afraid so.”

Another thought shook him. “My God, what if the children had been here? Would he have…?” He couldn’t complete the sentence.

His wife stared at the dusty yard, wiping sweat off her brow. Hollister’s a long way from the ocean, and summer air, trapped by the knobby hills, heated up fiercely by midday.

Dance said, “Actually, it was his second attempt to kill you.”

“Second?” Lily whispered. “You mean at the house? When we were unpacking the other day?”

“That’s right. That was Chilton too, wearing one of Travis’s hoodies.”

“But…is he insane?” Hawken asked, mystified. “Why would he want to kill us?”

Dance had learned that in her line of work nothing is gained by soft-pedaling. “I can’t say for absolute certain, but I think James Chilton murdered your first wife.”

A heartbreaking gasp. Eyes wide with disbelief. “What?”

Lily now lifted her head and turned to Dance. “But she died in an accident. Swimming near La Jolla.”

“I’m getting some details from San Diego and the Coast Guard to be sure. But it’s pretty likely that I’m right.”

“He couldn’t have. Sarah and Jim were very…” Hawken’s words dissolved.

“Close?” Dance asked.

He was shaking his head. “No. It’s not possible.” But then he blurted angrily, “Are you saying they were having an affair?”

A pause, then she said, “I think so, yes. I’ll be getting some evidence in the next few days. Travel records. Phone calls.”

Lily put her arm around her husband’s shoulders. “Honey,” she whispered.

Hawken said, “I remember that they’d always enjoy each other’s company when we’d go out. And, with me, Sarah was a challenge. I was always traveling. Maybe two, three days a week. Not a lot. But she sometimes said I was neglecting her. Kind of joking—I didn’t take it all that seriously. But maybe she meant it, and Jim stepped in to fill the gap. Sarah was always pretty demanding.”

The tone of delivery suggested to Dance that the sentence could have ended with “in bed.”

She added, “I’m guessing that Sarah wanted Chilton to leave Patrizia and marry her.”

A bitter laugh. “And he said no?”

Dance shrugged. “That’s what occurred to me.”

Hawken considered this. He added in hollow tones, “It wasn’t a good thing to say no to Sarah.”

“I thought about the timing. You moved to San Diego about three years ago. It was around then that Patrizia’s father died, and she inherited a lot of money. Which meant that Chilton could keep writing his blog—he started working on it full-time then. I think he was beginning to get a sense he was on a mission to save the world and Patrizia’s money could let him do that. So he broke it off with your wife.”

Hawken asked, “And Sarah threatened to expose him if he didn’t leave Pat?”

“I think she was going to broadcast that James Chilton, the moral voice of the country, had been having an affair with his best friend’s wife.”

Dance believed that Chilton lied to Sarah, agreeing to get the divorce, and met her in San Diego. She could imagine his suggestion of a romantic picnic, at a deserted cove near La Jolla. A swim at the beautiful seashore preserve there. Then an accident—a blow to the head. Or maybe he just held her underwater.

“But why was he going to kill us?” Lily asked, with a troubled look back at the house.

Dance said to Donald Hawken, “You’d been out of touch for a while?”

“After Sarah died, I was so depressed I gave up on everything, stopped seeing all my old friends. Most of my time went to the children. I was a recluse…until I met Lily. Then I started to resurface.”

“And you decided to move back.”

“Right. Sell the company and come back.” Hawken was understanding. “Sure, sure, Lily and I would get together with Jim and Patrizia, some of our old friends around here. At some point we’d have to reminisce. Jim used to come to Southern California a bit before Sarah died. He would’ve lied to Pat about it; it’d only be a matter of time before he’d get caught.” Hawken’s head swiveled to the house, his eyes wide. “The Blue Swan…Yes!”

Dance lifted an eyebrow.

“I told Jim I wanted to give him one of my late wife’s favorite paintings. I remembered him staring at it when he stayed with me after Sarah died.” A scoffing laugh. “I’ll bet it was Jim’s. He probably bought it years ago and one day when Sarah was over at his place she told him she wanted it. Maybe he told Patrizia he sold it to somebody. If she saw the painting now she’d wonder how Sarah had gotten it.”

This would explain Chilton’s desperation—why he’d take the risk of murdering. The righteous blogger lecturing the world on morality about to be exposed for having an affair—with a woman who’d died. Questions would be raised, an investigation started. And the most important thing in his life—his blog—would have been destroyed. He had to eliminate that threat.

The Report is too important to jeopardize….

Lily asked, “But that man at the house, Schaeffer? The statement that James was going to read—it mentioned Travis.”

“I’m sure Schaeffer’s plans didn’t originally involve Travis. He’d wanted to kill Chilton for some time—probably since his brother’s death. But when he heard about the Roadside Crosses attacks, he rewrote the statement to include Travis’s name—so no one would suspect Schaeffer himself.”

Hawken asked, “How did you figure out Jim was the one, not Schaeffer?”

Mostly, she explained, because of what wasn’t in the crime scene reports TJ had just delivered to her.

“What wasn’t there?” Hawken asked.

“First,” she explained, “there wasn’t any cross to announce the murder of Chilton. The killer had left crosses in public places before the other attacks. But nobody could find the last cross. Second, the perp had used Travis’s bicycle, or his own, to leave tread marks to implicate the boy. But Schaeffer didn’t have a bike anywhere. And then the gun he threatened Chilton with? It wasn’t the Colt stolen from Travis’s father. It was a Smith and Wesson. Finally, there were no flowers or florist’s wire in his car or hotel room.

“So, I considered the possibility that Greg Schaeffer wasn’t the Roadside Cross Killer. He just lucked into the case and decided to use it. But, if he wasn’t leaving the crosses, who could it be?”

Dance had gone back through the list of suspects. She’d thought of the minister, Reverend Fisk, and his bodyguard, possibly CrimsoninChrist. They were certainly fanatics and had threatened Chilton directly in their postings on the blog. But TJ had gone to see Fisk, the minder and several other key members of the group. They all had alibis for the times of the attacks.

She’d also considered Hamilton Royce—the troubleshooter from Sacramento, being paid to shut down the blog because of what Chilton was posting about the Nuclear Facilities Planning Committee. It was a good 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, actu ally 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 they were. 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 she remembered from the first day she’d been to his house: If you DESALINATE, you DEVASTATE.

It was the last syllable on that sticker that Ken Pfister had seen as the van drove past: STATE.

“I went to the magistrate with what I’d found and got a warrant. I sent officers to search Chilton’s house in Carmel. He’d discarded most of the evidence, but they found a few red rose petals and a bit of cardboard similar to what was used on the crosses. I remembered that he said he was coming here with you. So I called San Benito County and told them to send a tactical team here. The only thing I didn’t guess was that Chilton was going to force Travis himself to shoot you.”

She interrupted the man’s effusive thanks—he seemed about to cry—with a glance at her watch. “I have to leave now. You go home, get some rest.”

Lily hugged Dance. Hawken shook her hand in both of his. “I don’t know what to say.”

Disengaging, she walked to the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office squad car, where James Chilton sat. His thinning hair was plastered to the side of his head. He watched her approach with a hurt gaze on his face. Almost a pout.

She opened the back door, leaned down.

He hissed, “I don’t need shackles on my feet. Look at this. It’s degrading.”

Dance noted the chains. Noted them with satisfaction.

He continued, “They put them on, some deputies did, and they were smiling! Because they claimed I kept the boy shackled. This’s all bullshit. This is all a mistake. I’ve been framed.”

Dance nearly laughed. Apart from all the other evidence, there were three eyewitnesses—Hawken, his wife and Travis—to his crimes.

She recited his Miranda rights.

“Somebody did that already.”

“Just making sure you really understand them. Do you?”

“My rights? Yes. Listen, back there, yes, I had a gun. But people had been out to kill me. Of course I’m going to protect myself. Somebody’s setting me up. Like you said, somebody I’d posted about in my blog. I saw Travis come into the living room and I pulled out my gun—I started carrying one when you said I was in danger.”

Ignoring the rambling, she said, “We’re going to take you to Monterey County and book you, James. You can call your wife or your attorney then.”

“Do you hear what I’m saying? I’ve been framed. Whatever that boy’s claiming, he’s unstable. I was playing along with him, with his delusions. I was going to shoot him if he’d tried to hurt Don and Lily. Of course I was.”

She leaned forward, controlling her emotions as best she could. Which wasn’t easy. “Why’d you target Tammy and Kelley, James? Two teenage girls who never did anything to you.”

“I’m innocent,” he muttered.

She continued, as if he hadn’t spoken. “Why them? Because you didn’t like adolescent attitude? You didn’t like them tainting your precious blog with their obscenities? You didn’t like bad grammar?”

He said nothing, but Dance believed there was a flicker of acknowledgment in his eyes. She pushed ahead. “And why Lyndon Strickland? And Mark Watson? You killed them just because they posted under their real names and they were easy to find, right?”

Chilton was looking away now, as if he knew he was telegraphing the truth with his eyes.

“James, those pictures you uploaded to the blog, pretending to be Travis? You drew them yourself, didn’t you? I remembered from your bio in The Report that you were a graphic designer and art director in college.”

He said nothing.

The anger flared hotter. “Did you enjoy drawing the one of me getting stabbed?”

Again, silence.

She stood. “I’ll be by at some point to interview you. You can have your attorney present if you like.”

Then he turned to her, his face imploring. “One thing, Agent Dance? Please?”

She lifted an eyebrow.

“There’s something I need. It’s important.”

“What’s that, James?”

“A computer.”

“What?”

“I need access to a computer. Soon. Today.”

“You get phone calls from the lockup. No computer.”

“But The Report…I’ve got to upload my stories.”

Now she couldn’t contain the laugh. He was not at all concerned about his wife or children, only about the precious blog. “No, James, that’s not going to happen.”

“But I have to. I have to!”

Hearing those words and seeing his frantic gaze, Kathryn Dance finally understood James Chilton. The readers were nothing to him. He’d easily murdered two of them and was fully prepared to kill more.

The truth was nothing to him. He’d lied over and over again.

No, the answer was simple: Like the players in DimensionQuest, like so many people lost in the synth world, James Chilton was an addict. Addicted to his messianic mission. Addicted to the seductive power of spreading the word—his word—to the minds and hearts of people throughout the world. The more who read his musings, his rants, his praise, the more exquisite the high.

She leaned down, close to his face. “James. I will do everything possible to make sure that whatever prison you go to, you will never be able to get online ever again. Never in your life.”

His face turned livid and he began screaming, “You can’t do that! You can’t take my blog away. My readers need me. The country needs me! You can’t!”

Dance closed the door and nodded to the deputy behind the wheel.