ATHRYN DANCE SAT back, shaking her head. “A lot of hormones there,” she said to Jon Boling.

She was troubled by the viciousness of the blog posts—and most of them written by young people.

Boling scrolled back to the original post. “Look what happened. Chilton makes a simple observation about a fatal accident. All he does is question whether the road was safely maintained. But look at how the responding posts arc. They go from discussing what Chilton brought up—highway safety—then move on to government finances and then to the kid who was driving, even though he apparently didn’t do anything wrong. The posters get more and more agitated as they attack him and finally the blog turns into a barroom brawl among the posters themselves.”

“Like the game of Telephone. By the time the message moves along, it’s distorted. ‘I heard…’ ‘Somebody knows somebody who…’ ‘A friend of mine told me…’” She scanned the pages again. “One thing I noticed, Chilton doesn’t fight back. Look at the post about Reverend Fisk and the right-to-life group.”

Reply to Chilton, posted by CrimsoninChrist.

You are a sinner who cannot comprehend the goodness within the heart of Rev. R. Samuel Fisk. He has devoted his life to Christ and all of His works, while you do nothing but pander to the masses for your own pleasure and profit. Your misreading of the great Reverend’s views is pathetic and libelous. You should be nailed up on a cross yourself.

Boling told her, “No, the serious bloggers don’t argue back. Chilton will give a reasoned response, but flame wars—attacks among posters—get out of control and become personal. The postings become about the attack, not the substance of the topic. That’s one of the problems with blogs. In person, people would never feud like this. The anonymity of the blogs mean the fights go on for days or weeks.”

Dance looked through the text. “So the boy is a student.” She recalled her deduction from the interview with Tammy Foster. “Chilton deleted his name and the name of the school but it’s got to be Robert Louis Stevenson. Where Tammy goes.”

Boling tapped the screen. “And there’s her post. She was one of the first to say something about the boy. And everyone else jumped on board after that.”

Maybe the post was the source of the guilt Dance had picked up on during the interview. If this boy was behind the attack, then Tammy, as Dance and O’Neil had speculated, would feel partly responsible for the assault on her; she’d brought it on herself. And perhaps guilty too if he went on to hurt someone else. This explained why Tammy wouldn’t like the suggestion that her abductor had a bike in the car: that would lead Dance to consider a younger suspect—a student whose identity the girl didn’t want to reveal because she still considered him a threat.

“It’s all so vicious,” Dance said, nodding at the screen.

“Did you hear about the Litter Boy?”

“Who?”

“Happened in Kyoto a few years ago. Japan. A teenage boy tossed a fast food wrapper and soda cup on the ground in a park. Somebody shot a picture of the kid doing it on their cell phone and uploaded it to his friends. Next thing, it started appearing on blogs and social networking sites all over the country. Cybervigilantes tracked him down. They got his name and address and posted the info online. It spread to thousands of blogs. The whole thing became a witch hunt. People began showing up at his house—throwing trash in the yard. He nearly killed himself—that kind of dishonor is significant in Japan.” Boling’s tonal quality and body language revealed anger. “Critics say, oh, it’s just words or pictures. But they can be weapons too. They can cause just as much damage as fists. And, frankly, I think the scars last longer.”

Dance said, “I don’t get some of the vocabulary in the posts.”

He laughed. “Oh, in blogs and bulletin boards and social networking sites, it’s in to misspell, abbreviate and make up words. ‘Sauce’ for ‘source.’ ‘Moar’ for ‘more.’ ‘IMHO’ is ‘in my humble opinion.’”

“Do I dare ask? ‘FOAD.’”

“Oh,” he said, “a polite valediction to your note. It means ‘Fuck off and die.’ All caps, of course, is the same as shouting.”

“And what is ‘p-h-r-3–3-k’?”

“That’s leetspeak for ‘freak.’”

“Leetspeak?”

“It’s a sort of language that’s been created by teens over the past few years. You only see it with keyboarded text. Numbers and symbols take the place of letters. And spellings are altered. Leetspeak comes from ‘elite,’ as in the best and the chicest. It can be incomprehensible to us old folks. But anybody who’s mastered it can write and read it as fast as we do English.”

“Why do kids use it?”

“Because it’s creative and unconventional…and cool. Which, by the way, you should spell ‘K-E-W-L.’”

“The spelling and grammar are awful.”

“True, but it doesn’t mean the posters are necessarily stupid or uneducated. It’s just the convention nowadays. And speed is important. As long as the reader can understand what you’re saying, you can be as careless as you want.”

Dance said, “I wonder who the boy is. I guess I could call CHP about the accident Chilton refers to.”

“Oh, I’ll find it. The online world is huge but it’s also small. I’ve got Tammy’s social networking site here. She spends most of her time in one called OurWorld. It’s bigger than Facebook and MySpace. It’s got a hundred thirty million members.”

“A hundred thirty million?”

“Yep. Bigger than most countries.” Boling was squinting as he typed. “Okay, I’m in her account, just do a little cross-referencing…. There. Got him.”

“That fast?”

“Yep. His name’s Travis Brigham. You’re right. He’s a junior at Robert Louis Stevenson High in Monterey. Going to be a senior this fall. Lives in Pacific Grove.”

Where Dance and her children lived.

“I’m looking over some of the postings in OurWorld about the accident. Looks like he was driving a car back from a party and lost control. Two girls were killed, another one ended up in the hospital. He wasn’t badly injured. No charges were filed—there was some question about the condition of the road. It’d been raining.”

“That! Sure. I remember it.” Parents always recall fatal car crashes involving youngsters. And, of course, she felt a sting of memory from several years ago: the highway patrol officer calling her at home, asking if she was FBI Agent Bill Swenson’s wife. Why was he asking? she’d wondered.

I’m sorry to tell you, Agent Dance…I’m afraid there’s been an accident.

She now pushed the thought away and said, “Innocent but he’s still getting vilified.”

“But innocence is boring,” Boling said wryly. “It’s no fun to post about that.” He indicated the blog. “What you’ve got here are Vengeful Angels.”

“What’s that?”

“A category of cyberbullies. Vengeful Angels are vigilantes. They’re attacking Travis because they think he got away with something—since he wasn’t arrested after the accident. They don’t believe, or trust, the police. Another category is the Power Hungry—they’re closest to typical school-yard bullies. They need to control others by pushing them around. Then there are the Mean Girls. They bully because, well, they’re little shits. Girls, mostly, who’re bored and post cruel things for the fun of it. It borders on sadism.” A tinge of anger again in Boling’s voice. “Bullying…it’s a real problem. And it’s getting worse. The latest statistics are that thirty-five percent of kids have been bullied or threatened online, most of them multiple times.” He fell silent and his eyes narrowed.

“What, Jon?”

“Interesting that there’s one thing we don’t see.”

“What’s that?”

“Travis fighting back in the blog, flaming the people who attacked him.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know about it.”

Boling gave a thin laugh. “Oh, believe me, he would’ve known about the attacks five minutes after the first post in the Chilton thread.”

“Why’s it significant he’s not posting?”

“One of the most persistent categories of cyberbullying is called Revenge of the Nerds, or the Victims of Retaliators. Those are people who’ve been bullied and are fighting back. The social stigma of being outed or bullied or humiliated at that age is overwhelming. I guarantee he’s furious and he’s hurt and he wants to get even. Those feelings have to come out somehow. You get the implication?”

Dance understood. “It suggests that he is the one who attacked Tammy.”

“If he’s not going after them online, it’s all the more likely he’d be inclined to get them in real life.” A troubled glance at the screen. “Ariel, BellaKelley, SexyGurl362, Legend666, Archenemy—they all posted attacks on him. Which means they’re all at risk—if he’s the one.”

“Would it be hard for him to get their names and addresses?”

“Some, sure, short of hacking into routers and servers. The ‘Anonymous’ postings, of course. But a lot of them would be as easy to find as my getting his name. All he’d need would be a few high school yearbooks or class directories, access to OurWorld, Facebook or MySpace. Oh, and everybody’s favorite—Google.”

Dance noted a shadow had fallen over them and Jonathan Boling was looking past her.

Michael O’Neil stepped into the office. Dance was relieved to see him. They shared smiles. The professor stood. Dance introduced them. The two men shook hands.

Boling said, “So, I have you to thank for my first outing as a cop.”

“If ‘thank’ is the right word,” O’Neil said with a wry smile.

They all sat at the coffee table, and Dance told the deputy what they’d found…and what they suspected: that Tammy might have been attacked because she’d posted a comment on a blog about a high school student who’d been responsible for a car crash.

“Was that the accident on One a couple of weeks ago? About five miles south of Carmel?”

“Right.”

Boling said, “The boy’s name is Travis Brigham and he’s a student at Robert Louis Stevenson, where the victims went.”

“So he’s a person of interest, at least. And it’s possible—what we were afraid of?” O’Neil asked Dance. “He wants to keep going?”

“Very likely. “Cyberbullying pushes people over the edge. I’ve seen it happen dozens of times.”

O’Neil put his feet on the coffee table and rocked back in the chair. Two years ago she’d bet him ten dollars that someday he’d fall over backward. So far she had yet to collect. He asked Dance, “Anything more on witnesses?”

Dance explained that TJ hadn’t reported back yet about the security camera near the highway where the first cross had been left, nor had Rey responded about witnesses near the club where Tammy had been abducted.

O’Neil said that there hadn’t been any breakthroughs with the physical evidence. “Only one thing—Crime Scene found a gray fiber, cotton, on the cross.” He added that the lab in Salinas couldn’t match it to a specific database, other than to report that it was probably from clothing, not from carpet or furniture.

“That’s all, nothing else? No prints, tread marks?”

O’Neil shrugged. “The perp’s either very smart or very lucky.”

Dance walked to her desk and went into the state databases of warrants and records. She squinted over the screen and read, “Travis Alan Brigham, age seventeen. Driver’s license puts him at four oh eight Henderson Road.” She pushed her glasses up on her nose as she read. “Interesting. He’s got a record.” Then she shook her head. “No, sorry. My mistake. It’s not him. It’s Samuel Brigham, at the same address. He’s fifteen. Juvie record. Arrested twice on peeping, once on misdemeanor assault. Both dismissed, subject to psych treatment. Looks like he’s a brother. But Travis? No, he’s clean.”

She called Travis’s DMV picture up on the screen. A dark-haired boy with eyes closely set together, beneath thick brows, stared at the camera. He wasn’t smiling.

“I’d like to find out more about the accident,” O’Neil said.

Dance placed a call to the local office of the Highway Patrol, the official name for California’s state police. After a few minutes of being transferred around she ended up with a Sergeant Brodsky, put the call on speaker and asked about the accident.

Brodsky slipped immediately into the tone you hear when police take the stand at trial. Emotionally flat, precise. “It was just before midnight on Saturday, June nine. Four juveniles, three female, one male, were head ing north on Highway One about three miles south of Carmel Highlands, near Garrapata State Beach Reserve. The male was driving. The vehicle was a late-model Nissan Altima. It appears that the car was traveling at about forty-five. He missed a curve, skidded and went over a cliff. The girls in the back weren’t wearing their seat belts. They died instantly. The girl in the passenger seat had a concussion. She was in the hospital for a few days. The driver was admitted, examined and released.”

“What’d Travis say happened?” Dance asked.

“Just lost control. It’d rained earlier. There was water on the highway. He changed lanes and went into a skid. It was one of the girls’ cars and the tires weren’t the best. He wasn’t speeding, and he tested negative for alcohol and controlled substances. The girl who survived corroborated his story.” A defensive echo sounded in his voice. “There was a reason we didn’t charge him, you know. Whatever anybody said about the investigation.”

So he’d read the blog too, Dance deduced.

“You going to reopen the investigation?” Brodsky asked warily.

“No, this is about that attack Monday night. The girl in the trunk.”

“Oh, that. The boy did it, you think?”

“Possibly.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me. Not one bit.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Sometimes you get a feeling. Travis was dangerous. Had eyes just like the kids at Columbine.”

How could he possibly know the visage of the killers in that horrific 1999 murder spree?

Then Brodsky added, “He was a fan of theirs, you know, the shooters. Had pictures up in his locker.”

Did he know that independently, or from the blog? Dance recalled that someone had mentioned it in the “Roadside Crosses” thread.

“Did you think he was a threat?” O’Neil asked Brodsky. “When you interviewed him?”

“Yes, sir. Kept my cuffs handy the whole time. He’s a big kid. And wore this hooded sweatshirt. Just stared at me. Freaky.”

At this reference to the garment, Dance recalled what Tammy had given away about the attacker wearing a hoodie.

She thanked the officer and they hung up. After a moment she looked over at Boling. “Jon, any insights you can give us about Travis? From the postings?”

Boling reflected for a moment. “I do have a thought. If he’s a gamer, like they’re saying, that fact could be significant.”

O’Neil asked, “You mean by playing those games he’s programmed to be violent? We saw something on Discovery Channel about that the other night.”

But Jon Boling shook his head. “That’s a popular theme in the media. But if he’s gone through relatively normal childhood developmental stages, then I wouldn’t worry too much about that. Yes, some children can become numb to the consequences of violence if they’re continually exposed in certain ways—generally visual—too early. But at the worst that just desensitizes you; it doesn’t make you dangerous. The tendency to violence in young people almost always comes from rage, not watching movies or TV.

“No, I’m speaking of something else when I say that gaming probably affects Travis fundamentally. It’s a change we’re seeing throughout society now among young people. He could be losing the distinction between the synthetic world and the real world.”

“Synthetic world?”

“It’s a term I got from Edward Castronova’s book on the subject. The synthetic world is the life of online games and alternative reality websites, like Second Life. They’re fantasy worlds you enter through your computer—or PDA or some other digital device. People in our generation usually draw a clear distinction between the synthetic world and the real one. The real world is where you have dinner with your family or play softball or go out on a date after you log out of the synthetic world and turn off the computer. But younger people—and nowadays I mean people in their twenties and even early thirties—don’t see that distinction. More and more, the synth worlds are becoming real to them. In fact, there was a study recently that showed nearly a fifth of the players in one online game felt that the real world was only a place to eat and sleep, that the synthetic world was their true residence.”

This surprised Dance.

Boling smiled at her apparently naive expression. “Oh, an average gamer can easily spend thirty hours a week in the synth world, and it’s not unusual for people to spend twice that. There are hundreds of millions of people who have some involvement in the synth world, and tens of millions who spend much of their day there. And we’re not talking Pac-Man or Pong. The level of realism in the synthetic world is astonishing. You—through an avatar, a character that represents you—inhabit a world that’s as complex as what we’re living in right now. Child psychologists have studied how people create avatars; players actually use parenting skills subconsciously to form their characters. Economists have studied games too. You have to learn skills to support yourself or you’ll starve to death. In most of the games you earn money, payable in game currency. But that currency actually trades against the dollar or pound or euro on eBay—in their gaming category. You can buy and sell virtual items—like magic wands, weapons, or clothing or houses or even avatars themselves—in real-world money. In Japan, not too long ago, some gamers sued hackers who stole virtual items from their synth world homes. They won the case.”

Boling leaned forward, and Dance again noticed the sparkle in his eyes, the enthusiasm in his voice. “One of the best examples of the synth and real worlds coinciding is in a famous online game, World of Warcraft. The designers created a disease as a debuffer—that’s a condition that reduces the health or power of characters. It was called Corrupted Blood. It would weaken powerful characters and kill the ones who weren’t so strong. But something odd happened. Nobody’s quite sure how, but the disease got out of control and spread on its own. It became a virtual black plague. The designers never intended that to happen. It could be stopped only when the infected characters died out or adapted to it. The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta heard about it and had a team study the spread of the virus. They used it as a model for real-world epidemiology.”

Boling sat back. “I could go on and on about the synth world. It’s a fascinating subject, but my point is that whether or not Travis is desensitized to violence, the real question is which world does he inhabit most, the synth or the real? If it’s synth, then he runs his life according to a whole different set of rules. And we don’t know what those are. Revenge against cyberbullies—or anyone who humiliates him—could be perfectly accepted. It could be encouraged. Maybe even required.

“The comparison is to a paranoid schizophrenic who kills someone because he genuinely believes that the victim is a threat to the world. He isn’t doing anything wrong. In fact, to him, killing you is heroic. Travis? Who knows what he’s thinking? Just remember it’s possible that attacking a cyberbully like Tammy Foster meant no more to him than swatting a fly.”

Dance considered this and said to O’Neil, “Do we go talk to him or not?”

Deciding when to initially interview a suspect was always tricky. Travis would probably not yet think he was a suspect. Speaking to him now would catch him off guard and might make him blurt out statements that could be used against him; he might even confess. On the other hand, he could destroy evidence or flee.

Debating.

What finally decided it for her was a simple memory. The look in Tammy Foster’s eyes—the fear of reprisal. And the fear that the perp would attack someone else.

She knew they had to move fast.

“Yep. Let’s go see him.”