ANCE 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 Overby’s office. On the phone, as he often was, her boss gestured Dance and Boling in, with a glance of curiosity at the professor.

The agent-in-charge hung up. “They made the connection, the press did. He’s now the ‘Roadside Cross Killer.’”

BrittanyM…

Dance said, “Charles, this is Professor Jonathan Boling. He’s been helping us.”

A hearty handshake. “Have you now? What area?”

“Computers.”

“That’s your profession? Consultant?” Overby let this hang like a balsa-wood glider over the trio for a moment. Dance spotted her cue and was about to say that Boling was volunteering his time when the professor said, “I teach mostly, but, yes, I do some consulting, Agent Overby. It’s really how I make most of my money. You know, academia pays next to nothing. But as a consultant I can charge up to three hundred an hour.”

“Ah.” Overby looked stricken. “Per hour. Really?”

Boling held a straight face for exactly the right length of time before adding, “But I get a real kick out of volunteering for free to help organizations like yours. So I’m tearing up my bill in your case.”

Dance nearly had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing. Boling, she decided, could have been a good psychologist; he’d deduced Overby’s prissy frugality in ten seconds flat, defused it—and slipped in a joke. For her benefit, Dance noted—since she was the only member of the audience.

“It’s getting hysterical, Kathryn. We’ve had a dozen reports of killers wandering around in backyards. A couple of people’ve already taken some shots at intruders, thinking it’s him. Oh, and there’ve been a couple more reports of crosses.”

Dance was alarmed. “More?”

Overby held up a hand. “They were all real memorials, apparently. Accidents that had happened in the past few weeks. None with prospective dates on them. But the press is all over it. Even Sacramento’s heard.” He nodded at the phone, presumably indicating a call from their boss—the director of the CBI. Possibly even his boss, the attorney general.

“So where are we?”

Dance brought him up to date on Travis, the incidents at his parents’ house, her take on the boy. “Definitely a person of interest.”

“But you didn’t bring him in?” Overby asked.

“No probable cause. Michael’s checking out some physical evidence right now to link him to the scene.”

“And no other suspects?”

“No.”

“How the hell is a kid doing this, a kid riding around on a bicycle?”

Dance pointed out that local gangs, centered primarily in and around Salinas, had terrorized people for years, and many of them had members much younger than Travis.

Boling added, “And one thing we’ve found out about him. He’s very active in computer games. Young people who are good at them learn very sophisticated combat and evasion techniques. One of the things military recruiters always ask is how much the applicants game; everything else being equal they’d take a gamer over another kid any day.”

Overby asked, “Motive?”

Dance then explained to her boss that if Travis was the killer, his motive was probably revenge based on cyberbullying.

“Cyberbullying,” Overby said, gravely. “I was just reading up on that.”

“You were?” Dance asked.

“Yep. There was a good article in USA Today last weekend.”

“It’s become a popular topic,” Boling said. Did Dance detect slight dismay about the sources that informed the head of a regional office of the CBI?

“That’s enough to turn him to violence?” Overby asked.

Boling continued, nodding, “He’s being pushed over the edge. The postings and the rumors have spread. And it’s become physical bullying too. Somebody’s put up a YouTube video about him. They got him in a happy slap vid.”

“A what?”

“It’s a cyberbullying technique. Somebody came up to Travis at Burger King and pushed him. He stumbled—it was embarrassing—and one of the other kids was waiting to record it on a cell phone. Then they uploaded it. It’s been viewed two hundred thousand times so far.”

It was then that a slightly built, unsmiling man stepped out of the conference room across the hall and into the doorway of Overby’s office. He noted the visitors and ignored them.

“Charles,” he said in a baritone.

“Oh…Kathryn, this is Robert Harper,” Overby said. “From the AG’s office in San Francisco. Special Agent Dance.”

The man walked into the room and shook her hand firmly, but kept a distance, as if she’d think he was coming on to her.

“And Jon…” Overby tried to recall.

“Boling.”

Harper gave the professor a distracted glance. Said nothing to him.

The man from San Francisco had an unrevealing face and perfectly trimmed black hair. He wore a conservative navy blue suit and white shirt, a red-and-blue striped tie. On his lapel was an American flag pin. His cuffs were perfectly starched, though she noticed a few stray gray threads at the ends. A professional state’s attorney, long after his colleagues had gone into private practice and were making buckets of money. She put him in his early fifties.

“What brings you to Monterey?” she asked.

“Caseload evaluations.” Offering nothing more.

Robert Harper seemed to be one of those people who, if he had nothing to say, was comfortable with silence. Dance believed too she recognized in his face an intensity, a sense of devotion to his mission, akin to what she’d seen in the Reverend Fisk’s face at the hospital protest. Though how much of a mission caseload analysis would entail was a mystery to her.

He turned his attention to her briefly. She was used to being looked over, but usually by suspects; Harper’s perusal was unsettling. It was as if she held the key to an important mystery for him.

Then he said to Overby, “I’m going to be outside for a few minutes, Charles. If you could keep the door to the conference room locked, I’d appreciate it.”

“Sure. Anything else you need, just let me know.”

A chilly nod. Then Harper was gone, fishing a phone from his pocket.

“What’s the story with him?” Dance asked.

“Special prosecutor from Sacramento. Had a call from upstairs—”

The attorney general.

“—to cooperate. He wants to know about our caseload. Maybe something big’s going down and he needs to see how busy we are. He spent some time at the sheriff’s office too. Wish he’d go back and bug them. Fellow’s a cold fish. Don’t know what to say to him. Tried some jokes. They fell flat.”

But Dance was thinking about the Tammy Foster case; Robert Harper was gone from her mind.

She and Boling returned to her office and she’d just sat down at her desk when O’Neil called. She was pleased. She guessed he’d have the results of the analysis of the bike tread dirt and the gray fiber from the sweatshirt.

“Kathryn, we have a problem.” His voice was troubled.

“Go on.”

“Well, first, Peter says the gray fiber they found in the cross? It matches what we found at Travis’s.”

“So he is the one. What’d the magistrate say about the warrant?”

“Didn’t get that far. Travis’s on the run.”

“What?”

“He didn’t show up for work. Or, he did show up—there were fresh bike tread marks behind the place. He snuck into the back room, stole some bagels and some cash from the purse of one of the workers…and a butcher’s knife. Then he disappeared. I called his parents, but they haven’t heard from him and claim they don’t have any idea where he might go.”

“Where are you?”

“In my office. I’m going to put out a detain alert on him. Us, Salinas, San Benito, surrounding counties.”

Dance rocked back, furious with herself. Why hadn’t she planned better and had somebody follow the boy when he left his house? She’d managed to establish his guilt—and simultaneously let him slip through her fingers.

And, hell, now she’d have to tell Overby what had happened.

But you didn’t bring him in?

“There’s something else. When I was at the bagel place, I looked up the alley. There’s that deli near Safeway.”

“Sure, I know it.”

“They have a flower stand on the side of the building.”

“Roses!” she said.

“Exactly. I talked to the owner.” O’Neil’s voice went flat. “Yesterday, somebody snuck up to the place and stole all the bouquets of red roses.”

She understood now why he was sounding so grave. “All?…How many did he take?”

A slight pause. “A dozen. It looks like he’s just getting started.”