"That's right."
"Have you found Travis?"
"No, I--"
"Is he nearby?" the woman asked breathlessly, looking around.
"No, he's not. I'd just like to ask your daughter a few more questions."
The woman invited Dance into the entryway of the huge contemporary house in Carmel. Dance recalled that Caitlin was headed for some nice undergrad and medical schools. Whatever Dad or Mom did, it seemed they could afford the tuition.
Dance surveyed the massive living room. There were stark abstracts on the walls--two huge, spiky black-and-yellow paintings and one with bloody red splotches. She found them troubling to look at. She thought how different this was from the cozy feel of Travis's and Jason's house in the DimensionQuest game.
Yeah, well, we make cool homes in Aetheria 'cause where we live, I mean, in the real world, our places aren't so nice, you know. . . .
The girl's mother disappeared and a moment later returned with Caitlin, in jeans and a lime green shell under a tight-fitting white sweater.
"Hi," the teenager said uneasily.
"Hello, Caitlin. How you feeling?"
"Okay."
"Hoping you'll have a minute or two. I have a few follow-up questions."
"Sure, I guess."
"Can we sit down somewhere?"
"We can go in the sunroom," Mrs. Gardner said.
They passed an office and Dance saw a University of California diploma on the wall. Medical school. Caitlin's father.
The mother and daughter on the couch, Dance in a straight-backed chair. She scooted it closer and said, "I wanted to give you an update. There was another killing today. Have you heard?"
"Oh, no," Caitlin's mother whispered.
The girl said nothing. She closed her eyes. Her face, framed by limp blond hair, seemed to grow paler.
"Really," the mother whispered angrily, "I'll never see how you could go out with somebody like that."
"Mom," Caitlin whined, "what do you mean, 'go out'? Christ, I never went out with Travis. I never would. Somebody like him?"
"I just mean he's obviously dangerous."
"Caitlin," Dance interrupted. "We're really desperate to find him. We're just not having any luck. I'm learning more about him from friends, but--"
Her mother again: "Those Columbine kids."
"Please, Mrs. Gardner."
An affronted look, but she fell silent.
"I told you everything I could think of the other day."
"Just a few more questions. I won't be long." She scooted the chair closer yet and pulled out a notebook. She opened it and flipped through the pages carefully, pausing once or twice.
Caitlin was immobile as she stared at the notebook.
Dance smiled, looking into the girl's eyes. "Now, Caitlin, think back to the night of the party."
"Uh-huh."
"Something interesting's come up. I interviewed Travis before he ran off. I took some notes." A nod at the notebook resting on her lap.
"You did? You talked to him?"
"That's right. I didn't pay much attention until I'd spoken to you and some other people. But now I'm hoping to piece together some clues as to where he's hiding."
"How hard could it be to find--" Caitlin's mother began, as if she couldn't stop herself. But she fell silent under Dance's stern glance.
The agent continued, "Now, you and Travis talked some, right? That night."
"Not really."
Dance was frowning slightly and flipping through her notes.
The girl added, "Well, except when it was time to leave. I meant during the party he was hanging by himself mostly."
Dance said, "On the ride home you did, though." Tapping the notebook.
"Yeah, talked some. I don't remember too much. It was all a blur, with the crash and all."
"I'm sure it was. But I'm going to read you a couple of statements and I'd like you to fill in the details. Tell me if anything jogs your memory about what Travis said on the drive home, before the accident."
"I guess."
Dance consulted her notebook. "Okay, here's the first one: 'The house was pretty sweet but the driveway freaked me out.' " She looked up. "I was thinking maybe that meant Travis had a fear of heights."
"Yeah, that's what he was talking about. The driveway was on this hillside, and we were talking about it. Travis said he'd always had this fear of falling. He looked at the driveway and he said why didn't they have a guardrail on it."
"Good. That's helpful." Another smile. Caitlin reciprocated. Dance returned to the notes. "And this one? 'I think boats rule. I've always wanted one.' "
"Oh, that? Yeah. We were talking about Fisherman's Wharf. Travis really thought it'd be cool to sail to Santa Cruz." She looked away. "I think he wanted to ask me to go with him, but he was too shy."
Dance smiled. "So he might be hiding out on a boat somewhere."
"Yeah, that could be it. I think he said something about how neat it would be to stow away on a boat."
"Good. . . . Here's another one. 'She has more friends than me. I only have one or two I could hang out with.' "
"Yeah, I remember him saying that. I felt sorry for him, that he didn't have many friends. He talked about it for a while."
"Did he mention names? Anybody he might be staying with? Think. It's important."
The teenager squinted and her hand rubbed her knee. Then sighed. "Nope."
"That's okay, Caitlin."
"I'm sorry." A faint pout.
Dance kept the smile on her face. She was steeling herself for what was coming next. It would be difficult--for the girl, for her mother, for Dance herself. But there was no choice.
She leaned forward. "Caitlin, you're not being honest with me."
The girl blinked. "What?"
Virginia Gardner muttered, "You can't say that to my daughter."
"Travis didn't tell me any of those things," Dance said, her voice neutral. "I made them up."
"You lied!" the mother snapped.
No, she hadn't, not technically. She'd crafted her words carefully and never said they were actual statements from Travis Brigham.
The girl had gone pale.
The mother grumbled, "What is this, some kind of trap?"
Yes, that was exactly what it was. Dance had a theory and she needed to prove it true or false. Lives were at stake.
Dance ignored the mother and said to Caitlin, "But you were playing along as if Travis had said all of those things to you in the car."
"I . . . I was just trying to be helpful. I felt bad I didn't know more."
"No, Caitlin. You thought you might very well have talked with him about them in the car. But you couldn't remember because you were intoxicated."
"No!"
"I'm going to ask you to leave now," the girl's mother blurted.
"I'm not through," Dance growled, shutting up Virginia Gardner.
The agent assessed: with her science background--and her survival skills in this household--Caitlin had a thinking and sensing personality type, according to the Myers-Briggs index. She struck Dance as probably more introverted than extraverted. And, though her liar's personality would fluctuate, she was at the moment an adaptor.
Lying for self-preservation.
If Dance had had more time she might have drawn the truth out slowly and in more depth. But with the Myers-Briggs typing and Caitlin's personality of adaptor, Dance assessed she could push and not have to coddle, the way she had with Tammy Foster.
"You were drinking at the party."
"I--"
"Caitlin, people saw you."
"I had a few drinks, sure."
"Before coming here I talked to several students who were there. They said that you, Vanessa and Trish drank almost a fifth of tequila after you saw Mike with Brianna."
"Well . . . okay, so what?"
"You're seventeen," her mother raged, "that's what!"
Dance said evenly, "I've called an accident reconstruction service, Caitlin. The
y're going to look over your car at the police impound lot. They measure things like seat and rearview mirror adjustment. They can tell the height of the driver."
The girl was completely still, though her jaw trembled.
"Caitlin, it's time to tell the truth. A lot depends on it. Other people's lives are at stake."
"What truth?" her mother whispered.
Dance kept her eyes on the girl. "Caitlin was driving the car that night. Not Travis."
"No!" Virginia Gardner wailed.
"Weren't you, Caitlin?"
The teenager said nothing for a minute. Then her head dropped, her chest collapsed. Dance read pain and defeat through her body. Her kinesic message was: Yes.
Her voice breaking, Caitlin said, "Mike left with that little slut hanging on him and her hand down the back of his jeans! I knew they went back to his place to fuck. I was going to drive there . . . I was going to . . ."
"All right," her mother ordered, "that's enough."
"Be quiet!" the girl yelled to her mother and started to sob. She turned to Dance. "Yes, I was driving!" The guilt had finally detonated within her.
Dance continued, "After the accident Travis pulled you into the passenger seat and he got in the driver's. He pretended he was driving. He did that to save you."
She thought back to the initial interview with Travis.
I didn't do anything wrong!
The boy's assertion had registered as deceptive to Dance. But she believed that he meant he was lying about the attack on Tammy; in fact what he'd done wrong was to lie about who was driving the car that night.
The idea had occurred to Dance when she was looking over the house of Travis--Medicus--and his family in Aetheria. The fact that the boy spent virtually every moment he could in the DimensionQuest game as a doctor and healer, not a killer like Stryker, made her begin to doubt the boy's tendency toward violence. And when she'd learned that his avatar had been willing to sacrifice his life for the Elvish queen, she realized that it was possible Travis had done the same in the real world--taking the blame for the car crash so that the girl he admired from afar wouldn't go to jail.
Caitlin, tears flowing from her closed eyes, pressed back into the couch, her body a knot of tension. "I just lost it. We got drunk and I wanted to go find Mike and tell him what a shit he was. Trish and Vanessa were more wasted than me so I was going to drive, but Travis followed me outside and kept trying to stop me. He tried to take the keys. But I wouldn't let him. I was so mad. Trish and Vanessa were in the backseat and Travis just jumped in the passenger seat and he was like, 'Pull over, Caitlin, come on, you can't drive.' But I was acting like an asshole.
"I just kept going, ignoring him. And then, I don't know what happened, we went off the road." Her voice faded and her expression was one of the most sorrowful and forlorn Kathryn Dance had ever seen, as she whispered, "And I killed my friends."
Caitlin's mother, her face white and bewildered, eased forward tentatively. She put her arm around her daughter's shoulders. The girl stiffened momentarily and then surrendered, sobbing and pressing her head against her mother's chest.
After a few minutes, the woman, crying herself, looked at Dance. "What's going to happen?"
"You and your husband should find a lawyer for Caitlin. Then call the police right away. She should surrender voluntarily. The sooner the better."
Caitlin wiped her face. "It's hurt so bad, lying. I was going to say something. I really, really was. But then people started to attack Travis--all those things they said--and I knew if I told the truth they'd attack me." She lowered her head. "I couldn't do it. All those things people'd say about me . . . they'd be up on their site forever."
More worried about her image than the deaths of her friends.
But Dance wasn't here to expiate the teenager's guilt. All she'd needed was confirmation of her theory that Travis had taken the fall for Caitlin. She rose and left the mother and daughter, offering the briefest of farewells.
Outside, jogging toward her car, she hit speed-dial button three--Michael O'Neil.
He answered on the second ring. Thank God the Other Case wasn't keeping him completely incommunicado.
"Hey." He sounded tired.
"Michael."
"What's wrong?" He'd grown alert; apparently her tone told stories too.
"I know you're swamped, but any chance I could come by? I need to brainstorm. I've found something."
"Sure. What?"
"Travis Brigham isn't the Roadside Cross Killer."
DANCE AND O'NEIL were in his office in the Monterey County Sheriff's Office in Salinas.
The windows looked out on the courthouse, in front of which were two dozen of the Life First protesters, along with the wattle-necked Reverend Fisk. Apparently bored with protesting in front of Stuart and Edie Dance's empty house, they'd moved to where they stood a chance of getting some publicity. Fisk was talking to the associate she'd seen earlier: the brawny redheaded bodyguard.
Dance turned away from the window and joined O'Neil at his unsteady conference table. The place was filled with ordered stacks of files. She wondered which were related to the Indonesian container case. O'Neil rocked back on two legs of a wooden chair. "So, let's hear it."
She explained quickly about how the investigation had led to Jason and then into the DimensionQuest game and ultimately to Caitlin Gardner and the confession that Travis had taken the fall for her.
"Infatuation?" he asked.
But Dance said, "Sure, that's part of it. But there's something else going on. She wants to go to medical school. That's important to Travis."
"Medical school?"
"Medicine, healing. In that game he plays, DimensionQuest, Travis is a famous healer. I'm thinking one of the reasons he protected her was because of that. His avatar is Medicus. A doctor. He feels a connection to her."
"That's a little farfetched, don't you think? After all, it's just a game."
"No, Michael, it's more than a game. The real world and the synth world are getting closer and closer, and people like Travis are living in both. If he's a respected healer in DimensionQuest he's not going to be a vindictive killer in the real world."
"So he takes the fall for Caitlin's crash, and whatever people say about him in the blog, the last thing in the world he wants is to draw attention to himself by attacking anybody."
"Exactly."
"But Kelley . . . before she passed out she told the medic that it was Travis who attacked her."
Dance shook her head. "I'm not sure she actually saw him. She assumed it was him, maybe because she knew she'd posted about him and the mask at her window was from the DimensionQuest game. And the rumors were he was behind the attacks. But I think the real killer was wearing a mask or got her from behind."
"How do you deal with the physical evidence? Planted?"
"Right. It'd be easy to read up online about Travis, to follow him, learn about his job at the bagel place, his bicycle, the fact that he plays DQ all the time. The killer could have made one of those masks, stolen the gun from Bob Brigham's truck, planted the trace evidence at the bagel shop and stolen the knife when the employees weren't looking. Oh, and something else: the M&M's? The flecks of wrapper at the crime scene?"
"Right."
"Had to be planted. Travis wouldn't eat chocolate. He bought packets for his brother. He was worried about his acne. He had books in his room about what foods to avoid. The real killer didn't know that. He must've seen Travis buy M&M's at some point and assumed they were a favorite candy, so he left some trace of the wrapper at the scene."
"And the sweatshirt fibers?"
"There was a posting in The Report about the Brigham family being so poor that they couldn't afford a washer and dryer. And it mentioned which laundromat they went to. I'm sure the real perp read that and staked the place out."
O'Neil nodded. "And stole a hooded sweatshirt when the mother was out or wasn't looking."
"Yep. And there were some pictures posted
in the blog under Travis's name." O'Neil hadn't seen the drawings and she described them briefly, omitting the fact that the last one bore a resemblance to her. Dance continued, "They were crude, what an adult would think of a teenager's drawing. But I saw some pictures that Travis had done--of surgery. He's a great artist. Somebody else drew them."
"It would explain why nobody's been able to find the real killer, despite the manhunt. He pulls on a hoodie for the attack, then throws it and the bicycle in his trunk and drives off down the street like anybody else. Hell, he could be fifty years old. Or he could be a she, now that I think about it."
"Exactly."
The deputy fell silent for a moment. His thoughts had apparently arrived at the exact spot where Dance's awaited. "He's dead, isn't he?" the deputy asked. "Travis?"
Dance sighed at this harsh corollary of her theory. "It's possible. But I'm hoping not. I like to think he's just being held somewhere."
"The poor kid was in the wrong place at the wrong time." Rocking back and forth. "So, to find where the real perp is, we've got to figure out who's the intended victim. It's not somebody who posted an attack on Travis; they were just set up to mislead us."
"My theory?" Dance offered.
O'Neil looked at her with a coy smile. "Whoever the perp is, he's really after Chilton?"
"Yep. The perp was setting the stage, first going after people who'd criticized Travis, then those friendly with Chilton and finally the blogger himself."
"Somebody who doesn't want to be investigated."
Dance replied, "Or who wants revenge for something he'd posted in the past."
"Okay, all we need to find out is who wants to kill James Chilton," Michael O'Neil said.
Dance gave a sour laugh. "The easier question is: Who doesn't?"
Chapter 33
"JAMES?"
There was a pause on the other end of the line. The blogger said, "Agent Dance." His voice sounded weary. "More bad news?"
"I've found some evidence that suggests Travis isn't leaving the crosses."
"What?"
"I'm not positive, but the way things are looking, the boy could be a scapegoat and somebody's making it look like he's the killer."
Chilton whispered, "And he was innocent all along?"
"I'm afraid so." Dance explained what she'd learned--about who was really behind the wheel of the car on June 9--and about the likelihood of the evidence being planted.
"And I think you're the ultimate target," she added.
"Me?"
"You've posted some pretty inflammatory stories throughout your career. And you're writing now about controversial topics. I think some people'd be happy to see you stop. You've been threatened before, I assume."