"James, no! What are you saying?"
Travis steadied the gun, pointing it at Donald. He pulled back the hammer.
Lily screamed.
And then something in Travis's mind clicked.
James?
The boy from the blog.
Roadside Crosses.
Travis blinked. "James Chilton?" Was this the blogger?
"Travis," the captor said firmly, stepping behind him, pulling another gun from his back pocket. He touched it to Travis's head. "Go ahead and do it. I told you not to say anything, don't ask questions. Just shoot!"
Travis asked Donald, "He's James Chilton?"
"Yes," the man whispered.
What, Travis wondered, was going on here?
Chilton shoved the gun harder into Travis's skull. It hurt. "Do it. Do it, or you'll die. And your family will die."
The boy lowered the gun. He shook his head. "You don't have any friends at my house. You were lying to me. You're doing this alone."
"If you don't do it, I'll kill you and then go to their house and kill them. I swear I will."
Hawken cried, "Jim! Is this . . . for God's sake, what is this?"
Lily cried uncontrollably.
Travis Brigham understood now. Shoot them or not, he was dead. His family would be all right; Chilton had no interest in them. But he was dead. A faint laugh eased from his throat and he felt tears sting eyes already stinging from the sunlight.
He thought of Caitlin, her beautiful eyes and smile.
Thought of his mother.
Thought of Sammy.
And of all the terrible things that people had said about him in the blog.
Yet he'd done nothing wrong. His life was about nothing more than trying to get through school as best he could, to play a game that made him happy, to spend some time with his brother and look after the boy, to meet a girl who wouldn't mind that he was a geek with troubled skin. Travis had never in his life hurt anybody intentionally, never dissed anyone, never posted a bad word about them.
And the whole world had attacked him.
Who'd care if he killed himself?
Nobody.
So Travis did the only thing he could. He lifted the gun to his own chin.
Look at the luser, his life is epic FAIL!!!
Travis's finger slipped around the trigger of the gun. He began to squeeze.
The explosion was fiercely loud. Windows shook, acrid smoke filled the room, and a delicate porcelain cat tumbled from the mantelpiece and shattered on the hearth into dozens of pieces.
Chapter 43
KATHRYN DANCE'S CAR turned onto the long dirt driveway that led to James Chilton's vacation house in Hollister.
She was reflecting on how wrong she'd been.
Greg Schaeffer wasn't the Roadside Cross Killer.
Everyone else had been misled too but Dance took no solace from that. She'd been content to assume that Schaeffer was the guilty party and that he'd killed Travis Brigham. With the man dead, there'd be no more attacks.
Wrong . . .
Her phone rang. She wondered who was calling, but decided it was best not to look at Caller ID as she wove up the serpentine drive, with drop-offs on either side.
Another fifty yards.
She saw the home ahead of her, a rambling old farmhouse that would have looked in place in Kansas if not for the substantial hills surrounding it. The yard was scruffy, filled with untended patches of grass, gray broken branches, overgrown gardens. She would have thought that James Chilton would have a nicer vacation home, considering the inheritance from his father-in-law and his beautiful house in Carmel.
Even in the sun, the place exuded a sense of eeriness.
But that was, of course, because Dance knew what had happened inside.
How could I have read everything so wrong?
The road straightened and she continued on. She fished the phone off the seat and looked at the screen. Jonathan Boling had called. But the message flag wasn't up. She debated hitting "Last Received Call." But instead picked Michael O'Neil's speed-dial button. After four rings it went to voice mail.
Maybe he was on the Other Case.
Or maybe he was talking to his wife, Anne.
Dance tossed the phone onto the passenger seat.
As she pulled close to the house, Dance counted a half dozen police cars. Two ambulances as well.
The San Benito County sheriff, whom she'd worked with regularly, saw her and motioned her forward. Several officers stepped aside, and she drove over the uneven grass to where the sheriff was standing.
She saw where Travis Brigham lay on a gurney, his face covered.
Dance slammed the gearshift into park and climbed out, then walked quickly toward the boy. She noted his bare feet, the welts on his ankle, his pale skin.
"Travis," she whispered.
The boy jerked, as if she'd awakened him from a deep sleep.
He lifted the damp cloth and ice pack off his bruised face. He blinked and focused his eyes on her. "Oh, uh, Officer . . . I, like, can't remember your name."
"Dance."
"Sorry." He sounded genuinely contrite at the social slip.
"Not a problem at all." Kathryn Dance hugged the boy hard.
THE BOY WOULD be fine, the medic explained.
His worst injury from the ordeal--in fact, the only serious one--was from hitting his forehead on the mantel in the living room of Chilton's house when the San Benito County SWAT team stormed the place.
They had been conducting furtive surveillance--as they awaited Dance's arrival--when the commander had seen through the window that the boy had entered the living room with a gun. James Chilton too had pulled a weapon. For some reason, it then appeared that Travis was going to take his own life.
The commander had ordered his officers in. They'd launched flash-bang grenades into the room, which detonated with stunning explosions, knocking Chilton to the floor and the boy into the mantelpiece. The officers raced inside and relieved them of their weapons. They'd cuffed Chilton and dragged him outside, then escorted Donald Hawken and his wife to safety and gotten Travis to the paramedics.
"Where's Chilton?" Dance asked.
"He's over there," the sheriff said, nodding to one of the county deputy's cars, in which the blogger sat, handcuffed, his head down.
She'd get to him later.
Dance glanced at Chilton's Nissan Quest. The doors and tailgate were open and Crime Scene had removed the contents: most notable were the last roadside cross and bouquet of red roses--now tinged with brown. Chilton would have been planning to leave them nearby, after he'd killed the Hawkens. Travis's bike also rested near the tailgate, and in a clear evidence bag was the gray hoodie that Chilton had stolen and worn to impersonate the boy and that he'd picked fibers off to leave at the scenes.
Dance asked the paramedic, "And the Hawkens? How're they?"
"Shaken up, as you can imagine, a bit bruised, hitting the deck when we moved in. But they'll be fine. They're on the porch."
"You doing okay?" Dance asked Travis.
"I guess," he answered.
She realized what a foolish question it was. Of course he wasn't okay. He'd been kidnapped by James Chilton and been ordered to murder Donald Hawken and his wife.
Apparently rather than going through with that task he'd chosen to die.
"Your parents will be here soon," she told him.
"Yeah?" The boy seemed cautious at this news.
"They were real worried about you."
He nodded, but she read skepticism in his face.
"Your mother was crying, she was so happy when I told her."
That was true. Dance had no idea what the father's reaction had been.
A deputy brought the boy a soft drink.
"Thank you." He drank the Coke thirstily. For his days in captivity, he wasn't doing too badly. A medic had looked over the raw chafing on his leg; it wouldn't need treatment other than a bandage and antibiotic cream. The injury was
from the shackles, she realized, and a wave of fury coursed through her. She glared at Chilton, who was being transferred from the San Benito to a Monterey County car, but the blogger's eyes remained downcast.
"What's your sport?" the Coke-toting cop asked the boy, trying to make conversation and put Travis at ease.
"Like, I game, mostly."
"That's what I mean," the young crew-cut officer said, taking the skewed response to be a result of the boy's temporary hearing loss from the flash-bangs. More loudly he asked, "What's your fave? Soccer, football, basketball?"
The boy blinked at the young man in the blue outfit. "Yeah, I play all those some."
"Way to go."
The trooper didn't realize that the sports equipment involved only a Wii or game controller and that the playing field was eighteen inches diagonally.
"But start out slow. Bet your muscles've atrophied. Find a trainer."
"Okay."
A rattling old Nissan, the red finish baked matte, pulled up, rocking along the dirt driveway. It parked and the Brighams climbed out. Sonia, tearful, lumbered over the grass and hugged her son hard.
"Mom."
His father too approached. He stopped beside them, unsmiling, looking the boy up and down. "You're thin, pale, you know what I mean? You hurt in' anywhere?"
"He'll be okay," the paramedic said.
"How's Sammy?" Travis asked.
"He's at Gram's," Sonia said. "He's in a state, but all right."
"You found him, you saved him." The father, still unsmiling, was speaking to Dance.
"We all did, yes."
"He kept you down there, in that basement?" he said to his son.
The boy nodded, not looking at either of them. "Wasn't so bad. Got cold a lot."
His mother said, "Caitlin told everybody what happened."
"She did?"
As if he were unable to control himself the father muttered, "You shouldn't a took the blame for--"
"Shhh," the mother hissed sharply. His brow furrowed but the man fell silent.
"What's going to happen to her?" Travis asked. "Caitlin?"
His mother said, "That's not our concern. We don't need to worry about that now." She looked at Dance. "Can we go home? Is it all right if we just go home?"
"We'll get a statement later. No need right now."
"Thank you," Travis said to Dance.
His father said the same and shook her hand.
"Oh, Travis. Here." Dance handed him a piece of paper.
"What's that?"
"It's somebody who wants you to call him."
"Who?"
"Jason Kepler."
"Who's that? . . . Oh, Stryker?" Travis blinked. "You know him?"
"He went looking for you, when you were missing. He helped us find you."
"He did?"
"He sure did. He said you'd never met him."
"Like, not in person, no."
"You only live five miles from each other."
"Yeah?" He gave a surprised smile.
"He wants to get together with you sometime."
He nodded with a curious expression on his face, as if the idea of meeting a synth world friend in the real was very strange indeed.
"Come on home, baby," his mother said. "I'll make a special dinner. Your brother can't wait to see you."
Sonia and Bob Brigham and their son walked back to the car. The father's arm rose and slipped around his son's shoulders. Briefly. Then it fell away. Kathryn Dance noted the tentative contact. She believed not in divine salvation but in the proposition that we poor mortals are fully capable of saving ourselves, if conditions and inclinations are right, and the evidence of this potential is found in the smallest of gestures, like the uncertain resting of a large hand on a bony shoulder.
Gestures, more honest than words.
"Travis?" she called.
He turned.
"Maybe I'll see you sometime . . . in Aetheria."
He held his arm over his chest, palm outward, which she supposed was a salute among the inhabitants of his guild. Kathryn Dance resisted the temptation to reciprocate.
Chapter 44
DANCE 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?"