But, professionally, she thought, I was totally pissed you tried to flank me.
“There was a lot of pressure from Sacramento. I mean, a lot. I got carried away in the heat of the moment.” He looked away, partly embarrassed. And partly deceptive too; he didn’t feel that bad, Dance noticed. But she gave him credit for trying to make nice. He continued, “Not often that you’re in a situation like this, is it? Where you have to protect somebody as unpopular as Chilton.” He didn’t seem to expect an answer. He gave a hollow laugh. “You know something? In a funny way I’ve come to admire him.”
“Chilton?”
A nod. “I don’t agree with much of what he says. But he’s got moral character. And not a lot of people do nowadays. Even in the face of a murder threat, he stayed the course. And he’ll probably keep right on going. Don’t you think?”
“I assume so.” She said nothing about the possible termination of The Chilton Report.
That wasn’t her business, or Royce’s.
“You know what I’d like to do? Apologize to him too.”
“Would you?”
“I tried his house. Nobody was answering. Do you know where he is?”
“He and his family’re going to their vacation home in Hollister tomorrow. Tonight, they’re staying at a hotel. I don’t know where. Their house is a crime scene.”
“Well, I suppose I could email him at his blog.”
She was wondering if this would ever happen.
Then, silence. Time for my exit, Dance thought. She snagged the last cookie, wrapped it in a napkin and headed for the lunchroom door. “Have a safe drive, Mr. Royce.”
“Again, I’m truly sorry, Agent Dance. I look forward to working with you in the future.”
Her kinesic skills easily fired off a message that his comment had contained two lies.
Chapter 38
JONATHAN BOLING, LOOKING pleased, was walking up to Dance in the lobby of the CBI. She handed him a temporary pass.
“Thanks for coming in.”
“I was beginning to miss the place. I thought I’d been fired.”
She smiled. When she’d called him in Santa Cruz she’d interrupted a paper-grading session for one of his summer school courses (she’d wondered if she would catch him prepping for a date) and Boling had been delighted to abandon the job and drive back to Monterey.
In her office, she handed him his last assignment: Greg Schaeffer’s laptop. “I’m really desperate to find Travis, or his body. Can you go through it, look for any references to local locations, driving directions, maps… anything like that?”
“Sure.” He indicated the Toshiba. “Passworded?”
“Not this time.”
“Good.”
He opened the lid and began to type. “I’ll search for everything with a file access or creation date in the past two weeks. Does that sound good?”
“Sure.”
Dance tried not to smile once more, watching him lean forward enthusiastically. His fingers played over the keys like a concert pianist’s. After a few moments he sat back. “Well, it doesn’t look like he used it for much of his mission here, other than to research for blogs and RSS feeds, and emails to friends and business associates — and none of them have anything to do with his plot to kill Chilton. But those are just the undeleted records. He’s been deleting files and websites regularly for the past week. Those, I’d guess, might be more what you’re interested in.”
“Yep. Can you reconstruct them?”
“I’ll go online and download one of Irv’s bots. That’ll roam the free space on his C: drive and put back together anything he’s deleted recently. Some of it will be only partial and some will be distorted. But most of the files should be ninety percent readable.”
“That’d be great, Jon.”
Five minutes later Irv’s bot was silently roaming through Schaeffer’s computer, looking for fragments of deleted files, reassembling them and storing them in a new folder that Boling had created.
“How long?” she asked.
“A couple of hours, I’d guess.” Boling looked at his watch and suggested they get a bite of dinner. They climbed into his Audi and headed to a restaurant not far from CBI headquarters, on a rise overlooking the airport and, beyond that, the city of Monterey and the bay. They got a table on the deck, warmed with overhead propane heaters, and sipped a Viognier white wine. The sun was now melting into the Pacific, spreading out and growing violently orange. They watched it in silence as tourists nearby snapped pictures that would have to be Photoshopped to even approximate the grandeur of the real event.
They talked about her children, about their own childhoods. Where they were from originally. Boling commented that he believed only twenty percent of the Central Coast population comprised native Californians.
Silence flowed between them again. Dance sensed his shoulders rising and was expecting what came next.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.” She meant it, no reservations.
“When did your husband die?”
“About two years ago.”
Two years, two months, three weeks. She could give him the days and hours too.
“I’ve never lost anybody. Not like that.” Though there was a wistfulness in his voice, and his eyelids flickered like venetian blinds troubled by the wind. “What happened, you mind if I ask?”
“Not at all. Bill was an FBI agent, assigned to the local resident agency. But it wasn’t work-related. An accident on Highway One. A truck. The driver fell asleep.” A wisp of a laugh. “You know, I never thought about it until just now. But his fellow agents and friends put flowers by the roadside for about a year after it happened.”
“A cross?”
“No, just flowers.” She shook her head. “God, I hated that. The reminder. I’d drive miles out of my way to avoid the place.”