Edie Dance headed off once more, glancing outside. Her visage was angry and troubled. It seemed to say: You’ve got no business being here, disrupting our work.
Dance left the hospital with a glance toward Reverend R. Samuel Fisk and his bodyguard or whoever the big man was. They’d joined several other protesters, clasped hands and lowered their heads in prayer.
“ TAMMY’S COMPUTER ,” DANCE said to Michael O’Neil.
He lifted an eyebrow.
“It’s got the answer. Well, maybe not the answer. But an answer. To who attacked her.”
They were sipping coffee as they sat outside at Whole Foods in Del Monte Center, an outdoor plaza anchored by Macy’s. She once calculated that she’d bought at least fifty pairs of shoes here — footwear, her tranquilizer. In fairness, though, that otherwise embarrassing number of purchases had taken place over a few years. Often, but not always, on sale.
“Online stalker?” O’Neil asked. The food they ate wasn’t poached eggs with delicate hollandaise sauce and parsley garnish, but a shared raisin bagel with low-fat cream cheese in a little foil envelope.
“Maybe. Or a former boyfriend who threatened her, or somebody she met on a social networking site. But I’m sure she knows his identity, if not him personally. I’m leaning toward somebody from her school. Stevenson.”
“She wouldn’t say, though?”
“Nope, claimed it was a Latino gangbanger.”
O’Neil laughed. A lot of fake insurance claims started with, “A Hispanic in a mask broke into my jewelry store.” Or “Two African-Americans wearing masks pulled guns and stole my Rolex.”
“No description, but I think he was wearing a sweatshirt, a hoodie. She gave a different negation response when I mentioned that.”
“Her computer,” O’Neil mused, hefting his heavy briefcase onto the table and opening it. He consulted a printout. “The good news: We’ve got it in evidence. A laptop. It was in the backseat of her car.”
“And the bad news is it went for a swim in the Pacific Ocean?”
“‘Significant seawater damage,’” he quoted.
Dance was discouraged. “We’ll have to send it to Sacramento or the FBI up in San Jose. It’ll take weeks to get back.”
They watched a hummingbird brave the crowds to hover for breakfast at a red hanging plant. O’Neil said, “Here’s a thought. I was talking to a friend of mine in the Bureau up there. He’d just been to a presentation on computer crime. One of the speakers was local — a professor in Santa Cruz.”
“UC?”
“Right.”
One of Dance’s alma maters.
“He said the guy was pretty sharp. And he volunteered to help if they ever needed him.”
“What’s his background?”
“All I know is he got out of Silicon Valley and started to teach.”
“At least there’re no bursting bubbles in education.”
“You want me to see if I can get his name?”
“Sure.”
O’Neil lifted a stack of business cards from his attaché case, which was as neatly organized as his boat. He found one and made a call. In three minutes he’d tracked down his friend and had a brief conversation. The attack had already attracted the FBI’s attention, Dance deduced. O’Neil jotted down a name and thanked the agent. Hanging up, he handed the slip to Dance. Dr. Jonathan Boling. Below it was a number.
“What can it hurt?… Who’s got the laptop itself?”
“In our evidence locker. I’ll call and tell them to release it.”
Dance unholstered her cell phone and called Boling, got his voice mail and left a message.
She continued to tell O’Neil about Tammy, mentioning that much of the girl’s emotional response was from her fear that the attacker would strike again — and maybe target others.
“Just what we were worried about,” O’Neil said, running a thick hand through his salt-and-pepper hair.
“She also was giving off signals of guilt,” Dance said.
“Because she might’ve been partly responsible for what happened?”
“That’s what I’m thinking. In any case, I really want to get inside that computer.” A glance at her watch. Unreasonably, she was irritated that this Jonathan Boling hadn’t returned her call of three minutes before.
She asked O’Neil, “Any more leads on the evidence?”
“Nope.” He told her what Peter Bennington had reported about the crime scene: that the wood in the cross was from oak trees, of which there were about a million or two on the Peninsula. The green florist wire binding the two branches was common and untraceable. The cardboard was cut from the back of a pad of cheap notebook paper sold in thousands of stores. The ink couldn’t be sourced either. The roses couldn’t be traced to a particular store or other location.
Dance told him the theory of the bicycle. O’Neil was one step ahead, though. He added that they’d reexamined the lot where the girl had been kidnapped and the beach where the car was left, and found more bicycle tread marks, none identifiable, but they were fresh, suggesting that this was the perp’s likely means of transport. But the tread marks weren’t distinctive enough to trace.
Dance’s phone rang — the Warner Brothers’ Looney Tunes theme, which her children had programmed in as a practical joke. O’Neil smiled.
Dance glanced at the Caller ID screen. It read J. Boling. She lifted an eyebrow, thinking — again unreasonably — it was about time.
Chapter 7
THE NOISE OUTSIDE, a snap from behind the house, brought back an old fear.
That she was being watched.
Not like at the mall or the beach. She wasn’t afraid of leering kids or perverts. (That was irritating or flattering — depending, naturally, on the kid or the perv.) No, what terrified Kelley Morgan was some thing staring at her from outside the window of her bedroom.
Snap…
A second sound. Sitting at the desk in her room, Kelley felt a shivering so sudden and intense that her skin stung. Her fingers were frozen, pausing above the computer keyboard. Look, she told herself. Then: No, don’t.