The boy hesitated, as if wondering if she was trying to trap him. “She said I was taking pictures. You know, of the girls.” His face grew dark. “But I was just on the phone, you know, talking.”
“Really,” his mother interjected. “Bob’ll be home any minute now. I might rather wait.”
But Dance felt a certain urgency to keep going. She knew without doubt that if Sonia wanted to wait for her husband, the man would put a fast end to the interview.
Travis asked, “Is she going to be okay? Tammy?”
“Looks like it.”
He glanced at the scarred coffee table, where an empty but smudged ashtray rested. Dance didn’t think she’d seen an ashtray in a living room for years. “You think I did it? Tried to hurt her?” How easily his dark eyes, set deep beneath those brows, held hers.
“No. We’re just talking to everybody who might have information about the situation.”
“Situation?” he asked.
“Where were you last night? Between eleven and one?”
Another sweep of the hair. “I went to the Game Shed about ten-thirty.”
“What’s that?”
“This place where you can play video games. Like an arcade. I kind of hang there some. You know where it is? It’s by Kinko’s. It used to be that old movie theater but that got torn down and they put it in. It’s not the best, the connections aren’t so good, but it’s the only one that’s open late.”
Dance noted the rambling. She asked, “You were alone?”
“There were, like, other kids there. But I was playing alone.”
“I thought you were here,” Sonia said.
A shrug. “I was here. I went out. I couldn’t sleep.”
“At the Game Shed were you online?” Dance asked.
“Like, no. I was playing pinball, not RPG.”
“Not what?”
“Role-playing games. For shooter and pinball and driving games you don’t go online.”
He said this patiently, though he seemed surprised she didn’t know the distinction.
“So you weren’t logged on?”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“How long were you there?” His mother had taken on the interrogation.
“I don’t know, an hour, two.”
“What do those games cost? Fifty cents, a dollar every few minutes?”
So that was Sonia’s agenda. Money.
“If you play good, it lets you keep on going. Cost me three dollars for the whole night. I used money I made. And I got some food too and a couple of Red Bulls.”
“Travis, can you think of anybody who saw you there?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I’ll have to think about it.” Eyes studying the floor.
“Good. And what time did you come home?”
“One-thirty. Maybe two. I don’t know.”
She asked more questions about Monday night and then about school and his classmates. She wasn’t able to decide whether or not he was telling the truth since he wasn’t deviating much from his baseline. She thought again about what Jon Boling had told her about the synth world. If Travis was mentally there, not in the real world, baseline analysis might be useless. Maybe a whole different set of rules applied to people like Travis Brigham.
Then the mother’s eyes flickered toward the doorway. The boy’s too.
Dance and O’Neil turned to see a large man enter, tall and broad. He was wearing workmen’s overalls streaked in dirt, Central Coast Landscaping embroidered on his chest. He looked at everybody in the room, slowly. Dark eyes still and unfriendly beneath a fringe of thick, brown hair.
“Bob, these are police—”
“They’re not here with the report for the insurance, are they?”
“No. They—”
“You have a warrant?”
“They’re here to—”
“I’m talking to her.” A nod at Dance.
“I’m Agent Dance with the California Bureau of Investigation.” She offered an ID he didn’t look at. “And this is Senior Deputy O’Neil, Monterey County Sheriff’s Office. We’re asking your son a few questions about a crime.”
“There was no crime. It was an accident. Those girls died in an accident. That’s all that happened.”
“We’re here about something else. Someone who’d posted a message about Travis was attacked.”
“Oh, that blog bullshit.” He growled. “That Chilton is a danger to society. He’s like a fucking poisonous snake.” He turned to his wife. “Joey, down at the dock, nearly got hisself popped in the mouth, the stuff he was saying about me. Egging on the other boys. Just ’cause I’m his father. They don’t read the newspaper, they don’t read Newsweek. But they read that Chilton crap. Somebody should…” His voice faded. He turned toward his son. “I told you not to say anything to anybody without we have a lawyer. Did I tell you that? You say the wrong fucking thing to the wrong person, and we get sued. And they take the house away and half my paycheck for the rest of my life.” He lowered his voice. “And your brother goes into a home.”
“Mr. Brigham, we’re not here about the accident,” O’Neil reminded him. “We’re investigating the assault last night.”
“Doesn’t matter, does it? Things get written down and go into the record.”
He seemed more concerned about responsibility for the accident than that his son might get arrested for attempted murder.
Ignoring them completely, he said to his wife, “Why’d you let ’em in? This ain’t Nazi Germany, not yet. You can tell ’em to shove it.”
“I thought—”
“No, you didn’t. You didn’t think at all.” To O’Neil: “Now, I’ll ask you to leave. And if you come back it better be with a warrant.”
“Dad!” Sammy cried, racing from his bedroom, startling Dance. “It’s working! I wanta show you!” He was holding up a circuit board, from which wires sprouted.
Brigham’s gruffness vanished instantly. He hugged the younger son and said kindly, “We’ll look at it later, after supper.”
Dance was watching Travis’s eyes, which grew still at the display of affection toward his younger brother.
“Okay.” Sammy hesitated, then went out the back door and clomped down the porch and headed toward the shed.