The attorney general.
“—to cooperate. He wants to know about our caseload. Maybe something big’s going down and he needs to see how busy we are. He spent some time at the sheriff’s office too. Wish he’d go back and bug them. Fellow’s a cold fish. Don’t know what to say to him. Tried some jokes. They fell flat.”
But Dance was thinking about the Tammy Foster case; Robert Harper was gone from her mind.
She and Boling returned to her office and she’d just sat down at her desk when O’Neil called. She was pleased. She guessed he’d have the results of the analysis of the bike tread dirt and the gray fiber from the sweatshirt.
“Kathryn, we have a problem.” His voice was troubled.
“Go on.”
“Well, first, Peter says the gray fiber they found in the cross? It matches what we found at Travis’s.”
“So he is the one. What’d the magistrate say about the warrant?”
“Didn’t get that far. Travis’s on the run.”
“What?”
“He didn’t show up for work. Or, he did show up — there were fresh bike tread marks behind the place. He snuck into the back room, stole some bagels and some cash from the purse of one of the workers… and a butcher’s knife. Then he disappeared. I called his parents, but they haven’t heard from him and claim they don’t have any idea where he might go.”
“Where are you?”
“In my office. I’m going to put out a detain alert on him. Us, Salinas, San Benito, surrounding counties.”
Dance rocked back, furious with herself. Why hadn’t she planned better and had somebody follow the boy when he left his house? She’d managed to establish his guilt — and simultaneously let him slip through her fingers.
And, hell, now she’d have to tell Overby what had happened.
But you didn’t bring him in?
“There’s something else. When I was at the bagel place, I looked up the alley. There’s that deli near Safeway.”
“Sure, I know it.”
“They have a flower stand on the side of the building.”
“Roses!” she said.
“Exactly. I talked to the owner.” O’Neil’s voice went flat. “Yesterday, somebody snuck up to the place and stole all the bouquets of red roses.”
She understood now why he was sounding so grave. “All?… How many did he take?”
A slight pause. “A dozen. It looks like he’s just getting started.”
Chapter 12
DANCE’S PHONE RANG. A glance at Caller ID.
“TJ. Was just about to call you.”
“Didn’t have any luck with security cameras but there’s a sale on Blue Mountain Jamaican coffee at Java House. Three pounds for the price of two. Still sets you back close to fifty bucks. But that coffee is the best.”
She made no response to his banter. He noticed it. “What’s up, boss?”
“Change of plans, TJ.” She told him about Travis Brigham, the forensics match and the dozen stolen bouquets.
“He’s on the run, boss? He’s planning more?”
“Yep. I want you to get to Bagel Express, talk to his friends, anybody who knows him, find out where he might go. People he might be staying with. Favorite places.”
“Sure, I’ll get right on it.”
Dance then called Rey Carraneo, who was having no luck in his search for witnesses near the parking lot where Tammy Foster had been abducted. She briefed him as well and told him to head over to the Game Shed to find any leads to where the boy might’ve gone.
After hanging up, Dance sat back. A frustrating sense of helplessness came over her. She needed witnesses, people to interview. This was a skill she was born to, one she enjoyed and was good at. But now the case slogged along in the world of evidence and speculation.
She glanced at the printouts of The Chilton Report.
“I think we better start contacting the potential victims and warning them. Are people attacking him in the social sites too, MySpace, Facebook, OurWorld?” she asked Boling
“It’s not as big a story in those; they’re international sites. The Chilton Report is local, so that’s where ninety percent of the attacks on Travis are. I’ll tell you one thing that would help: getting the Internet addresses of the posters. If we could get those, we can contact their service providers and find their physical addresses. It would save a lot of time.”
“How?”
“Have to be from Chilton himself or his webmaster.”
“Jon, can you tell me anything about him that’ll help me persuade him to cooperate, if he balks?”
“I know about his blog,” Boling responded, “but not much about him personally. Other than the bio in The Report itself. But I’d be happy to do some detective work.” His eyes had taken on the sparkle she’d seen earlier. He turned back to his computer.
Puzzles…
While the professor was lost in his homework assignment Dance took a call from O’Neil. A Crime Scene team had searched the alley behind Bagel Express and found traces of sand and dirt where the tread marks showed Travis had left his bike; they matched the sandy soil where Tammy’s car had been left on the beach. He added that an MCSO team had canvassed the area but nobody had seen him.
O’Neil told her too that he’d gotten a half dozen other officers from Highway Patrol to join in the manhunt. They were coming in from Watsonville.
They disconnected and Dance slumped back in her chair.
After a few minutes, Boling said that he’d gotten some background on Chilton from the blog itself and from other research. He called up the homepage again, which had the bio Chilton himself had written.
Http://www.thechiltonreport.com