TJ was good at his job, though he was the most unconventional agent in a law enforcement organization noted for its conventional approach and demeanor. Today he was wearing jeans, a polo shirt and plaid sports coat — madras, a pattern on some faded shirts in her father’s storage closet. TJ owned one tie, as far as Dance had been able to tell, and it was an outlandish Jerry Garcia model. TJ suffered from acute nostalgia for the 1960s. In his office two lava lamps bubbled merrily away.
Dance and he were only a few years apart, but there was a generational gap between them. Still, they clicked professionally, with a bit of mentor-mentee thrown in. Though TJ tended to run solo, which was against the grain in the CBI, he’d been filling in for Dance’s regular partner — still down in Mexico on a complicated extradition case.
Quiet Rey Carraneo, a newcomer to the CBI, was about as opposite to TJ Scanlon as one could be. In his late twenties, with dark, thoughtful features, he today wore a gray suit and white shirt on his lean frame. He was older in heart than in years, since he’d been a beat cop in the cowboy town of Reno, Nevada, before moving here with his wife for the sake of his ill mother. Carraneo held a coffee cup in a hand that bore a tiny scar in the Y between thumb and forefinger; it was where a gang tat had resided not too many years ago. Dance considered him to be the calmest and most focused of all the younger agents in the office and she sometimes wondered, to herself only, if his days in the gang contributed to that.
The deputy from the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office — typically crew cut and with a military bearing — introduced himself and explained what had happened. A local teenager had been kidnapped from a parking lot in downtown Monterey, off Alvarado, early that morning. Tammy Foster had been bound and tossed into her own car trunk. The attacker drove her to a beach outside of town and left her to drown in high tide.
Dance shivered at the thought of what it must’ve been like to lie cramped and cold as the water rose in the confined space.
“It was her car?” O’Neil asked, sitting in one of Dance’s chairs and rocking on the back legs — doing exactly what Dance told her son not to do (she suspected Wes had learned the practice from O’Neil). The legs creaked under his weight.
“That’s right, sir.”
“What beach?”
“Down the coast, south of the Highlands.”
“Deserted?”
“Yeah, nobody around. No wits.”
“Witnesses at the club where she got snatched?” Dance asked.
“Negative. And no security cameras in the parking lot.”
Dance and O’Neil took this in. She said, “So he needed other wheels near where he left her. Or had an accomplice.”
“Crime scene found some footprints in the sand, headed for the highway. Above the tide level. But the sand was loose. No idea of tread or size. But definitely only one person.”
O’Neil asked, “And no signs of a car pulling off the road to pick him up? Or one hidden in the bushes nearby?”
“No, sir. Our people did find some bicycle tread marks but they were on the shoulder. Could’ve been made that night, could’ve been a week old. No tread match. We don’t have a bicycle database,” he added to Dance.
Hundreds of people biked along the beach in that area daily.
“Motive?”
“No robbery, no sexual assault. Looks like he just wanted to kill her. Slowly.”
Dance exhaled a puffy breath.
“Any suspects?”
“Nope.”
Dance then looked at TJ. “And what you told me earlier, when I called? The weird part. Anything more on that?”
“Oh,” the fidgety young agent said, “you mean the roadside cross.”
THE CALIFORNIA BUREAU of Investigation has broad jurisdiction but usually is involved only in major crimes, like gang activity, terrorism threats and significant corruption or economic offenses. A single murder in an area where gangland killings occur at least once a week wouldn’t attract any special attention.
But the attack on Tammy Foster was different.
The day before the girl had been kidnapped, a Highway Patrol trooper had found a cross, like a roadside memorial, with the next day’s date written on it, stuck in the sand along Highway 1.
When the trooper heard of the attack on the girl, not far off the same highway, he wondered if the cross was an announcement of the perp’s intentions. He’d returned and collected it. The Monterey County Sheriff’s Office’s Crime Scene Unit found a tiny bit of rose petal in the trunk where Tammy had been left to die — a fleck that matched the roses from the bouquet left with the cross.
Since on the surface the attack seemed random and there was no obvious motive, Dance had to consider the possibility that the perp had more victims in mind.
O’Neil now asked, “Evidence from the cross?”
His junior officer grimaced. “Truth be told, Deputy O’Neil, the Highway Patrol trooper just tossed it and the flowers in his trunk.”
“Contaminated?”
“Afraid so. Deputy Bennington said he did the best he could to process it.” Peter Bennington — the skilled, diligent head of the Monterey County Crime Scene Lab. “But didn’t find anything. Not according to the preliminary. No prints, except the trooper’s. No trace other than sand and dirt. The cross was made out of tree branches and florist wire. The disk with the date on it was cut out of cardboard, looked like. The pen, he said, was generic. And the writing was block printing. Only helpful if we get a sample from a suspect. Now, here’s a picture of the cross. It’s pretty creepy. Kind of like Blair Witch Project, you know.”
“Good movie,” TJ said, and Dance didn’t know if he was being facetious or not.
They looked at the photo. It was creepy, the branches like twisted, black bones.
Forensics couldn’t tell them anything? Dance had a friend she’d worked with not long ago, Lincoln Rhyme, a private forensic consultant in New York City. Despite the fact he was a quadriplegic, he was one of the best crime scene specialists in the country. She wondered, if he’d been running the scene, would he have found something helpful? She suspected he would have. But perhaps the most universal rule in police work was this: You go with what you’ve got.
She noticed something in the picture. “The roses.”
O’Neil got her meaning. “The stems are cut the same length.”