Dance looked around. “Wasn’t killed here, I assume?” There were no residences or other buildings nearby. Nor would the victim have been hiking or jogging here — there were no trails.
“Right.” The officer continued, “There wasn’t much blood. Looks like the perp drove the body here and dumped it. Found some tire tracks in the sand. We’re guessing Travis boosted the guy’s own car, threw him in the trunk. Like that first girl. Tammy. Only this time, he didn’t wait for the tide. Stabbed him to death. As soon as we’ve got the deceased’s ID, we can put out a call on the wheels.”
“You’re sure Travis did it?” Dance asked.
The deputy offered, “You’ll see.”
“And he was tortured?”
“Looks that way.”
They paused at the Crime Scene tape about ten feet from the corpse. The CS officer, in a jumpsuit like a spaceman, was taking measurements. He glanced up and saw the two officers. He nodded a greeting and through his protective goggles lifted an eyebrow. “You want to see?” he called.
“Yes,” Dance replied, wondering if he asked thinking a woman might not be comfortable seeing the carnage. Yes, in this day and age, it still happened.
Though, in fact, she was steeling herself for the sight. The nature of her work involved the living, mostly. She’d never grown fully immune to the images of death.
He began to lift the cover when a voice called from behind her, “Agent Dance?”
She glanced back to see another officer in uniform walking up to her. He was holding something in his hand.
“Yes?”
“Do you know a Jonathan Boling?”
“Jon? Yes.” She was staring at a business card in his hand. And recalled that somebody had taken the victim’s wallet to verify ID.
A horrifying thought: Was the victim Jon?
Her mind did one of its leaps — A to B to X. Had the professor learned something from Travis’s computer or in his search for victims and, with Dance away, decided to investigate by himself?
Please, no!
She glanced briefly at O’Neil, horror in her eyes, and lunged for the body.
“Hey!” the CS tech shouted. “You’ll contaminate the scene!”
She ignored him and flung back the tarp.
And gasped.
With mixed relief and horror, she stared down.
It wasn’t Boling.
The lean bearded man in slacks and a white shirt had been repeatedly stabbed. One glazed eye was half open. A cross was carved into his forehead. Rose petals, red ones, were scattered over his body.
“But where did that come from?” she asked the other deputy, nodding at Boling’s business card, her voice shaking.
“I was trying to tell you — he’s at the road block, over there. Just drove up. He wants to see you. It’s urgent.”
“I’ll talk to him in a minute.” Dance inhaled deeply, shaken.
Another deputy came up with the dead man’s wallet in a plastic bag. “Got the ID. His name’s Mark Watson. He’s a retired engineer. Went out to the store a few hours ago. Never got home.”
“Who is he?” O’Neil asked. “Why was he picked?”
Dance dug into her jacket pocket and retrieved the list of everyone mentioned in the blog who might be a potential target.
“He posted in the blog — a reply to the ‘Power to the People’ thread. About the nuclear plant. It doesn’t agree or disagree with Chilton about the location of the plant. It’s neutral.”
“So anybody connected to the blog at all could be at risk now.”
“I’d think so.”
O’Neil looked her over. He touched her arm. “You okay?”
“Just… kind of a scare.”
She found herself thumbing Jon Boling’s card. She told O’Neil she was going to see what he wanted and began down the path, her heart only now returning to a normal beat from the fright.
At the roadside she found the professor standing beside his car, the door open. She frowned. In the passenger seat was a teenager with spiky hair. He was wearing an Aerosmith T-shirt under a dark brown jacket.
Boling waved to her. She was struck by the look of urgency on his face, unusual for him.
And by the intensity of the relief she felt that he was all right.
Which gave way to curiosity when she saw what was stuck in the waistband of his slacks; she couldn’t tell for certain but it seemed to be the hilt of a large knife.
Chapter 31
DANCE, BOLING AND the teenager were in her office at the CBI. Jason Kepler was a seventeen-year-old student in Carmel South High, and he, not Travis, was Stryker.
Travis had created the avatar years ago, but he’d sold it online to Jason, along with “like, a shitload of Reputation, Life Points and Resources.”
Whatever those were.
Dance recalled that Boling had told her that players could sell their avatars and other accoutrements of the game.
The professor explained about his finding a reference in Travis’s data to the Lighthouse Arcade’s hours of operation.
Dance was grateful for the man’s brilliant detective work. (Though she was absolutely going to dress him down later for not calling 911 immediately upon learning that the boy was at the arcade and for going after him alone.) On her desk behind them, in an evidence envelope, was the kitchen knife that Jason had used to threaten Boling. It was a deadly weapon and he was technically guilty of assault and battery. Still, since Boling hadn’t actually been injured and the boy had voluntarily handed over the blade to the professor, she was probably going to be satisfied with giving the kid a stern warning.
Boling now explained what had happened: he himself had been the victim of a sting, orchestrated by the young teen who sat before them now. “Tell her what you told me.”
“What it is, I was worried about Travis,” Jason told them wide-eyed. “You don’t know what it’s like seeing somebody who’s in your family getting attacked like he was, in the blog.”
“Your family?”
“Yeah. In the game, in DQ, we’re brothers. I mean, we’ve never met or anything, but I know him real good.”