Roadside Crosses

None of her family was home, her parents working, her brother at practice.

Laughing uneasily to herself: It was less scary for her to go outside and meet a hulking pervert face-to-face than to see him looking into her window. Kelley glanced at the magnetic knife rack. The blades were totally sharp. Debated. But she left the weapons where they were. Instead she held her iPhone up to her ear and walked outside. "Hi, Gi

The conversation was pretend, but he-or it-wouldn't know that.

"No, I'll keep talking. Just in case there's some asshole out there." Talking loud.

The door opened onto the side yard. She headed toward the back, then, approaching the corner, she slowed. Finally she stepped tentatively into the backyard. Empty. At the end of the property, beyond a thick barrier of plants, the ground dropped away steeply into county land-a shallow canyon filled with brush and some jogging trails.

"So, how's it going? Yeah…yeah? Sweet. Way sweet."

Okay. Don't overdo it, she thought. Your acting sucks.

Kelley eased to the row of foliage and peered through it into the canyon. She thought she saw someone moving away from the house.

Then, not too far away, she saw some kid in sweats on a bike, taking one of the trails that was a shortcut between Pacific Grove and Monterey. He turned left and vanished behind a hill.

Kelley put the phone away. She started to return to the house when she noticed something out of place in the back planting beds. A little dot of color. Red. She walked over to it and picked up the flower petal. A rose. Kelley let the crescent flutter back to the ground.

She returned to the house.

A pause, looking back. No one, no animals. Not a single Abominable Snowman or werewolf.

She stepped inside. And froze, gasping.

In front of her, ten feet away, a human silhouette was approaching, features indistinct because of the backlighting from the living room.

"Who-?"

The figure stopped. A laugh. "Jesus, Kel. You are so freaked. You look…gimme your phone. I want a picture."

Her brother, Ricky, reached for her iPhone.

"Get out!" Kelley said, grimacing and twisting away from his outstretched hand. "Thought you had practice."

"Needed my sweats. Hey, you hear about that girl in the trunk? She goes to Stevenson."

"Yeah, I've seen her. Tammy Foster."

"She hot?" The lanky sixteen-year-old, with a mop of brown hair that matched her own, headed for the refrigerator and grabbed a power drink.

"Ricky, you're so gross."

"Uh-huh. So? Is she?"

Oh, she hated brothers. "When you leave, lock the door."

Ricky screwed his face into a huge frown. "Why? Who'd wa

"Lock it!"

"Like, okay."

She shot him a dark look, which he missed completely.

Kelley continued to her room and sat down at the computer again. Yep, AnonGurl had posted an attack on Kelley for defending Tammy Foster.

Okay, bitch, you're going down. I am go

Kelley Morgan began to type.

PROFESSOR JONATHAN BOLING was in his forties, Dance estimated. Not tall, a few inches over her height, with a frame that suggested either a tolerance for exercise or a disdain for junk food. Straight brownish hair similar to Dance's, though she suspected that he didn't sneak a box of Clairol into his shopping cart at Safeway every couple of weeks.

"Well," he said, looking around the halls as she escorted him from the lobby to her office at the California Bureau of Investigation. "This isn't quite what I pictured. Not like CSI."

Did everybody in the universe watch that show?

Boling wore a digital Timex on one wrist and a braided bracelet on the other-perhaps symbolizing support for something or another. (Dance thought about her children, who would cover their wrists with so many colored bands she was never sure what the latest causes were.) In jeans and a black polo shirt, he was handsome in a subdued, National Public Radio kind of way. His brown eyes were steady, and he seemed fast with a smile.

Dance decided he could have any grad student he set his sights on.

She asked, "You ever been in a law enforcement office before?"

"Well, sure," he said, clearing his throat and giving off odd kinesic signals. Then a smile. "But they dropped the charges. I mean, what else could they do when Jimmy Hoffa's body never turned up?"

She couldn't help but laugh. Oh, you poor grad students. Beware.

"I thought you consulted with police."

"I've offered to, at the end of my lectures to law enforcement agencies and security companies. But nobody's taken me up on it. Until now. You're my maiden voyage. I'll try not to disappoint."

They arrived in her office and sat across from each other at her battered coffee table.

Boling said, "I'm happy to help however I can but I'm not sure exactly what I can do." A bolt of sunlight fell across his loafers and he glanced down, noticed that one sock was black and one navy blue. He laughed without embarrassment. In another era Dance would have deduced that he was single; nowadays, with two busy working partners, fashion glitches like this were inadmissible evidence. He didn't, however, wear a wedding ring.

"I have a hardware and software background but for serious technical advice, I'm afraid I'm over the legal age limit and I don't speak Hindi."

He told her that he'd gotten joint degrees in literature and engineering at Stanford, admittedly an odd combination, and after a bit of "bumming around the world" had ended up in Silicon Valley, doing systems design for some of the big computer companies.

"Exciting time," he said. But, he added, eventually he'd been turned off by the greed. "It was like an oil rush. Everybody was asking how could they get rich by convincing people they had these needs that computers could fill. I thought maybe we should look at it the other way: find out what needs people actually had and then ask how computers could help them." A cocked head. "As between their position and mine. I lost big-time. So I took some stock money, quit, bummed around again. I ended up in Santa Cruz, met somebody, decided to stay and tried teaching. Loved it. That was almost ten years ago. I'm still there."

Dance told him that after a stint as a reporter she'd gone back to college-the same school where he taught. She studied communications and psychology. Their time had coincided, briefly, but they didn't know anyone in common.

He taught several courses, including the Literature of Science Fiction, as well as a class called Computers and Society. And in the grad school Boling taught what he described as some boring technical courses. "Sort of math, sort of engineering." He also consulted for corporations.

Dance interviewed people in many different professions. The majority radioed clear signals of stress when speaking of their jobs, which indicated either anxiety because of the demands of the work, or, more often, depression about it-as Boling had earlier when speaking about Silicon Valley. But his kinesic behavior now, when discussing his present career, was stress free.

He continued to downplay his technical skill, though, and Dance was disappointed. He seemed smart and more than willing to help-he'd driven down here on a moment's notice-and she would have liked to use his services, but to get into Tammy Foster's computer it sounded like they'd need more of a hands-on tech person. At least, she hoped, he could recommend someone.

Maryellen Kresbach came in with a tray of coffee and cookies. Attractive, she resembled a country-western singer, with her coiffed brown hair and red Kevlar fingernails. "The guard desk called. Somebody's got a computer from Michael's office."