Roadside Crosses

"Good. You can bring it up."

Maryellen paused for a moment and Dance had an amusing idea that the woman was checking out Boling as romantic fodder. Her assistant had been waging a none-too-subtle campaign to find Dance a husband. When the woman eyed Boling's naked left ring finger and lifted her brow at Dance, the agent flashed her an exasperated glance, which was duly noted and summarily ignored.

Boling called his thanks and, after pouring three sugars into his coffee, dug into the cookies and ate two. "Good. No, better than good."

"She bakes them herself."

"Really? People do that? They don't all come out of a Keebler bag?"

Dance went for half a cookie and enjoyed a sip of coffee, though she was caffeinated enough from her earlier meeting with Michael O'Neil.

"Let me tell you what's going on." She explained to Boling about the attack on Tammy Foster. Then said, "And we have to get into her laptop."

Boling nodded understandingly. "Ah, the one that went for a swim in the Pacific Ocean."

"It's toast…"

He corrected, "With the water, more likely it's oatmeal-if we're keeping to breakfast food metaphors."

Just then a young MCSO deputy stepped into Dance's office, carrying a large paper bag. Good-looking and eager, though more cute than handsome, he had bright blue eyes, and for a moment he seemed about to salute. "Agent Dance?"

"That's right."

"I'm David Reinhold. Crime Scene at the Sheriff's Office."

She nodded a greeting. "Nice to meet you. Thanks for bringing that over."

"You bet. Anything I can do."

He and Boling shook hands. Then the trim officer, in a perfectly pressed uniform, handed Dance the paper bag. "I didn't put it in plastic. Wanted it to breathe. Get as much moisture out as we could."

"Thanks," Boling said.

"And I took the liberty of taking the battery out," the young deputy said. He held up a sealed metal tube. "It's a lithium-ion. I thought if water got inside there could be a fire risk."

Boling nodded, clearly impressed. "Good thinking."

Dance had no clue what he was talking about. Boling noticed her frown and explained that some lithium batteries, under certain circumstances, could burst into flames when exposed to water.

"You a geek?" Boling asked him.

The deputy replied, "Not really. Just stuff you pick up, you know." He held out a receipt for Dance to sign and then pointed out the chain-of-custody card, attached to the bag itself. "If there's anything else I can do, let me know." He handed her a business card.

She thanked him, and the young man retreated.

Dance reached inside the bag and extracted Tammy's laptop. It was pink.

"What a color," Boling said, shaking his head. He turned it over and examined the back.

Dance asked him, "So, do you know somebody who could get it ru

"Sure. Me."

"Oh, I thought you said you weren't that much of a tech anymore."

"That's not tech, not by today's standards." He smiled again. "It's like rotating your tires on a car. Only I need a couple of tools."

"We don't have a lab here. Nothing as sophisticated as you probably need."

"Well, that depends. I see you collect shoes." Her closet door was open and Boling must've glanced inside, where a dozen pairs sat, more or less ordered, on the floor-for those nights when she went out after work, without stopping at home. She gave a laugh.

Busted.

He continued, "How 'bout personal care appliances?"

"Personal care?"

"I need a hair dryer."

She chuckled. "Sadly, all my beauty aids are at home."

"Then we better go shopping."

Chapter 8

Jon Boling needed a bit more than a hair dryer, as it turned out. Though not much.

Their shopping spree had yielded a Conair, a set of miniature tools and a metal box called an enclosure-a three-by-five-inch rectangle from which sprouted a wire that ended in a USB plug.

These items now sat on Dance's coffee table in her office at the CBI.

Boling surveyed Tammy Foster's designer laptop. "I can take it apart? I'm not going to screw up any evidence, am I?"

"It's been dusted for prints. All we found were Tammy's. Go ahead and do what you want-she's not a suspect. Besides, she lied to me, so she's in no position to complain."

"Pink," he said again, as if this was a shocking breach of propriety.

He turned the machine over and, with a tiny Phillips-head screwdriver, had the panel off the back in a few minutes. He then extracted a small metal-and-plastic rectangle.

"The hard drive," he explained. "By next year this'll be considered huge. We're going to flash memory in central processing units. No hard drives-no moving parts at all." The subject seemed to excite him but he sensed a lecture was a digression inappropriate at the moment. Boling fell silent and examined the drive closely. He didn't seem to wear contacts; Dance, who'd worn glasses since girlhood, had a mild attack of eye envy.

The professor then gently rattled the drive beside his ear. "Okay." He set it on the table.

"Okay?"

He gri

With his free hand he sipped the coffee. He mused, "We professors're very envious of the private sector, you know. 'Private sector'-that's Latin for 'actually making money.' " He nodded at the cup. "Take Starbucks… Coffee was a pretty good idea for a franchise. I keep looking for the next big one. But all I could think of were things like House O' Pickles and Jerky World. Beverages're the best, but all the good ones're taken."

"Maybe a milk bar," Dance suggested. "You could call it Elsie's."

His eyes brightened. "Or how 'bout 'Just An- Udder Place.' "

"That was really bad," she said as they shared a brief laugh.

When he finished drying the hard drive he slipped it into the enclosure. He then plugged the USB co

"I'm curious what you're doing." She was watching his sure fingers pound the keys. Many of the letters were worn off. He didn't need to see them to type.

"The water would've shorted out the computer itself, but the hard drive should be okay inside. I'm going to turn it into a readable drive." After a few minutes he looked up and smiled. "Nope, it's good as new."

Dance scooted her chair closer to his.

She glanced at the screen and saw that Windows Explorer was reading Tammy's hard drive as "Local Disk (G)."

"It'll have everything on it-her emails, the websites she's browsed, her favorite places, records of her instant messages. Even deleted data. It's not encrypted or password-protected-which, by the way, tells me that her parents are very uninvolved in her life. Kids whose folks keep a close eye on them learn to use all kinds of tricks for privacy. Which I, by the way, am pretty good at cracking." He unplugged the disk from his computer and handed it and the cable to her. "It's all yours. Just plug it in and read to your heart's content." He shrugged. "My first assignment for the police…short but sweet."

With a good friend, Kathryn Dance owned and operated a website devoted to homemade and traditional music. The site was pretty sophisticated technically but Dance knew little of the hardware and software; her friend's husband handled that side of the business. She now said to Boling, "You know, if you're not too busy, any chance you could stay around for a little? Help me search it?"

Boling hesitated.

"Well, if you have plans…"

"How much time are we talking? I've got to be in Napa on Friday night. Family reunion sort of thing."