Roadside Crosses

Dance said, "I don't get some of the vocabulary in the posts."

He laughed. "Oh, in blogs and bulletin boards and social networking sites, it's in to misspell, abbreviate and make up words. 'Sauce' for 'source.' 'Moar' for 'more.' 'IMHO' is 'in my humble opinion.'"

"Do I dare ask? 'FOAD.'"

"Oh," he said, "a polite valediction to your note. It means 'Fuck off and die.' All caps, of course, is the same as shouting."

"And what is 'p-h-r-3-3-k'?"

"That's leetspeak for 'freak.'"

"Leetspeak?"

"It's a sort of language that's been created by teens over the past few years. You only see it with keyboarded text. Numbers and symbols take the place of letters. And spellings are altered. Leetspeak comes from 'elite,' as in the best and the choicest. It can be incomprehensible to us old folks. But anybody who's mastered it can write and read it as fast as we do English."

"Why do kids use it?"

"Because it's creative and unconventional…and cool. Which, by the way, you should spell 'K-E-W-L.' "

"The spelling and grammar are awful."

"True, but it doesn't mean the posters are necessarily stupid or uneducated. It's just the convention nowadays. And speed is important. As long as the reader can understand what you're saying, you can be as careless as you want."

Dance said, "I wonder who the boy is. I guess I could call CHP about the accident Chilton refers to."

"Oh, I'll find it. The online world is huge but it's also small. I've got Tammy's social networking site here. She spends most of her time in one called OurWorld. It's bigger than Facebook and MySpace. It's got a hundred thirty million members."

"A hundred thirty million?"

"Yep. Bigger than most countries." Boling was squinting as he typed. "Okay, I'm in her account, just do a little cross-referencing… There. Got him."

"That fast?"

"Yep. His name's Travis Brigham. You're right. He's a junior at Robert Louis Stevenson High in Monterey. Going to be a senior this fall. Lives in Pacific Grove."

Where Dance and her children lived.

"I'm looking over some of the postings in OurWorld about the accident. Looks like he was driving a car back from a party and lost control. Two girls were killed, another one ended up in the hospital. He wasn't badly injured. No charges were filed-there was some question about the condition of the road. It'd been raining."

"That! Sure. I remember it." Parents always recall fatal car crashes involving youngsters. And, of course, she felt a sting of memory from several years ago: the highway patrol officer calling her at home, asking if she was FBI Agent Bill Swenson's wife. Why was he asking? she'd wondered.

I'm sorry to tell you, Agent Dance…I'm afraid there's been an accident.

She now pushed the thought away and said, "I

"But i

"What's that?"

"A category of cyberbullies. Vengeful Angels are vigilantes. They're attacking Travis because they think he got away with something-since he wasn't arrested after the accident. They don't believe, or trust, the police. Another category is the Power Hungry-they're closest to typical school-yard bullies. They need to control others by pushing them around. Then there are the Mean Girls. They bully because, well, they're little shits. Girls, mostly, who're bored and post cruel things for the fun of it. It borders on sadism." A tinge of anger again in Boling's voice. "Bullying…it's a real problem. And it's getting worse. The latest statistics are that thirty-five percent of kids have been bullied or threatened online, most of them multiple times." He fell silent and his eyes narrowed.

"What, Jon?"

"Interesting that there's one thing we don't see."

"What's that?"

"Travis fighting back in the blog, flaming the people who attacked him."

"Maybe he doesn't know about it."

Boling gave a thin laugh. "Oh, believe me, he would've known about the attacks five minutes after the first post in the Chilton thread."

"Why's it significant he's not posting?"

"One of the most persistent categories of cyberbullying is called Revenge of the Nerds, or the Victims of Retaliators. Those are people who've been bullied and are fighting back. The social stigma of being outed or bullied or humiliated at that age is overwhelming. I guarantee he's furious and he's hurt and he wants to get even. Those feelings have to come out somehow. You get the implication?"

Dance understood. "It suggests that he is the one who attacked Tammy."

"If he's not going after them online, it's all the more likely he'd be inclined to get them in real life." A troubled glance at the screen. "Ariel, BellaKelley, SexyGurl362, Legend666, Archenemy-they all posted attacks on him. Which means they're all at risk-if he's the one."

"Would it be hard for him to get their names and addresses?"

"Some, sure, short of hacking into routers and servers. The 'Anonymous' postings, of course. But a lot of them would be as easy to find as my getting his name. All he'd need would be a few high school yearbooks or class directories, access to OurWorld, Facebook or MySpace. Oh, and everybody's favorite-Google."

Dance noted a shadow had fallen over them and Jonathan Boling was looking past her.

Michael O'Neil stepped into the office. Dance was relieved to see him. They shared smiles. The professor stood. Dance introduced them. The two men shook hands.

Boling said, "So, I have you to thank for my first outing as a cop."

"If 'thank' is the right word," O'Neil said with a wry smile.

They all sat at the coffee table, and Dance told the deputy what they'd found…and what they suspected: that Tammy might have been attacked because she'd posted a comment on a blog about a high school student who'd been responsible for a car crash.

"Was that the accident on One a couple of weeks ago? About five miles south of Carmel?"

"Right."

Boling said, "The boy's name is Travis Brigham and he's a student at Robert Louis Stevenson, where the victims went."

"So he's a person of interest, at least. And it's possible-what we were afraid of?" O'Neil asked Dance. "He wants to keep going?"

"Very likely. "Cyberbullying pushes people over the edge. I've seen it happen dozens of times."

O'Neil put his feet on the coffee table and rocked back in the chair. Two years ago she'd bet him ten dollars that someday he'd fall over backward. So far she had yet to collect. He asked Dance, "Anything more on witnesses?"

Dance explained that TJ hadn't reported back yet about the security camera near the highway where the first cross had been left, nor had Rey responded about witnesses near the club where Tammy had been abducted.

O'Neil said that there hadn't been any breakthroughs with the physical evidence. "Only one thing-Crime Scene found a gray fiber, cotton, on the cross." He added that the lab in Salinas couldn't match it to a specific database, other than to report that it was probably from clothing, not from carpet or furniture.

"That's all, nothing else? No prints, tread marks?"

O'Neil shrugged. "The perp's either very smart or very lucky."

Dance walked to her desk and went into the state databases of warrants and records. She squinted over the screen and read, "Travis Alan Brigham, age seventeen. Driver's license puts him at four oh eight Henderson Road." She pushed her glasses up on her nose as she read. "Interesting. He's got a record." Then she shook her head. "No, sorry. My mistake. It's not him. It's Samuel Brigham, at the same address. He's fifteen. Juvie record. Arrested twice on peeping, once on misdemeanor assault. Both dismissed, subject to psych treatment. Looks like he's a brother. But Travis? No, he's clean."