Roadside Crosses

Chapter 12

Dance's phone rang. A glance at Caller ID.

"TJ. Was just about to call you."

"Didn't have any luck with security cameras but there's a sale on Blue Mountain Jamaican coffee at Java House. Three pounds for the price of two. Still sets you back close to fifty bucks. But that coffee is the best."

She made no response to his banter. He noticed it. "What's up, boss?"

"Change of plans, TJ." She told him about Travis Brigham, the forensics match and the dozen stolen bouquets.

"He's on the run, boss? He's pla

"Yep. I want you to get to Bagel Express, talk to his friends, anybody who knows him, find out where he might go. People he might be staying with. Favorite places."

"Sure, I'll get right on it."

Dance then called Rey Carraneo, who was having no luck in his search for witnesses near the parking lot where Tammy Foster had been abducted. She briefed him as well and told him to head over to the Game Shed to find any leads to where the boy might've gone.

After hanging up, Dance sat back. A frustrating sense of helplessness came over her. She needed witnesses, people to interview. This was a skill she was born to, one she enjoyed and was good at. But now the case slogged along in the world of evidence and speculation.

She glanced at the printouts of The Chilton Report.

"I think we better start contacting the potential victims and warning them. Are people attacking him in the social sites too, MySpace, Facebook, OurWorld?" she asked Boling

"It's not as big a story in those; they're international sites. The Chilton Report is local, so that's where ninety percent of the attacks on Travis are. I'll tell you one thing that would help: getting the Internet addresses of the posters. If we could get those, we can contact their service providers and find their physical addresses. It would save a lot of time."

"How?"

"Have to be from Chilton himself or his webmaster."

"Jon, can you tell me anything about him that'll help me persuade him to cooperate, if he balks?"

"I know about his blog," Boling responded, "but not much about him personally. Other than the bio in The Report itself. But I'd be happy to do some detective work." His eyes had taken on the sparkle she'd seen earlier. He turned back to his computer.

Puzzles…

While the professor was lost in his homework assignment Dance took a call from O'Neil. A Crime Scene team had searched the alley behind Bagel Express and found traces of sand and dirt where the tread marks showed Travis had left his bike; they matched the sandy soil where Tammy's car had been left on the beach. He added that an MCSO team had canvassed the area but nobody had seen him.

O'Neil told her too that he'd gotten a half dozen other officers from Highway Patrol to join in the manhunt. They were coming in from Watsonville.

They disco

After a few minutes, Boling said that he'd gotten some background on Chilton from the blog itself and from other research. He called up the homepage again, which had the bio Chilton himself had written.

http://www.thechiltonreport.com

Scrolling down, Dance began to skim the blog while Boling offered, "James David Chilton, forty-three years old. Married to Patrizia Brisbane, two boys, ten and twelve. Lives in Carmel. But he also has property in Hollister, vacation house, it looks like, and some income property around San Jose. They inherited it when the wife's father died a few years ago. Now, the most interesting thing I found out about Chilton is that he's always had a quirky habit. He'd write letters."

"Letters?"

"Letters to the editor, letters to his congressmen, op ed pieces. He started with snail mail-before the Internet really took off-then emails. He's written thousands of them. Rants, criticism, praise, compliments, political commentary. You name it. He was quoted as saying one of his favorite books was Herzog, the Saul Bellow novel about a man obsessed with writing letters. Basically Chilton's message was about upholding moral values, exposing corruption, extolling politicians who do good, trashing the ones who don't-exactly what his blog does now. I found a lot of them online. Then, it seems, he found out about the blogosphere. He started The Chilton Report about five years ago. Now before I go on, it might be helpful to know a little history of blogs."

"Sure."

"The term comes from 'weblog,' which was coined by a computer guru in nineteen ninety-seven, Jorn Barger. He wrote an online diary about his travels and what he'd been looking at on the Web. Now, people'd been recording their thoughts online for years but what made blogs distinctive was the concept of links. That's the key to a blog. You're reading something and you come to that underlined or boldface reference in the text and click on it and that takes you someplace else.

"Linking is called 'hypertext.' The H-T-T-P in a website address? It stands for 'hypertext transfer protocol.' That's the software that lets you create links. In my opinion it was one of the most significant aspects of the Internet. Maybe the most significant.

"Well, once hypertext became common, blogs started to take off. People who could write code in HTML-hypertext markup language, the computer language of links-could create their own blogs pretty easily. But more and more people wanted in and not everybody was tech savvy. So companies came up with programs that anybody, well, almost anybody, could use to create linked blogs with-Pitas, Blogger and Groksoup were the early ones. Dozens of others followed. And now all you have to do is have an account with Google or Yahoo and, poof, you can make a blog. Combine that with the bargain price of data storage nowadays-and getting cheaper every minute-and you've got the blogosphere."

Boling's narrative was animated and ordered. He'd be a great professor, she reflected.

"Now, before Nine-eleven," Boling explained, "blogs were mostly computer-oriented. They were written by tech people for tech people. After September Eleventh, though, a new type of blog appeared. They were called war blogs, after the attacks and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Those bloggers weren't interested in technology. They were interested in politics, economics, society, the world. I describe the distinction this way: While pre-Nine-eleven blogs were i

"Jim Chilton is the quintessential war blogger. He doesn't care about the Internet per se or the tech world, except to the extent it lets him get his message out. He writes about the real world. Now the two sides-the original bloggers and the war bloggers-constantly battle for the number-one spot in the blogosphere."

"It's a contest?" she asked, amused.

"To them it is."

"They can't coexist?"

"Sure, but it's an ego-driven world and they'll do anything they can to be top of the heap. And that means two things. One, having as many subscribers as possible. And two, more important-having as many other blogs as possible include links to yours."

"Incestuous."

"Very. Now, you asked what could I tell you to get Chilton's cooperation. Well, you have to remember that The Chilton Report is the real thing. It's important and influential. You notice that one of the early posts in the 'Roadside Crosses' thread was from an executive at Caltrans? He wanted to defend their inspection of the highway. That tells me that government officials and CEOs read the blog regularly. And get pretty damn upset if Chilton says anything bad about them.