Jeffery Deaver - Roadside Crosses

"Hi."

He nodded and followed her into the kitchen.

The dogs bounded up. Boling crouched and hugged them as they double-teamed him.

"Okay, guys, outside!" Dance commanded. She flung Milk Bones out the back door and the dogs charged down the steps and into the backyard.

Boling stood, wiped his face from the licks and laughed. He reached into the shopping bag. "I decided to bring sugar for a hostess gift."

"Sugar?"

"Two versions: fermented." He extracted a bottle of Caymus Conundrum white wine.

"Nice."

"And baked." A bag of cookies emerged. "I remembered the way you looked at them in the office when your assistant was trying to fatten me up."

"Caught that did you?" Dance laughed. "You'd be a good kinesic interviewer. We have to be observant."

His eyes were excited, she could see. "Got something to show you. Can we sit down somewhere?"

She directed him into the living room, where Boling unpacked yet another laptop, a big one, a brand she didn't recognize. "Irv did it," he announced.

"Irv?"

"Irving Wepler, the associate I was telling you about. One of my grad students."

So, not Bambi or Tiff.

"Everything on Travis's laptop is in here now."

He began typing. In an instant the screen came to life. Dance didn't know computers could respond so quickly.

From the other room, Maggie hit a sour note on the keyboard.

"Sorry." Dance winced.

"C sharp," Boling said without looking up from the screen.

Dance was surprised. "You a musician?"

"No, no. But I have perfect pitch. Just a fluke. And I don't know what to do with it. No musical talent whatsoever. Not like you."

"Me?" She hadn't told him her avocation.

A shrug. "Thought it might not be a bad idea to check you out. I didn't expect you to have more Google hits as a songcatcher than a cop… Oh, can I say cop?"

"So far it's not a politically incorrect term." Dance went on to explain that she was a failed folksinger but had found musical redemption in the project that she and Martine Christensen operated-a website called American Tunes, the name echoing Paul Simon's evocative anthem to the country from the 1970s. The site was a lifesaver for Dance, who often had to dwell in some very dark places because of her work. There was nothing like music to pull her safely out of the minds of the criminals she pursued.

Although the common term was "songcatcher," Dance told him, the job description was technically "folklorist." Alan Lomax was the most famous-he'd roam the hinterland of America, collecting traditional music for the Library of Congress in the midtwentieth century. Dance too traveled around the country, when she could, to collect music, though not Lomax's mountain, blues and bluegrass. Today's homegrown American songs were African, Afro-pop, Cajun, Latino, Caribbean, Nova Scotian, East Indian and Asian.

American Tunes helped the musicians copyright their original material, offered the music for sale via download and distributed to them the money listeners paid.

Boling seemed interested. He too, it seemed, trekked into the wilderness once or twice a month. He'd been a serious rock climber at one time, he explained, but had given that up.

"Gravity," he said, "is nonnegotiable."

Then he nodded toward the bedroom that was the source of the music. "Son or daughter?"

"Daughter. The only strings my son's familiar with come on a tennis racket."

"She's good."

"Thank you," Dance said with some pride; she had worked hard to encourage Maggie. She practiced with the girl and, more time-consuming, chauffeured her to and from piano lessons and recitals.

Boling typed and a colorful page popped up on the laptop's screen. But then his body language changed suddenly. She noticed he was looking over her shoulder, toward the doorway.

Dance should have guessed. She'd heard the keyboard fall silent thirty seconds before.

Then Boling was smiling. "Hi, I'm Jon. I work with your mom."

Wearing a backward baseball cap, Maggie was standing in the doorway. "Hello."

"Hats in the house," Dance reminded.

Off it came. Maggie walked right up to Boling. "I'm Maggie." Nothing shy about my girl, Dance reflected, as the ten-year-old pumped his hand.

"Good grip," the professor told her. "And good touch on the keyboard."

The girl beamed. "You play anything?"

"CDs and downloads. That's it."

Dance looked up and wasn't surprised to see twelve-year-old Wes appear too, looking their way. He was hanging back, in the doorway. And he wasn't smiling.

Her stomach did a flip. After his father's death, Wes could be counted on to take a dislike to the men that his mom saw socially-sensing them, her therapist said, as a threat to their family and to his father's memory. The only man he really liked was Michael O'Neil-in part because, the doctor theorized, the deputy was married and thus no risk.

The boy's attitude was hard for Dance, who'd been a widow for two years, and at times felt a terrible longing for a romantic companion. She wanted to date, she wanted to meet somebody and knew it would be good for the children. But whenever she went out, Wes became sullen and moody. She'd spent hours reassuring him that he and his sister came first. She planned out tactics to ease the boy comfortably into meeting her dates. And sometimes simply laid down the law and told him she wouldn't tolerate any attitude. Nothing had worked very well; and it didn't help that his hostility toward her most recent potential partner had turned out to be far more insightful than her own judgment. She resolved after that to listen to what her children had to say and watch how they reacted.

She motioned him over. He joined them. "This is Mr. Boling."

"Hi, Wes."

"Hi." They shook hands, Wes a bit shy, as always.

Dance was about to add quickly that she knew Boling through work, to reassure Wes and defuse any potential awkwardness. But before she could say anything, Wes's eyes flashed as he gazed at the computer screen. "Sweet. DQ! "

She regarded the splashy graphics of the DimensionQuest computer game homepage, which Boling had apparently extracted from Travis's computer.

"Are you guys playing?" The boy seemed astonished.

"No, no. I just wanted to show your mother something. You know Morpegs, Wes?"

"Like, definitely."

"Wes," Dance murmured.

"I mean, sure. She doesn't like me to say 'like.' "

Smiling, Boling asked, "You play DQ ? I don't know it so well."

"Naw, it's kind of wizardy, you know. I'm more into Trinity. "

"Oh, man," Boling said with some boyish, and genuine, reverence in his voice. "The graphics kick butt." He turned to Dance and said, "It's S-F."

But that wasn't much of an explanation. "What?"

"Mom, science fiction."

"Sci-fi."

"No, no, you can't say that. It's S-F." Eyes rolling broadly ceilingward.

"I stand corrected."

Wes's face scrunched up. "But with Trinity, you definitely need two gig of RAM and at least two on your video card. Otherwise it's, like…" He winced. "Otherwise it's so slow. I mean, you've got your beams ready to shoot…and the screen hangs. It's the worst."

"RAM on the desktop I hacked together at work?" Boling asked coyly.

"Three?" Wes asked.

"Five. And four on the video card."

Wes mimicked a brief faint. " Nooooo! That is sooo sweet. How much storage?"

"Two T."

"No way! Two tera bytes?"

Dance laughed, feeling huge relief that there wasn't any tension between them. But she said, "Wes, I've never seen you play Trinity. We don't have it loaded on our computer here, do we?" She was very restrictive about what the children played on their computers and the websites they visited. But she couldn't oversee them 100 percent of the time.