Jeffery Deaver - Roadside Crosses

"Jim did this?" he whispered.

"I'm afraid so."

Another thought shook him. "My God, what if the children had been here? Would he have…?" He couldn't complete the sentence.

His wife stared at the dusty yard, wiping sweat off her brow. Hollister's a long way from the ocean, and summer air, trapped by the knobby hills, heated up fiercely by midday.

Dance said, "Actually, it was his second attempt to kill you."

"Second?" Lily whispered. "You mean at the house? When we were unpacking the other day?"

"That's right. That was Chilton too, wearing one of Travis's hoodies."

"But…is he insane?" Hawken asked, mystified. "Why would he want to kill us?"

Dance had learned that in her line of work nothing is gained by soft-pedaling. "I can't say for absolute certain, but I think James Chilton murdered your first wife."

A heartbreaking gasp. Eyes wide with disbelief. "What?"

Lily now lifted her head and turned to Dance. "But she died in an accident. Swimming near La Jolla. "

"I'm getting some details from San Diego and the Coast Guard to be sure. But it's pretty likely that I'm right."

"He couldn't have. Sarah and Jim were very…" Hawken's words dissolved.

"Close?" Dance asked.

He was shaking his head. "No. It's not possible." But then he blurted angrily, "Are you saying they were having an affair?"

A pause, then she said, "I think so, yes. I'll be getting some evidence in the next few days. Travel records. Phone calls."

Lily put her arm around her husband's shoulders. "Honey," she whispered.

Hawken said, "I remember that they'd always enjoy each other's company when we'd go out. And, with me, Sarah was a challenge. I was always traveling. Maybe two, three days a week. Not a lot. But she sometimes said I was neglecting her. Kind of joking-I didn't take it all that seriously. But maybe she meant it, and Jim stepped in to fill the gap. Sarah was always pretty demanding."

The tone of delivery suggested to Dance that the sentence could have ended with "in bed."

She added, "I'm guessing that Sarah wanted Chilton to leave Patrizia and marry her."

A bitter laugh. "And he said no?"

Dance shrugged. "That's what occurred to me."

Hawken considered this. He added in hollow tones, "It wasn't a good thing to say no to Sarah."

"I thought about the timing. You moved to San Diego about three years ago. It was around then that Patrizia's father died, and she inherited a lot of money. Which meant that Chilton could keep writing his blog-he started working on it full-time then. I think he was beginning to get a sense he was on a mission to save the world and Patrizia's money could let him do that. So he broke it off with your wife."

Hawken asked, "And Sarah threatened to expose him if he didn't leave Pat?"

"I think she was going to broadcast that James Chilton, the moral voice of the country, had been having an affair with his best friend's wife."

Dance believed that Chilton lied to Sarah, agreeing to get the divorce, and met her in San Diego. She could imagine his suggestion of a romantic picnic, at a deserted cove near La Jolla. A swim at the beautiful seashore preserve there. Then an accident-a blow to the head. Or maybe he just held her underwater.

"But why was he going to kill us?" Lily asked, with a troubled look back at the house.

Dance said to Donald Hawken, "You'd been out of touch for a while?"

"After Sarah died, I was so depressed I gave up on everything, stopped seeing all my old friends. Most of my time went to the children. I was a recluse…until I met Lily. Then I started to resurface."

"And you decided to move back."

"Right. Sell the company and come back." Hawken was understanding. "Sure, sure, Lily and I would get together with Jim and Patrizia, some of our old friends around here. At some point we'd have to reminisce. Jim used to come to Southern California a bit before Sarah died. He would've lied to Pat about it; it'd only be a matter of time before he'd get caught." Hawken's head swiveled to the house, his eyes wide. " The Blue Swan …Yes!"

Dance lifted an eyebrow.

"I told Jim I wanted to give him one of my late wife's favorite paintings. I remembered him staring at it when he stayed with me after Sarah died." A scoffing laugh. "I'll bet it was Jim's. He probably bought it years ago and one day when Sarah was over at his place she told him she wanted it. Maybe he told Patrizia he sold it to somebody. If she saw the painting now she'd wonder how Sarah had gotten it."

This would explain Chilton's desperation-why he'd take the risk of murdering. The righteous blogger lecturing the world on morality about to be exposed for having an affair-with a woman who'd died. Questions would be raised, an investigation started. And the most important thing in his life-his blog-would have been destroyed. He had to eliminate that threat.

The Report is too important to jeopardize…

Lily asked, "But that man at the house, Schaeffer? The statement that James was going to read-it mentioned Travis."

"I'm sure Schaeffer's plans didn't originally involve Travis. He'd wanted to kill Chilton for some time-probably since his brother's death. But when he heard about the Roadside Crosses attacks, he rewrote the statement to include Travis's name-so no one would suspect Schaeffer himself."

Hawken asked, "How did you figure out Jim was the one, not Schaeffer?"

Mostly, she explained, because of what wasn't in the crime scene reports TJ had just delivered to her.

"What wasn't there?" Hawken asked.

"First," she explained, "there wasn't any cross to announce the murder of Chilton. The killer had left crosses in public places before the other attacks. But nobody could find the last cross. Second, the perp had used Travis's bicycle, or his own, to leave tread marks to implicate the boy. But Schaeffer didn't have a bike anywhere. And then the gun he threatened Chilton with? It wasn't the Colt stolen from Travis's father. It was a Smith and Wesson. Finally, there were no flowers or florist's wire in his car or hotel room.

"So, I considered the possibility that Greg Schaeffer wasn't the Roadside Cross Killer. He just lucked into the case and decided to use it. But, if he wasn't leaving the crosses, who could it be?"

Dance had gone back through the list of suspects. She'd thought of the minister, Reverend Fisk, and his bodyguard, possibly CrimsoninChrist. They were certainly fanatics and had threatened Chilton directly in their postings on the blog. But TJ had gone to see Fisk, the minder and several other key members of the group. They all had alibis for the times of the attacks.

She'd also considered Hamilton Royce-the troubleshooter from Sacramento, being paid to shut down the blog because of what Chilton was posting about the Nuclear Facilities Planning Committee. It was a good theory, but the more she'd thought about it, the less likely it seemed. Royce was too obvious a suspect, since he'd already tried to get the blog closed down-and very publicly-by using the state police.

Clint Avery, the construction boss, was a possibility too. But she'd learned that Avery's mysterious meetings after Dance had left his company were with a lawyer specializing in equal employment law and two men who ran a day-labor service. In an area where most employers worried about hiring too many undocumented aliens, Avery was worried about getting sued for hiring too few minorities. He was uneasy with Dance, it seemed, because he was afraid she was really there investigating a civil rights complaint that he was discriminating against Latinos.

Dance had also fleetingly considered Travis's father as the perp, actually wondering if there was some psychological connection between the branches and roses and Bob Brigham's job as a landscaper. She'd even considered that the perp might be Sammy-troubled, but maybe a savant, cunning, and possibly filled with resentment against his older brother.