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Excerpt of Roadside Crosses
Out of place.
The California Highway Patrol trooper, young with bristly yellow hair beneath his crisp hat, squinted through the windshield of his Crown Victoria Police Interceptor
as he cruised south along Highway 1 in Monterey. Dunes to the right, modest commercial sprawl to the left.
Something was out of place. What?
Heading home at
5:00 p.m. after his tour had ended, he surveyed the road. The trooper didn't write a lot of tickets here, leaving that to the county deputies — professional courtesy — but he occasionally lit up somebody
in a German or Italian car if he was in a mood, and this was the route he often took home at this time of day, so he knew the highway pretty well.
There . . . that was it.
Something colorful, a quarter mile ahead, sat by the side of the road, sitting at the base of one of the hills of sand that cut off the view of Monterey Bay.
What could it be?
He hit his light bar — protocol — and pulled over onto the right shoulder. He parked with the hood of the Crown Vic pointed leftward toward traffic, so a rear-ender would shove the
car away from, not over him, and climbed out. Stuck in the sand just beyond the shoulder was a cross — a roadside memorial. It was about eighteen inches high and homemade, cobbled together out of dark,
broken-off branches, bound with wire like florists use. Dark red roses sat in a splashy bouquet at the base. A cardboard disk was in the center, the date of the accident written on it in blue ink. There
were no names on the front or back.
Officially these memorials to traffic accident victims were discouraged, since people were occasionally injured, even themselves killed,
planting a cross or leaving flowers or stuffed animals.
Usually the memorials were tasteful and poignant. This one was spooky.
What was odd, though, was
that he couldn't remember any accidents along here. In fact this was one of the safest stretches of Highway 1 in California. The roadway becomes an obstacle course south of Carmel, like that spot of a
really sad accident several weeks ago: two girls killed coming back from a graduation party. But here, the highway was three lanes and mostly straight, with occasional lazy bends through the old Fort Ord
grounds, now a college, and the shopping districts.
The trooper thought about removing the cross, but the mourners might return to leave another one and endanger themselves again.
Best just to leave it. Out of curiosity he'd check with his sergeant in the morning and find out what had happened. The trooper walked back to his car, tossed his hat on the seat and rubbed his crew cut.
He pulled back into traffic, his mind no longer on roadside accidents. He was thinking about what his wife would be making for supper, about taking the kids to the pool afterward.
And when was his brother coming to town? He looked at the date window on his watch. He frowned. Was that right? A glance at his cell phone confirmed that, yes, today was June 25.
That was curious. Whoever had left the roadside cross had made a mistake. He remembered that the date crudely written on the cardboard disk was June 26, Tuesday, tomorrow.
Maybe
the poor mourners who'd left the memorial had been so upset they'd jotted the date down wrong.
Then the images of the eerie cross faded, though they didn't vanish completely and,
as the officer headed down the highway home, he drove a bit more carefully.
# # #
The faint light — the light of a ghost, pale green — danced just out of her reach.
If she could only get to it . . .
If she could only reach the ghost she'd be safe.
The glow, floating in the dark of the car's trunk, dangled tauntingly above her feet, which were duct-taped
together, as were her hands.
A ghost . . .
Another piece of tape was pasted over her mouth and she was sucking in stale air through her nose, rationing it,
as if the trunk of her Camry held only so much.
A painful bang as the car hit a pothole. She gave a brief, muted scream.
Other hints of light intruded
occasionally: the dull red glow of the brake light, the turn signal. No other illumination from outside; the hour was close to 1:00 a.m.
The luminescent ghost rocked back and forth. It was the emergency trunk release: a glow-in-the-dark hand pull emblazoned with a comical image of a man escaping from the car.
But it remained just out of reach of her feet.
Tammy Foster had forced the crying to stop. The sobs had begun just after her attacker came up behind her in the
shadowy parking lot of the club, slapped tape on her mouth, taped her hands behind her back and shoved her into the trunk. He'd bound her feet as well.
Frozen in panic, the
seventeen-year-old had thought: He doesn't want me to see him. . . . That's good. He doesn't want to kill me.
He just wants to scare me. That's all.
She'd
surveyed the trunk, spotting the dangling ghost. She'd tried to grip it with her feet but it slipped out from between her shoes. Tammy was in good shape, soccer and cheerleading. But, because of the
awkward angle, she could keep her feet raised for only a few seconds.
The ghost eluded her.
The car pressed on. With every passing yard, she felt more and
more despair. Tammy Foster began to cry again.
Don't, don't . . . Your nose'll clog up, you'll choke. Don't!
She forced herself to stop.
She was supposed to be home at midnight. She'd be missed by her mother — if she wasn't drunk on the couch, pissed about some problem with her latest boyfriend.
Missed by
her sister, if the girl wasn't online or on the phone. Which of course she was.
Clank.
The same sound as earlier: the bang of metal as he loaded something
into the backseat.
She thought of some scary movies she'd seen. Gross, disgusting ones. Torture, murder, Involving tools.
Don't think about that. Tammy
focused on the dangling green ghost of the trunk release.
And heard a new sound. The sea.
Finally they stopped and he shut the engine off. In the silence
she could clearly hear the ocean.
The lights went out.
The car rocked as he shifted in the driver's seat. What was he doing? Now she heard the throaty croak
of seals nearby. They were at a beach, which at this time of night, around here, would be completely deserted.
One of the car doors opened and closed. And a second opened. The
clank of metal from the backseat.
Torture . . . tools.
The door slammed shut, hard.
And Tammy Foster broke. She dissolved into sobs,
struggling to suck in more lousy air. "No, please, please!" she cried, though the words were filtered through the tape and came out as a sort of moan.
Tammy began
running through every prayer she could remember as she waited for the click of the trunk.
The sea crashed. The seals hooted.
She was going to die.
"Mommy . . ."
But then . . . nothing.
The trunk didn't pop, the car door didn't open again, she heard no footsteps
approaching. After three minutes she controlled the crying. The panic diminished.
Five minutes passed, and he hadn't opened the trunk.
Ten.
Tammy gave a faint, mad laugh.
It was just a scare. He wasn't going to kill her or rape her. It was a practical joke.
She was smiling
beneath the tape, when the car rocked, ever so slightly. Her smile faded. It rocked again, a gentle push-pull, though stronger than the first time. She heard a splash and felt a shudder. Tammy knew an
ocean wave had struck the front end of the car.
Oh, my God, no . . . He'd left the car on the beach, with high tide coming in!
The car settled into the sand, as the ocean undermined the tires.
No! One of her worst fears was drowning. And being stuck in a confined space like this . . .
it was unthinkable. Tammy began to kick at the trunk lid.
But there was, of course, no one to hear except the seals.
The water was now sloshing hard against the sides of the Toyota.
The ghost . . .
Somehow she had to pull the trunk release lever. She worked off her shoes and tried again, her head pressing hard against the carpet, agonizingly lifting her feet toward the glowing pull. She got them on either side of it, pressed hard, her stomach muscles quivering.
Now!
Her legs cramping, she eased the ghost downward.
A tink . . .
Yes! It worked!
But then she moaned in horror. The trunk pull had come away in her feet, without opening the trunk. She stared at the green ghost lying near her. He must've cut the wire! After he'd dumped her into the
trunk, he'd cut it. The release pull had been dangling in the eyelet, no longer connected to the latch cable.
She was trapped.
Please, somebody, Tammy
prayed again. To God, to a passerby, even to her kidnapper, who might show her some mercy.
But the only response was the indifferent gurgle of saltwater as it began seeping into
the trunk.
# # #
The California Bureau of Investigation's west central regional headquarters is in a nondescript modern building identical to those of the adjacent insurance companies and software consulting firms, all
tucked neatly away behind hills and the elaborate vegetation of Central Coast California.
Kathryn Dance and Michael O'Neil climbed from his unmarked Crown Vic.
Dance, a trim woman in her thirties, today wore her dark blond hair as she often did, in a French braid, the feathery tail end bound with a bright blue tie her daughter had selected that morning
and tied into a careful bow. Dance was in a long, pleated black skirt and matching jacket over a white blouse. Black ankle boots with two-inch heels — footwear she'd admired for months but been able to
resist buying only until they had gone on sale.
O'Neil was in one of his three or four civilian configurations: chinos and powder blue shirt, no tie. His jacket was dark blue, in
a faint plaid pattern.
Dance slung her purse over her shoulder and hefted her bulging computer bag — which her daughter had dubbed "Mom's purse annex," after the girl had
learned what annex meant — and she and O'Neil walked into the building.
Inside they headed immediately to where she knew her team would be assembled: her office, in the
portion of CBI known as the Gals' Wing, or "GW" — owing to the fact that it was populated exclusively by Dance, fellow agent Connie Ramirez, as well as their assistant, Maryellen Kresbach, and
Grace Yuan, the Bureau administrator, who kept the entire building humming like a timepiece. The name of the wing derived from an unfortunate comment by an equally unfortunate, and now former, CBI agent,
who coined the designation while trying to press his cleverness on a date he was touring around the headquarters.
Everyone on the GW still debated if he — or one of his dates —
had ever found all the feminine hygiene products Dance and Ramirez had seeded into his office, briefcase and car.
Dance and O'Neil now greeted Maryellen. The cheerful and
indispensable woman could easily run both a family and the professional lives of her charges without a bat of one of her darkly mascaraed eyelashes. She also was the best baker Dance had ever met.
"Morning, Maryellen. Where are we?"
Maryellen gave a pleased laugh. "Okay, I called Charles again and left another message. Honestly." she sighed. "He wasn't picking up. TJ and Rey are inside. Oh, Deputy O'Neil, one of your people is here from MCSO."
"Thanks. You're a dear."
In Dance's office wiry young TJ Scanlon was perched in her chair. The redheaded agent leapt up. "Hi, boss. How'd
the audition go?"
He meant the deposition.
"I was a star." Then she delivered the bad news about the immunity hearing.
The agent scowled. He too had known the perp and was nearly as adamant as Dance about winning a conviction.
TJ was good at his job, though he was the most unconventional agent in
a law enforcement organization noted for its conventional approach and demeanor. Today he was wearing jeans, a polo shirt and plaid sports coat — madras, a pattern on some faded shirts in her father's
storage closet. TJ owned one tie, as far as Dance had been able to tell, and it was an outlandish Jerry Garcia model. TJ suffered from acute nostalgia for the 1960s. In his office two lava lamps bubbled
merrily away.
Dance and he were only a few years apart, but there was a generational gap between them. Still, they clicked professionally, with a bit of mentor- mentee thrown in.
Though TJ tended to run solo, which was against the grain in CBI, he'd been filling in for Dance's regular partner — still down in Mexico on a complicated extradition case.
Quiet
Rey Carraneo, a newcomer to the CBI, was about as opposite to TJ Scanlon as one could be. In his late twenties, with dark, thoughtful features, he today wore a gray suit and white shirt on his lean
frame. He was older in heart than in years, since he'd been a beat cop in the cowboy town of Reno, Nevada, before moving here with his wife for the sake of his ill mother. Carraneo held a coffee cup in a
hand that bore a tiny scar in the Y between the thumb and forefinger; it was where a gang tat had resided not too many years ago. Dance considered him to be the calmest and most focused of all the
younger agents in the office and she sometimes wondered, to herself only, if his days in the gang had contributed to that.
The deputy from the Monterey County Sheriff's Office,
the MCSO — typically crew cut and with a military bearing — introduced himself and explained what had happened. A local teenager had been kidnapped from a parking lot in downtown Monterey, off Alvarado,
early that morning. Tammy Foster had been bound and tossed into her own car trunk. The attacker drove her to a beach outside of town and left her to drown in high tide.
Dance
shivered at the thought of what it must've been like to lie cramped and cold as the water rose in the confined space.
"It was her car?" O'Neil asked, sitting in one of
Dance's chairs and rocking on the back legs — doing exactly what Dance told her son not to do (she suspected Wes had learned the practice from O'Neil). The legs creaked under his weight.
"That's right, sir."
"What beach?"
"Down the coast, south of the Highlands."
"Deserted?"
"Yeah, nobody around. No wits."
"Witnesses at the club where she got snatched?" Dance asked.
"Negative. And no security cameras in the parking lot."
Dance and O'Neil took this in. She said, "So he needed other wheels near where he
left her. Or an accomplice."
"Crime scene found some footsteps in the sand, headed for the highway. Above the tide level. But the sand was too loose. No idea of tread or
size. But definitely only one person."
O'Neil asked, "And no signs of a car pulling off the road to pick him up? Or one hidden in the bushes nearby?"
"No, sir. Our people did find some bicycle tread marks, but they were on the shoulder. Could've been made that night, could've been a week old. No tread match. We don't have a bicycle
database."
Hundreds of people biked along the beach in that area daily.
"Motive?"
"No robbery, no sexual assault.
Looks like he just wanted to kill her. Slowly."
Dance exhaled a puffy breath.
"Any suspects?"
"Nope."
Dance then looked at TJ. "And what you told me earlier, when I called? The weird part. Anything more on that?"
"Oh," the fidgety young agent said, "you mean the roadside cross."
# # #
The California Bureau of Investigation has broad jurisdiction but usually is involved only in major crimes, like gang activity, terrorism threats and significant corruption or economic offenses. A single
murder in an area where gangland killings occur at least once a week wouldn't attract any special attention.
But the attack on Tammy Foster was different.
The day before the girl had been kidnapped, a Highway Patrol trooper had found a cross, like a roadside memorial, with the next day's date written on it, stuck in the sand along Highway 1.
When the trooper heard of the attack on the girl, not far off the same highway, he wondered if the cross was an announcement of the kidnapper's intentions. He'd returned and collected
it. The Monterey County Sheriff's Office's Crime Scene Unit found a tiny bit of rose petal in the trunk where Tammy had been left to die — a fleck that matched the roses from the bouquet left with the
cross.
Since on the surface the attack seemed random and there was no obvious motive, Dance had to consider the possibility that the perp had more victims in mind.
O'Neil now asked, "Evidence from the cross?"
His junior officer grimaced. "Truth be told, Deputy O'Neil, the CHP trooper picked it up himself,
didn't want to wait for Crime Scene. Just tossed it and the flowers in his trunk."
"Contaminated?"
"Afraid so. Deputy Bennington said he
did the best he could to process it." Peter Bennington — the skilled, diligent head of the Monterey County Crime Scene lab. "But didn't find anything. Not according to the preliminary. No
prints, except the trooper's. No trace other than sand and dirt. The cross was made out of tree branches. And wired together with florist wire. The disk with the date on it was cut out of cardboard,
looked like. The pen, he said, was generic. And the writing was block printing. Only helpful if we get a sample from a suspect. . . Now, here's a picture of the thing. It's pretty creepy. Kind of like Blair
Witch Project, you know."
"Good movie," TJ said, and Dance didn't know if he was being facetious or not.
They looked at the photo. It was
creepy. The branches like twisted, black bones.
Forensics couldn't tell them anything? Dance had a friend she'd worked with not long ago, Lincoln Rhyme, a private forensic
consultant in New York City. Despite the fact he was a quadriplegic, he was one of the best crime scene specialists in the country. She wondered, if he'd been running the scene, would he have found
something helpful? She suspected he would have. But perhaps the most universal rule in police work was this: You go with what you've got.
She noticed something in the picture. "The roses."
O'Neil got her meaning. "The stems are cut the same length."
"Right. So they probably came from a store, not clipped from somebody's yard."
The senior deputy asked, "Where exactly was the cross?"
"Highway One. Just south of Marina." He touched a location on Dance's wall map.
"Any witnesses to leaving the cross?" Dance now asked the deputy.
"No, ma'am, not according to the CHP. And there are no cameras along that stretch of highway. We're still looking."
"Any stores?" O'Neil
asked, just as Dance took a breath to ask the identical question.
"Stores?"
O'Neil was looking at the map. "On the east side of the highway.
In those strip malls. Some of them have to have cameras. Maybe one was pointed toward the spot. At least we could get a make and model of the car — if he was in one."
"TJ," Dance said, "check that out."
"You got it, boss. There's a good Java House there. One of my favorites."
"I'm so pleased."
A shadow appeared in her doorway. "Ah. Didn't know we were convening here."
Charles Overby, the
recently appointed agent in charge of this CBI branch, walked into her office. In his midfifties, tanned. The pear-shaped man was athletic enough to get out on the golf or tennis courts several times a
week but not so spry to keep up a long volley without losing his breath.
"I've been in my office for . . . well, quite some time."
Dance ignored
TJ's subtle glance at his wristwatch. She suspected that Overby had rolled in a few minutes ago.
"Charles," she said. "Morning. Maybe I forgot to mention where we'd
be meeting. Sorry."
"
Hello, Michael." A nod toward TJ too, whom Overby sometimes gazed at curiously as if he'd never met the junior agent — though that might have just been disapproval of TJ's fashion choices.
Dance had in fact informed Overby of the meeting. On the drive here from the Peninsula Garden hotel, she'd left a message on his voice mail, giving him the troubling news of the
immunity hearing in L.A. and telling him of the plan to get together here, in her office. Maryellen apparently had told him about the meeting too. But the CBI chief hadn't responded."Well. This girl
in the trunk thing . . . the reporters are calling already. I've been stalling. They hate that. Brief me."
Ah, reporters. That explained the man's interest.
Dance told him what they knew at this point, and what their plans were.
"And the cross is connected?" Overby asked. "You're sure?"
"Yep," Dance explained. "Forensics match." She shook her head. "He didn't leave it as a memorial that somebody did die. He left it as an announcement that somebody's going to. And since we have no idea of his motive, I think we have to assume that there'll be more. He's not through yet."
# # #
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