“Not enough to get you guys to actually do something about it.”
This seemed to sting.
“That’s not true. We are doing something. Right now we’re—”
“Anybody ever look into this, like a criminologist or somebody?”
“Yeah. Nick’s wife, Kate—her dad is Dillon Walker, Reed Walker’s dad too, he’s a professor of military history at VMI. He got into this thing a few years back, but he gave it up when his wife got killed.”
“I remember that. Six years ago. I was duty sergeant and took the call. Had to cut what was left of her out of the wreckage. She died in my arms, raving about something she saw in her rearview mirror … had her blood all over me … man, I’ll never forget that night.”
“Never caught the guy either, did you? Guy in the SUV, supposed to have run her off the road?”
“I never believed there was one, Boonie. I think the poor lady was off her meds. She was doing a hundred and forty when she rolled it, according to the OnStar GPS thing, how fast she was going, how fast she was covering the ground. A hundred and forty, easy. Over she goes. OnStar sends the rollover signal and I’m the second car on the scene. Last thing she ever said to me was she uses the mirrors.”
“She uses the mirrors? What the fuck does that mean?”
“No idea. She just kept saying it. She uses the mirrors. But try telling Reed Walker that. He was convinced it was some drunk driver, because one of the witnesses said he thought he saw somebody in a gray Lexus cut her off. He’s out every day in his pursuit car, still looking, stopping every gray Lexus SUV he can find.”
“Reed’s a fucking fruitcake. If he reaches fifty I’ll paint my toes with gentian violet and take up the zither. Anyway, that sort of took the heart out of the professor, and he gave it all up. Other than that, some pencil-neck statistician at MIT did a paper called … wait a minute, I got it memorized … ‘Non-Randomized Scatter Patterns and the Law of Statistical Regression as It Relates to Anomalous Abduction Phenomenology.’ ”
“Fuck me.”
“Roger that. Anyway, in the paper he mentions what he calls the Niceville Disappearances—you know, like the Bermuda Triangle—all in caps, right? Get this—he calls them—wait a minute—you’ll fucking love this, Charlie—an artifact of a Boolean scatter-back loop that created an apparent uptick in disappearance stats that was … shit, wait a minute, I got it here somewhere.”
Boonie scrabbled around in his desk while Charlie, still a cop under it all, waited him out with genuine interest. He had spent a lot of his professional life wondering what the hell was wrong with Niceville for exactly this reason. Boonie found the paper, slipped on his reading glasses, leaned back in his chair.
“Okay. Brace yourself. He called it a Boolean scatter-back loop that created an apparent uptick in disappearance stats that was really just a semantic glitch in the reporting protocols.”
“Fuck me sideways.”
“Roger that too. Wait a minute. Yeah, here we go—he compared the Niceville Disappearances to reports of Alien Abduction—”
“Dumb shit.”
“Not so dumb. Got him on Good Morning America, but the book deal fell through, so I hear, so that was that for the pencil-neck.”
“So how many again, over the years?”
“One hundred and seventy-nine confirmed and completely random SAs. Only seventeen of these incidents have been solved: three sex-related abductions, where the bodies were found, the perp caught and executed—”
“Claude James Picton.”
“Yep. Him. Five more were wives or girlfriends or daughters getting away from bad men, and the rest were random, bankrupts trying for a new life or insurance frauds or prostitutes giving up and going back home. Of the remaining one hundred and sixty-two people—men, women, sometimes kids—not a single trace has ever been found.”
“Shit. That many?”
“That many.”
“Anything ever link them all up?”
Boonie looked very pleased with himself.
“That’s what I was trying to tell you. That’s what we’re doing right now. We’re going over the entire list, we got all these computers, we got people downstairs entering all the stats of every one of these cases, all one hundred and sixty-two, and when they’re done, we’re going to cross-check them all and dig out anything that links them all together. Sound good?”
“Sounds more like a rat-fuck from the get-go, Boonie. These abductions go back how far?”
“Far back as 1928, anyway. Probably longer.”
“So it’s not going to be the same guy doing this, is it?”
“No. Maybe. Might be. Could be. Or maybe his sons.”
“Boonie, all respect, you’re totally whacked.”
“Yeah? Nick Kavanaugh doesn’t think so.”
“What’s Nick got to do with it? He’s not in Missing Persons.”
Boonie looked offended.
“It was his idea.”
“Nick’s? Was it? Got it from Kate’s dad, maybe? Well, I wish him well, then. Nick’s a good man.”
Boonie brooded over the thing for a while, and then let it go.
“Yeah. Nick’s a good cop too, for somebody from away. Nick’s the one told Tig to call us about Crowder. We also heard from Phil Holliman—”
“Byron Deitz’s muscle guy?”
“Yeah. He says Deitz really wants to help, any way he can. Phil says Deitz thinks the driver’s dirty.”
“So’s Byron Deitz,” said Danziger, who didn’t like Deitz at all. “What the fuck business is it of his?”
“BD Securicom does all the intel and security work for Quantum Park. The bank at Gracie holds the payroll for most of Quantum Park. You know that.”
“Yeah. Half their cash draw was on our truck. But Byron Deitz has no need to be sticking his ugly face in. You tell Holliman you’re already looking at the driver?”
“Yeah.”
“Holliman back off?”
Boonie had to think about that.
“Well, he said so.”
“You believe him?”
“No, I don’t, now you come to ask. I don’t trust Phil Holliman. Or Byron Deitz. Deitz is taking this bank thing real personal. No doubt he’d like to get some knuckle-time with Lyle Crowder, just to make sure.”
“Did you tell Holliman where Crowder was?”
Boonie actually went pink.
“Yeah, I let it slip, as a matter of fact.”
“Where is Crowder now?”
“We got him in a sealed ward at Sorrows,” said Boonie, letting it slip again. “Got two guys with him.”
“Good guys?”
“Arnie Sparks and Tom Tibbet.”
“They’re both pretty new, Boonie.”
“Yeah. But they’re who I had to spare. Everybody else is out knocking on snitches and shaking out the whorehouses. Marty Coors has all his guys on it too. Hell, be a good time to rob another bank, all these guys out looking for cop killers.”
“Don’t say that out loud, Boonie, you don’t know who might be listening. One thing, I were you, I’d move this Crowder guy.”
Boonie was quiet for a full minute.
“You really think so, Charlie?”
“I do. I really think—”
Something in his jacket buzzed and then beeped. He looked at the call display, made a sorry-gotta-take-it gesture at Boonie, who grinned and waved him on. Danziger picked up the phone, flicked it open. “Danziger,” he said into the cell.
“Charlie, it’s Coker. I been going through the proceeds,” he said. Danziger made it a point not to glance up at Boonie.
“Is that right?”
“You remember a flat box, two inches thick, stainless steel, maybe ten by eight?”
“Yeah, I believe I do.”
“You figured jewels or some shit, right?”
“Yeah. Say. Hold on a minute, will you?”
He lifted the phone, smiled a big happy smile.
“It’s Coker, Bo
onie. Hey, Coker, I’m down here at Boonie’s place.”
“Yo, Coker,” Boonie called out. “You miserable old fuck. How they hanging?”
Danziger gave Boonie a nice good-old-boy smile so cheerful and friendly it hurt his cheeks and then got back on the phone.
“Boonie wants to know how they hanging?”
A pause.
“Shit. You’re still at Boonie’s?”
“You bet. We’re having some JB and shooting the breeze.”
“Fuck. Well, you can tell Boonie they’re not hanging at all. You can tell him they’ve fully retracted and they took my dick up with them.”
“Yeah. No shit. That’s interesting.”
“No shit. I opened the steel box, Charlie. Now I’m looking at this weird techno-gizmo thing lying here, round and flat, some sort of cyber-robot-Frisbee, and it has a Raytheon GNS logo on it. You figure Raytheon is making robot Frisbees, Charlie, or is this some sorta ultra-top-secret spy shit you stole that is going to jam us deep in the Dumpster of fucking doom with the CIA?”
“That’s something to think about, for sure.”
“That’s not all. I’m staring at this robot-spy-Frisbee and then my cell phone rings.”
“Well, there it is. Look, nice talking—”
“It’s Merle Zane calling. His number anyway, on account of he got cut off. You coming back to help out or you going to play hide-the-floppy with Boonie Hackendorff all day?”
“Well, you give her a big wet kiss from me, okay? Talk at you later.”
He snapped the phone shut, got to his feet.
“Gotta run?” said Boonie, draining his Jim Beam and setting the glass down with a satisfied smile. Danziger stood up, finished his off, came over and placed it gently down on Boonie’s desk, shook Boonie’s hand. Boonie shook back hard enough to jerk Danziger’s chest wound and send a bolt of pain up his throat, but Danziger had other things to think about right now.
“Yeah. Gotta run,” he said, but he managed to keep it down to a walk until he got to the curb.
Nick and Beau Find Time to Reflect
It was past midday—it was turning into a long Saturday shift—by the time they got Brandy Gule and Lemon Featherlight sorted out and Beau Norlett’s butt attended to. He hadn’t been stabbed, he explained in a stage whisper, for Nick’s ears alone—he’d been bitten on the back of his, as he put it, “upper thigh region” while he was carrying Gule, upside down and squalling like a bearcat, to the car—“uncooperative ain’t in it,” said a chastened Beau a while later.
But when the good-looking typist chick from Lacy’s office had come out to see what the screaming was all about, Beau hadn’t found it in him to tell her he’d been bitten on the ass by the skinny Goth chick now kicking the living daylights out of the backseat of their cruiser.
So instead he’d mumbled something vague about being “sorta stabbed like,” at which point she’d turned sharply on her spikes and stalked back inside to relay the happy news to Detective Kavanaugh.
After the initial flurry of talk and countertalk, Beau Norlett availed himself of the facilities in the back of The Probe offices to examine, privately, with the help of the bathroom mirror and a stepladder, the damage done to his “upper thigh region,” which turned out to be a superficial but nasty semicircular wound on his right cheek, now in the process of turning purple.
But no blood had been drawn, and Beau was in no way anxious to lay any sort of a charge on the girl, for reasons blindingly obvious to all, so Nick let that part slide, trying to keep the grin off his face.
This being decided, Lemon Featherlight managed to talk Nick into letting him take Brandy Gule back to her walk-up flat over the needle exchange on Bauxite Row, giving Nick his personal word that she’d be available to him anytime he wanted, and that she was really just sort of a harmless stalker chick with a major thing for him and that he was just trying to keep her safe in a kind of older-wiser-brother-feral-wing-nut-Goth-biker-chick arrangement.
Nick wished him the best of luck with that, and they parted, if not as friends, then as men with a slightly better understanding of each other, and as Nick and Beau rolled the cruiser away from the Miracle Mile, each man had a lot to think about.
Beau rode shotgun, listing severely to his left in order to keep his right butt cheek elevated, and listened with a glum expression to the lecture Nick felt compelled to give him about safe methods for arresting feral biker chicks with excellent teeth and the will to apply them where they could do the most harm, and what might have happened if he’d slung the girl over his shoulder the other way around, her feet hanging down his back, thereby presenting her fangs with a much more sensitive target area than his oversized butt cheeks.
When Nick was finished, as they were wheeling up Long Reach Boulevard on the eastern side of the Tulip, with the rain slacking off and the skies breaking up and the forested hills of The Chase rising on their right, Tallulah’s Wall looming over all of it, Beau, looking as pale as he could manage, said, “Nick, sir, is there any way we could just sorta … kinda …”
Nick knew where this was going.
“I’m sure as shit not telling anyone back at the office that my partner got his entire assal region bitten off by a girl no bigger than a salt shaker, if that’s what’s worrying you.”
Beau worked this through, emerging at last with the shiny new idea that Nick, in spite of recent shameful events, had just referred to him as “my partner.” This put a glow on him that you could read by in the dark.
“Thank you, Nick. It won’t happen again.”
“If it does, I’m getting it on film and it’s going on YouTube. We’re about five minutes from Delia Cotton’s place. You spoke to Missing Persons while I was on the phone to Lacy. What’d you get from them?”
Beau lost his smile, changing into a concentrated professional frown as he pulled out a fat and brand-new black notepad with the logo of the CID embossed on the front, a bright golden disk.
He flipped it open, wincing as a sharp left turn through the stone gates of The Chase shifted his weight onto his right butt cheek, then began to read aloud from his notes.
“Cotton, Delia, DOB 1920—”
“Beau.”
“Yes sir.”
“Just summarize, okay?”
“Summarize?”
“Yeah.”
Beau, disappointed—in a CSI frame of mind, he had written it all out in longhand complete with footnotes—reluctantly put his new notebook back into his suit pocket, took a deep breath.
“Well, mainly she’s all that’s left of the money side of the Cotton family, one of the Founding Four families, eighty-four years old, lives alone at Temple Hill, that’s the name of her house at six eight two Upper Chase Run. Still has a driver’s license, has a 1975 Cadillac Fleetwood, navy blue, in the shop for a busted axle. Missing Persons says her shopping lady, named Alice Bayer, sixty-three, she lives in The Glades, drove by the house early this morning with a load of groceries, there was a pink and lime green ’52 Packard in the drive which she recognized as belonging to an old man who does fix-up and gardening for Miss Cotton, name of Gray Haggard—that’s another one of those Founding Four, isn’t it?”
“The Haggards, the Cottons, the Teagues—”
“And your missus, right, Nick? Missus Kate?”
“Kate’s part Walker, yes.”
“Anyway, Alice Bayer sees the house is all lit up, windows and doors all open, music playing so loud it was rattling the glass—”
“Summarize, Beau.”
“Goes through the house, shuts off the music, sees nothing unusual other than there’s nobody home, far as she can see nothing taken, but she says she all of a sudden got … the jimjams.”
“That means the place gave her a fright.”
“Jimjams? Never heard of them. Anyway, she calls the security people for The Chase—”
“Armed Response. Owned by Byron Deitz.”
“Yep. Armed Response arrives, they do a walk-throug
h, Miss Delia’s gone, no sign of this Gray Haggard guy, no sign of violence. By this time Alice Bayer is having a fit, so one of the security guys takes her back home—she lives on Virtue Place in The Glades and she’ll be happy to talk to us if we want. Armed Response has a call-in-case list and they get on the horn to all those people—she has a book club and all these ladies are it—nobody knows nothing, so Armed Response calls NPD and NPD calls Missing and Missing tells Tig and Tig tags us—how’s that for summarizing?—and here we are.”
Which they were, as they rounded a long tree-shaded curve of cobblestone road lined in black wrought iron covered in vines and Temple Hill, Delia Cotton’s mammoth Victorian pile, emerged massively from behind a wall of willows and live oaks draped in Spanish moss.
A red and black Armed Response Jeep and a slate gray NPD patrol car were parked on either side of the open gate, two uniforms leaning side by side on the hood of the patrol car, a solid bald-headed young black man in the complicated red and white regalia of Armed Response and an older white woman with red cheeks and rich red hair and shiny gold sergeant stripes on her dark blue NPD tunic.
They both watched as Nick and Beau rolled up in their navy blue Crown Vic. Across the street a small crowd of Chase residents had gathered, mostly elderly people, but a few young couples. They all had that avid, slightly glazed look civilians get when the cops show up.
The lady sergeant pushed herself off the hood and came around to Nick’s side, smiling as she recognized him.
“Nick, old horse, you’re catching this?”
“I am, Mavis. You’re looking lovely today.”
The sergeant rolled her eyes, smiling down at him. She had strong arms and big shoulders and a beefy body and looked like most sergeants look—cool, amiable, calm, risky to piss off.
Lovely? Possibly not.
Nick smiled back, introduced Beau Norlett to Staff Sergeant Mavis Crossfire of the Niceville Police Department.
Beau leaned across to shake her hand, got it well and truly shook, managed to get it back mostly unmangled.
“So, Nick, why you?” asked the sergeant, puzzled. “This is something for MP, I woulda thought?”
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