Niceville

by Carsten Stroud

  No one moved a muscle.

  Outside, the shafts of sparkling bright sunlight faded into pale golden beams, filling the earthy, comfortable room with a gentle amber glow.

  “I … did this,” he said, after a long time.

  He lifted his hands to his face, started to sob. Twyla stepped in and ripped his hands away, leaning down to speak directly into his center.

  “You’re dead to me. You understand me?”

  “But … Twyla …”

  “No tears, no tears from you. You’re only crying because you got caught. All those years, you made Bluebell and me feel like whores, just because we were growing up into women. You treated us like lepers, never hugged us, never said we were pretty, never made us feel …”

  Her voice choked into silence.

  She pulled herself together, stood up straight again.

  “And all the time, you were doing … that,” she said, her hand sweeping out towards the television, the sudden motion making Littlebasket flinch as if she was about to hit him again.

  “Listen to me now, Dad. Listen and remember. You will never know what this has done to me. You will never know what you took away from me—”

  Littlebasket whispered something barely audible. Twyla cocked her head, her mouth tightening.

  “Bluebell? Have I told Bluebell? No, I have not told Bluebell. I am not going to tell Bluebell, now or ever. She’s the reason why I’m not going to tell anyone about this. I don’t want her to know. You’ll have to find some way to explain why you’re dead to me. I don’t care what it is.”

  She stopped, seemed to center herself.

  “But one thing will happen. Bluebell must never have to know what I know. That’s one thing you can do. One good thing.”

  Littlebasket’s mouth was working, trying to form some kind of an apology.

  Twyla brushed it aside.

  “You will find a way for her not to ever know. If you decide to shoot yourself, don’t leave a note explaining it all. If you decide to crash your plane, just go do it and let everybody go on thinking what a great guy you are. I don’t care about any of that. You’re dead to me from the moment I leave this house. Tell Bluebell anything you want. Just make sure that Bluebell never knows about those pictures. Say that you understand me … say it … Daddy.”

  The word rocked him and his tears suddenly became much more convincing.

  He nodded and covered his eyes again.

  She stepped back, looked over at Coker and Danziger, both of whom were really wishing they had had a lot more to drink than a couple of glasses of Jim Beam and a bucket of Valiums.

  Coker and Danziger exchanged looks, and Danziger came over to the old man, stood in front of him. “Listen up, old-timer. Listen up. Shit. Coker, he’s turning into a puddle of warm piss here. Pour the old man some more tequila.”

  Coker poured them all some tequila, handed a glass of it to Morgan Littlebasket, for whom he had no feelings of any kind at all. This thing here, this deer tick—squashing him wasn’t worth the stain on the sole of his boot.

  He walked away, stood beside Twyla, and she eased herself under his arm, spent and shaking now that it was done.

  Danziger took his glass, sipped at it, took a knee in front of the old man.

  “These shots are small-file jpegs taken from a digital hard drive, or a mainframe, right?”

  No word, just the head moving up and down. Yes.

  “But when you started doing this, years back, there were no digital recorders, so at some point you took the earlier images and had them scanned into digital shots, right?”

  Yes.

  “And then you switched to a digital recorder so you didn’t have to use film, right?”

  Yes.

  “How did you get the pictures scanned? Nobody at a camera shop would have done that. They’d have called the cops. So you did it all yourself?”

  Yes.

  “Okay. Big question here. Lie and we find out, Twyla’s not the only one you’re going to have to worry about. Did you ever take any of the shots and sell them? Put them on the Internet to trade with other kiddy-porn freaks or sell them to a porn mag?”

  The man looked up, a spark there, and then gone again. “No. Never.”

  “Twyla got an e-mail today, with about fifty shots taken from that camera you got rigged in her bathroom. Looks like it’s been there for years. How many years?”

  Lips dry and working, eyes down.

  “Since Bluebell was fifteen.”

  Danziger glanced at Twyla.

  “Ten years ago,” she said, a harsh whisper.

  “Ten years? That right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is the camera still there?”

  “No. I took it all out when Twyla moved away.”

  “When was that?”

  “Two … two and a half years ago.”

  “Did you throw the recorder away?”

  “No. I wanted to, but then … I didn’t.”

  “Is the camera still in the house?”

  “Yes. In a trunk. In the attic.”

  Danziger looked at Coker, who looked at Twyla, and they both left the room.

  “These shots here, they look like they stopped a while back. Like when the girls were younger. The shot where Twyla is helping Bluebell shampoo her hair, in the shower together—did you see that?”

  “Yes. I … I remember it.”

  “It looks like the last shot in the series that Twyla got. I want you to place it in time.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if you never let those shots out, then somebody else did. If we can figure out who that was, then Coker and Twyla and I are going to go see him and make sure he stops doing shit like this. So can you place that shot in time?”

  Silence, but he was thinking.

  “I think … it was Bluebell’s birthday. She was going to have her hair done special. Twyla was helping her in the bathroom.”

  “Which birthday?”

  “Her twentieth. She was going to be a full-grown woman. In our clan, twenty is the age—”

  “Her twentieth. What date?”

  “Bluebell’s birthday is the seventeenth of July.”

  “So after that date, you were still taking shots of the girls, but none of those shots are in the e-mail Twyla got. So maybe that’s just because he never sent them, or maybe that was all he got when he got into your camera. It’s all we got to go on right now. Bluebell is twenty-five, right?”

  “Yes.”

  Coker and Twyla came back into the room, Coker carrying a large digital recorder. Twyla was carrying a box of mini-disks and looking sickly.

  “So can you remember anybody coming into the house around that time five years ago? Was there a party, where maybe somebody could have gotten upstairs and found the camera?”

  “No. The party was at the Pavilion.”

  “How about cleaning staff? Do you have a cleaning lady?”

  “No. Lucy did it all.”

  “Did you have any kind of repairs done to the place around then? Any construction workers in?”

  “I can’t … I don’t think so.”

  “Coker, any dates on those disks?”

  Coker took the box, opened it, flicked through the plastic cases. “Yeah. Most of them have labels.”

  “Jesus,” said Twyla in a whisper, and then she walked away down the hall and went into a bathroom in the hall, closing the door behind her.

  “See if there’s anything for August five years back.”

  Silence from Littlebasket while Coker flicked through the cases. He pulled out one.

  “Here’s one labeled for August and September, same year.”

  “The recorder still work?”

  Coker checked it.

  “Battery’s flat.”

  “Does it have an AC converter?”

  More digging.

  “Yep. Hold on, I’ll see what we got.”

  He plugged in the converter, inserted the disk, stared down a
t the flip-out LED screen. Twyla came back into the great room, wiping her lips with a towel, her forehead damp, her hair brushed back.

  Littlebasket stared at her until he realized that she was never going to look at him again in this life or the next and then he lowered his head.

  “Here’s something,” said Coker, handing the box to Danziger. In the screen a man was bending over the shower drain, on his hands and knees, only his back visible, a dark-haired white male with a thick neck and a puffy waistline, the usual plumber’s hairy-assed butt crack, wearing some sort of uniform jacket with a logo.

  The logo was blurred, the man moving energetically, prying up a shower drain for some unknown reason.

  “Go to the next frame,” said Danziger.

  Coker hit the tab, and the images jumped a bit, and now the logo was more visible, a white oval with black lettering.

  “That’s Niceville Utility Commission,” said Danziger, turning to the old man. “Looks like you had a service call that August from the NUC. You remember that?”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “It might be on his computer,” said Twyla. “He keeps a record of all his financial transactions on a Quicken program. Archives it every year. Let me go see.”

  Twyla left, went down the hall, apparently to some sort of home office at the rear of the house. She was back in less than a minute.

  “He paid $367.83 for an energy audit from the NUC on Friday, August 9.”

  “Energy audit? So the guy’s no plumber. Why was the guy in the shower stall?” asked Coker.

  “Any name on the bill?”

  Twyla shook her head.

  “Just the bank transaction. The actual receipt might be in the box of tax receipts for that year. He always took care to save everything, if the IRS ever wanted to jack him up.”

  “Those boxes in the house?” Danziger asked.

  “Yes,” said the old man. “In the basement.”

  Coker sighed, looked at Twyla, and they left the room again, this time going downstairs. Danziger went back at it.

  “You remember anything at all about this energy deal, Morgan?” The old man went away for a time, his red eyes glazed and unfocused.

  “He was young, a middle-sized guy, black-haired, white guy, pale white skin. Homely, but not mean-looking. Ordinary. He was all over the house. Went everywhere. Took several hours to do it all—main floor and basement, the attic. I never thought … all those guys are bonded, you know? You never think. He had a funny name. Short. It reminded me of some kind of beer.”

  “What, like Coors? Schlitz, Beck’s?”

  “Short, like that, maybe Beck’s … but … I can’t remember. I can’t think. Are you a policeman?”

  “Yeah. But you’re not getting charged.”

  “It’s not that. Do you think … in your experience, do you think she’ll ever forgive me?”

  Danziger looked at the pitiful old man, seeing his desperate need for comfort, for sympathy, the hope of redemption, for anything at all—no matter how small—to ease the sting, the burning shame.

  “Not a chance,” said Danziger. “I were you, you sorry son of a bitch, I’d eat my gun.”

  The rest was silence, and the old man wheezing, until Twyla and Coker came back into the room, Coker holding a rumpled receipt with the NUC logo over a row of figures and a handwritten signature along the bottom line.

  C. A. Bock, NUC Energy Auditor

  “Bock,” said the old man, hearing Coker read it out. “That was the name. He called himself Tony. He was a nice young man. You don’t think he’s the one who …”

  “I don’t know,” said Danziger, taking out his cell phone. “But we’re sure as hell going to ask him.”

  Nick Drills Down

  Nick was at the house, in the backyard, facing away from the conservatory, staring out into the lindens where Kate said she had seen the woman in the bloody dress, but he wasn’t thinking about her right now.

  He was listening.

  He was listening to a detective sergeant with the Lexington, Virginia PD, older, a calm baritone voice, some gravel in it. Nick was trying to visualize him. His name was Linus Calder, and he was standing in the doorway of Dillon Walker’s office in the Preston Library at VMI, the cop talking to Nick on his cell, describing what he was looking at.

  Kate and Beau and Lemon Featherlight were in the conservatory, in a row all facing out, all watching Nick in the twilight of Kate’s garden with his cell phone at his ear, every line of his body as tight as piano wire, intensity in every angle of it, but in a still place, his mind far away in Virginia, seeing through another man’s eyes.

  “No sign of a struggle, Detective Kavanaugh. Office in order, nothing broken. Papers on his desk, held down by a model cannon, window open, but onto the parade square, and he’s four floors up. He always worked alone here, according to the cleaners—place is closed on Saturday afternoons when the cadets are out on an exercise.”

  “And his quarters?”

  “Been all over them. Nothing out of line, according to the staff. I mean, there’s no sign that anything is wrong in any of this—”

  “Except that he’s disappeared and nobody knows where to?”

  “What can I tell you, Detective Kav—”

  “Nick. Call me Nick.”

  “Nick. Call me Linus. What can I tell you? Guy’s seventy-four, a prof, lives alone, he goes for a walk, he doesn’t have to check in … only reason we’re having this talk, to be honest, is you’re a cop and I’m a cop and your wife is a very persuasive lady too, and now we’ve got her brother, who’s also a cop—what’s his name—”

  “Reed Walker. He drives an interceptor for the State Patrol.”

  “Now I hear we got him racing up here in his pursuit cruiser, and he’s already called me four times to let me know how far away he is.”

  “Reed’s a good kid. He just can’t sit still.”

  “Well, State guy or no, he’ll be sitting on his ass in his car with a box of donuts and staying out of my way. I’m not having some wild-ass highway cop cowboy my investigation. I mean, Professor Walker’s only been off the grid for a few hours—”

  “Which he’s never done before—”

  “And he always answers his cell when your wife calls him, even if he’s in a lecture, and they always talk on Saturdays—”

  “Have for years, every Saturday at five—”

  “Except for today, when they just talked a while ago, and he said he’d be coming down there in about four hours. I get that, but—look, you’re a detective, you know how this thing works—unless he’s a kid, or diagnosed as having Alzheimer’s or dementia, which he isn’t, then all we can do is ask the uniform guys to keep an eye out and we wait for him to show up—”

  “Or not—”

  “Especially not. As soon as we get to not then the machine kicks in. You’d do the same thing.”

  “I’m on a Missing right now. Two old people went missing last night or this morning, here in Niceville. Both of them knew Kate’s dad very well. The guy was in the Big Red One, like within a mile of him at Omaha Beach, and the lady was a family friend. You see where I’m going with this?”

  “Pattern.”

  “Yeah. Look, Linus, I know this is crazy, but look around the office—”

  “Nick, with respect, what the hell you think I’m doing? Playing with my dick? I’m looking—”

  Silence, while Nick listened to the guy breathing, rapid and wheezy, like he had asthma or a cold.

  “What is it?”

  “I’m just … okay, the floor here …”

  Nick’s chest froze solid, but he said nothing.

  “There’s like …”

  The man was moving around, stepping back. Nick could hear his shoes on the floor.

  “Okay, there’s like a stain here, like something got spilled on the floor and took the varnish off—”

  Nick couldn’t help himself.

  “Is the floor warm?”

  “Warm? You
mean, like, to the touch?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hold on a minute”—creaking leather, the man’s wheezy breath coming shorter—“Yeah, it is. I mean, you can feel it pretty—”

  “Try outside the stain. See if the stain is warmer than the rest of the floor.”

  More rustling.

  “Yeah. Yeah, it is—okay, hold on. There’s something under the desk here … rolled under …”

  More creaking, the man breathing hard as he reached under the desk, Nick wondering why people always held their breath when they were reaching down to pick something up off the floor. It was why their faces got all—

  “Little metal rods. Sorta corroded.”

  Nick’s mind went on a short trip to Tahiti because it was a long way from here and Tahiti was supposed to be a real nice place to get away from all the bad things in life, but then Nick had to go get it and drag it all the way back to here and now.

  “Little rods. Okay. How many?”

  “Let’s see. Five … no, six.”

  “Steel rods? About two inches long?”

  “Yeah. That’s right. Stainless steel.”

  He had to convince the guy, not just say it right out loud.

  “Kate’s dad had a medical every year. At the VMI clinic. I’m going to tell you something, going to sound weird as shit, so you’re going to need to know I’m not crazy. I want you, after I tell you what I’m thinking, I want you to go over to the clinic and ask to see Dillon Walker’s X-rays—”

  “Nick, I’m like off duty in a half hour—”

  “Dillon Walker served in the Hundred and First Airborne. He dropped into France on D-Day. He landed on a stone fence and shattered his right femur. They had to put pins in it to hold it together. They’ve been there ever since.”

  A silence, but it was that special kind of cop silence that you hear while the cop is thinking oh please God not another fucking fruitcake.

  “That’s why I want you to go over to the clinic, Linus. Take the pins and go over to the clinic and if they’re not the same damn pins Dillon Walker had in his femur then you’re right and I’m just another fucking fruitcake.”

  “Hey. I wasn’t thinking that.”

  “Yes you were. Will you do it?”