Niceville (21 page)

“When’d the trailer go over?”

Boonie didn’t have to look this up.

“Fourteen forty-one hours, roughly.”

“And they hit the bank when?”

“Forty-two minutes later.”

“While every law enforcement officer in three states was farting around the wreckage playing grab-ass and talking on their radios. Yes?”

Boonie had to smile at that.

“I’m not admitting to any personal grab-ass.”

“I’m speaking metaphorically, Boonie.”

“Well, if you think we haven’t looked at Lyle Crowder, you’d be wrong. We’re looking at him right now. And all we’re seeing is an amiable young guy with no family who worked real hard for Steiger for six years and before that did a lot of freelance trucking with his own Kenworth until the recession came and the bank took his rig away.”

“Yeah? What bank was that?”

“Not the First Third, Charlie.”

“So credit-wise, he’s a fuckup?”

“Hey, this economy, so’s Jesus Christ. Why are you picking on this poor damn driver, Charlie?”

Danziger’s expression got more stony.

“Because no matter how this comes out, Fargo’s going to look like shit. My division especially. Even if we all show up as clean as a rubber ducky’s dingle. Fargo’s still going to take the hit with the general trade. And so will I. Remember, I washed out of State—”

Boonie sat up, waved a finger in the air.

“No. You got injured in the line of duty, Charlie, and got all tangled up with hillbilly heroin on account of the pain. Nobody blamed you for that.”

“I don’t see a badge on my fucking chest,” Danziger said, flushing red.

Boonie sympathized with him for a while, and Danziger’s mood cooled down. Everybody knew that Charlie Danziger had been screwed by the Internal Affairs guys. Boonie lived in fear of it happening to him. So did everybody in law enforcement. Criminals occasionally showed mercy. IAD did not. If they set out to rat-fuck you, you could consider yourself rat-fucked.

“Sorry I blowed up a bit,” said Danziger, after Boonie had topped up their glasses. His anger had been very real but he never liked to let it show, especially since the Gracie bank robbery had been his way of getting back at IAD and all the rest of those Rear Echelon Motherfuckers at HQ.

“No harm done,” said Boonie, looking carefully at Charlie over the lip of his glass. “When are you back at work?”

“Monday morning,” said Danziger, looking past Boonie’s shoulders at the glittering sweep of towers and pillars that made up Cap City, thinking maybe when all this blew over he’d come down here and buy himself a real nice condo with a high-up view of the Tulip and the Cap City skyline.

“While you’re here, can you think of anybody can put you in Metairie yesterday?”

Danziger gave it some thought, or at least he looked like he was giving it some thought.

“Not right off. I moor the pirogue at Canticle Key. People were coming and going. You could ask Cyril—wait a minute. Wait a minute.”

Boonie looked happy to wait until Judgment Day.

“I bought gas. Couple of times on my way back up. I likely got the receipts in my car. That’ll have the time date, the location on it. I mean, doesn’t put
me
in the car, but it’s something.”

Danziger wouldn’t have been offering gas receipts at all if he hadn’t made a point of buying gas on his way home from Metairie the week before and then changing the dates with a scanner and Photoshop and printing them out again. He’d bought the gas from two little mom-and-pop stations three hundred miles apart, knowing that the receipts were printed on scrap paper and that neither mom nor pop kept any kind of accurate records. Risky, but offering them didn’t mean that Boonie would remember to actually collect them. What Boonie would remember was the offer, which was all Danziger really wanted.

“Got any credit card receipts?”

“Don’t use credit cards anymore, Boonie. I mean, I got ’em, but I don’t like ’em.”

Boonie leaned over, scribbled something on a sheet, hesitated, looked up with a frown.

“Can-tik—what? How you spell that?”

Danziger spelled out
Canticle Key
and then gave him the phone number of the gas tender, Cyril Fond Du Lac, an amiable old Cajun who would quite probably back up Danziger’s story because his days and nights were all a blur of marijuana and whiskey anyway. Nothing Cyril could say would hurt Danziger, and might even help. In the meantime, what with drawing attention to Crowder and offering up the flash drive and the gas receipts and generally being up-front and cooperative, Danziger felt he was looking as innocent as a man could look.

“Well, thanks for coming in,” said Boonie, lifting the flash drive. “Okay if I call you, I see anything on this that looks interesting?”

“Yeah. I’ll be on my cell, anytime you need me, don’t care when, day or night. I want these assholes as much as you do. You sure you don’t wanna go sweat that Crowder puke a bit, just to see what comes out?”

“You’re not the only guy thinks we should look harder at him. I got a call from Tig Sutter—”

“That old warthog. How’s he doin’?”

“Sounded busy. They got a whack of shit happening in Niceville. Some wealthy old broad gone missing, they caught that rapist who did
those two girls on Patton’s Hard, and Nick Kavanaugh thinks he might have a lead in the Rainey Teague case.”

“Good for him. It don’t surprise me. You were on that Teague thing too, weren’t you?”

Boonie’s shining face dimmed.

“I was.”

“Ever make any sense of it?”

“You don’t want to know what I think about that case, Charlie.”

“Sure I do.”

Boonie looked up at the president’s picture as if he could see an answer there.

“It’s complicated. You
sure
you want to know?”

“I got nothing better to do. You got any more bourbon?”

Boonie poured them each a hefty splash, brought Danziger his, and sat back down.

“Okay. Here goes. Brace yourself for some stats I been putting together—”

“
You
been putting together?”

“I’m not as dumb as I look, Charlie.”

“I never thought you were, Boonie.”

Boonie ignored that.

When he spoke, it was in the voice of a completely different Boonie, Boonie the solid FBI investigator under the good-old-boy facade.

“Okay. This is the backgrounder. Your average town the size of Niceville, population between twenty and thirty thousand people, once you set aside the custody dispute kidnaps and the occasional incident like a teen having a fight with her dad over a curfew and taking Greyhound Therapy and being found six weeks later at her ex-boyfriend’s house in Duluth—”

“Lyla Boone.”

“Lyla Boone, exactly. So the average American town has maybe one or two suspected stranger abductions every five years, most of which turn out, after some digging, to have some connection between the victim and the perp. Like, say, a gang banger who gets kidnapped and murdered by a member of a rival gang, a guy he doesn’t know, then his case would get tagged by us as a case of stranger abduction, but then, once the facts get worked out, the file would later get amended—”

“But it
never
does get amended, does it?”

“Nope. Least hardly ever. Human error. Not enough resources. So it goes into the stats as a stranger abduction. Along with thousands more just like that across the country. So all the civilians and all the media dinks are thinking, fuck, our children aren’t safe, the streets are fulla pervos slavering after every little Binky and Boopsie. But the fact is, Charlie, real honest-to-God stranger abductions are extremely rare. A one in a million shot. So how many stranger abductions you figure Niceville has?”

“I don’t know. I did wonder about it. When I was on the job, I figured we had a lot more than made any kind of sense.”

“Damn right. Niceville has logged one hundred and seventy-nine confirmed and completely random SAs since records first started being kept back in 1928. This is a disappearance rate of, like, a little over two a year, Charlie, which is completely whacked. It’s so far above the national average that Niceville gets cited every year at the FBI training courses at Quantico—”

“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.”