Niceville (40 page)

“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 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?”

More silence.

“Okay. What the hell. I’ll do it. Will you be at this number?”

“Yes. Anytime. Day or night.”

“You’re serious, right? I mean, if what you’re saying is true—”

“You’re screwing around in a crime scene.”

“Oh jeez,” said Linus, and clicked off.

Nick put the cell in his pocket, drew a long breath, and turned around to walk back to the house and tell Kate something other than what he firmly believed to be true, which was that her father was as dead and gone as Gray Haggard and how it was done was a complete mystery to him.

She opened the door and stepped out to meet him halfway and as soon as she looked at him she knew what was in his heart. She dropped to her knees and began to cry, and Nick stepped in and held her.

“That,” said Beau, watching from the conservatory, “doesn’t look good.”

“It isn’t,” said Lemon Featherlight.

“What the hell’s going on in this town?” asked Beau. A rhetorical question, but Lemon tried to answer it anyway.

“Whatever it is,” he said, watching Kate Kavanaugh trying to pull herself together, “it’s been going on for a long time. Too long.”

Kate came in, gave both of them a harried, puzzled look, as if wondering what to do with two strangers in her house.

Both men saw it.

“Nick, I think maybe I should turn the cruiser in. I can drop Lemon off somewhere?”

Nick thought about it, about the day. He was done, and Beau looked the same. Lemon was quivering with a drive to do … something. Kate was about to collapse. The old line from the Bible came back:

Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof
.

“Lemon, you said you wanted to take a look at Sylvia Teague’s computer. At what she was doing with the Ancestry program. You still feel like doing that?”

“Yes,” said Lemon, “I do. Is it all still there, at their house?”

“Yes. Kate’s Rainey’s legal guardian. She’s kept the house up. Everything’s just the way it was when it all started. Wait a second.”

Nick took out his notebook, wrote down a string of numbers, ripped the sheet out and handed it to Lemon.

“That’s the entry code to Sylvia’s house.”

Lemon looked at it.

“It’s different.”

“Yeah. Had it changed. Beau, will you drop him off there? Pick up some beer and a pizza on the way, okay, Lemon? You have some money?”

“I’m fine,” said Lemon. “But I hate pizza and I hate beer. They’ve got a wine cellar and I’ll call out for some KFC.”

“Okay. Beau, let the NPD patrol guys for Garrison Hills know that we’ve got someone at the Teague house. I don’t want them kicking in the door because some nosy neighbor sees a light on.”

“I will. What about the rest of it?”

“You mean Delia and Gray Haggard? Tig’s had the house locked down. Crime Scene is already out of there. Dale Jonquil and the Armed Response guys are sitting in the driveway. NPD is out looking for any sign of Delia. It’s getting dark, and we’re all dead tired. Tig went home an hour ago. Nothing else is going to happen on that file until tomorrow. You go home, see to May. Lemon, you want somebody to go see if Brandy is okay?”

“I spoke to her this afternoon. She’s at her place over the needle exchange. She’ll stay there.”

“Hope her teeth are all okay,” said Beau, with an edge. “Hope she didn’t break one off in my ass or something.”

Nick took a long look at Lemon Featherlight.

“You really up to going over to Sylvia’s?”

“I’m not going to get any sleep until I do.”

Vangelis Kinkedes was the night shift supervisor at the NUC field office on North Kennesaw. He was an avocado-shaped second-generation Greek with droopy bloodhound eyes and bad skin. He was up to his ears in grease from a souvlaki pita when Bock appeared at the glass doors of the office and slipped his ID card through the reader. Bock was wearing all black and looked bone weary.

“Tony, hey, Tony, what the fuck you doing here at this hour? And what’s with the ninja suit?”

Bock slumped into the padded chair in front of his computer station, reached down into his pack, and pulled out a six-pack of Rolling Rock, peeled one off and tossed it across to Vangelis.

“The AC is out at my flat. Too damn hot to sleep. I have a bunch of reports to key in. I figured I’d get them done here, where it’s cool. Is it just you and me, or is everybody out on a call?”

“We got two trucks out, on account of the heat. Everybody has their AC on—”

“Except me.”

Vangelis grinned at him over the top of his Rolling Rock. “Except you. We got rolling brownouts and people calling in all over the place. You want to post on as R2R? I’ll put you down for double OT. We could really use you.”

“Works for me,” said Bock, typing in his password and looking at the system entry screen. He was concerned about having to log in with his own ID, but he had no choice.

Chu had him by the throat.

I chose you when I saw what you did for a living. You can go into any house in the city and no one will pay any attention to you. That is why I chose you. I have studied the Niceville Utility computer. I know that you can disable his home climate-control system from the head office. Then you will arrange to take the service call—

How?

That’s your problem. You will go to Deitz’s house and you will search his home office and you will find a way to copy the hard drive on his home computer—

Why can’t you do that from—

Because he never goes online with that computer. I need what’s on his hard drive—

Why?

To complete my dossier. Deitz was in trouble with the federal government. What he did was bad enough to force him to resign from the FBI. I also believe that he betrayed four men who were conspiring with him, and these four men went to jail in his place. It would be useful to know the names of these men, in order to persuade Mr. Deitz that his interests may best be served by cooperating with me
.

What did he do?

I believe the details will be on his computer or on files in his home office. I want to complete my dossier on him. I wish to possess the whole story of all his crimes. I want the names of those four men
.