Niceville (16 page)

“Disappeared,” said Tig, who knew that Nick, until he saw her body, was never going to acknowledge her suicide.

“Yeah, since then. Leah Searle died the next year, but Kate went over all the papers. Rainey’s the only heir. Kate’s got power of attorney for Rainey, sees to his finances and monitors the Teague portfolio, which is huge. Kept the house as it was, so if Rainey ever comes around, everything will be the way it was on the day he was taken. Gardeners. Cleaners. Has it checked every day by some people from Armed Response.”

“Kate. Gotta love her. One of my favorite people. Can’t believe you were thinking of going back into the shit, a lady like that at home.”

On their terms this was an intrusion, but Tig felt it strongly, so he just let it stand.

Nick understood it.

Tig was right.

A moment passed in silence.

“Okay,” said Tig, changing the tone. “You go see Lacy, let’s hear what Lemon has to say.”

“I will,” said Nick. “We have anything else?”

“Yeah,” said Tig, looking troubled. “Vice got an anonymous tip. I didn’t like to hear it.”

“They get a voice?”

“No. It was an e-mail. Sort of. But the IP was stripped out, or it was from a computer link we haven’t got a line on yet. I don’t get all that cyber-shit stuff, Nick. Anyway, like I said, untraceable. Anonymous.”

Nick looked at his hands. Snitches were how it all worked, but nobody liked to work with them.

“What was the tip?”

Tig moved his shoulders, hesitated, and then handed a printout across to Nick.

Nick read it, handed the sheet back. “Jesus.
A friend
. Man, I really hate this kind of anonymous shit.”

Tig’s face said the same thing.

“So do I. I ran this Kevin David guy and he looks pretty solid. Custodian. Wife died of cancer last year. Grown kids. Has a house up in Sallytown. Lives alone. Nothing against him. I asked around on the quiet. Everybody at the church thinks he’s a saint.”

“What about Maryland?”

“I’m waiting for a sheet and a photo. Age and general description is right, but there’s a lot of Kevin Dennisons in the world. I gotta be sure before I let Vice go burn down a guy’s life.”

“Any whiff of anything?”

Tig looked down.

“Yeah. He has a cell phone cluster.”

“You mean his GPS records. That was fast.”

“My sister’s family goes to Saint Innocent. They have a girl. I was motivated. I called a friend at Comcast.”

“Where’s the cluster?”

“Schoolyards. Playgrounds.”

“Oh hell.”

“Yeah,” said Tig. “Oh hell.”

“You want me to do this?”

Tig shook his head.

“Vice already has it. I didn’t want to look like I was getting in the way.”

Nick looked at the printout again.

“This e-mail, someone who would send this out, Tig, is a slug. Guy’s capable of a whole lot worse. We should find out who this asshole actually is.”

“You want to do that?”

Nick shook his head.

“I don’t get this cyber shit any better than you do. Do we have anybody around who can look into it? Like one of those tattooed geeks in dispatch?”

“No. Not like this. Mainly they all sit around and twatter each other on their twats.”

“I think that’s
Twitter
, Tig.”

“Whatever. What about your brother-in-law, that Deitz guy? Doesn’t he have a whole boxcar full of computer wing nuts in that outfit of his?”

Nick wasn’t very happy with Byron Deitz—something was going sour inside the guy—but he would definitely have guys who could track a cyber trail like this.

“Okay with me. I’d rather you asked him.”

Tig was aware that there was some tension between Nick and his brother-in-law.

“Sure. I’ll ask Deitz myself. Off the record, like. But I got something for you to do yourself. Take your mind off this Army thing. You know Delia Cotton, the Sulfur King’s widow, up in The Chase?”

“I know the Cotton mansion. Called Temple Hill. Big yellow-brick place, wraparound porch, lots of that white gingerbread crap in every corner.”

“Well, she’s gone missing.”

Nick sat up, life coming back into his frame.

“Missing?”

“Yes. Got a cleaning lady named Alice Bayer. Went there today to deliver some groceries, found the door open, music playing. Half a
scotch on the table. House wide open and Delia Cotton gone. Cat gone too, some kind of Maine Coon cat. Name of Mildred Pierce. Maybe also the yard man, fellow named Gray Haggard. His Packard was in the drive, but no sign of him either.”

“Relatives?”

“All dead. Maybe a few friends in her book club. Patrol guys did some leg work, got diddly. She’s gone, Nick. With her yard man. Gone like the snows of yesteryear. That’s Proust, you know.”

Nick shook his head.

“Actually, I don’t think so.”

Tig lost his smug smile.

“Not Proust?”

“No. I mean, he said something
like
it—about the remembrance of things past, sort of. But he never said anything about the snows of yesteryear.”

“Then who the fuck did?”

“I think it was some dead Frog. Gimme a minute. Villon. Yes. François Villon.”

“What did he say?”

Nick took a moment.

“I think he said,
Où sont les neiges d’antan?
”

“Which means?”

“Where are the snows of yesteryear.”

Tig remained unconvinced.

“You sure?”

“I’d have to google it. But I’m pretty sure.”

Tig looked unhappy.

“Man. I’ve been throwing that quote around for years. Now I feel like a mook.”

“Maybe. But you’ve still got your looks. Who’s catching the Cotton thing?”

“You are. Delia was one of ours. I know the family; they were real good to my dad. Cottons were also one of the Founding Four. A fine lady too.”

Nick stood up, put the chair back under the president’s dreamy eyes, his faraway look.

“Can I have Beau?”

“Beau? He’s pretty raw.”

“He’s not going to get any better unless we take him around some. Otherwise, he’s just filling a chair and filing shit and losing his nerve.”

“Okay. Take Beau. It’ll give him a taste. We’ll see what he’s got too. One other thing,” said Tig, as Nick turned to leave. His casual tone became a bit forced. “You run on Patton’s Hard, don’t you? Down there by the Tulip?”

“Yes.”

“You run there last night?”

“Yes. Every night.”

“Last night?”

“Every night.”

“You see a big white guy down there, wearing a blue track suit, a muscle guy?”

“Nope. Why?”

“Well, Boots Jackson’s got the motorcycle beat for Patton’s Hard—”

“I know Boots. He found the last guy who had seen Rainey.”

“Yeah. Alf Pennington. Anyway, Boots found this guy there around two in the morning, looked like he’d been mugged. Banged around pretty good. Like he had been worked over by a pro. He’ll never look at the same face in his mirror again. Ribs cracked. Nose all over on one side. Cheekbone cracked like an eggshell. Both testicles ruptured and crushed. Effectively castrated, the medics are saying. Also may lose his right eye. Said he was just out jogging and somebody jumped him. Came out of the dark. A random attack.”

Nick shrugged.

“Well, his story held up until Boots got him to the ER medics. They were cleaning him up and a big plastic Baggie fell out of his track suit pocket. Skate laces. Roll of duct tape. Baby oil. A box cutter.”

“Tools for rape.”

“Yes. Tools for a rape. So Boots ran him and he was wanted up in Charleston for forcible sexual assault. Looks like a chain of attacks on young women, mostly joggers, going way back.”

“Not Ziggy Danich? Vice has been after him for months. Never able to pin anything on him.”

“Yeah. I know. I remember you asking about him a while back.”

“So they got him, finally?”

“Looks like it will stand up. Reasonable search, chain of evidence.
Ziggy might be the guy who did those two young girls down by the Tulip two weeks ago. They’re doing the DNA now.”

Tig stopped, seemed to wait for Nick to say something, which didn’t happen.

“So you didn’t see anything?”

“No. Not a thing.”

“Thing is, guy said he had no idea who attacked him, never saw it coming, no idea where the rape stuff came from. Said it must have been planted.”

“They all say that.”

Tig nodded. “They do.”

He looked troubled, moved a couple of things around on his desk and then moved them back.

Nick waited, but Tig seemed to be done.

He wasn’t.

“And you got nothing to add, Nick?”

“Not a thing. Good for Boots. Oughta get an attaboy for nailing that cockroach. Nobody else could. Sometimes you just get lucky.”

Tig was quiet. Then he said, “Well, it doesn’t pay to get too damned lucky. This kind of thing happened again, we’d have to figure we had some sort of vigilante thing going on. Remember that guy last year, in The Glades, we found him lying beside his car, in his garage, somebody took a bat to him? Every bone in both legs smacked into splinters? Never gonna walk again?”

“DeShawn Coles. Ran underage whores out of the Double Deuce in Tin Town. Mean as a razorback hog. We were looking at him for pouring bleach down the throat of a little runaway named Shaniqua Throne, but she died before she could ID anybody.”

“Yeah. Him. Thing is, once, it’s chance, twice, it’s a coincidence. Three times—that’s different. Gotta start looking at it. A vigilante, hell, even the Feds would start looking at that. And the press would suck it up like a dual-bag Dyson. They’d never lay off till the guy was caught.”

“Yeah,” said Nick. “I can see that.”

“Yeah. So can I.”

Now Tig was finished.

Point made.

Some air came back into the room.

“Okay,” said Nick. “Well, I’ll go jump on the Cotton thing, then?”

“Yes,” said Tig, leaning back and folding his arms across his big bony chest, cracking a broad smile. “Right after the Teague thing. Check that out, and then go see what happened to Delia Cotton. You go do that. Maybe it’ll take your edges off.”

“I have edges?”

“Just go, will you?”

Like the boy in the fairy tale who stole these magic beans from the evil giant and planted them in his garden by the light of the silvery moon and then woke up the next day all crazy with excitement to see what radical magical delight had popped out of the … well, Tony Bock woke up in his over-the-garage flat in The Glades late on Saturday morning in that kind of state, anxious to see what his e-mail to the County CID about this Kevin David Dennison had wrought. It was a question about which Bock, in the cold light of dawn, was sorely conflicted.

He was partly on fire to see what had happened and partly sick with dread that in some totally unexpected way he had thoroughly buggered up his life with some obscure but legally cataclysmic blunder—abuse of the Internet? crossing phone lines in the commission of felony privacy invasion?—and was therefore about to reap the ugly reapings of his heedless night before.

No, he had to know NOW.

Bock couldn’t even wait to brush his teeth or have some coffee or even get decently dressed. He sat down and fired up his computer, started a search string looking for any news of
Kevin David Dennison Saint Innocent Orthodox Niceville CID
and was, a few minutes later, oddly relieved when the string retrieved nothing at all.

So, as of this point, no action from the forces of justice. His heart rate began to return to normal. He leaned back and reached—out of habit—for one of the few cold Stellas that had survived his winnowing hand the night before.

He popped the cap with an opener shaped like a naked woman, leaned back in his chair, sipping from the bottle, and began considering the state of his world. Okay. Fine. Nothing yet.

He would have to be patient.

Remember the spider who waits?

The lion that lieth in the long grasses?

Fine.

A pause here for self-examination.

What exactly was he feeling?

Now that his fear was gone, or at least temporarily abated, Bock was feeling…

… 
disappointed
.

He had, without reason, hoped that there might be something like an arrest notice—a suicide after a running gun battle with the cops was too much to hope for—or that at least there would be some kind of ripple on the surface of the Niceville community that suggested an investigation was under way. And, he suddenly realized, there might well be.

After all, the cops weren’t going to
alert the media
on the basis of an anonymous e-mail tip, no matter how well composed and electrifying.

No, of course; they were quietly looking into the thing first, which was only right and proper.

Bock reminded himself, again, that in this new enterprise, he would have to be patient …

… and judicious …

… and …

… well … fuck that.

Let’s face it—he was still pretty disappointed.

He called up the e-mail he had sent to Lieutenant Commander Tyree Sutter, CO of the Cullen and Belfair County Criminal Investigation Division, and stared at it for a time.

He leaned into the keyboard, thought about it for a moment, and then forwarded this same e-mail—through a server somewhere east of Eden—to the city editor at the
Niceville Register
, the station manager at WEZE EZ JAZZn’ROCK, based in Gracie, to the manager at the Cap City Fox News affiliate, and to [email protected]