Niceville

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 at 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