Niceville

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