Niceville

Crossfire, who knew and liked the Teague family—Garrison Hills was part of her patrol area—leaned on the Cayenne’s window and got the urgency of Sylvia’s story as fast as Father Casey had, a story she was inclined to take much more seriously than a police sergeant in any other mid-sized American town might have taken it at this early stage, because, when it came to Missing Persons, Niceville had a stranger abduction rate five times higher than the national average.
    So Sergeant Mavis Crossfire was paying very close attention to Rainey Teague’s disappearance, and, after listening to Sylvia for about four minutes, she got on the radio and called her duty captain, who got on his horn to Lieutenant Tyree Sutter, the officer commanding the Belfair and Cullen County Criminal Investigation Division.
    About ten minutes after that, every cop in Niceville and every county sheriff and all the local staties had gotten a digital download of Rainey’s photograph and description—Regiopolis Prep kept digital photo files on every student—and every officer who could be spared was rolling on the Rainey Teague disappearance. This was a very creditable performance, as good as the best city police force in the nation and a lot better than most. Motivation counts.
    Less than an hour later, a beat cop named Boots Jackson called in from his riverside foot patrol along Patton’s Hard, walked into Alf Pennington’s bookshop on North Gwinnett, and developed the last confirmed sighting of Rainey Teague, which he then promptly punched in to the HQ mainframe on his handheld-computer link.
    By this time the search perimeter had been expanded to include all the Cullen County and Belfair County deputies as well as the State Patrol guys as far north as Gracie and Sallytown, on the other side of the Belfair Range, and as far south as Cap City, about fifty miles downrange.
    Sitting at his desk at the CID headquarters on Powder Ridge Road, Tyree Sutter, known as Tig, a blunt-featured broken-nosed black manlarge enough to have his own gravity field, saw the Alf Pennington notation appear on his Coordinated Search Screen. He immediately handed the contact off to Detective Nick Kavanaugh, a thirty-two-year-old ex–Special Forces officer, a white guy, around six one, lean, hard as cordwood, with pale gray eyes and a shock of shiny black hair going white at the temples, who was standing in Tig’s office door and staring at Tig like a wolf on a choke chain.
    Kavanaugh was in his navy blue Crown Vic a minute later and flying up Long Reach Boulevard, following the bend of the Tulip, his strobes lit up but no siren, on his way to see Alf Pennington, pulling up to the curb outside Pennington’s Book Nook at 1148 North Gwinnett less than twenty minutes later. The time was 6:17 p.m. and Rainey Teague had now been officially listed as missing for one hour and fourteen minutes.
    Alf Pennington, late sixties, rail-thin, with a dowager’s hump, bald as an eagle, with sharp black eyes and a downturned mouth, looked up from behind his banker’s desk as Nick came through the door, Alf’s sour expression deepening as Nick weaved his way through the bookcases.
    Not by nature a sunny person, Alf worked up a disapproving frown as Nick approached his desk, registering the slim well-tailored summer-weight dark blue suit—
too expensive for a cop—probably a bribe
—the unbuttoned jacket—
so he could get to his billy club, no doubt
—showing a pure white shirt, open at the neck, his tanned angular face shadowed in the dim light, the wary gray eyes, the shining gold badge clipped to his belt, the obvious bulge of a gun on his right hip.
    “Hello. You must be the police. Would you like a coffee?”
    “Thanks, no,” said Nick in a pleasant baritone, looking around the shop, taking in the titles, breathing in the scent of must and wood polish and cigarette smoke, putting his hand out. “I’m Nick Kavanaugh. With the CID?”
    “Yes,” said Alf, giving him a quick shake and taking his hand back to see if his pinky ring was still there. Alf, a closet Marxist from Vermont, didn’t like cops very much. “Officer Jackson said you’d be by.”
    “And here I am. Officer Jackson says you saw Rainey Teague shortly after three? Can you describe him for me?”
    “Done that already,” said Alf, his Yankee accent jagged with short, sharp fricatives.
    “I know,” said Nick, deploying an apologetic smile to soften the request, “but it would be a big