Niceville

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.
    The custodian at saint innocent orthodox has a history of child sex abuse going back to 1982. His name is kevin david his crimes were committed under the name kevin david dennison his dob is 1956/06/23. look first in maryland. He also is online on AIM as katydee999. You should look at him. a friend.
    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 rector.​parish@​stinn​ocent​orthdox.​org.
    This exercise provided a frisson that lasted not nearly long enough, since this sort of activity bears some parallels to crack addiction.
    After a short time, he was edgy again, feeling that there was still useful work to be done here.
    He tilted the bottle up, drained it to half, listening in a distracted way to the staccato yapping of Mrs. Kinnear’s demented shi-tzu and staring at the screen. Something was surfacing. He could feel it working up, something inspired at first by the sight of his own nakedness and then becoming more specific as he recalled some of the insights he had gained into the people of Niceville in the course of his day job.
    Not the
natural
course, since the job description didn’t include snooping through boxes of tax records in the basement or poking around in old family albums up in the attic. Amazing the stuff that people hang on to, or forget they ever had, or think they’ll get away with keeping.
    For example, the cosmetic surgeon with a cardboard box full of counterfeit med school diplomas. The retired letter carrier who had seventeen bags of undelivered mail in her furnace room. The pharmacist with several cartons of stolen prescription drugs in her closet.
    And there was a guy, a bank manager type, had this nice big rancher near Mauldar Field, a pillar of the community, who was taking peep shots of his teenage daughters in the bathroom.
    Bock, in the course of his professional labors at the banker’s house, had found the tiny camera in the ceiling of the shower stall, concealed in the fan housing. After some detective work, he had traced the fiber-optic cable to a still-frame recorder in the attic, hidden inside a trunk full of old clothes.
    Bock had managed to copy the contents of the camera’s hard drive, getting at least a thousand different shots of the girls over several years, doing all the things one normally does in a bathroom, the girls of course totally oblivious, which was the whole point.
    Bock had savored the shots for a very long time—they gave him agodlike sense of
power
over these half-grown girls—seeing what no man had yet seen, watching them do all their secret female rituals.
    But even that sick thrill wore off after a while, as they will, and Bock had posted the shots—anonymously—on this voyeur website, shredding his own copies as soon as the download was complete.
    But what
was
the guy’s
name
?
    Can’t mess with a guy’s life without a name.
    It’d be in his work records, on the Niceville Utility laptop, wouldn’t it? One of his first out-calls, maybe five, six years back?
    Very risky to tap that source
, Bock thought, trying to calm himself down.
    Remember the rules
.
    No linkages
.
    But if he only used
one
, then there’d be no linkage, right? You can’t draw a line between one dot and no dot.
    No.
    Not a
banker
.
    The guy wasn’t a
banker
.
    What do you call a guy who
comptrols
stuff?
    A
comptroller
, right?
    It was rising up in the back of his mind. The trunk in the attic was filled with old clothes, but they were
weird
old clothes, leathers and feathers and beady folky thingies …
    … flowers …
    … boxes …
    … tiny purses …
    It was all in there somewhere …
    Think, Bock, think …
    Visualize …
    Wicker?
    Straw?
    Weavings?
    And then it all came back in a rush.
    Littlebasket
.
    Morgan Littlebasket
.
    He googled it, and there he was, a craggy-faced leathery old buzzard, smiling out like a Redskin Rushmore from the website banner of something called the Cherokee Nation Trust, based in Sallytown.Some more googling delivered up a news photo dated five months ago, the guy posing with two