Niceville

anything on this that looks interesting?”
    “Yeah. I’ll be on my cell, anytime you need me, don’t care when, day or night. I want these assholes as much as you do. You sure you don’t wanna go sweat that Crowder puke a bit, just to see what comes out?”
    “You’re not the only guy thinks we should look harder at him. I got a call from Tig Sutter—”
    “That old warthog. How’s he doin’?”
    “Sounded busy. They got a whack of shit happening in Niceville. Some wealthy old broad gone missing, they caught that rapist who didthose two girls on Patton’s Hard, and Nick Kavanaugh thinks he might have a lead in the Rainey Teague case.”
    “Good for him. It don’t surprise me. You were on that Teague thing too, weren’t you?”
    Boonie’s shining face dimmed.
    “I was.”
    “Ever make any sense of it?”
    “You don’t want to know what I think about that case, Charlie.”
    “Sure I do.”
    Boonie looked up at the president’s picture as if he could see an answer there.
    “It’s complicated. You
sure
you want to know?”
    “I got nothing better to do. You got any more bourbon?”
    Boonie poured them each a hefty splash, brought Danziger his, and sat back down.
    “Okay. Here goes. Brace yourself for some stats I been putting together—”
    “
You
been putting together?”
    “I’m not as dumb as I look, Charlie.”
    “I never thought you were, Boonie.”
    Boonie ignored that.
    When he spoke, it was in the voice of a completely different Boonie, Boonie the solid FBI investigator under the good-old-boy facade.
    “Okay. This is the backgrounder. Your average town the size of Niceville, population between twenty and thirty thousand people, once you set aside the custody dispute kidnaps and the occasional incident like a teen having a fight with her dad over a curfew and taking Greyhound Therapy and being found six weeks later at her ex-boyfriend’s house in Duluth—”
    “Lyla Boone.”
    “Lyla Boone, exactly. So the average American town has maybe one or two suspected stranger abductions every five years, most of which turn out, after some digging, to have some connection between the victim and the perp. Like, say, a gang banger who gets kidnapped and murdered by a member of a rival gang, a guy he doesn’t know, then his case would get tagged by us as a case of stranger abduction, but then, once the facts get worked out, the file would later get amended—”
    “But it
never
does get amended, does it?”
    “Nope. Least hardly ever. Human error. Not enough resources. So it goes into the stats as a stranger abduction. Along with thousands more just like that across the country. So all the civilians and all the media dinks are thinking, fuck, our children aren’t safe, the streets are fulla pervos slavering after every little Binky and Boopsie. But the fact is, Charlie, real honest-to-God stranger abductions are extremely rare. A one in a million shot. So how many stranger abductions you figure Niceville has?”
    “I don’t know. I did wonder about it. When I was on the job, I figured we had a lot more than made any kind of sense.”
    “Damn right. Niceville has logged one hundred and seventy-nine confirmed and completely random SAs since records first started being kept back in 1928. This is a disappearance rate of, like, a little over two a year, Charlie, which is completely whacked. It’s so far above the national average that Niceville gets cited every year at the FBI training courses at Quantico—”
    “Not enough to get you guys to actually do something about it.”
    This seemed to sting.
    “That’s not true. We
are
doing something. Right now we’re—”
    “Anybody ever look into this, like a criminologist or somebody?”
    “Yeah. Nick’s wife, Kate—her dad is Dillon Walker, Reed Walker’s dad too, he’s a professor of military history at VMI. He got into this thing a few years back, but he gave it up when his wife got killed.”
    “I remember that. Six years ago. I was duty sergeant and took the call. Had to cut what was left of her out of the wreckage. She died in my arms, raving about something she saw in her rearview mirror … had her blood all over me … man, I’ll
never
forget that night.”
    “Never caught the guy either, did you? Guy in the SUV, supposed to have run her off the road?”
    “I never believed there was one, Boonie. I think the poor lady was off her meds. She was doing a hundred and forty when she rolled it, according to the OnStar