Niceville

GPS thing, how fast she was going, how fast she was covering the ground. A hundred and forty, easy. Over she goes. OnStar sends the rollover signal and I’m the second car on the scene. Last thing she ever said to me was
she uses the mirrors
.”
    “
She uses the mirrors
? What the fuck does that mean?”
    “No idea. She just kept saying it.
She uses the mirrors
. But try tellingReed Walker that. He was convinced it was some drunk driver, because one of the witnesses said he thought he saw somebody in a gray Lexus cut her off. He’s out every day in his pursuit car, still looking, stopping every gray Lexus SUV he can find.”
    “Reed’s a fucking fruitcake. If he reaches fifty I’ll paint my toes with gentian violet and take up the zither. Anyway, that sort of took the heart out of the professor, and he gave it all up. Other than that, some pencil-neck statistician at MIT did a paper called … wait a minute, I got it memorized … ‘Non-Randomized Scatter Patterns and the Law of Statistical Regression as It Relates to Anomalous Abduction Phenomenology.’ ”
    “Fuck me.”
    “Roger that. Anyway, in the paper he mentions what he calls the Niceville Disappearances—you know, like the Bermuda Triangle—all in caps, right? Get this—he calls them—wait a minute—you’ll fucking love this, Charlie—an artifact of a Boolean scatter-back loop that created an apparent uptick in disappearance stats that was … shit, wait a minute, I got it here somewhere.”
    Boonie scrabbled around in his desk while Charlie, still a cop under it all, waited him out with genuine interest. He had spent a lot of his professional life wondering what the hell was wrong with Niceville for exactly this reason. Boonie found the paper, slipped on his reading glasses, leaned back in his chair.
    “Okay. Brace yourself. He called it a Boolean scatter-back loop that created an apparent uptick in disappearance stats that was really just a semantic glitch in the reporting protocols.”
    “Fuck me sideways.”
    “Roger that too. Wait a minute. Yeah, here we go—he compared the Niceville Disappearances to reports of Alien Abduction—”
    “Dumb shit.”
    “Not so dumb. Got him on
Good Morning America
, but the book deal fell through, so I hear, so that was that for the pencil-neck.”
    “So how many again, over the years?”
    “One hundred and seventy-nine confirmed and completely random SAs. Only seventeen of these incidents have been solved: three sex-related abductions, where the bodies were found, the perp caught and executed—”
    “Claude James Picton.”
    “Yep. Him. Five more were wives or girlfriends or daughters getting away from bad men, and the rest were random, bankrupts trying for a new life or insurance frauds or prostitutes giving up and going back home. Of the remaining one hundred and sixty-two people—men, women, sometimes kids—not a single trace has ever been found.”
    “Shit. That many?”
    “That many.”
    “Anything ever link them all up?”
    Boonie looked very pleased with himself.
    “That’s what I was trying to tell you. That’s what we’re doing right now. We’re going over the entire list, we got all these computers, we got people downstairs entering all the stats of every one of these cases, all one hundred and sixty-two, and when they’re done, we’re going to cross-check them all and dig out anything that links them all together. Sound good?”
    “Sounds more like a rat-fuck from the get-go, Boonie. These abductions go back how far?”
    “Far back as 1928, anyway. Probably longer.”
    “So it’s not going to be the same guy doing this, is it?”
    “No. Maybe. Might be. Could be. Or maybe his sons.”
    “Boonie, all respect, you’re totally whacked.”
    “Yeah? Nick Kavanaugh doesn’t think so.”
    “What’s Nick got to do with it? He’s not in Missing Persons.”
    Boonie looked offended.
    “It was his idea.”
    “Nick’s? Was it? Got it from Kate’s dad, maybe? Well, I wish him well, then. Nick’s a good man.”
    Boonie brooded over the thing for a while, and then let it go.
    “Yeah. Nick’s a good cop too, for somebody from away. Nick’s the one told Tig to call us about Crowder. We also heard from Phil Holliman—”
    “Byron Deitz’s muscle guy?”
    “Yeah. He says Deitz really wants to help, any way he can. Phil says Deitz thinks the driver’s dirty.”
    “So’s Byron Deitz,” said Danziger, who didn’t like Deitz at all. “What the fuck