“On Tee?”
“He hasn’t given me the records I need to get started,” said Becker. “Tee-ee!”
“They’re in the car,” said Tee, grinning and opening the back door of the sedan.
Laurie touched Becker’s arm. “I don’t know how to thank you,” she said.
“I haven’t really done anything. I may not be able to.”
“You will, I know you will. Tee says you’re the very best there is.”
“It isn’t a good idea to believe absolutely everything Tee tells you.”
Laurie strained up on tiptoes and kissed Becker on the cheek.
“Thank you, Mr. Becker. Thank you.” She was crying again as she got into the car.
Tee tucked a file folder into Becker’s hands but avoided his eyes. “I’ll call you,” said Tee.
“No. You won’t. You’ll leave me the fuck alone until I contact you. In fact, you’d better give me plenty of room for quite some time. Tee.”
“Gotcha.”
“Yeah, you got me, but I don’t like the way you did it.”
“I understand,” said Tee. “You’re a good man, John.”
No, thought Becker as Tee’s police car pulled away. No, I’m not, which is why I couldn’t tell that child I wouldn’t do it. Maybe a good man could have been honest enough to break her heart. But a bad man could not take that chance, Becker thought. It would be entirely too revealing.
Alan had reached the top of the palisade and now Cindi was creeping her way under the overhang. For a moment her face was turned directly toward Becker and he thought she smiled at him. With a movement, he realized it was a grimace. Even an expert was struggling against her fear on this particular route.
Becker felt the file folder in his hand and was suddenly glad for it. At least it was something he could handle. I’m like an alcoholic with a bottle in front of me, Becker thought. Sure, it will kill me, but at least it’s something I know how to do.
He waited until Cindi had pulled herself around the overhang and was pressed safely-or as safely as her ego would allow-against the vertical face before driving off.
The contents of the file were spread across the dining room floor in a semicircle around Becker’s chair so he could see them all by twisting his head. The dining table was littered with more papers and scraps of scribbled notes surrounding the computer and its terminal.
“Technically, that’s police property,” said Tee, gesturing at the strewn files. “So?”
Becker was bringing his aging computer to life. The seconds it took to perform its more complex functions had come to seem interminable to Becker.
Tee was standing in the doorway leading to the kitchen, drinking a beer he had taken without comment from the refrigerator. It was a bottle from the same six-pack he had brought to Becker’s house two days before. Leaving beer and finding it untouched later was something novel in Tee’s experience.
“So you should treat them with respect.”
“I give them all the respect they deserve. It’s pretty slack work, Tee.”
“We don’t have the Bureau standards in Clamden.”
“No, you don’t. I spent the last two days running around and filling in the gaps.”
“Sorry. I spent the last two days holding Laurie’s hand and maintaining law and order.”
The computer signaled its readiness and Becker gave it new instructions. The screen filled with columns.
“How do you get it to do that?” Tee asked. “Do they sell a missing-persons software?”
“I programmed it myself”
“You did? Jesus. How do you know how to do that?”
“What age are you living in, Tee?”
“The Iron Age, isn’t it? I don’t know how to smelt ore, though. Fortunately, you do. Did you find out anything?”
“Would I ask you over for social reasons?”
“My wife has been asking me the same thing. About you, I mean. She thinks you don’t love us enough. You’ve got the house, you’ve got the refrigerator. Why don’t you entertain? Why not have friends over, Gloria wants to know.”
“I have no friends.”
“You’ve got at least one.”
“And he takes advantage of me.”
“I meant the human fly, what’s her name, Cindi. I ran into her in the Crossroads the other night. She asked about you.”
“The Crossroads?”
“A restaurant, bar, whatever. It’s where you single people go to arrange your nasty liaisons.”
“I know what it is. What were you doing there?”
“Official drinking. She’s gorgeous, you know, if you take her out of her climbing gear-and wouldn’t I like to. She was asking lots of questions about you: Are you married, why not, what are your sexual preferences, how do you spell that-that sort of thing.”
“What is it about marriage that makes you so horny. Tee? They have an operation that will cure that problem right up, you know. Your local vet could probably take care of it for you.”
“I don’t think so. My local vet’s a man.” Tee drained the beer and crushed the can in his hand.
“Whew,” said Becker. “How do you do that?”
“Scary, isn’t it?”
“Now, Chief, if your testosterone level has settled down, tell me about Mick. Did he fool around, too?”
“I don’t really fool around. I just want to. No, he didn’t. Not that I know of”
“Would you know?”
“I think so. We talked a lot.”
“At the Crossroads?”
“Yeah, some. I’d see him there sometimes, having a beer after work, you know. He’d be at the bar, though. He wasn’t off in a corner with a girl.”
“That’s the last place he was seen before he disappeared.”
“I know. Nothing unusual about his being there, though.”
“There was nothing unusual about him at all,” said Becker. He pointed to the screen. “There was nothing unusual about most of them. At least not at first glance. Or second glance, either. You’ve got to study it for a while. First of all, it’s not fifteen men missing in four years. Not for our purposes. Under normal circumstances in a population of one hundred thousand in this kind of New England situation- non-isolated, small communities, close to major cities-you’d lose five or six in four years. Running out on their wives, skipping out to avoid alimony and child support, just starting over, whatever. So what we have is an aberration of nine or ten disappearances, not fifteen. The question is which nine or ten are unusual, which of them make a pattern. You can’t begin until you see a pattern. So I had the computer try to eliminate the five or six normal disappearances for me, and it went at it a number of ways; annual income, marital status, number of kids, type of work, age, place last seen, you name it. It took awhile because I ran out of questions to ask the computer. Then it took awhile longer because I had to find out more about the missing men, which meant interviewing a lot of people.”
“I could have helped you there.”
“Not if you didn’t know what questions to ask, and I didn’t know until I was halfway through the process, and then I had to go back and ask some more. I stumbled on it when I was checking out this guy named Jensen from Guileford. Salvatore Jensen, strange combination. But half the people I talked to about him didn’t know him as Jensen; they knew him as D’Amico. He was born Sal D’Amico, became an actor and changed his name to Sal Jensen because there was another actor in Actors’ Equity named Sal D’Amico and they have a rule about that kind of duplication.”
“You mean all these guys changed their names? Because Mick didn’t.”
“D’Amico is the only one who changed his name, but it was how he changed it. He did what a lot of actors do, they tell me. He didn’t just make something up the way they used to do in Hollywood. And he didn’t just add a middle initial-apparently all the actors with middle initials? It’s because someone else has registered their
