“Did he say what?”
Dutch hated admitting to them that Wise—in fact all those FBI sons of bitches—was stingy with information. They were especially tight-lipped around cops they considered to be inferior, incompetent burnouts. Like yours truly, for instance.
“I believe you gave Wise access to Millicent’s journal,” he said.
“That’s right.” Mr. Gunn turned to his wife and clasped her hand for encouragement. “Maybe Mr. Wise will come across something in it that’ll lead them to her.”
Dutch pounced on that point. “That’s a very real possibility. Millicent might have left of her own accord.” He held up his hand to stave off their protests. “I know that’s the first thing I asked you when you reported her missing. You dismissed it out of hand. But hear me out.”
He divided his best serious-cop look between them. “It’s entirely possible that Millicent needed some time away. Maybe she’s not connected to the other missing women at all.” He knew the chances of that were highly remote, but it was something to say that would give them hope.
“But her car,” Mrs. Gunn said in a voice so reedy Dutch could barely hear her. “It was still in the parking lot behind the store. How could she have left without her car?”
“Maybe a friend took her somewhere,” Dutch said. “Because of the widespread panic her disappearance has caused, that friend is afraid to come forward now and ’fess up, afraid that he or she will get into trouble along with Millicent for scaring us out of our wits.”
Mr. Gunn frowned doubtfully. “We’ve had our problems with Millicent, same as all parents with teenagers, but I don’t think she’d pull a stunt like this to spite us.”
Mrs. Gunn said, “She knows we love her, knows how worried we’d be if she just up and ran off.” Her voice faltered on the last few words, and she crammed a soggy Kleenex against her lips to contain a sob.
Her misery was painful to witness. Dutch focused on his desk blotter, giving her a moment to compose herself. “Mrs. Gunn, I’m sure that deep down she knows how much you love her,” he said kindly. “But I understand Millicent wasn’t too keen on that hospital you sent her to last year. You checked her in against her will, isn’t that right?”
“She wouldn’t go voluntarily,” Mr. Gunn said. “We had to do it, or she was gonna die.”
“I understand,” Dutch said. “And probably, on some level, Millicent understands that, too. But could she be holding a grudge over it?”
The girl had been diagnosed with anorexia, and she was bulimic. To her parents’ credit, when her condition became life-threatening, they had borrowed against nearly everything they owned in order to send her to a hospital in Raleigh for treatment and psychiatric counseling.
She was there for three months before being pronounced cured and sent home. The scuttlebutt around town was that she had reverted to her bingeing and purging habits as soon as she was released, afraid any weight gain would keep her off the high school cheerleading squad. Having been a cheerleader since sixth grade, she didn’t want to miss out her senior year.
“She was doing good,” her father said. “Getting better, healthier every day.” He gave Dutch a hard look. “Besides, you know as well as I do that she didn’t run away. She was took. A blue ribbon was tied to her steering wheel.”
“You’re not supposed to talk about that,” Dutch reminded him. A blue ribbon had been left at the scene of each woman’s supposed abduction, but that fact had been withheld from the media. Because of the ribbon, the unknown kidnapper had been nicknamed Blue.
The cell phone on Dutch’s belt vibrated, but he let it go without answering. He was addressing a serious issue here. If word had leaked out about the blue ribbon, you could bet the feebs would think the leak had sprung from Dutch’s department. Maybe it had. Of course it had. Nevertheless, he would do all he could to contain it and try to avoid blame.
“Damn near everybody already knows about it, Dutch,” Mr. Gunn argued. “You cain’t keep something like that a secret, especially since the sumbitch has left that ribbon five times now.”
“If everybody knows about it, then more than likely Millicent does. She could have put the ribbon there as a decoy to make us all think—”
“The hell you say,” Ernie Gunn retorted angrily. “She wouldn’t be so cruel as to scare us like that. No sir, Blue’s got Millicent. You know he does. You gotta get out there and find her before he . . .” His voice cracked. Tears formed in his eyes.
Mrs. Gunn stifled another sob. But it was she who spoke next. Her expression had turned bitter. “You coming from the police
department in Atlanta and all, we thought you’d catch this man before he had a chance to get our Millicent or some other girl.”
“I worked homicide, not missing persons,” Dutch said tightly.
He’d been nothing but sympathetic to these people, doing everything he could to find their daughter, but he was still underappreciated. They were expecting a miracle from him because he’d been a cop in a metropolitan area.
The way he was feeling at that moment, he wondered why in hell he’d taken this job. When the city council—led by Chairman Wes Hamer—offered it to him, he should have told them that he would become their chief of police only after they’d caught their serial kidnapper.
But he had needed the employment. More important, he’d needed to get out of Atlanta, where he’d been humiliated personally by Lilly and professionally by the department. His divorce had become final the same month he’d been fired. Admittedly, there had been a correlation.
When he was at his lowest point, Wes had come to Atlanta to extend him the offer. He’d boosted Dutch’s flagging ego by saying that his hometown was in dire need of a badass cop with his experience.
It was the brand of bullshit at which Wes excelled. It was a halftime, locker room pep talk, the kind he delivered to fire up his team. Even recognizing it as such, Dutch had liked hearing it, and before he quite knew how it had come about, they were sealing their deal with a handshake.
He was known and respected here. He knew the people, knew the town and the area like the back of his hand. Moving back to Cleary was like slipping into a comfortable pair of old shoes. But there was a definite drawback. He had walked into a mess left by his predecessor, who’d known nothing about crime solving beyond writing a citation for an expired parking meter.