“Fat?”
“Actually, Miss Gunn is anorexic and bulimic.”
Begley nodded, having read on her stat sheet about her hospitalization last year. “Where did she see this B.T. twice in three days?”
“That’s what put me onto Ben Tierney. I went digging to see who B.T. might be. The first logical place to look was the high school. I came up empty. All the B.T.s were girls.
“Second logical place would be where Millicent works. She clerks part-time in her uncle’s store. In addition to hardware and gardening equipment, he sells . . .” Hoot paused and pushed up his eyeglasses. “Sporting goods, clothing, and equipment.”
Begley turned back to the corkboard, studying the photographs of the five apparent victims as he thoughtfully tugged on his lower lip. He focused on the first. “Was he in Cleary at the time Torrie Lambert disappeared off that hiking trail?”
“I don’t know,” Hoot admitted. “So far I have no record of his being there on the actual day she disappeared. But he definitely was in town soon thereafter. The lodge’s registry bears that out.”
“Maybe after Torrie Lambert he thought the pickins in the area were good, so he came back, and has kept coming back ever since.”
“My thinking exactly, sir.”
“He travels. Have you researched similar missing persons cases near any of his destinations?”
“Perkins is working on that, too.”
“ViCAP, NCIC?” Begley ask
ed, referring to the information networks widely used by law enforcement agencies.
“Nothing.” After a short pause, Hoot continued. “But we don’t yet know all the places he’s been. We’re having to review his credit card statements to see where his travels have taken him over the last several years, then cross-checking our unsolved cases in those specific areas. It’s tedious and time-consuming.”
“Was he in the vicinity of Cleary when Millicent Gunn disappeared?”
“He checked into the lodge a week before her parents reported her missing.”
“What do the boys in the RA out there think about him?”
“I haven’t shared this information with them, sir.”
Begley came around. “Then let me rephrase. What do they think about you working this case?”
There was a resident agency nearer to Cleary than Charlotte. Hoot had been transferred from it to the field office in Charlotte thirteen months ago, but his investigation into Torrie Lambert’s disappearance and assumed kidnapping had begun in the RA that covered that jurisdiction. “It’s been my case from the start, sir. The agents in that office recognize it as such and frankly are glad to let me have it. I’d like to see it through, sir.”
Twenty seconds of silence ticked by as Begley continued to stare at the photographs on the corkboard. Suddenly he made an abrupt about-face. “Hoot, I think it’s worth our time to make a trip up there to talk to Mr. Tierney.”
Hoot was stunned. “You and me? Sir.”
“I haven’t done fieldwork in a long time.” Begley glanced around the walls of his office as though they’d suddenly become constricting. “It’ll be good for me.”
Having made the decision, he began immediately to plan their course of action. “I don’t want it to get around Cleary that we’re looking at Ben Tierney. How did you explain your interest to that . . . What’s his name, the owner of the lodge?”
“Gus Elmer. I told him that Tierney is a contender for a humanitarian award at his alma mater and that all aspects of his life are being reviewed.”
“And he bought that?”
“He’s got three teeth, sir.”
Begley nodded absently, his mind already racing ahead. “For as long as possible, let’s keep the local PD in the dark, too. I don’t want to put them on alert and give them a chance to fuck it up if this guy’s Blue. What’s the asshole’s name?”
“Tierney.”
“Not that asshole,” he said impatiently, “the police chief.”