“Can’t the mother do that find-my-friend deal on her phone?” I ask.
“She tried. The last place the phone was active was right here.”
“Shit,” I say.
“On a stick,” Burt says.
“Maybe the phone died,” I say, knowing as soon as I do how weak that sounds.
“Or she did,” he says in a voice that sounds much louder than it ought to at Scobee’s.
I look around myself and think about all the times when we were here after a big game we’d won in high school, or even one we’d lost.
“Maybe you know this and maybe you don’t, because you’ve had all your own stuff to deal with,” he says. “But five girls have disappeared in this county since the start of the summer. Pardon me. Six, counting Allie Gonsalvo, the girl from here whose name we just released. Mom works at the nail salon. Dad has his own landscaping business. Good people.”
Burt Webb looked at everybody as good people until he had a reason not to.
“Maybe the girl saw there are no customers and turned her phone off before she snuck off with a date,” I say. “And is planning to come back.”
“Not Molly,” Burt says. “Tay says she’s a great kid for a whole bunch of reasons, but one of them is that you can count on her, no matter what.”
“Sounds like she could be related to Tay.”
“Even looks a little like her, as a matter of fact. Like she could be a younger sister.”
He takes in so much air it’s as if he’s trying to suck in all the oxygen in the place. Even though he’d played on the offensive line, he isn’t as big as I am. But one thing we always said about Burt Webb is that he played a whole lot bigger than he was.
“They’ve all been pretty, Silas,” he says. “The ones who got taken.”
“Taken but not kidnapped?”
“Not one single call asking for ransom money,” Burt Webb says. “That’s the balls of it, and something that’s got my own balls in a vise.”
He looks around again. I hear sirens in the distance then, sounding as if they’re getting closer.
“Those girls just got gone,” he says.
I turn and see the flashing blue lights in the lot, even as the sirens get turned off. A smallish guy wearing the same uniform Burt iswearing gets out of his cruiser and walks toward the front door of Scobee’s, where I’d shown up just a little while ago hoping to get myself a slice of pie and had walked into a world of trouble, and dread, instead.
Trouble that makes me feel as if I can fit my problems into the palm of my hand. Makes me sorry that I’d been feeling sorry for myself less than an hour ago.
Burt walks me back into the kitchen, instructing me not to touch anything. The crime-scene guys are right behind the cruiser.
“I think we might be dealing with a serial killer in our little corner of blue heaven,” he says to me. “And goddammit all to hell.”
Now I’m the one taking in a lot of air and letting it out as slowly as I can, a way of trying to calm myself, knowing there’s not much chance of that happening.
“You got any idea who might be behind something like this?” I ask.
Burt Webb gives me a long, searching look. Not something from my old high school teammate, or my lifelong buddy. Or even Taylor’s husband. This is a look that is all cop, through and through.
“You ever hear the expression ‘good crazy’?” Burt asks me.
I tell him I have.
SIXTEEN
EVEN OPERATING ON hardly any sleep, I am up early as I promised EJ I would be, though not in time for one of her world-class breakfasts, stopping just long enough in the kitchen to grab a cup of coffee on my way to the barn.
