With a look, Wes scorned the detailed correction. “Get yourself a bleached blonde. Short, not tall. Big titties and a butt you can hold on to. A gal that’s none too bright, without an opinion of her own except regarding your cock, which she thinks is a fucking magic wand.” Wes was pleased with his description of the perfect female; his entire face was involved in his grin.
“Tell you what,” he said, “come over to the house later. We’ll kill a bottle of Jack while considering your options. I’ve got a dirty video or two we can watch. That’ll change your outlook, or you aren’t human. Wha’d’ya say?”
“I’m not supposed to be drinking, remember?”
“Rules don’t apply during an ice and snow storm.”
“Who said?”
“I did.”
It was nearly impossible to resist Wes at his most affable, but Dutch gave it an earnest try. He pushed the Bronco’s gearshift into reverse. “I’ll have both hands full tonight, and then some.”
“Come over,” Wes said, wagging a stern finger at Dutch as he backed away. “I’ll be looking for you.”
Dutch pulled back into traffic and pointed his Bronco toward the single-story brick building one block off Main Street that housed the police department.
Before finally being booted out of the Atlanta PD, Dutch had been required to see the department’s psychiatrist twice a week. He’d told Dutch during one of their sessions that he was borderline paranoid. But what was that old joke? Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean everybody still isn’t out to get you.
He was beginning to think that everybody in the whole damn world had it in for him today.
When he entered headquarters and saw Mr. and Mrs. Ernie Gunn sitting in the waiting area, that cinched it. He must have a bull’s-eye painted on his back. Lilly, Millicent Gunn’s folks, the people of Cleary, even the weather had conspired to make this the worst day of his life.
Okay. One of the worst.
Mrs. Gunn, a rawboned sparrow of a woman on her best day, looked like she hadn’t slept or had a meal since her daughter’s disappearance a week ago. Her small head poked from the collar of her quilted coat like that of a turtle from its shell. As Dutch walked in, she looked at him with naked despair.
He wasn’t a stranger to that feeling. He empathized, all right. He just didn’t want to cope with Mrs. Gunn’s desperation tonight, when he was having a hell of a time battling his own.
Mr. Gunn was a rotund man who looked even larger in his red-and-black checked wool coat, the kind Dutch associated with lumberjacks. Gunn did, in fact, work with wood. His carpenter’s hands, roughened by decades of manual labor and chapped by the cold, looked like sugar-cured hams.
He was threading his hat between his scarred fingers, staring vacantly at the stained brown felt. At an elbow nudge from his wife, he looked up and followed her hollow-eyed gaze toward Dutch.
He stood. “Dutch.”
“Ernie. Mrs. Gunn.” Dutch nodded at them in turn. “It’s getting bad out there. You ought to be at home.”
“We just came by to ask was there anything new.”
Dutch knew the reason for this ambush. He’d received several telephone messages from them today but hadn’t responded. He wished one of his men had warned him that they were in the office so he could have delayed his return until they gave up and went home. But he was here, and so were they. He might just as well get the meeting over with.
“Come on back. We’ll talk in my office. Did somebody offer you coffee? It’s thick as road tar, but it’s usually hot.”
“No thanks,” Ernie Gunn said, speaking for both of them.
Once they were seated across the desk from him in his private office, Dutch frowned with regret. “Unfortunately I don’t have anything new to report. I had to call off the search today for obvious reasons,” he said, motioning toward the window.
“Before this storm hit, we towed Millicent’s car to the county pound. We’ll be gathering all the trace evidence we can from it, but there are no obvious signs of a struggle.”
“Like what?”
Dutch squirmed in his seat and shot a glance at Mrs. Gunn before answering her husband. “Broken fingernails, clumps of hair, blood.”
Mrs. Gunn’s head wobbled on her skinny neck.
“That’s actually good news,” Dutch said. “My men and I are still trying to reconstruct Millicent’s movements her last evening at work. Talking to everybody who saw her in and out of the store. But we had to suspend the canvassing this afternoon, again on account of the storm.
“I haven’t heard anything more from Special Agent Wise, either,” he said, heading off what he figured would be their next question. “He was called back to Charlotte a few days ago, you know. He had another case there that needed his attention. Before he left, though, he told me he was still actively working on Millicent’s disappearance and wanted to use the computers there in the bureau office to check out some things.”