“No steady boyfriend?”
“Not since Scott.”
Dutch reacted with a start, which the agents noticed. They looked at him curiously, then turned back to the Gunns.
“Scott who?” Wise asked.
“Hamer,” Mr. Gunn supplied. “Wes’s boy. He and Millicent went steady all last year, although that’s not what they call it these days. They were ‘together,’ ” he said with a snort of disdain for the term.
“Were?” Wise said.
“They broke up right before school was out last spring.”
“Do you know why?”
Mr. Gunn shrugged. “Got tired of each other, I reckon.”
“No, honey,” Mrs. Gunn chimed in. “Something happened that caused them to break up. I always thought so.”
Begley leaned forward. “Like what, Mrs. Gunn?”
“I don’t know. Millicent never told me. Hard as I tried to get her to talk about it, she wouldn’t and still won’t. Eventually I stopped asking because it made her upset, and she’d stop eating. I was more worried about her starving herself than I was about her boyfriend trouble.”
If she had shouted that the two problems were related, it couldn’t have been any more obvious to either Dutch or the FBI agents.
Wise was the first to break the ensuing silence. “I found nothing in her diary about Scott Hamer or their breakup.”
“She only started keeping her diary since she left the hospital. It’s part of her ongoing therapy,” Mr. Gunn explained. “The psychologist said she should start writing stuff down. Positive things.” His mouth became a hard, rigid line. “Guess she thinks Ben Tierney is a good thing.”
“At this point we have no reason to think otherwise, Mr. Gunn,” Begley cautioned, his tone more stern now than before.
“You think what you want, Mr. Begley.” Gunn stood up and extended his hand to his wife to help her from her chair. “I’m putting my money on him. I’ve known everybody in Cleary and the three neighboring counties all my life. I can’t think of anybody who could do such a thing as to cause five women to disappear. It’s gotta be an outsider, but somebody who knows his way around these parts, and has the initials B.T. Mr. Ben Tierney fits the bill on all counts.”
CHAPTER
21
THERE’S A KNACK TO IT,” WILLIAM SAID.
“Not everyone can do it.”
“I think I can handle it. I mean, how hard can it be?”
William resented Wes Hamer’s condescending tone. Just because he was the superstud football coach didn’t mean he had a talent for giving injections. “I’ll stop by your house on my way home and—”
“I can do it, Ritt.”
William also hated to be called Ritt. Wes had been calling him Ritt ever since they were in grade school. He’d been a bully then, and he was still a bully. They were the same age, yet he addressed William with no more respect than he would talk to one of his students, and that rankled.
William had a good mind to take back the package of syringes and the small sack containing several days’ supply of vials. But he didn’t. Being Wes’s supplier gave him definite leverage, which he enjoyed immensely.
“What’s that?”
Marilee’s sudden appearance in the stockroom startled them both. Wes was the first to recover. He pocketed the goods in his overcoat pocket and gave her one of his killer smiles. “Ready for me?”
William’s sister responded to Wes’s suggestive question with a simper. Just like every other woman who was exposed to his insinuating smile, she was instantly transformed into a twit.
“I came to remind you that I can’t toast the bread because the power is out,” she said to Wes. “Linda always makes pimiento cheese sandwiches on toasted bread.”