Free Prayer for the Dead by David Wiltse Page B

readiness and Becker gave it new instructions. The screen filled with columns.
    “How do you get it to do that?” Tee asked. “Do they sell a missing-persons software?”
    “I programmed it myself”
    “You did? Jesus. How do you know how to do that?”
    “What age are you living in, Tee?”
    “The Iron Age, isn’t it? I don’t know how to smelt ore, though. Fortunately, you do. Did you find out anything?”
    “Would I ask you over for social reasons?”
    “My wife has been asking me the same thing. About you, I mean. She thinks you don’t love us enough. You’ve got the house, you’ve got the refrigerator. Why don’t you entertain? Why not have friends over, Gloria wants to know.”
    “I have no friends.”
    “You’ve got at least one.”
    “And he takes advantage of me.”
    “I meant the human fly, what’s her name, Cindi. I ran into her in the Crossroads the other night. She asked about you.”
    “The Crossroads?”
    “A restaurant, bar, whatever. It’s where you single people go to arrange your nasty liaisons.”
    “I know what it is. What were you doing there?”
    “Official drinking. She’s gorgeous, you know, if you take her out of her climbing gear—and wouldn’t I like to. She was asking lots of questions about you: Are you married, why not, what are your sexual preferences, how do you spell that—that sort of thing.”
    “What is it about marriage that makes you so horny. Tee? They have an operation that will cure that problem right up, you know. Your local vet could probably take care of it for you.”
    “I don’t think so. My local vet’s a man.” Tee drained the beer and crushed the can in his hand.
    “Whew,” said Becker. “How do you do that?”
    “Scary, isn’t it?”
    “Now, Chief, if your testosterone level has settled down, tell me about Mick. Did he fool around, too?”
    “I don’t really fool around. I just want to. No, he didn’t. Not that I know of”
    “Would you know?”
    “I think so. We talked a lot.”
    “At the Crossroads?”
    “Yeah, some. I’d see him there sometimes, having a beer after work, you know. He’d be at the bar, though. He wasn’t off in a corner with a girl.”
    “That’s the last place he was seen before he disappeared.”
    “I know. Nothing unusual about his being there, though.”
    “There was nothing unusual about him at all,” said Becker. He pointed to the screen. “There was nothing unusual about most of them. At least not at first glance. Or second glance, either. You’ve got to study it for a while. First of all, it’s not fifteen men missing in four years. Not for our purposes. Under normal circumstances in a population of one hundred thousand in this kind of New England situation— non-isolated, small communities, close to major cities—you’d lose five or six in four years. Running out on their wives, skipping out to avoid alimony and child support, just starting over, whatever. So what we have is an aberration of nine or ten disappearances, not fifteen. The question is which nine or ten are unusual, which of them make a pattern. You can’t begin until you see a pattern. So I had the computer try to eliminate the five or six normal disappearances for me, and it went at it a number of ways; annual income, marital status, number of kids, type of work, age, place last seen, you name it. It took awhile because I ran out of questions to ask the computer. Then it took awhile longer because I had to find out more about the missing men, which meant interviewing a lot of people.”
    “I could have helped you there.”
    “Not if you didn’t know what questions to ask, and I didn’t know until I was halfway through the process, and then I had to go back and ask some more. I stumbled on it when I was checking out this guy named Jensen from Guileford. Salvatore Jensen, strange combination. But half the people I talked to about him didn’t know him as Jensen; they knew him as D’Amico. He was born Sal D’Amico,