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  Powder found the manager’s lack of interest puzzling at best.

  Chapter Six

  Powder was walking the corridor from the garage to Police Headquarters when a plainclothes detective hailed him and stepped in his way.

  “Lieutenant Powder!” the man said. “I planned to come down to see you later today but since fate has crossed our paths, we might just as well take advantage of this little bit of luck. Luck in more ways than one, maybe.”

  “Do I know you?”

  “I don’t think so. But let’s not wait to be formally introduced. I’m Wayne Killops, detective sergeant. Of course everybody knows you.” Killops reached for Powder’s right hand, grabbed it, pulled it up from where it dangled by Powder’s side, shook it with vigor.

  “And,” Killops continued,“everybody’s heard about your financial good fortune following the unfortunate demise of your relative. Sorry to hear about that, of course, but we’re all pleased that a bit of something good has come down to you by way of compensation for your loss.”

  Powder pulled his hand away.

  “What I wanted to talk to you about,” Killops continued, “is a vineyard in New Mexico! How about that! You wouldn’t expect wine from New Mexico, would you? But it’s going to boom like nothing you’ve ever heard of before, and there are a number of us in the department going together to invest a little money. We stand to make a real killing out of it, a real killing, in the nicest possible sense. So naturally, when the grape vine made it clear that you might be in a position to come in, even though almost all the shares are gone, it seemed only right that—”

  Sue Swatts was giving her full sympathetic attention to two middle-aged women in flowered dresses when Powder entered the office. Howard Haddix was poised with his left hand over the office log. Fleetwood was on the telephone.

  Powder went to Noble Perkins and smacked him on the back.

  “Nobe, old buddy, I’ve been worrying about you.”

  “Why’s that?” Perkins said as he flipped through a fanfold printout.

  “Staying in front of that machine all day is going to give you occupational diseases.”

  The tall young man turned to look up at Powder. “Yeah?”

  “Sure as sitting,” Powder said. “It’s well-documented fact, based on generations of hands-on research with secretaries and typists. It’s going to corrupt your hardware and invalidate your software.”

  “Gosh.”

  “You’ve got to make sure to get up and walk around at least ten minutes out of every hour.”

  Perkins looked a little puzzled. “But where will I go?”

  “We’ll try to find someplace. How long have you been sitting there this morning?”

  Perkins looked sheepish.

  “OK,” Powder said. “Here, I’ll do you a favor. Why don’t you go up to auto records and find out what kind of car this man has, and then get a search out for it.”

  Powder gave Perkins a slip of paper with Sidney Arthur Sweet’s name and address on it.

  When Fleetwood finally hung up, Powder moved to the edge of her desk. “I am troubled. Sergeant.”

  “Oh, yeah?” she said, continuing to write on the paper she was working on.

  “How much money do bodyguards make?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “No? I thought you hired one for a couple of years to fight off all the kinky guys that wanted to touch up your crippled body. Didn’t you tell me that once?”

  Fleetwood said nothing.

  “No, come on. How much bread do bodyguards draw? Enough to buy a house?”

  “I guess.”

  “A nice ranch house with a third of an acre and nice furniture and good clothes?”

  Fleetwood shrugged but accepted the doubt that Powder was suggesting.

  “And tell me something else. Your average bodyguard, would you expect him to be carrying a gun or not?”

  Fleetwood shrugged again.

  “Come on! He’d be carrying a gun, wouldn’t he, if he were the real thing. So a convicted felon, who wouldn’t be licensed to carry, he’d have to be a pretty lucky felon to land himself a secure bodyguarding job, wouldn’t he?”

  “I don’t know any bodyguards. Powder.”

  “All right. You don’t know anything about bodyguards,” he said, looking away, affecting patience. “What about that house we had dinner in last night?”

  “What are you going to do about that poor kid?”

  “Tell me about the house. A nice house?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Worth a bit? More than yours?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Kind of house you could get by working in a bottling plant where they don’t rate you and they don’t care whether you show up for work or not?”

  Powder called a social worker acquaintance for advice about Robert Sweet. Off the record.

  “What about the mother?” Adele Buffington asked.

  “I don’t know where she is,” Powder said. “The kid doesn’t either. She may be in Mexico somewhere.”

  “Are there other relatives?”

  “All I know of is the mother’s sister. None too sympathetic.”

  “You really ought to report it, Roy.”

  “The father hasn’t even been gone two days yet.”

  “You sound like you think it’s serious though.”

  “True, it doesn’t feel like an ordinary `Daddy Decamps’ to me. But I can’t seem to get a handle on it.”

  “If anything should happen to the boy,” Buffington said, “the responsibility would come back to you, in a big way.”

  “I understand,” Powder said.

  “What’s important is that you try to think of the child.”

  “When I was over there he hung on to his telephone, like it was a lifeline” Powder said. “If he gets carted out of his own house, what’s he going to hang on to?”

  Powder went to the canteen and smiled as he saw the angular figure of Lieutenant Tidmarsh drop into a chair at a table next to the windows.

  When he’d passed through the line himself. Powder sat down opposite Tidmarsh. “I’d planned to come up to see you later on,” he said, “but since fate has crossed our paths I thought I’d take advantage of this bit of luck.”

  “What a load of bull,” Tidmarsh said. “I’m up here this time every day, which you know damn well.”

  “You computer people,” Powder said. “Life by numbers.” He took the top off his plain yogurt. “Tell me about Ace Mencelli.”

  Tidmarsh put down his cup of coffee. He put both arms on the table. He said, “Mencelli knows his business.”

  “I see,” Powder said. “Which means you are going to find some way to let him work?”

  “Which means that on the surface of things, by the standards we normally accept here, he has already just about proved his case.”

  Powder studied his yogurt. “So Indiana is not a healthy place to be disabled?”

  “Or mentally ill, or mentally handicapped, or chronically sick.”

  “Tidmarsh,” Powder said, raising his eyes to meet the other man’s, “are we talking about what I think we’re talking about?”

  “Which is?”

  “That a substantial number of people in these categories have died younger in Indiana than their counterparts elsewhere for no good reason?”

  “That’s what we’re talking about,” Tidmarsh said.

  “I see,” Powder said.

  “What I haven’t done is checked the work in detail yet, confirmed the numbers and the formulas. But I’ve roughed my way through his logic and methodology and if the data he says he’s gotten from various places are correct, then it looks pretty strong.”

  “So it’s possible that he’s made mistakes?”

  “Yes.”

  “But if he hasn’t?”

  “Then there is some reason why living in Indiana is unhealthy for certain groups of people.”

  “What might that be?”

  “I can tel
l you what Mencelli thinks it is.”

  “Which is?”

  “Mencelli thinks there is somebody out there murdering them.”

  Chapter Seven

  When Powder reentered the office after lunch Sue Swatts asked to consult with him for a moment.

  “What can I do for you, Officer Swatts?”

  “I was covering the desk for Howard for a while this morning and I had a case I didn’t quite know how to handle.”

  “Was that the floral twins I saw you with?”

  “Floral . . .?” A questioning smile.

  “Two women wearing dresses made out of the same material with flowers on it.”

  “Oh!” with recognition. “No, no.They were just asking directions to Municipal Courtroom Five. They were witnesses.”

  “Pity. I thought they’d come in to report the third triplet had run away and was suspected of wearing plaids.”

  Swatts nodded gently as she tried to make sense of his comment.

  “Do you always smile?” Powder asked.

  “Gee, I guess my face just kind of rests in that shape, Lieutenant.” She giggled momentarily. “It’s always been like that.”

  “It’s not natural.”

  “It’s not?” Still smiling.

  “You wanted to ask me something,” Powder said tiredly.

  “Oh. Yeah, what I wanted to know is what we do about parents who report a daughter missing and they know where she is.”

  “Some details, please.”

  “I had this couple come in wanting us to get their daughter out of some group called The Promised Land.”

  “Not one of those boring cult things . . .?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “How old is the girl?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “And where is The Promised Land?”

  “There’s a farm off Moore Road.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Near the Boone County border. On Big Eagle Creek.”

  Powder rubbed his face with both hands. He said, “If the parents know where the daughter is, she’s not a Missing Persons case.”

  “They didn’t get any help when they went upstairs,” Swatts said. “They were sent to us because the girl is so old.”

  “Send us your weak, your lame, your halt and your over-sixteens.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Not many people would confuse Indianapolis with the promised land,” Powder said. “Still, I suppose it’s getting pretty crowded in the cult business these days.”

  Swatts stood looking at Powder for a moment.

  “Do you want something. Officer?”

  “The parents seemed so sad.”

  “Parenthood is intrinsically sad,” Powder said.

  Swatts shrugged. “Is it?”

  “What else of interest happened this morning?” Powder asked.

  “I managed to match a body. A hit and run with a man on `Have You Seen Them?’ who went out for a video movie and didn’t come back.”

  “Good. How about letting the press know?”

  Fleetwood was the last back after the lunch break.

  She came to Powder’s desk and said, “Jules thinks he is going to get some computer time here.”

  “He’s still around?”

  “I just saw him off. I took him to lunch.”

  “Lucky Jules.”

  “Jules thinks Tidmarsh was impressed.”

  “Jules has a pretty good opinion of himself,” Powder said.

  “Tidmarsh wanted to go through some of the work in more detail. Jules will probably be asked back in tomorrow.”

  “I’ll try to make sure you’re free,” Powder said. He turned away, rose and walked to Noble Perkins’s computer corner.

  “How are you feeling. Noble?”

  “OK, I guess, sir. You got my message?”

  “Which message was that?”

  “That the car you wanted hasn’t been found?”

  “Yes, I got that all right.”

  “OK. Good,” Perkins said.

  “Did you have some lunch?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you get out of your chair and walk someplace for it?”

  “I went to the canteen.”

  “Good work. Noble. You’ll feel the benefit.”

  “I feel OK now, sir.”

  Powder sat at his own telephone and called the Sweets’ home number.

  After two rings Robert Sweet answered. “Hello. Dad?”

  “I wrote you a note last night so that you could go back to school today.”

  “Oh, it’s you.”

  “Do you understand, son, that if you play truant it will be taken as evidence that you can’t cope alone while your father is away and the city will move you out of your house?”

  “They can’t do that!”

  “They can do that,” Powder said.

  “Who would answer the phone?”

  “Your father wouldn’t call at this time of day anyway,” Powder said. “He didn’t bring you up to skip off school.”

  “He didn’t mind sometimes,” the boy said. “He’s all right that way, my dad.”

  Powder sat in thought at his desk. After a time he wrote out the name and address of the bottling plant Sweet had worked at on a piece of paper. Then he added the names Earle Nason, Imelda Nason nee Stanton, “Sunny” Sweet nee Stanton.

  He took his list to Noble Perkins.

  “I want whatever is in the data bank on these names, as a priority,” Powder said.

  “I’m going out,” Fleetwood said.

  The voice broke Powder’s concentration.

  Fleetwood watched as he raised his eyes and took her in.

  “I just don’t get it,” Powder said. “A guy who really works at being a father just disappears one day. No contact with the kid. Why?”

  “I take it you didn’t get anything useful from the sister-in-law.”

  Powder shook his head.

  “On the list the son made for you there weren’t any friends, were there?”

  “No.”

  “Isn’t that a little odd?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did this man do for adult company?” Fleetwood asked.

  “Mmmm,” Powder said uneasily. “I don’t know.”

  “Which means either he had no ‘own’ life or he kept it secret.”

  “Yes,” Powder said. “What are you doing tonight?”

  “I’m going over to see Jules. Sorry.”

  “When there’s work to be done?” Powder asked in an offended tone.

  When Noble Perkins gave Powder printouts of the information he had obtained on the East Haven Bottling Company, the Nasons and “Sunny” Stanton Sweet, Powder folded them and put them in a pocket. He rose to leave for the day.

  But as he did, a large man in dungarees entered the office and approached the counter where Sue Swatts and Howard Haddix sat working. He chose to address Swatts and fixed her with a gaze of unwavering intensity. “My name is Gale Heyhurst. I am from The Promised Land.”

  “Oh,” Officer Swatts said.

  Powder stepped to the counter. “We have a complaint this morning from the parents of one of your recruits.”

  Heyhurst took a moment to detach his attention from Sue Swatts. Then, speaking in a low, soft voice, he said to Powder, “So I understand. I have come in to make clear that they are free to visit their daughter at any time. It would be helpful if they were to give a little notice, but it is not necessary. Here is a map of how to get to us. If one hasn’t been to us before, it can be a little difficult to find.”

  Powder took the folded paper that the man offered. “A map to The Promised Land,” Powder said.

  “Just so,” Heyhurst said.

  “Tell me,” Powder said, “when I inform Mr. and Mrs. . . .” He looked in the log for the names. “Mr. and Mrs. Beehler and pass this on to them, can I assure them that they’ll be able to see their daughter alone?”

  “In private,” Heyhurst said
. “Certainly.” His concentration on Powder increased and he said, “In The Promised Land we have no need for the techniques of group influence.”

  “Usually called brainwashing.”

  “We depend on the cogency of our reasoning.”

  “Got a lot of sheep in your flock, Mr. Heyhurst?”

  “We are a thriving, growing community. We enjoy life and we look forward to the future.”

  “Would you object to my asking for a concise statement of what principles are at the core of your beliefs?”

  “We believe,” Heyhurst said, “in the restructuring of American society, by means of the electoral process. Our motivating force is enlightened self-interest.”

  Powder scratched his head. “Enlightened self-interest?”

  “We call it ESI.”

  “Does that mean you’re in it for the profit?”

  “Yes,” Gale Heyhurst said, staring hard at Powder, but not without a suggestion of humor in his expression.

  “Oh,” Powder said. “Good stuff. I’ll pass the message on.”

  Chapter Eight

  Powder went from work to his neighborhood grocery, Johnson’s. A focus of civic activities, centered on the Johnson family’s paterfamilias, the store was far more than a source of food. But this time Powder simply assembled a collection of frozen meals. Then he went to Robert Sweet’s house.

  When the boy answered the door he said, “Oh, I thought it was Dad.”

  Powder scowled. “Would your father ring the bell?”

  “Might have lost his key.”

  “Look, kid, chances are your father isn’t coming back. The sooner you stop mooning around and drooling at every creak of a floorboard, the better. Now, how are you off for money?”

  The boy was silent.

  “Do you have any money?” Powder insisted.

  “Not really.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “I’ve got about a buck and a half.”

  “OK.” Powder gave the boy twenty dollars. “Tomorrow, after school, you get yourself something. Anything. A magazine, a comic, some baseball chewing gum. Now, there’s some frozen food in this bag. Shall we get it unpacked before I have to be treated for frostbite?”

  They went to Sweet’s kitchen, and Powder watched as the boy loaded the freezer section of his refrigerator. Then the two of them sat down at the kitchen table.