Blunt Darts

haven’t found anything. And I bet they’re not nearly as good as you.”
    I set down my wine glass and fixed her with my best counselor’s look. “Val, Sturney and Perkins have a substantial staff. In a specific crime-type case, sometimes one operative is better than an army. That’s because he or she can get inside the investigation without causing ripples until he wants to make something happen. But a missing-person case requires a computer-type approach, assembling all the information you can from all sources and trying to blanket the areas he might be in with investigators, police and private.”
    “But then why haven’t there been newspaper articles with pictures of him to help?” she asked, her eyes glittering.
    “Maybe the police and Sturney, et alia, feel that publicity would just invite a lot of crank calls or start the wrong people looking for him.”
    “You mean like criminals the judge put away?” she asked.
    “One example,” I said.
    “But right now he’s out there with them anyway. I mean, he’s in their element, where he’s more likely to be hurt by someone who doesn’t even know who he
    is.”
    She was becoming upset, so I decided to shift gears a little. “By the way, if his disappearance has been kept so much under wraps, how do you know about his packing and so forth?”
    She blinked a few times and played with her nearly empty wine glass. “Well, that’s how I came to see you. Stephen didn’t come to school for two days—you see, he took off just after final exams. Anyway, I called his house—I’d given up trying to reach his father—and Mrs. Kinnington told me all about it. We’ve talked almost every day since, and she was so upset last night, because nothing has happened, and I know I don’t have the money to pay you, so...”
    “So you sort of volunteered to be her cat’s-paw and bring me into the case for her.”
    She looked at me with a smile somewhere between bleakness and mischief. “At least you think it’s a case, huh?”
    I put on a fake frown, and she laughed. “Oh, please, John, he’s such a good, bright little kid. He’s had such a tough time so far, with his mother and all, and I’m so afraid for him out there.”
    “Okay, okay,” I said, and motioned to the waiter. “Let’s have our salad, and then you call Mrs. Kinnington to set up an appointment.”
    She smiled and shook her hair and poured herself another glass of wine.
    “Today’s the judge’s day for tennis, so he won’t be home until at least seven. She’sexpecting you at four-fifteen.”
     
     
     

     
     
    Valerie wanted to drive me out to the Kinnington place, but I insisted that she merely lead me there and let me see Mrs. Kinnington alone. She reluctantly walked with me to a rent-a-car place in Copley Square (my ancient Renault Caravelle being in the shop awaiting a used A-frame from North Carolina). I rented a Mercury Monarch, and we bailed her car out of a parking garage.
    We took the Mass Turnpike to Route 128, the elongated beltway around Boston. We were beating the high-tech rush hour by thirty minutes. After about six miles we took the exit after the one I used for Bonham and continued into Meade.
    As we wound down the stylish country road, I began to get a better sense of the town. Meade was about as rural as its neighbor Bonham, but a good deal ritzier. In Bonham, there were big old farmhouses flanked by peeling, musty-looking barns with rusting agricultural machinery slumped in the yards. In Meade, there were big, skylighted farmhouses flanked by newly painted, too-red bams with burnished Mercedeses and Jags in the yards. I looked at myself in the rear-view mirror. Meade would happen to Bonham someday, and at that point I’d probably no longer be able to use the pistol range.
    Val signaled a turn onto a private gravel road, then pulled past it to a stop. She stuck her head out the window and swiveled a hopeful face back toward me. I waved her on. She frowned and crunched some gravel on the shoulder as she accelerated out. I checked my watch. It was a shade after four, so I made the turn and weaved slowly upward through the trees.
    As I approached it, the house appeared more modest than I had expected. It was a white colonial, with thin black shutters framing the smallish downstairs windows. No modern glass walls punched through here.
    I swung around a wide circular drive with a small, nonspitting fountain in the center. I pulled past the fountain so that the Merc