The Body In the Belfry by Katherine Hall Page

get a list of the names of Dave’s friends.
    â€œIf they don’t give us much, which will probably be the case, there are. a bunch of other people we can ask,” Charley told Dunne.
    â€œWell, the kid’s all we have so far, so we’d better concentrate on finding him. Now how much of a problem is this Mrs. Fairchild going to be? I know the type—couldn’t wait for us to leave so she could sit down with her husband and solve the case.”
    MacIsaac laughed. “She’s an intelligent woman. I don’t think she’s going to put herself in any danger. I doubt she’ll interfere and Tom’s as sensible as they come.”
    â€œIf she’s so smart, too bad we can’t recruit her to fill out all the damned reports and let us get away from the desk long enough to get a handle on things.”
    The paperwork was Dunne’s least favorite part of the job. He wasn’t sure he had a favorite part, but he knew what he hated. His father had been a cop. He’d died of a massive coronary while chasing a suspect. Dunne was three years old and too young to hear the pros and cons of the business. His mother wanted him to go to college and he’d ended up at Columbia on a Regent’s scholarship. He stayed for two years, developed a taste for elegant clothes and New Orleans jazz, then enlisted in the army. He knew he’d be going to Vietnam, and he wanted to do it on his own terms. When he returned from the war, he became a cop, just as he had always assumed he would. Anything else would have been boring. All the paperwork in the world could be balanced by ten minutes of action. He married and moved to Massachusetts,
the midway point between his family and his wife’s in Maine—a bitch of a drive either way. That was. ten years ago and he’d mellowed a little. This bothered him occasionally. Without the city to keep him perpetually in a state of alert, he worried he might be losing his edge, and this Aleford case didn’t promise to be much of a sharpener. It was probably the boyfriend or someone like him. One look at the girl had told him that. Of course it was these easy assumptions that always turned out to be wrong. That was the fun of it.
    â€œAll right, Charley, we’ll look for the kid, then I’ll toss you for the reports.”
    Charley looked a little askance.
    â€œJust kidding.”
    Â 
    Tom called the Svensons as soon as the police left, but they either didn’t know where Dave was or weren’t saying anything. So he started going down the list of kids who he knew were friends of Dave in the parish. At noon, he called it quits.
    â€œHe does seem to have vanished into thin air, Faith. At any rate, if someone I spoke to does know where he is, he’ll get the message that I’m looking for him and maybe he’ll show up here again.”
    He went upstairs, donned his collar, and got ready to go to the Moores’. They had asked Faith to come, too. She wasn’t sure whether it was because they wanted to talk to her about finding the body or because she, as the minister’s wife, could offer support to them in their grief. She was still new at the support business and hoped it was the former. She was looking forward to some discreet inquiries into the life and death of Cindy Shepherd and it would be hard to direct the conversation that way if she was going to be limited to empathetic nods and gentle pats on the shoulder.
    They left Benjamin at home with thirteen-year-old
Samantha Miller from next door, whom Faith was grooming for a life of baby-sitting bondage. She fervently hoped Samantha’s shyness lasted through high school. Not that she wanted her to be unpopular, but the baby-sitter wars in Aleford made the War for Independence look like a fistfight. And the parsonage didn’t have Nintendo or big screen TV to lure anyone. Sure, the snacks were superior, but Samantha, like most teenagers, preferred