Robert B. Parker's Stone's Throw E-Book

Mike Lupica

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Serie: A Jesse Stone Mystery
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 319

Beschreibung

The town of Paradise receives a tragic shock when the mayor is discovered dead, his body lying in an open grave on a property on the lake. It's ostensibly suicide, but Jesse has his doubts... especially because the piece of land where the man was found is the subject of a contentious and dodgy land deal. Two powerful moguls are fighting over the right to buy and develop the prime piece of real estate, and one of them has brought in a hired gun, an old adversary of Jesse's: Wilson Cromartie, aka Crow. Meanwhile, the town council is debating if they want to sacrifice Paradise's stately character for the economic boost of a glitzy new development. Tempers are running hot, and as the deaths begin to mount, it's increasingly clear that the mayor may have standing in the wrong person's way.

Leseprobe

CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR ROBERT B. PARKER

‘Parker writes old-time, stripped-to-the-bone, hard-boiled school of Chandler… His novels are funny, smart and highly entertaining… There’s no writer I’d rather take on an aeroplane’– Sunday Telegraph

‘Parker packs more meaning into a whispered “yeah” than most writers can pack into a page’– Sunday Times

‘Why Robert Parker’s not better known in Britain is a mystery. His best series featuring Boston-based PI Spenser is a triumph of style and substance’ – Daily Mirror

‘Robert B. Parker is one of the greats of the American hard-boiled genre’ – Guardian

‘Nobody does it better than Parker…’ – Sunday Times

‘Parker’s sentences flow with as much wit, grace and assurance as ever, and Stone is a complex and consistently interesting new protagonist’– Newsday

‘If Robert B. Parker doesn’t blow it, in the new series he set up in Night Passage and continues with Trouble in Paradise, he could go places and take the kind of risks that wouldn’t be seemly in his popular Spenser stories’ –New York Times

CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR MIKE LUPICA

‘Fans of the series will rejoice as Lupica captures Parker’s style and cadence making Stone’s Throw a worthwhile addition to the pantheon’ – Florida Times-Union

‘Lupica seems thoroughly comfortable carrying on the fictional lives of Robert B. Parker’s characters. He has the jaunty tone down pat, and everything flows from that with Parker’s people’ – Booklist

Lupica successfully captures the cadences and banter of Parker’s crime fiction… Parker fans won’t be disappointed’ – Publisher’s Weekly

‘Mike Lupica mixes a heavy dose of suspense with a shot of nostalgia, effortlessly delivering a relentless thriller that might just be the best book in the series so far’ – The Real Book Spy

‘Lupica mimics the heroine’s voice, much less distinctive than those of Parker’s other leads, with ease’ – Kirkus Reviews

This book is for my editor, and my friend, Sara Minnich.

1

Sunny Randall, with whom Jesse Stone was currently in a relationship time-out, asked him once what he missed the most about baseball. ‘Everything,’ he said.

‘Even though it broke your heart?’

‘Even though,’ he said.

They’d been walking on the beach in Paradise, a couple miles from where he lived.

‘Do you ever miss drinking the way you miss baseball?’ Sunny said.

‘Let me answer you this way,’ Jesse said. ‘The worst days I ever had because of drinking were the worst days I ever had. The worst day I ever had in baseball, at least until the one when I got hurt, was great.’

That day had been in Albuquerque, Triple-A ball, last stop before the majors, when he’d landed on his shoulder and had his dreams of making the show blow up along with his shoulder.

‘What about sex?’ Sunny asked.

Jesse had grinned.

‘Right here?’ Jesse said. ‘Damn it, I knew I should have brought a blanket.’

‘You know what I mean,’ she said. ‘Baseball or sex?’

‘Sex with you, or sex in general?’

‘In general.’

‘Baseball,’ he said.

‘Seriously?’

‘Both pleasurable activities, more with you than anyone I’ve ever known,’ he said. ‘But baseball wasn’t just what I did. Was who I was.’

‘I thought being a cop was who you are.’

‘Now it is,’ he said.

It was one of the last times they’d been together before she went to Los Angeles on a case a few weeks later, unsure of when she would return. She’d been hired by an old boyfriend of hers named Tony Gault, a big-time talent agent Out There whom she still refused to classify as having been her boyfriend, describing him more accurately, she said, as an itch she’d occasionally felt the urge to scratch. Jesse had met Gault, who wasn’t much different from a lot of Hollywood phonies he’d met when he was still working Robbery Homicide for the LAPD. He’d told Sunny, and more than once, that the next time she had a similar itch she should consider ointment.

But they both knew they hadn’t taken this time-out because of the case, or because she was there right now and he was here. They’d decided to take a break because they both knew they needed one. They loved each other, Jesse was certain of that. But she still loved her ex-husband, who had recently helped save her life from some very bad Russians on a case she’d been working. In the aftermath of that, she told Jesse that despite her best intentions, she was still feeling an old, almost gravitational pull in her ex’s direction, no matter how hard she fought it.

‘I don’t pull,’ he told her.

‘Or push.’

‘Nor that.’

‘Why I love you,’ Sunny said.

‘Just not enough?’

‘I didn’t say that,’ she said.

‘Didn’t have to,’ Jesse said.

‘Let me ask another question about baseball,’ Sunny had said that night.

‘As a way of changing the subject?’

‘As a way of circling back to the original.’

‘Do I need a lawyer before answering?’

‘You hate lawyers,’ Sunny had said.

‘Well,’ Jesse said. ‘There’s that.’

‘Are you as happy with me as you were playing baseball?’

‘Right now,’ he said, ‘or in general?’

‘In general,’ she said. ‘And I don’t need to remind the witness that he’s still under oath.’

When Jesse took too long to answer she’d said, ‘A full stop like that could hurt a girl’s feelings.’

‘You didn’t even let me answer.’

‘Didn’t have to,’ Sunny had said.

He had been thinking a lot about baseball the past few days, even more than usual, because he had to decide whether or not to play in the Paradise Men’s Softball League, about to start up in a few weeks. The men’s league, the kind of bar league he used to play in when he was in L.A., wasn’t like real baseball, Jesse knew that. Or even close. But close enough. And all the ball he had now. He couldn’t make the kind of throw from shortstop that he used to be able to make when he still had the arm. Sometimes in the morning, when he was sitting on the side of the bed, he would rotate his right shoulder and hear what sounded like loose coins rattling around in a clothes dryer.

But he could still make that throw better than even young studs in the league just out of college. Jesse smiled now, to himself, as he walked the same beach he’d walked with Sunny, just walked it in the night, with her Out There and him here. Knowing that’s the way all old guys thought, all the old ballplayers who were sure they would have made the show if things had broken differently for them.

But I would have made it.

He was on another one of his late-night long walks. He had been taking a lot of them lately, more since Sunny had left. He was still running a few miles a day, a few days a week. But it was getting harder for him to do that, because his knees had begun to bark at him the way his shoulder did. More old-man shit that he knew wasn’t going to get any better, or easier, the older he got. Whoever had said it in Hollywood had been right. Getting old wasn’t for sissies.

Especially when they were old ballplayers.

These were the things you thought about out here, the things you couldn’t stop yourself from remembering, sometimes coming at you like the waves.

But it was better for him to be in motion than sitting at home, the time of night in his drinking days when he’d fall asleep in front of the television, in his chair or on the floor, passed out after trying to watch a Red Sox game. Ballgames on television still made him think about drinking. But, then, what the hell didn’t? Even thinking about softball made him think about drinking, that first cold one when the game was over that Suitcase Simpson always described as ‘the best beer of the week.’

So he walked, sometimes through the streets of Paradise, sometimes along the water. Tonight he had decided on the water, Jesse making it all the way down to the piece of land, high up above him to his right, that had been pulling the town apart, the one nicknamed The Throw.

It was the last and biggest and absolutely most valuable piece of oceanfront property in Paradise, Mass, having been put up for sale by the rich asshat Thomas Lawton III, who owned it, now being fought over by two even richer men who wanted to buy it from him and develop the shit out of it. And because it was their stated plan to develop it, the sale had to be approved by the Board of Selectmen.

One bidder was Billy Singer, Vegas guy. The other was Ed Barrone, a Boston developer who’d recently built two of the first non-tribal casinos in Massachusetts. Both had made no secret of the fact that they wanted to build a hotel and casino at The Throw. Both had been hard-lobbying the Board of Selectmen to approve the sale of the land, before each submitted his final bid. Both had spent an insane amount of money advertising in local media, promising jobs that both men swore would finally bring the town’s economy back from the damage COVID-19 had done. Doing what guys like them always did, no matter the prize:

Showing they’d be willing to fight to the death over dirt.

Jesse made his way up there now, first through the dunes, then the long path that led up to the eastern end of the property, which had one of the great views of the ocean in Massachusetts, or anywhere else.

It was where they’d found the first shallow grave about a month ago, with this miniature headstone, made of lightweight concrete, next to it:

R.I.P. PARADISE

The headstone had the date the town had officially been incorporated in the nineteenth century, and this year’s date. The responsibility for the graves – or credit – had been accepted freely by the local group, mostly kids, known as the ‘SOB.’ Completely without irony. Or maybe just a little bit. Save Our Beach. They really saw themselves as saving Paradise and its ecosystem from these two grubby developers, no matter how many jobs Singer and Barrone were promising. The owner of The Throw, Lawton, the last living member of the Lawton family, had another name for them. He had taken to derisively calling them ‘the tree huggers,’ and constantly hectoring Jesse to find every one of them vandalizing his property and throw their asses in jail.

‘For digging holes?’ Jesse’d said to him the last time he’d come barging into Jesse’s office. ‘You mean before the bulldozers come rolling through your property like the First Army?’

All in all, Jesse thought, he needed an old-fashioned land grab like this the way he needed to fall off the goddamn wagon. Jesse knew that Singer had hated Barrone from the time Ed Barrone had tried to invade his turf in Vegas. The feud between the two men only got worse when Barrone got the casinos in Taunton and Springfield that Singer wanted. Barrone hated Singer for being a mobbed-up Vegas guy thinking he could come east and throw his weight and money around as a way of getting even with him. They were both the real SOBs in the story, to Jesse’s way of thinking. The only thing on which Singer and Barrone agreed was that each man hated the tree huggers as much as Thomas Lawton did, because the kids weren’t just digging graves, they were attacking all of them on social media on a daily basis, vowing to continue their fight even if the Board of Selectmen had voted to approve the sale, which everybody in Paradise assumed it would in the end; there was simply too much money at stake, too many jobs. By now the whole thing had turned the whole town meaner than the place Jesse called Tweeterville. Choosing sides on the sale of the land. Choosing sides on the men bidding to buy it.

The Throw felt serene to Jesse in the night, almost like sacred ground, with the sound of the ocean behind Jesse now and the cloudless sky full of stars. In this moment it was impossible for him to believe that a piece of earth as beautiful and previously undeveloped had turned, at least symbolically, into a war zone.

Jesse had his flashlight out, and now spotted what looked to be a new grave up ahead, just without a headstone next to it this time.

Shit, he thought.

Not because the tree huggers had come back. Just because a new grave meant more work for him, because their latest effort would mean another visit from young Thomas Lawton in the morning, and a continuation of his bitch-a-thon.

Only this grave, Jesse saw when he stared down into it, was different.

This one had a body inside it.

His boss’s.

2

‘The mayor shot himself in the middle of The Throw?’ Suitcase Simpson said when he got there.

‘To be determined,’ Jesse said.

Neil O’Hara. Not just Jesse’s boss. His friend. One who’d ended up in the middle of the war between Singer and Barrone and the middle of the campaign about the sale. One who’d been fighting the deal in vain, trying to convince his constituents that there were more important things than money.

‘And I’d finally started thinking of him as the mayor,’ Suit said.

For as long as anybody could remember, the true mayor of Paradise had been the president of the Board of Selectmen. They had finally decided the year before to make it an elective office. Neil had then won the town’s first-ever mayoral race, Gary Armistead running as his deputy. They had won by a lot. People liked Neil O’Hara.

Just not everybody.

Jesse said, ‘Doesn’t do him much good now.’

By now, Jesse had done everything by the numbers. Called 911. Called Ellis Munroe, Paradise’s new district attorney and no friend to the Paradise Police Department, who’d called Brian Lundquist at the state police, who’d sent two of his guys over. For once, Jesse and Munroe had managed to get through a conversation without arguing. He had made no secret, from the time he’d gotten the job, that he was the most powerful law enforcement figure in the town, and in the county. Not Jesse. And had made it clear to Jesse that it was a new day in law enforcement in America, maybe he’d noticed, it had been in all the papers, and that the days when prosecutors let cops make up the rules as they went along were long gone.

‘I know you don’t need my guys,’ Lundquist had said on the phone. ‘But my boss got the ass last time we didn’t have our people there first thing.’

It had been when Lily Cain had shot herself, on the other side of town. A member of one of Paradise’s royal families, the way Thomas Lawton was.

‘We’ve all got bosses,’ Jesse said.

‘You don’t,’ Lundquist said.

Jesse had called Dev Chadha, the medical examiner. Called Molly Crane, knowing there would be holy hell to pay later in the morning if he didn’t, and Suit, and Gabe Weathers. They all knew how crucial the first two hours were, that missed evidence – whether it was a suicide or a homicide – could be devastating to an investigation later on. Suit liked to tell Jesse that he didn’t just do things by the book, he acted sometimes like he’d written the book.

It was past two in the morning now, a couple hours after Jesse had discovered the body and the SIG P365, the expensive XL model, next to Neil’s right hand in the dirt.

R.I.P., Jesse thought.

The body of Neil O’Hara had finally been bagged and loaded into the van and taken to Dev’s lab. Jesse had once again reminded Suit and Molly that only amateurs wanted a body transported away from the scene as quickly as possible.

‘Can I do the rest of it?’ Molly Crane said, grinning at him. ‘By now, pretty sure I know it by heart.’

‘Knock yourself out,’ Jesse said.

‘You want your ME’s eyes on the scene as long as possible,’ Molly said.

Suit picked it up from there.

‘Can’t have too many sets of eyes,’ Suit said.

‘Am I really that entertaining to the two of you?’ Jesse said.

‘Endlessly,’ Molly said.

They had been through this enough times by now, Jesse and Molly and Suit, to know that they weren’t disrespecting the victim, or his memory, with humor or snark. They weren’t trying to normalize what had happened, whatever had happened, and how Neil O’Hara, a good guy, had ended up here. But Neil wasn’t Jesse’s friend now, or mayor. Or husband of Kate. He was their vic. He was whatever case number Molly would give him when they were at the station later, and what was going to be a shitshow began almost immediately.

Molly said, ‘Why would Neil kill himself?’

‘If he killed himself,’ Jesse said.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘If.’

‘You want the whole list, or just a partial?’ Jesse said. ‘Problems at home. He got caught embezzling money. He found out he was sick. He found out Kate was sick. Or she’d been cheating on him. He found out her secrets, or had some of his own. Or just one big one. Maybe it was just depression.’

They’d stepped away from the grave.

‘Twenty-five million people in this country suffer from depression every year,’ he said. Almost talking to himself now. ‘Half of the people who kill themselves suffer from major depression. If you include alcoholics who are goddamn depressed, it goes from fifty percent to seventy-five.’

He stopped and smiled at both of them.

‘You learn a lot about depression in rehab,’ he said. ‘Their position is that safe is a hell of a lot better than sorry.’

‘He’s the chief,’ Suit said to Molly. ‘He even knows shit he didn’t learn in rehab.’

Gabe had taken foot castings from the grass around the grave. Dev had cut Neil O’Hara’s fingernails before he left, and checked them, and his hands, for gunpowder residue. Jesse had been the one to bag the SIG, and handed it over to Lundquist’s detectives, Crandall and Scoppetta, both solid cops with whom he had worked before.

Jesse walked away from Molly and Suit, wanting to think, wanting to absorb the scene, making a long, slow circle, walking toward the ocean and then back around, toward the woods. The Throw. Not prime real estate now. This was a crime scene, involving a man who, even before he became mayor, when he was just a member of the Board, had saved Jesse’s job more than once when Jesse was still a drunk.

With all that, Jesse couldn’t help himself, he felt the way he did when he was a kid before the first pitch of a game, a combination of excitement and adrenaline and even fear. If it was suicide, he would find out why. If it was murder, made to look like suicide, he would find out who did that to Neil O’Hara, because he owed him that.

He didn’t need Dix, his therapist, to explain why something as bad as this made the cop in him feel this good. Dix knew. He’d been a cop himself. A cop was who Jesse was now. Sometimes all he was.

Peter Perkins came walking over to them, from the west side of the property. He’d been over to Neil’s house, said his car was in the garage.

‘You go through the house?’ Jesse said.

‘I was waiting for you to give me the go-ahead.’

‘Go ahead,’ Jesse said.

Jesse told Molly and Suit to make another sweep of the property, and then another one after that. Jesse told them he was going to drive over to Neil’s old house, the one on Stiles Island in which he’d lived before he and his wife separated, and break the news to his wife.

‘Estranged wife,’ Molly said.

‘Still his wife,’ Jesse said.

‘You sure you want to be the one?’ Molly said.

Jesse knew what she meant. Jesse had been involved with Kate O’Hara once, the last relationship she’d had before she’d married Neil. It hadn’t lasted long, but had been fairly intense while it did. He was still drinking then. Sometimes he wondered if it was as intense as he remembered, or if it just felt that way because he was still a drunk.

‘It should be me,’ Jesse said. ‘He was my friend. She’s still my friend, even though I haven’t seen much of her lately.’

He noticed Molly staring past him then, out toward the woods in the distance, her eyes suddenly wide, her focus nearly fervid, everything about her completely alert. He had seen this look from her plenty of times before, the full force of her directed at someone, or something.

‘What’s wrong?’ Jesse said.

‘Thought I saw a ghost,’ Molly Crane said.

3

Sometimes Jesse thought he would rather find a dead body, bullet through the eye, than talk to the survivors, especially when they were survivors he knew.

Not only knew.

But with whom he had history.

He assumed by now, because Paradise was such a small town, that the only people who didn’t know he had history with Kate Alexander O’Hara were either dead or in Europe.

Jesse and Kate had broken off their relationship long before she started seeing Neil. After that, Neil and Kate had gotten very serious, very quickly. Both of them had been married before. Jesse knew how much Kate wanted to be married again. Six months after she and Neil had started dating, they were holding a Paradise wedding, with all the trimmings, in that Episcopal church on Main Street. Then he heard they separated about six months ago. She was still living in the house on Stiles Island, in a small gated community called The Bluffs, even though there weren’t any bluffs within a couple miles. Neil had moved to a house in town.

Jesse had been to the Stiles Island house for dinner after Neil had been elected, and drove there now, over the Stiles Island Bridge, not needing Waze, remembering where Neil and Kate had lived when they were together. He had considered waiting until the sun was up, but then couldn’t think of one good reason why that would make what he had to do any easier. This was the modern world of social media, after all. No matter how much you tried to button up news like this, it would get out. Why? Because it always did, because trying to stop Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and all the rest of it was like trying to stop a speeding train.

The information highway, Jesse thought. What a joy.

As he got out of the car, he wished now he had brought Molly with him.

There were no lights from inside the house, but why would there be at this time of night? Jesse took in a lot of air, felt as if he let out even more, headed up the walk.

As he did, there was a splash of light in front of the house, and Kate O’Hara had opened the front door.

‘I was afraid I might startle you,’ he said.

‘You live alone,’ she said, ‘you go with a doorbell cam these days.’

Then she said, ‘Something’s happened to Neil, hasn’t it?’

She was as beautiful as ever, even with her senses clearly on high alert now, even having just been awakened, hair shorter than it was the last time he’d seen her, wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt that read not arguing. explaining.

‘Let’s go inside,’ Jesse said.

‘Was he in some kind of accident?’ she said.

‘Not out here,’ Jesse said.

‘You can tell me out here as well as you can tell me inside,’ she said. ‘Goddamn it, Jesse, what happened?’

He stood there on the front porch and told her what he’d found. It was as if all the air came out of her once he did, and she started to slide down the doorframe. He caught her before she fell and walked her inside and sat her down on the couch in the living room and turned on the antique light at one end of it. She curled into a corner of the couch and hugged herself, gently rocking from side to side. Jesse sat at the other end of the couch. Everyone reacted differently, with both shock and grief. Some cried, some got hysterical. Some people collapsed within themselves the way Kate had. Some showed no reaction at all.

‘Tell me what you found,’ she said.

He told her what he’d discovered in the shallow grave. The gun next to him. He asked when the last time she’d seen him was. She said three or four days ago, she couldn’t remember exactly which one, he was stopping around all the time, always talking about wanting them to try again. She was rambling. Jesse let her go.

Just like that, she stopped herself.

‘Neil killed himself?’ she said. ‘Is that what you’re telling me?’

‘I’m telling you that he might have,’ he said. ‘But that doesn’t mean he did. This all just happened.’

He thought of a case Sunny had worked on, one of the principals in it made to look like a suicide victim. But it wasn’t one. And it didn’t matter.

‘Say it was,’ Jesse said. ‘Could you possibly have seen it?’

She waited before answering.

‘Could I possibly have seen it?’ she said. ‘You mean if I’d tried a little harder or cared a little more?’

‘I didn’t mean it that way,’ Jesse said.

‘He’d been under a lot of pressure because of the land deal, but he was always under some kind of pressure,’ she said. ‘Maybe he was showing signs of depression and I just missed them. But then he’d always done a good job of hiding that side of himself.’

‘He was depressed about not being able to stop the deal from going through?’

‘That, mostly,’ Kate O’Hara said. ‘But there was more. He kept thinking we were going to get back together, no matter how many times I told him, as gently as I could, that wasn’t going to happen. His world had gotten smaller. I wanted mine to expand, and not here. My honest opinion? I think events were just ganging up on him.’ She rubbed her eyes, hard. ‘Is it impossible for me to believe that he might have killed himself? It’s not.’

She sighed.

‘Neil was a pleaser, Jesse,’ she said. ‘But it didn’t help him this time. The majority of the people in town wanted this sale. He felt he should have done more to persuade them they were wrong.’

‘He told me one time that he thought he knew what it would be like to be mayor,’ Jesse said. ‘But he hadn’t signed on to feel like a real estate agent closing a deal.’

‘He was almost morally opposed to this deal,’ she said. ‘But he was a politician, too, which made him a pragmatist. It was another reason why this was eating him up inside.’

‘Might there have been money problems in his life?’

She said, ‘Not having to do with me.’

Jesse shook his head. ‘Didn’t mean that, either.’

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m still trying to process this.’

‘Lot to process,’ Jesse said.

‘Maybe he got tired of fighting,’ she said. ‘I feel guilty now that I couldn’t get as obsessed about the deal as he was. But when we did get together, it was all he wanted to talk about. He even wanted to have dinner last night, as a matter-of-fact. I’ll always regret turning him down.’

‘No way you could have known.’

‘I just didn’t want to hear about The Throw all over again,’ she said. ‘Does that make me a bad person?’

Jesse was already thinking he should leave now, talk to her again later. They hadn’t been alone together in a long time. But whatever they’d had, for as long as they’d had it, there was still something in the air they were breathing, and he wondered if she still felt it as well. Or maybe he had it all wrong. The older he got, the less he knew about women. Proof being Sunny. He’d thought what he and Sunny had was damn near perfect, until it wasn’t.

Suddenly a single tear appeared on her cheek. She reached up absently and brushed it away.

‘Neil…,’ she said. She stopped, then started again. ‘Neil is what this town is supposed to be, as quaint a notion as that is.’

‘I know,’ Jesse said, because he did know.

There was nothing more for now. Jesse stood. So did she. She covered the few feet between them and gently kissed him on the cheek. Everything was familiar again as soon as she did, the feel of her, the smell of her. He started to put his arms around her, almost by habit, but did not.

‘It was nice of you to tell me in person,’ she said.

‘I felt I owed it to you.’

‘You never owed me anything,’ she said.

She walked him to the door.

‘I owe him,’ Jesse said.

‘Somebody once said Neil was a friend behind your back,’ Kate said.

He smiled at her now, and shrugged.

‘I feel like there’s something more I should say,’ he said. ‘But beats the hell out of me what it might be.’

‘I couldn’t live with him any longer,’ she said. ‘But I still loved him.’

Jesse gave her a long look.

‘Do you think he killed himself?’ Kate O’Hara said.

‘Beats the hell out of me,’ Jesse said again.

4

Molly sat across from Jesse, their usual window table at Daisy Dyke’s diner, just after seven in the morning, neither one of them having slept. They were meeting the new mayor, Gary Armistead, at the station in an hour.

Overture to the shitshow, Jesse thought.

Daisy was waiting on them. She already knew what had happened to Neil O’Hara, whom she said had eaten breakfast here almost every morning, including yesterday. Jesse asked what they had talked about. Daisy said Neil had wanted to know if she might be the last person in the state of Massachusetts calling herself a dyke. Daisy had informed him there were still Dyke Marches in various locations across the country every June.

‘He told me he’d pay if I had one down Main Street,’ Daisy said. She shook her head.

‘Goddamn, this is a kick in the nuts,’ Daisy said.

Her hair was streaked with blue this spring. When Molly remarked on it, Daisy said she’d seen an old picture of Lady Gaga with blue hair and decided to go for it, what the hell, you were only gay once.

She poured both of them more coffee.

‘How’s Sunny?’ she said to Jesse now.

‘In L.A.,’ he said. ‘But we’d decided to take a time-out before she left.’

‘You think I didn’t already know that, putz?’ she said.

When she walked away, Molly said, ‘Did you ask Kate if Neil owned a gun?’

‘Right before I pulled away,’ Jesse said. ‘She said he hated guns. But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t have put his hands on one. She said anybody could these days.’

‘The staties already ran the one we found,’ she said. ‘Not even a 4473.’

Proof of ownership.

‘So it came from where most guns come from,’ Jesse said.

‘Somewhere,’ Molly said.

Jesse drank coffee. ‘I can’t see him doing this,’ he said.

‘I knew him practically my whole life,’ Molly said. ‘Neither can I.’

Jesse stared out the window.

‘Something’s bothering you,’ she said.

‘A lot is bothering me,’ he said.

‘Personal or professional?’ she said.

‘Professional,’ he said.

‘That means you don’t want to talk about Sunny,’ Molly said.

‘Daisy took care of that.’

‘So she did,’ Molly said. ‘Putz.’

‘Seems to be the consensus,’ he said.

‘So what’s the professional?’ she said.

‘Where were the footprints?’ he said. ‘That’s one thing. Other than mine, there were no footprints around that grave.’

‘It had rained earlier in the evening,’ Molly said. ‘Maybe he did it before it rained.’

‘Or somebody just dumped him there and then brought something with him to cover his tracks, from the end of the dirt road and back,’ Jesse said. ‘Especially back, if he’d carried the body to the grave.’

‘Lot of work,’ Molly said.

‘Not to make it look like he killed himself when he didn’t,’ Jesse said.

‘Anything else?’ she said.

‘It’s probably nothing,’ Jesse said. ‘But Dev said the bullet ended up behind Neil’s right eye. But the gun was in the dirt above his head. Almost like somebody had just tossed it into the grave.’

‘Teach me, sensei,’ she said.

‘Somebody who shoots themself has no control over where the gun ends up, they usually die instantly,’ Jesse said. ‘But Dev says the bullet was behind his right eye. I had a case once in L.A. We had to keep testing the gun to see if it could have landed in the position it did next to the body. And no matter how many times we tested it, we finally decided it couldn’t have ended up where it did.’

‘You’re gonna do that, aren’t you?’

‘Eventually.’

‘How long ago was that case in L.A.?’ Molly said. ‘Just out of curiosity.’

‘Long,’ Jesse said.

She grinned. ‘You know what drinking didn’t do with you? Kill brain cells.’

‘So far, so good.’

‘Probably no point in stressing on it until you get Dev’s full report,’ she said.

‘I’ve been stressing since I looked down into that grave and saw who it was,’ Jesse said.

Now Molly was the one staring out the window, chin in hand. She never seemed to age. Jesse just assumed that Molly Crane would still have her looks, and her marbles, when she was eighty.

‘You worried about Michael?’ Jesse said.

Her husband. Last year he had crewed for a hedge-funder named Teddy Altman in the Trans Pacific race. Now he was with Altman in a new race across the Atlantic.

‘Michael Crane against the ocean?’ she said. ‘My money would be on my cutie.’

‘You’ve got that look,’ Jesse said. He grinned. ‘The one where you’re almost having a deep thought.’

‘Very funny,’ she said.

She had been working up to something. But Jesse knew her well enough to know she’d get there when she was ready.

Finally she turned back to him and said, ‘Remember at The Throw when I said I thought I saw a ghost? Well, it wasn’t just a figure of speech.’

Jesse waited.

‘I thought I saw Crow,’ she said.

5

‘Your Native American friend,’ Jesse said.

‘Good for you for not saying “Indian,”’ Molly said.

‘Even the Cleveland Indians aren’t going to be the Indians for much longer. And the Redskins aren’t the Red-skins.’

‘And don’t call him my friend,’ Molly said.

‘He did have benefits, though.’

They had first met Wilson Cromartie, who claimed he was Apache, when he was part of a crew, Jimmy Macklin’s, that had blown up the Stiles Island Bridge and essentially taken everybody who lived over there hostage. Jesse had lost two of his cops during the siege. Finally had gotten to Stiles by boat and shot Macklin dead. Molly had been the one to capture Macklin’s girlfriend. When it was all over, Cromartie – known as Crow – had gotten away with millions of dollars, actual amount still unknown to Jesse.

Crow had gotten away on a speedboat. Jesse was sure that it was the last he would ever see of him. But he came back to Paradise ten years later, outside the statute of limitations for the money with which he’d gotten away, denying that he had killed anybody before he took off up the coast. At the time he was tracking down the runaway daughter of a Florida gangster. But then Crow decided he couldn’t give the girl, Amber Francisco, back to a bum like her father. Jesse helped him save the kid from the father’s men. The father later ended up dead. With no way of knowing or ever proving it, Jesse assumed that Crow had just gone down to South Florida and gotten it done, before disappearing again.

While Crow had been in Paradise the second time, he had spent one night with Molly Crane, the first and only infidelity in her marriage to Michael, another time when Michael had been out of town. Other than Molly and Crow, only Jesse knew what had happened between them. Michael Crane, according to Molly, had never found out that the mother of their four children, a Catholic almost as Catholic as a bishop, had slept not just with another man, but a criminal.

Jesse had always thought he understood the need upon which Molly had acted that night. It was the same sort of need, bordering on obsession, that he’d had for Jenn, during their marriage and long after it had ended, no matter how much she slept around.

Crow had been like that for Molly Crane. There was no way to know what would have happened if he had stayed in Paradise, what further damage she might have done to her marriage, and to her career. But she never had to find out. He left after he and Jesse had saved Amber Francisco.

Now she thought he was back.

‘We don’t even know if he was really an Apache,’ Molly said.

‘One of many things we don’t know about Crow.’

‘He could have been lying about that.’

‘Hard to believe,’ Jesse said. ‘A button man and thief being that unreliable. What can you even believe in anymore?’

‘But you admitted you couldn’t have saved Amber without him,’ Molly said. ‘In a way, you used him, too.’

Jesse grinned.

‘Strange bedfellows,’ he said. ‘So to speak.’