Robert B. Parker's The Devil Wins E-Book

Reed Farrel Coleman

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

Seitenzahl: 404

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

In the wake of a huge storm, three bodies are discovered in the rubble of an abandoned factory building in an industrial part of Paradise known as The Swap. One body, a man's, wrapped in a blue tarp, is only hours old. But found within feet of that body are the skeletal remains of two teenage girls who had gone missing during a Fourth of July celebration twenty-five years earlier. Not only does that crime predate Jesse Stone's arrival in Paradise, but the dead girls were close friends of Jesse's right hand, Officer Molly Crane. And things become even more complicated when one of the dead girls' mothers returns to Paradise to bury her daughter and is promptly murdered. It's up to Police Chief Jesse Stone to pull away the veil of the past to see how all the murders are connected.

Leseprobe

DEVIL WINS

In the wake of a huge storm, three bodies are discovered in the rubble of an abandoned factory building in an industrial part of Paradise known as The Swap. One body, a man’s, wrapped in a blue tarp, is only hours old. But found within feet of that body are the skeletal remains of two teenage girls who had gone missing during a Fourth of July celebration twenty-five years earlier. Not only does that crime predate Jesse Stone’s arrival in Paradise, but the dead girls were close friends of Jesse’s right hand, Officer Molly Crane. And things become even more complicated when one of the dead girls’ mothers returns to Paradise to bury her daughter and is promptly murdered. It’s up to Police Chief Jesse Stone to pull away the veil of the past to see how all the murders are connected.

About the Author

Robert B. Parker (1932–2010) has long been acknowledged as the dean of American crime fiction. His novels featuring the wisecracking, street-smart Boston private-eye Spenser earned him a devoted following and reams of critical acclaim, typified by R.W.B. Lewis’ comment, ‘We are witnessing one of the great series in the history of the American detective story’ (The New York Times Book Review).

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’

– Marilyn Stasio, New York Times

To Mel Farman and Jim Kennedy,

for taking me in as one of their own

1

Jesse Stone no longer felt adrift. No longer a man caught between two coasts, he had finally left his days as an L.A. homicide detective behind him. If not his private shame at how his life there had gone to hell. He was chief of police in Paradise, Mass. This was his town now. Yet there were still some things about the East Coast and the Atlantic he had never gotten used to and wasn’t sure he ever would. Nor’easters, for one. He found their brooding, slate-gray clouds and roiling tides a little unnerving. These late-fall or winter storms seemed to blow up out of spite, raking across whole swaths of New England or the Mid-Atlantic, leaving nothing but pain in their wake.

As was his habit, he drove through the darkened streets of Paradise in his old Ford Explorer before heading home. He wanted to get a few hours’ sleep before going back to work. Maybe a drink, too. The storm wasn’t supposed to make landfall until about midnight, but the winds were bending trees back against their will, sleet already pelting his windshield. Jesse shook his head thinking about that. About how storms in the east warned you they were coming. About how they told you when they were coming and then kicked your ass.

It was different out west. He remembered how, when he was a kid in Tucson, a few inches of unexpected rain would morph into the cascading wall of a flash flood, washing away everything before it. One minute people would be horseback riding or hiking through bone-dry arroyos and the next they’d be swallowed up by waters squeezed between canyon walls and ground sunbaked so mercilessly hard it could not soak up a drop of rain. Jesse remembered that he had once gone out with his dad, searching for some missing hikers after one of the floods. How they had come upon the body of a drowned horse. It had been many years since he had thought of that horse, its carcass rotting in the Arizona sun.

Then in L.A. there were the choking Santa Ana winds that would blow across the mountains, swoop down into the valleys and through the canyons from the Mojave. The Santa Anas brought destruction with them, too, sucking the moisture out of the vegetation, wildfires following in their path. Fires that would consume whole hillsides, one after the other. Sometimes the winds blew so strongly through the canyons that they howled. His ex-partner used to say it was Satan whistling while he worked. At the moment, Jesse felt about as far away from those Santa Anas as a man could get, but he thought he could still hear Satan’s whistling in the winds that buffeted his SUV.

There weren’t many cars on the road, but a few brave or stupid souls dared the weather. Jesse knew most of the vehicles. Robbie Wilson, the fire chief, was out in his red Jeep, looking for trouble. Jesse didn’t have much patience for men like Wilson, guys who liked being big fish in tiny ponds. Little men with big chips on both shoulders. Men with something to prove, always on the prowl for a chance to prove it. Jesse could never figure out what it was Robbie Wilson had to prove. He also hated that Wilson refused to call him by his first name, always calling him Chief or Chief Stone.

Alexio Dragoa, one of the few commercial fishermen who still sailed out of Paradise, was coming from the docks in his ancient F-150. That damned pickup was nearly all rust. The thing was like an old married couple who stayed together more out of habit than anything else. No doubt Alexio had been securing his boat, the Dragoa Rainha, in anticipation of the storm. Jesse gave the fisherman a wave in passing. Dragoa, a gruff Portuguese SOB, couldn’t be bothered to return the gesture. Par for the course, Jesse thought. Par for the course.

Bill Marchand was out in front of his insurance brokerage on Nantucket Street, wrestling the wind for control of a storm shutter. Jesse pulled over to lend him a hand. Bill and Jesse were friendly, if not exactly friends. Jesse didn’t have friends, not the way other people had friends. But Marchand sponsored the police softball team and was generous with local charities. In all the years Jesse had served as chief, there hadn’t been many town selectmen who’d earned his respect. Most selectmen had proven themselves craven and spineless, rarely backing Jesse or the department in tough situations. Bill Marchand was the exception. He was a thoughtful man who had usually based his support not on the direction of the political currents but on the facts before him.

‘Let me get that for you,’ Jesse said, pinning the shutter to the wall.

‘Thanks, Jesse. It’s gonna be a bad one, this nor’easter. You been through enough of these, you can smell it on the wind.’

‘One is enough of these.’ Jesse used his free hand to lift up the fleece-lined collar of his jacket against the sleet. The wind was gusting more intensely. ‘Ready for the shutter?’ Jesse asked.

‘I’ve got the latch ready.’

Jesse forced the shutter closed, Marchand helping the last foot or two. When the shutter was in place, the insurance broker latched it closed.

‘I hope the damned thing holds. I’ve had to replace these shutters twice,’ Marchand said, raising his voice above the wind.

‘I’m sure your insurance will cover it.’

‘You’re a funny man, Jesse Stone. Thanks again,’ Marchand said, offering Jesse his gloved right hand. ‘It’s gonna be a bad one, all right. I’ll be busy for weeks after this. We’ll have to call adjusters in from all over the States. You watch yourself out there.’

But it was Jesse’s job to watch out for everyone else. He waited for Marchand to get into his massive Infiniti SUV and drive off before pulling away himself. As Jesse was about to turn for home, he caught sight of another vehicle he recognized. It was John Millner’s beat-up Chevy van. Millner was a career criminal, a petty thief who’d been in and out of commonwealth correctional facilities during Jesse’s tenure as chief. Millner was from the Swap – Southwest Area of Paradise – the only rough part of town. But even the Swap was changing. It was turning into a hipper, more ethnically diverse part of Paradise. Millner’s family was old-school Swap and John was more a lowlife than a tough guy. A parasite, an opportunist, not a mastermind.

Jesse followed the white van at a distance up into the bluffs that overlooked the ocean and the rest of town to the south. The Bluffs were where the rich founders of Paradise had built their big fussy houses more than a century and a half ago. Most of those families were gone, their manses knocked down, properties long since sold off. A few, like the Salter place, remained as summer homes. Many had fallen into disrepair.

Millner’s van pulled off the road by a darkened behemoth of a house: the old Rutherford place. It had been vacant for Jesse’s entire tenure in Paradise. For years there had been efforts by the town’s historical society to get it named to the commonwealth’s register of historical places, but those avenues had finally been exhausted, and come spring the Rutherford place would be demolished. Jesse had a pretty good idea of what Millner meant to get up to. Giant old houses were lined with miles of copper wiring and other metals that could be sold off to scrap dealers at good prices. The problem for crooked scavengers like Millner was opportunity. You needed time to break through plaster walls and lath to get to the wiring. And a big storm had opportunity written all over it. Emergency situations stretched the cops thin, especially small-town forces like the Paradise PD.

Normally, Jesse would have given Millner enough rope to hang himself. He would have let him break into the condemned house before arresting him, but Jesse didn’t have time for that now, not with the storm blowing in. When Millner, all six-foot-six of him, got out of his vehicle and went to swing open the van’s side door, Jesse shined his Maglite in the thief’s face.

‘Who the hell is that?’ asked Millner, holding his hand before his eyes to block the light.

‘It’s Chief Stone, John. What are you doing here?’

Millner hemmed and hawed, thinking of any reasonable lie.

‘Don’t bother,’ Jesse said. ‘I’m not in the mood for your crap. Consider yourself lucky I don’t want to deal with you tonight. Now, get out of here and don’t let any of my people catch your ass up here again.’

Millner didn’t say a word, just got back into his van and drove away down toward town. Jesse watched the van’s taillights until they disappeared. Then he stepped to the edge of the bluff on which the Rutherford house stood. He looked out at the vast blackness of the Atlantic. He listened to the bones of the old house creak in the wind, listened to the wind whistling through the broken windows. He thought he heard the devil at work. He decided he really needed that drink.

2

He supposed they were all thinking the same thing: this can’t be happening. Not again. Not after all these years. But it was happening, only this time they weren’t a bunch of kids with too much Southern Comfort and Thai stick in them. That first time, it was some innocent fun gone sideways. Severely sideways, plunging them into a paralyzing hell with slick, jagged walls from which there would be no escape. None. Not ever. That they were here to kill their old friend proved as much.

They had been given a temporary reprieve, a cruel reprieve, lasting just long enough to fool them into believing they had put real distance between that old evil and the fragile lives they had built in the meantime. Lives that included wives and lovers, children, careers, small successes, and grander failures, but haunted lives just the same. Haunted because distance from evil is a myth of time, because they were never more than one restless night or, worse still, a tainted moment of joy away from it.

The wind rattled the windows and the loading bay door. The plinking of sleet was less urgent now that the snow was falling in sheets and collecting on the corrugated metal roof. Raw, cold air seeped into the maintenance shed like an accusation and made heaving clouds of their breath. Small plumes of breath came from the mouth of the nude man on the floor at their feet. His wrists and ankles were trussed behind him and his sun-streaked brown hair was caked with the drying blood that had leaked from the welt at the base of his skull. His broken lower jaw was unhinged, his mouth a wreck of splintered teeth and bone. After the pipe had been laid into him, the spray of blood had given the air a coppery tang that the two other men could almost taste. But the blood had settled out of the air like silt out of water. Now the place smelled only of burnt black motor oil, gasoline fumes, and antifreeze.

‘What’d you do with his clothes?’

‘The furnace in the church.’

‘His duffel bag?’

‘It’s a big furnace. Burnt that up, too. Nothing but old, smelly clothes and a Bible, anyways.’

‘Okay, drag that canvas over here and wrap it around his head.’

‘You really gonna do this?’

‘We are.’

‘But that’s Zevon, man. He was our friend once.’

‘Friends don’t come back to town to fuck up everyone else’s lives. If he wanted to stay my friend, he should have stayed lost. You may not have anything to lose, but I do.’

‘But –’

‘But nothing. We talked this through. We all agreed. It’s too late now, anyway. He’s already more than half dead. Now get the canvas and do what I told you. The storm’s blowing in faster than we thought and he’s going to be here soon to get rid of the body. C’mon.’

The unconscious man moaned a little as the coarse, mildewed fabric was wrapped around his head.

‘What’s the canvas for, anyways?’

‘Think about it.’

‘Oh.’

‘Exactly. You got the tarp ready for him? The rope?’

‘Yeah.’

Outside, there was already six inches on the ground and the roads were slick from the layer of sleet that had come before the snow. As he swung around to back up to the bay door, he checked his rearview mirror and saw two quick flashes of lightning and heard two muted claps of thunder. It was done. Zevon was dead. Now the time had come to play his part in keeping the past buried. Yet he understood that this particular episode of thunder and lightning, like their prior sins, was of their own doing and pushed them even further away from heaven than they already were. That the past was unrelenting and that no grave was deep enough to keep it buried forever.

3

Jesse hadn’t slept a wink after getting home. He hadn’t tried. He did manage to polish off two Black Labels. That’s why he’d headed home in the first place. Sleep hadn’t ever been a part of the plan, not really. It was always about the drinks. Drinkers are great rationalizers, spinning tales that only they will hear. Tales only they would believe. Jesse kept a bottle of something in his desk drawer at the station, but he didn’t generally prefer drink at work or when the sun was up. Coming home, having a drink before dinner, then one or two afterward, was sometimes how he got through the day. He knew his bottle of Johnnie Walker was home waiting for him like a faithful wife. He’d had a wife once, just not a faithful one.

His ritual entailed pouring the drink – sometimes on the rocks, sometimes in a tall glass with soda – stirring it with his finger, licking the scotch off his finger, raising a toast to his poster of Ozzie Smith, and taking that first sip. Sometimes he savored it. Sometimes, like that night, it was open wide and down the hatch. Any confirmed drinker knows that ritual is as integral to the addiction as the drinking itself. Dix was fond of saying that ritual was a secondary reinforcement. Jesse laughed at the notion of secondary reinforcement. He liked the drinking well enough all by itself. He enjoyed the ritual on its own merits. He’d gotten some food in him, taken a shower, and watched a half hour of weather reports before heading back to work.

Whatever sleep Jesse had managed came on the cot in his office. He was still on the cot, staring up at the ceiling, when the first dull rays of light filtered in through his window. He noticed the window was no longer being pelted and the howl of the wind had been reduced to a whisper. Morning had brought with it a soft hush. Then there was a knock at his office door.

‘Come,’ he said.

Luther ‘Suitcase’ Simpson came into the office, a lack of sleep evident on his puffy, still-boyish face and in his bloodshot eyes. He was moving more slowly these days, and not from lack of sleep. It was painful for Jesse to watch. A big man, Suit had been quite the high school football player in his day. But he’d been gut-shot last spring and was only now getting back to work.

‘Any coffee out there?’ Jesse asked, swinging his legs off the cot.

‘Sure, but I wouldn’t drink it. Better to save what’s left and use it to strip paint.’

Jesse stood, stretched the tension out of his muscles. His right shoulder aching from the damp air.

‘Making a fresh pot of coffee against your religion?’

Suit reddened. ‘I’m not Molly, Jesse. You know I’m no good at this stuff. You got to get me back on the street.’

Simpson had been on light duty since his return and chafed at working the front desk. Worse, Molly Crane had taken Suit’s place in the patrol rotation.

‘I know this is tough for you, Suit. I already stuck my neck out by bringing you back this soon.’

‘I’m sorry.

‘No need. I’d be mad at you if you didn’t want to get back out there.’

Suit smiled that broad, goofy smile of his. Jesse’s opinion meant everything to him. He’d always dreamed of living up to Jesse Stone’s standards, of being a cop good enough to work in a big city like L.A. Living up to Jesse is what had gotten him shot. He knew it. Jesse knew it, too. That’s what worried him.

Jesse asked, ‘You going to the counseling sessions?’

The smile vanished from Suit’s face. He reddened again.

‘Yeah, Jesse.’

‘Getting shot is a serious thing, Suit. It screws with your head. I can’t put you back out there if you’re going to doubt yourself.’

‘I’m going. I said I was going.’

‘Okay, let’s talk real police work. The donut shop open?’

Simpson laughed.

‘I went and got some at five o’clock on the nose. They’re last night’s leftovers, but they’re good.’

Jesse put up a new pot of coffee, ate a hardened jelly donut, and asked Suit to fill him in on the storm damage.

‘Storm’s almost blown itself out already,’ Suit said. ‘We had gusts up to sixty-five, but nothing now. Dumped lots of snow. About a foot, give or take. And it’s that real wet, heavy snow. You know.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘You get a lot of that wet snow back in L.A., Jesse?’

‘Cute. You want to earn some more time on the desk?’

For a second, Suit thought Jesse was serious.

‘Anyway, there were a few trees and power lines down. I had to dispatch some cars to block roads off and put down some flares while the repair crews did their thing. There were three fender benders. Reports already filed. Only serious thing was a partial building collapse.’

‘Anybody injured?’

‘Nah. It was one of those old abandoned factory buildings on Trench Alley. Molly’s over there handling it with the fire department.’

Then, as if on cue, Molly’s voice crackled through the desk speaker.

‘Unit Four to dispatch, over.’

‘Dispatch, over,’ Suit said.

‘Is Jesse up yet? Over.’

‘Unit Four, Jesse’s right here, over.’

Jesse dispensed with protocol. ‘What’s up, Molly?’

‘You better get over here, Jesse. Right now.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘We’ve got a body.’

‘Someone was killed in the collapse?’

‘Someone was killed, all right, but not in the collapse. The body’s in a tarp.’

4

Trench Alley was a dingy, crooked street in the ass end of the Swap. Backed up against Sawtooth Creek and dead-ended by Pennacook Inlet, it was as Dickensian as Paradise got. Even scenic New England villages need garages, body shops, cabinetmakers, plumbing supply houses, welders, and self-storage units.

Jesse pulled up behind a fire truck. Molly Crane’s cruiser was parked across the street, half on the sidewalk. The fire chief’s red Jeep Cherokee was parked behind Molly’s unit. When Jesse walked around the fire truck he was surprised to see Molly, Robbie Wilson, and the entire crew of firemen standing in the middle of the street, boot-deep in snow. But when he looked at the building in question, Jesse’s surprise faded away. The building was a squat red-brick affair with plywood where windows used to be, the plywood covered in generations of frayed handbills and posters about forgotten bands and closed musicals at the Village Playhouse. The building’s front right corner had collapsed into the street. You could look into the building and see that part of the back wall had collapsed inward as well.

‘Robbie,’ Jesse said.

‘Chief Stone.’

‘Unstable, huh?’

‘Badly. If I didn’t get your girl out of there when I did, you might’ve had two bodies on your hands.’

Molly bristled at being called a girl. She was only two or three years younger than Wilson and disliked him even more than Jesse did. Jesse could see Molly was about to let Wilson have it. He shook his head no at her.

‘Robbie, excuse us. I need to talk to Officer Crane for a minute.’

‘Take your time. I’m not letting anyone in there, stiff or no stiff.’

As they walked toward Molly’s cruiser, she kept turning back to stare at Robbie Wilson. Wilson was pretty lucky that looks couldn’t actually kill.

‘That obnoxious little bastard,’ Molly said. ‘I should’ve kicked his ass in front of his men. Then we’d see who he’d be calling a girl.’

They sat in the front of Jesse’s Explorer, the heater blowing full blast.

‘Relax, Molly. Two weeks back on the street and you’re already cursing like a sailor.’

She smiled in spite of herself. Jesse could do that to her.

‘And no matter what he called you, he was right to get you out of that building. I can’t afford you getting hurt.’

‘So you really do love me,’ she said.

‘You know I do, but that’s not it. With Suit on desk duty and Gabe Weathers still in rehab for his injuries, the department’s two men short.’

She punched him in his left biceps. Now it was his turn to smile. Then he wiped it away.

‘The body in the tarp,’ he said.

‘A passerby called the building collapse in to the desk. I had the Swap, so Suit sent me over here. It was still pretty dark when I arrived on scene. I had to look inside to see if anyone was hurt. When I got into the building I saw that another part of the roof, toward the left rear of the building, had collapsed onto some metal plates. One of the plates had been dislodged by the debris so that the plate was forced upward like one end of a seesaw. When I shined my flash in behind the plate, I saw the tarp. At first I didn’t think anything of it. Maybe some forgotten equipment or building supplies or something. But when I looked at it under the flash for a minute, I saw that it was bound up with rope and shaped like a body. When I kneeled down and stuck my head into the hole, it was pretty obviously a body. I couldn’t tell much about it from looking. I pushed the tarp and it felt like flesh underneath. And before you say anything, Jesse, my hand was gloved.’

Jesse put up his palms. ‘I didn’t say anything.’

‘But you would have. I know you, Jesse.’

‘Maybe. Back to the body in the tarp.’

‘Funny thing,’ Molly said.

‘What?’

‘The tarp was pretty clean and the flesh gave when I pushed, but pushed back. It didn’t seem frozen or in rigor.’

‘That’s a lot to tell from one push with your hand. No insult, Molly, but –’

‘Did I say it was one push? I pushed a few times. Then…’ She hesitated.

‘Do I even want to hear this?’

‘Probably not.’ She said it anyway. ‘I climbed down into the hole.’

‘You what? It’s a crime scene, Molly. You know better than –’

‘I had to check to see if the victim might be alive.’

‘Molly!’

‘I swear, Jesse. I wasn’t trying to be a hero. I thought I was doing the right thing.’

‘And…’

‘That’s when Napoleon showed up. Suit must have called the FD after he sent me over here. Robbie ordered me out of the building. He had his guys practically drag me out of the hole when I didn’t hop to. But for what it’s worth, I don’t think the victim was alive. He was physically unresponsive to my touch and to my verbal commands. No movement that I could detect. And when I put my hand on where I thought the chest was, there didn’t seem to be any respiration.’

‘Anything else?’

‘I think the vic’s a male. Would be pretty tall if you stood him upright. Maybe six-three or -four. Broad across the shoulders.’

‘But you don’t think he’d been there very long?’ Jesse asked.

‘That’s my gut feeling. Of course, I don’t know these things like you would. In L.A. you must have seen bodies in all sorts of places.’

‘Not in a snow-covered factory, Molly. We didn’t get much of that sort of thing in L.A. All right, let’s get back over there and see if we can’t get Chief Robbie to let us retrieve the body.’

But she didn’t move. There was something else besides Robbie Wilson bothering her. Jesse could see it on her face. He put a hand on her shoulder.

‘It’s okay, Molly. You did good. I’m proud of you for –’

‘It’s not that, Jesse.’

‘Then what?’

‘I can’t put it in words. It’s just when I was down there with the vic… I… it was just strange. It felt like I had a connection to him.’

Jesse nodded. It was like that sometimes. On most occasions, a body was just a body to a cop. It wasn’t callousness. It was an attitude born of repeated exposure and self-protection. But there were moments when you couldn’t help but feel a kind of weird connection to the victim.

‘It happens. I know. Don’t beat yourself up over it. Now, let’s go,’ he said.

They got out of the SUV. Just then an inhuman groan filled the air.

‘Watch it!’ one of the firemen shouted. ‘Stand back. She’s going!’

The ground shook beneath their feet. Jesse and Molly ran around the fire truck and saw that the building was gone. The roof lay halfway into Trench Alley. It had taken down the rusted cyclone fence that had surrounded the empty, rubble-filled lot next door.

‘Everybody okay, Robbie?’ Jesse said.

‘Fine. We’re all clear. You both all right, Chief Stone?’

‘We’re good.’

‘That stiff of yours is good and buried now.’

Not for long, Jesse Stone thought. Not for long.

5

Jesse was wrong. It was Friday morning before the body in the blue tarp could be retrieved. The nor’easter had blown in Monday evening. The building had gone down Tuesday morning. It was late Thursday afternoon before the building inspector gave the go-ahead for the site to be cleared. Whoever said that there was less red tape to deal with in small towns was wrong. It had taken a full-court press by Jesse, the medical examiner, and Captain Healy to get the village selectmen to push the building inspector into action. As usual, it was Bill Marchand who did the last bit of persuading.

Now Jesse, Molly Crane, Captain Healy, Chief Wilson, and the medical examiner’s crew stood on the corner of Algonquin Street and Trench Alley, just beyond the safety barrier set up by the demolition crew. Technically, there was no reason for Molly’s presence, but Jesse knew she would have found an excuse to be there anyway. For all the ass-covering Molly had done for him over the years, for how she looked out for him, he owed her more than he could say. Allowing her to be there was the least he could do, though he was ambivalent about her being back on the street.

Most of it was selfishness. He liked having her at the station with him. They were good together. More than that, he trusted her. She was organized. Unlike Suit and the other guys who worked the desk and dispatch, Molly could do her job and brew a pot of coffee without being overwhelmed. Having her at the stationhouse also made dealing with female suspects much easier. But the truth was that when it came to Molly, Jesse’s attitudes were a little old-fashioned. Although she was as good a cop as there was on the Paradise PD, Molly had four kids and a husband at home. Jesse had seen too many officers killed in the line of duty during his tenure. He had almost lost two more in the last six months and he didn’t think he could face Molly’s family if anything happened to her on his watch.

Molly had been willing to trade off her desire to be on patrol for a job with a regular schedule, one that allowed her to cook dinner for her family and participate in some of the kids’ after-school activities. Now that the kids were older, Molly had been itching to get on the street again. With Suit and Gabe out and no money in the budget for new hires, Jesse had no choice but to let Molly scratch that itch. He only hoped she wouldn’t develop a taste for the street.

‘Come on, come on,’ Molly said aloud, without meaning to.

‘Relax,’ Jesse said, looking at his watch. ‘Your pal in the blue tarp isn’t going anywhere. Should only be a few more minutes.’

‘What’s your girl even doing here, Chief?’ Robbie Wilson wanted to know.

‘She’s not my girl, Robbie. She’s the best cop I’ve got. Maybe you want to start showing her some respect.’

Wilson threw up his hands. ‘Jeez, so sensitive. All right. All right. I’m sorry, Mol – Officer Crane.’

She didn’t answer.

‘You realize any crime scene evidence is probably screwed beyond hope,’ Healy said to Jesse. ‘And what hasn’t been tainted has been carted away with the line of dump trucks that have been passing us for the last hour.’

Jesse nodded. ‘That’s why I asked your forensics team to handle the crime scene. If there’s anything left, your team is better equipped to find it.’

A heavyset man in a blue hard hat and reflective lime-green vest over a dust-covered Carhartt jacket came running up Trench Alley. He nearly slipped on the slick pavement. He yammered into a black microphone as he ran. It squawked back at him. By the time he got to the barrier, the fat man was sweating and panting. There was a shocked look on his face.

‘Which one of… you… is Chief… Stone?’ he asked, bending over, gasping for breath.

Jesse stepped forward. ‘I’m Chief Stone.’

‘You… gotta come… quick… There’s… there’s…’ He was too out of breath to finish.

‘Healy, Molly, you’re with me. The rest of you stay put.’

Robbie Wilson didn’t like it. ‘But I’m –’

‘Stay put. This is a police matter now,’ Jesse said.

The three cops hurried down Trench Alley, around the crooked elbow in the street, and up toward the site of the demolished building. They didn’t have their weapons drawn, but kept their hands close to their holsters. The fat man hadn’t indicated there was any immediate threat. They hadn’t heard any shots. No one was screaming. No one was running in their direction. When they got to where the abandoned building had stood, all the workmen wore the same shocked expression on their faces. The debris from the old factory building was completely gone: bricks, rebar, tar, plywood, glass, steel columns, all of it. All that remained was the cracked concrete slab, though a fine cloud of dust hung in the air. Thirty feet beyond the slab, Sawtooth Creek, swelled with melted snow, flowed by.

‘Who’s in charge here?’ Jesse asked.

A lanky, middle-aged black man in an orange reflective vest walked up to Jesse. foreman was written neatly in permanent marker across the front of his blue hard hat. pettigrew was written in the same marker in the same block lettering across the name strip on his vest. He held a radio in his left hand.

‘That’d be me, James Pettigrew.’

‘Jesse Stone. You wanted me?’

Pettigrew removed his glove and shook Jesse’s hand.

‘We got a situation here, Chief. I think you better come have a look.’

Jesse pointed at Healy and Molly. ‘Is it safe for all of us?’

‘Not a problem,’ Pettigrew said. ‘The slab is damaged but stable. This way.’

‘What’s the problem?’ Jesse asked.

‘You better just see for yourself.’

The metal plate that had been dislodged during Tuesday morning’s partial collapse had been removed. Bent and twisted by the debris, it sat close off to the side. The body in the blue tarp was clear to see in the morning light. It smelled, too, though not nearly as bad as it would if the temperatures had gotten above the week’s high of thirty-seven degrees. Molly was right. Whoever the man in the tarp was, he’d been tall and broad across the chest and shoulders. Loops of red and white synthetic rope were tied tightly around the ankles, knees, waist, chest, and neck of the body. But Jesse didn’t see what the fuss was about.

‘I’m confused,’ Jesse said, turning to Pettigrew. ‘Everybody knows about the body.’

Pettigrew shook his head. He put his radio in a vest pocket, moved to his left, and pointed at another metal plate a few feet away from the blue tarp. ‘That’s not it. Here, Chief, give me a hand. Help me lift this up.’

Jesse and Healy went around to the other side of the plate. Molly helped Pettigrew.

The foreman said, ‘Ready? Now!’

And with that, they lifted and slid the second metal plate up and back, resting it on the slab next to the other damaged metal plate. Then they looked down into the hole it had covered and saw a frayed, filthy blanket. Jesse knelt down and slowly pulled back the blanket, pieces of it disintegrating in his fingers.

‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!’ Healy crossed himself.

Molly dropped to her knees, crossing herself, too. ‘Oh my God.’ She clamped her hand over her mouth.

‘You think it’s them, Officer Crane?’ Healy asked.

She did not answer. He wasn’t sure she’d even heard him.

‘Them who?’ Jesse asked, peering down at the two skeletons.

‘Mary Kate O’Hara and Ginny Connolly,’ Healy said.

Molly pulled the small flashlight off her belt and laid flat on her stomach. She shined it down into the hole. The skeletons were different sizes. One was about five feet in length. The other five-six or -seven. Then Molly gasped. She pushed herself up and ran. She stumbled, fell forward, ripping the knees of her uniform pants. Got up again, limped outside, fell to her knees, and vomited.

When Jesse reached Molly, tears were pouring out of her. He got down beside her, threw his arm around her shoulders.

Healy came and stood over the both of them.

‘What is it, Officer Crane?’

‘It’s them, Captain. It’s Mary Kate and Ginny.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘The ring,’ she said. ‘Look at the ring.’

6

There had been very few times after his rookie year on the LAPD that Jesse Stone was at a loss. This was one of those times. Jesse wasn’t drinking, but Healy was. He was working on his second Jameson, pacing in front of Jesse’s desk.

‘How’s Crane holding up?’ Healy asked.

‘She’ll be fine. I sent her home to get cleaned up. She’ll be back here in a little while. You want to fill me in?’

‘I was still in uniform back then, just starting out,’ the captain said. ‘You were probably taking infield practice in your first season in A ball.’

‘Long time ago.’

‘Feels like yesterday, Jesse. Two sixteen-year-old girls, Mary Kate O’Hara and Virginia Connolly, went missing on the Fourth of July. They were supposed to meet a bunch of friends at Kennedy Park to see the fireworks and hang around for a concert by a local band afterward. Their parents said they left their houses around eight. The friends said that Mary Kate and Ginny were there for the fireworks, but that both of the girls skipped out during the concert. They never made it home. Nobody realized they were missing until about three a.m. If I remember right, the parents didn’t notify the Paradise PD until they had called all of the girls’ friends. So it was maybe five or six before the cops had any idea what was going on. Your department was smaller then. I think it was eight men and the chief. His name was –’

‘Frederick W. Tillis,’ Jesse said, pointing at the wall to his right. ‘Someday my picture will be up there staring down at the poor fool who inherits this job.’

‘I knew Freddy Tillis a little bit after I got the bump to detective. Nice enough fella, I guess. Not the most competent policeman I ever came across. I think his major qualification for the job was that he came cheap.’

‘They hired me because they thought I was a bumbling drunk.’

Healy laughed. ‘They were half right.’

‘The wrong half. But what about the girls?’

‘Tillis waited two days before he called us staties in. By then the trail was icy cold, not that there was much of a trail to begin with. The girls seemed to have vanished. There weren’t even many tips. You know, the usual crazies. One said he’d seen them abducted by a spacecraft. There was one credible lead, I think, a drunk guy eating at the Gray Gull. He said he saw a few kids in an overcrowded boat rowing out to Stiles at a time that would fit. His name will be in your files somewhere. It’s something like Sabo or Laszlov, like that. Nothing came of it. The guy was plastered.’

‘The ring,’ Jesse said. ‘Molly kept talking about the ring.’

‘Mary Kate O’Hara’s ring. Her class ring from Sacred Heart Girls Catholic. The ring company made a mistake in sizing it. It was too large for her ring finger, so she always wore it on the middle finger of her right hand. Both of the skeletons had Sacred Heart rings on, the smaller one on its right middle finger. Be a hell of a coincidence.’

‘I don’t believe in coincidence, but let’s wait for the autopsies before we get ahead of ourselves.’

‘It’s them, Jesse.’ Healy gulped the rest of his drink. Held the empty cup out for another. ‘Don’t make the same mistake Freddy Tillis did. Go dig the file out and start working it.’

Jesse poured.

‘Why is this the first I’m hearing about these girls, Healy? I’ve been chief here for over a decade now. I’ve heard about almost everything else that’s come down the sewer pipe in this town. Why not this?’

‘You’re from where? Tucson, right? You played ball in Albuquerque. Worked LAPD for ten years. Paradise is a small town. I been in all sorts of small towns since I came on the job. And if there’s one thing small towns protect, it’s their darkest secrets. It’s shame. They’re ashamed, Jesse. You may be chief, you may live here, but you didn’t grow up here. It’s one thing to be from a place. Something else to be of a place. Talk to Crane about it. She’ll tell you.’

Jesse nodded.

‘What do you make of the guy in the blue tarp?’ he asked.

Healy laughed. It was a laugh that had no relationship to joy. ‘You just said you don’t believe in coincidences.’

‘Would be a hell of a coincidence for three bodies to end up in the same abandoned building, buried in utility holes ten feet apart.’

Healy shook his head. ‘So you think there’s a connection?’

‘One way or the other.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Healy asked.

‘That the bodies being ten feet apart means more to me than the passage of time.’

‘We’ll know soon enough.’

‘Uh-huh,’ Jesse said, finally pouring himself a drink.

7

The files were buried and forgotten, much as their bodies had been. It had taken him nearly a half-hour to dig them out of a back storage room, a room Jesse had spent precious little time in since his arrival in Paradise. He didn’t want to think about the other secrets Paradise kept buried there. Now he sat with an array of the girls’ photos laid out on his desktop, the photos dulled by time and carelessness. In spite of their faded images, Jesse could see enough to get a sense of the girls and to glimpse the past.

Mary Kate O’Hara was the smaller of the two girls. Copper-haired and freckle-faced, more cute than pretty, she had fire in her eyes. They looked hazel in the faded photographs. The paperwork said they were green. What did it matter now? Virginia ‘Ginny’ Connolly was the taller of the pair. She was strawberry blond and blue-eyed. In her tenth-grade graduation picture – taken in February of that year – there was still some awkwardness in her features. A nose a bit too big for her face, a mouth full of braces, slumped shoulders to hide her height. But in the photos of her taken in the months leading up to her July Fourth disappearance, she’d shed her braces, grown into her face and body. She would have been a beautiful woman, Jesse thought. Both girls had been good if not remarkable students at Sacred Heart. Both had been good athletes, particularly Ginny. Neither had gotten into much trouble, though Mary Kate was a bit of a pistol. She’d been a prankster, according to her school records.

When Jesse took out the other photos from the files, the ones that weren’t just of the two dead girls, he was taken aback. Several of those pictures featured Ginny and Mary Kate with their arms around a third girl. That girl was quite pretty, with dark, wavy hair and an infectious smile. She had a look in her eyes that was quite familiar to Jesse. He had gazed at that expression, at that face, for five or six days a week, for more than ten years. It was a face more familiar to him than Jenn’s, his ex-wife, or Sunny Randall’s, or Diana Evans’s, or any of his other lovers, recent or past. It was Molly’s face.

He put the photos aside and began seriously reading through the files, such as they were. Jesse shook his head at how haphazardly the investigation seemed to have been handled, at least at the start. He knew he shouldn’t judge a small-town PD’s investigation the way he would judge one handled by a big-city police department, but he couldn’t help but compare his LAPD experiences to what had gone down in Paradise when the girls went missing. He recalled how he had been taught to keep extensive and thorough notes, especially during a homicide investigation. Jesse’s murder books were legend. No detail was too small to escape mention, because you just never knew what would lead you to the killer.

That didn’t seem to be the philosophy of the Paradise PD back in the day. Of course, he had to allow that it was never really a murder investigation. In fact, from what he could glean, there didn’t seem to have been a working theory of the case or, more accurately, there seemed to be any number of working theories. From the interview notes, Jesse could infer the questions the cops were asking and could thereby reconstruct what the cops were thinking. Early on, they apparently believed Ginny and Mary Kate went off on an adventure together, possibly hitching down to Boston or to New York City. Then that shifted to a runaway scenario based on the fact that Ginny and her mother had recently been at odds. It was only after the state police came in to help that the girls’ bank records were checked – something a big-city department would have done immediately. And only when no unusual activity turned up, no big withdrawals the week before they vanished, did the working theories take a darker turn.

When the state came into it, they rounded up all the usual suspects: local sex offenders, ex-cons with a history of violence, especially a history of violence toward women. There were a few suspects the state police kept an eye on, but it came to nothing. And it took the better part of a week for a physical search to be mounted. It was a pretty thorough search, too. People had combed over the Bluffs, Stiles Island, the marina, and the rest of town. Unfortunately, there had been a few days of heavy rains in the interim and the feeling was that, if there had been any less-than-obvious physical evidence to be found, it had been washed away with the rains.

The most fascinating parts of the reading for Jesse were the interviews with the teenagers of Paradise. It was fascinating on many levels because the kids interviewed back then were people Jesse had known only as adults. Molly and her husband among them. In fact, Molly had been interviewed three times. Bill Marchand and two other selectmen, Robbie Wilson, the mayor, and several of Paradise’s other citizens had been interviewed. Just as fascinating for Jesse was seeing names he didn’t recognize. A good number of the teens back then had stayed and made their lives here, but many had not. He wondered where those kids had gone and why they had gone and what they were up to now. The bottom line was that the interviews, like everything else in the case, led the cops nowhere. No one knew who Ginny and Mary Kate were meeting in the park. No one remembered seeing them.