She bowed her head and in a whisper said, “The cat.”
“Cat. What cat?” Monty asked. “You never mentioned a cat.”
“Like Jesse said, I felt stupid.”
Jesse pushed her. “Tell us about the cat.”
“Right at the end of the chase, when Vandercamp was approaching Newton Alley, I got the sense that there was someone else there besides the suspect and me, in the shadows, mirroring my movements. I heard a plastic garbage can fall and swung my gun around, but a gray tabby cat came out of the dark.”
“Exactly where was this?” Jesse asked.
“You know where the back of the last building on Newton Alley bumps out on Bridge Street, where the people put out their trash in the triangle between the back of the building and the street?”
“And this sense you were being mirrored, was it just a feeling or was it something you heard?”
Alisha looked embarrassed and bowed her head again. “I thought I was imagining it because I was a little drunk, I guess.”
“Let’s never mention that last part ever again,” Monty said.
Jesse stood up. “That’s good, Alisha. It gives us more to work with.”
Monty walked him to the door.
“Do you really think this means something, Jesse? Or is it grabbing-at-straws time?”
Jesse shrugged. “We’ll see, Monty. As of right now, you’re still her best hope.”
The lawyer grabbed Jesse’s biceps. “Then you better find something solid and soon.”
71
Jesse parked his Explorer on Bridge Street across from where Alisha said she heard the garbage can fall and where the cat came out of the shadows. He’d been down this street hundreds of times, but now he pushed his familiarity with it out of his mind. Holding a copy of Alisha’s statement in his hand, he walked slowly back to the Gray Gull and retraced the steps she had taken that night while pursuing John Vandercamp. Although he was doing this in full daylight, Jesse was constantly checking to see if there were places along the way where someone could have kept out of sight while mirroring Alisha and Vandercamp’s movements.
It didn’t take long for him to become discouraged. While there were a few places at every juncture along the route where someone might have been able to stay completely out of sight in the dark of night, Jesse didn’t see any way a third person could have mirrored the chase without Alisha spotting him or her. Even on a moonless night or if Alisha had been more intoxicated than she was, another person could not have remained completely out of Alisha’s line of sight. And she likely would have heard him as well. But as Jesse came back to his Explorer and the place where the back wall of the last building on Newton Alley jutted out onto Bridge Street, he had another thought. What if that third person already knew where the chase would come to an end?
If Alisha’s instincts were right and there had been someone else there the night of the shooting and that person knew John Vandercamp was headed for Newton Alley, he wouldn’t have had to follow every inch of the chase. He might have been there the entire time, waiting for Vandercamp and Alisha to come his way. But that led to a question Jesse had no answer for—not yet, anyway: Why? Even if Jesse was correct and this was all part of some larger scheme, he still couldn’t grasp what that third person might be doing there.
Jesse stood in the little triangle where the plastic garbage can had fallen and from where the gray cat had emerged. Even on a night with a full moon, it would have been easy for someone to hide himself in the shadows by simply pressing himself against the wall. While that was true, it didn’t help answer the question. Why? Jesse stepped away from the wall and looked around. He knew there was something he wasn’t seeing. Then he remembered what his drill sergeant had hammered into his unit in Marines boot camp. The enemy don’t always fight you at eye level. Looking up and down and side to side may save your life. He’d had them sing it out as they ran. Up and down and side to side may in battle save my worthless hide. Up and down and side to side may in battle save my . . .
Jesse stood at every point in the triangle formed by the back of the building and the street. He looked from side to side. Nothing. He stood across the street where Alisha would have been and where his Explorer was now parked. He looked from side to side. Nothing. He followed the same pattern, scanning the pavement as he moved. Nothing. When he did it a third time, keeping his eyes focused above him, Jesse saw something at last: possibilities. He left his SUV where it was, walked to the corner, and turned down Newton Alley.
As he made his way down the alley, he waved through the art gallery windows at the proprietors. Art had never been his thing and there was a certain sameness to the paintings and sculptures displayed in the windows and on the walls of the galleries on Newton Alley. Lots of seascapes and paintings of whaling ships, bronzes of native Indians and pilgrims, photos of beached driftwood, of lonely gulls soaring over grassy dunes. Some of the stuff was more daring, but in a town like Paradise you had to give the tourists what they expected.
Jesse stopped outside the Pembroke Gallery, the last gallery on the alley. It was to the right of the Pembroke where John Vandercamp’s body had fallen. Gayle Pembroke was nowhere in sight, but the lights were on. Jesse tried the door and it gave way. A bell jingled as he stepped inside. Gayle Pembroke, a retired high school art teacher well into her seventies, was a native daughter of Paradise and living her dream.
“Jesse!” Her face lit up as she came out of the gallery office. “Good to see you.”
“Nice to see you, Gayle.”
“Ugly business lately.” She stepped past Jesse, went right to the front window, and pointed. “You know he died right over there.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Of course you do,” she said. “How silly of me. I’m sorry. What can I do for you?”
“You own this building and the one next door?”
“I do. When Sam died, I sold our house, took the insurance money, and bought both places. Good thing I bought when I did, too. With all the Bostonians and New Yorkers moving in, I’d be hard pressed to pay half what they’re worth now. Sorry for rambling on.”
“Do you think I could have a look around next door?”
She turned her head and squinted at him. “That’s an odd request.”
He didn’t want to explain, nor did he want to raise awareness by getting a warrant. “Maybe so, Gayle, but what do you think?”
Gayle Pembroke retreated into her office, returning a few seconds later with a set of keys.
Jesse took the keys and thanked her. “Shouldn’t take long. And, Gayle, you’ve got a tenant in there, right?”
“Maryglenn. She rents the top-floor loft.” Gayle had a big smile on her face and walked over to a haunting painting of one of the old Victorians on the Bluffs. “Maryglenn’s a painter. This is her work.”
“Beautiful.”
“It’s sold,” Gayle said. “I have some of her other work here. Would you like to take a look?”
“Not right now, Gayle. I’ll be back down in a few minutes.”
72
The blood had been scrubbed off the pavement where John Vandercamp died, and with the blood the patina had been removed as well. In an odd way, the clean spot called almost as much attention to itself as the blood had. Jesse hoped foot traffic and weather would take care of that before it became a shrine to Leon Vandercamp’s followers. Jesse had no desire for swastika-shaped wreaths to be laid on the spot.
The weathered red door to the building next to the gallery complained when Jesse pushed it in. The building had once served as a carriage house, but the carriage doors had been removed and bricked over so long ago that it was impossible to distinguish the old brick from the new. Old or new, the bricks now bore scars from Alisha’s bullets that had missed John Vandercamp. A dangling pull cord hit Jesse in the forehead as he stepped inside. He tugged on the cord and an old fluore
scent light fixture flickered to life. To his left was warehouse space where Gayle and the other gallery owners stored some of their stock, unused fixtures, business records, and boxes. Much of the artwork was wrapped in plastic or draped with fabric sheets all covered in a light downy layer of dust.
In front of him was a too-steep wooden staircase, the steps warped and worn shiny. They groaned under his weight as he climbed to the artist’s loft above the warehouse. The ladder to the roof was right in front of him, but he hesitated. He stared at the black metal door of the loft. He could hear music, strings and a harpsichord, leaking out from the gap between the threshold and the bottom of the door. He decided that whatever there might be to see on the roof could wait, but that he should talk to Maryglenn while he was sure she was in. Jesse knocked on the door hard enough to be heard above the music.
He was surprised when the door pulled back. Given the haunting painting in the gallery and the classical music, Jesse pictured the artist as a contemporary of Gayle Pembroke. Maryglenn was a nice-looking woman in her early forties. Her brown hair was threaded with gray and cut at an angle matching her jawline. Her face was round and pleasant. Her black T-shirt and ripped black jeans were speckled with a rainbow of paint. She didn’t look happy to see Jesse.
“Haven’t I talked to enough of you people already?” she said, a lot of Nashville in her accent.
That caught Jesse as off guard as her appearance had, then he remembered he was wearing his PPD hat and jacket.
“I’m Jesse Stone, the Paradise police chief.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, realizing how her greeting must have sounded. “That was rude of me. Come in.”
Jesse stepped into the loft and could immediately see the appeal of the place for an artist. Two sets of large angled windows on the Bridge Street side of the loft filled that area of the space with tons of natural light, and it was there that Maryglenn had seemed to set up shop. There were several easels, and shelves with arrays of paint tubes, cans, and brushes. Various-size canvases—some blank, some not—were stacked and piled in a few places on either side of the easels. The wooden flooring was, like the artist’s clothing, covered in drips and speckles of different colored paints.
“Pardon me, but is Maryglenn your whole name?”
“There’s a last name, too, but I don’t use it. How can I help, Chief?”
“Please call me Jesse. I take it you were at home on the night of the shooting.”
“I was. Look, Chief—Jesse—I’ve gone over this twenty times.”
“How about once more? It could be very important.”
Maryglenn offered Jesse tea, which he refused, but he did sit with her at the card table in the small kitchen area of the loft. After some preliminaries to help put the artist at ease, Jesse began.
“How many shots did you hear?”
“I was dozing off,” she said, “so I’m not sure. I heard one loud explosion that woke me up and then I heard a lot of shots. I don’t know, eight or nine, maybe ten altogether.”
“Did any of the shots sound closer to you than the others?”
Her eyes got a faraway look in them, the way people’s eyes do when they’re trying to picture or remember something from the past. “The first shot, the one that woke me up, sounded louder, I guess, so that might mean it was closer. But I don’t know anything about guns or acoustics.”
“Was there a lapse in time between the first shot, the louder one, and the ones that followed?”
“I don’t know . . . maybe. I was asleep.”
“Did you hear anything unusual other than the gunfire? Anything at all? Was there noise on the roof or—”
“Don’t tell Gayle, but we have squirrels and rats, even raccoons and opossum sometimes climb up on the roof.” She pointed at the ceiling. “Gulls perch up on there, too.”
That got Jesse’s attention. “So you heard something on the roof?”
“Maybe. Things scurry around up there all the time. I mean, if I heard anything, it wasn’t that different than stuff I’d heard before.”
“And the only window on Newton Alley is your bathroom window.”
She nodded. “Yeah, it’s next to the shower, but it’s small and cloudy so it lets light in. You can’t really see much through it.”
“Can I take a look?”
Maryglenn got up and showed him the window. She was right. Even if she had been at the window, staring down at Newton Alley while the shooting was going on, she wouldn’t have been able to see much. In the dark, she wouldn’t have been able to make out shapes. Jesse shook her hand, thanked her, and told her he was going up onto the roof.
“Jesse,” she said. “I’m sorry about being rude before.”
“No worries. By the way, I thought your painting of the house on the Bluffs was haunting.”
She smiled up at him, letting go of his hand. “Thank you.”
* * *
—
AS HE CLIMBED THE LADDER to the roof, Jesse could not get Maryglenn’s smile out of his head. When it came to women, Jesse didn’t have a type per se, but Bohemian wasn’t usually a sensibility that got his attention. Maryglenn had changed that.
Up on the roof, Jesse walked to the back ledge and looked down where the rear wall of the building ran perpendicular to the rear wall of a building on Connecticut Street and intersected the sidewalk on Bridge Street to form that triangle where the trash cans were kept. He knelt down, checked the tarred wall of the ledge, and found the type of damage—two angular scars dug so deep into tar they had chipped the brick beneath—he had hoped to find. He stood and walked in a straight line to the ledge on the Newton Alley side of the building. Even as he walked, he saw the same type of pits dug into the tar. Jesse stood at the ledge and, looking down, saw that he was standing almost directly above the spot where John Vandercamp had been killed, the freshly cleaned area on the pavement below marking the spot.
As he climbed back down the ladder and then the stairs to the street, Jesse thought he might now be able to explain how Alisha’s claim of being fired upon first could be true although no weapon was found on or near Vandercamp’s body. But explaining it wouldn’t be good enough. He would have to prove it, and that wasn’t going to be easy.
73
Molly was looking pleased with herself when Jesse got back to the station.
“What is it, Crane?”
“Check out the video footage I sent as attachments.”
“What am I going to find?”
“I think I found how John Vandercamp got to the Gull.”
“Green Jeep?”
Molly smiled. “Close, but no cigar.”
“The person who made the nine-one-one call at the Cummings murder scene said he saw a green Jeep passing him in the opposite direction when he was heading in to get gas.”
“It’s not green,” Molly said, “at least not all green. In the color footage it looks like it’s painted in a hunter’s camo print.”
“It’s progress. You get a tag number?”
“Not really. The footage, even the color footage, isn’t clear enough, but you can see a driver and a passenger at one point, and then at another point only a driver. The time stamps match, Jesse. The Jeep has a passenger just before the incident with Alisha begins, and then there’s only a driver after that.”
“Anything else?”
“I don’t know what strings you pulled, but we got the records on Lee Harvey Vandercamp. I printed it out. It’s all on your desk.”
“You look at it?”
Molly nodded.
“Let me guess,” Jesse said. “He was a Ranger with extensive special-ops experience.”
Molly’s face went blank again. “I’m not even going to ask this time.”
Jesse smiled. “I think Alisha’s version of events that night could be true.”
“That she w
as fired on first? How, Jesse? I want to believe her, too, but there was no gun.”
“There was no gun found. That doesn’t mean there was no gun.”
“It’s not like you to parse language like that.”
“I’m telling you what I think, but I need more proof before I can go to anyone with it. For now, this is between the two of us. We don’t want to give false hope to Alisha.”
“My lips are sealed, but why not tell Monty?”
Jesse shook his head. “If I’m right, we can bypass Monty and go straight to Weld and the DA.”
“How about Alisha’s job?”
“Let’s save her from prison first. I’m heading into my office. Did Healy call?”
“He did. He wants you to call him back.”
* * *
—
MOLLY WAS RIGHT. The Jeep was painted in a camo pattern and was outfitted for severe off-road use. Its suspension had been lifted to accommodate bigger tires and to allow for more ground clearance. It had a rack of roof lights and a heavy-duty front bumper with a towing winch, and its exhaust had been modified so that it could drive through several feet of water without stalling out. But Jesse was frustrated because Molly had also been right about the plates being unreadable. He couldn’t even tell what state the plates were from. On the other hand, the locations of the Jeep and the time stamps put it near the Gull and then, only ten minutes after the shooting, heading out of Paradise.
Jesse had gotten a little better at using a computer and tried to zoom in on the faces of the driver and passenger, but it was no use. They were shadows and blurs. When he enlarged their images, they became even more indistinct. When he zoomed in on their faces, they became dark blotches. He wondered if the state tech people might be able to do more with the footage. But for the moment, Jesse didn’t want to alert anyone about what he thought he’d found. His sense was that his presence at the Cummingses’ store had already resulted in a double homicide. If the Cummingses had been involved in the cross-burning and the rest of it, they deserved to be punished. But they didn’t deserve to be executed. No, until what he had was more than conjecture, he didn’t want to involve another outside agency. He shouldn’t have even shared as much as he had with Molly.
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