Fool's Paradise

by Mike Lupica

  Then Jesse drove over to the Neck. Lily and Bryce Cain had told him they had no idea who Paul Hutton was, or why he’d gone to the house that night. Maybe one of them was lying. Or both.

  And to an officer of the law, Jesse thought.

  Suit was right.

  What was the country coming to?

  Nineteen

  Bryce Cain was waiting on the front porch after he’d buzzed Jesse in through the front gate. He was wearing running shorts. Jesse knew he was a runner. Half-marathons, Lily had told him once, same as she used to run. No wonder he always looked as if he needed a hot meal.

  “You ever call before you just show up?” Bryce said.

  “I called your mom’s cell,” Jesse said. “No answer.”

  “She doesn’t always have it with her,” Bryce said. “She’s funny that way.”

  “So she’s not here?”

  “She’s not and I’m leaving. I just came over to look in on my father.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “She pushes his chair over to the window and he looks out at the water. Or maybe infinity. He doesn’t talk much, at least not to me.”

  Jesse thought, I wouldn’t, either, if I didn’t have to.

  “Mostly,” Bryce continued, “he just sits there while she holds his hand.”

  “Your mom?”

  “Karina. His nurse. Or caretaker. Whatever.”

  “She up there with him now?” Jesse said.

  Bryce had given no indication that he was going to invite Jesse inside. His phone was in his hand, like a security blanket. Jesse imagined he’d burst into tears if he reached over and took it away from him.

  “The only time she leaves his side is when she sleeps,” Bryce said. “She’s got a room down the hall.”

  “She a citizen?” Jesse said.

  He was thinking about Luis Andujar.

  “Did you come over here to ask me about Karina?” Bryce said.

  Jesse didn’t want to be talking to him about any of this. Bryce was one of those people who made you wonder who they thought were assholes. But Lily wasn’t here. He was. Jesse had questions.

  “The guy who got killed said he was hoping his trip over here really was a trip to paradise,” Jesse said. “Any idea what that would have meant?”

  “From a dead drunk I never met?” Bryce said.

  His shirt today was the color of Molly’s roses, and had a whale on the front.

  “Ex-drunk,” Jesse said.

  “Whatever,” Bryce Cain said.

  “I was going to ask your mother this, but I’ll ask you,” Jesse said. “Is there any possible connection you can think of between this guy and your family?”

  “None,” he said.

  “Any possible connection between your family and the horse business in South Florida?”

  He could hear Bryce Cain’s phone buzzing. Bryce turned his palm up so he could see the screen, and quickly glanced down at it. He was absolutely the type. One of those who thought a missed call or text or email might alter the order of the universe.

  Bet he never leaves the house without his phone.

  “I think my father might have owned horses at one time,” Bryce said. “Back in the day. And used to like to bet them at Hialeah. But I don’t think he’s done either for years.”

  “Paul, the guy who died, worked as a groom in Wellington,” Jesse said. “It’s close to Palm Beach, and I know your father spent more and more time down there.”

  “Wait, you think that might be a connection between my dad and this Hutton guy?” Bryce said.

  “I’m not sure what I think,” Jesse said. “I’m just looking to figure out why a cab dropped him off here the night he died.”

  “Look somewhere else,” he said. “And stop bothering my mother.”

  “I wasn’t aware I was bothering anybody.”

  “She’s too polite to tell you to fuck off,” Bryce said.

  Jesse grinned. He couldn’t help himself.

  “Actually,” he said, “she’s not.”

  “We went over this before,” Bryce said. “My father’s dying. We don’t need any other distractions around here right now.”

  The phone buzzed again. Bryce looked at it again.

  “Are we done here?” he said to Jesse.

  “Just one more thing.”

  Bryce blew out some air.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  “The last time I was here you said I forget sometimes that I work for you,” Jesse said. He casually took a step closer to Bryce, smiling. “You weren’t talking about yourself, were you?”

  Bryce opened his mouth, then closed it before turning and walking into the house. Jesse walked down the front steps to where he’d parked the car. Still smiling. Wondering how Bryce Cain knew Paul Hutton’s last name.

  Twenty

  Jesse and Molly met back at the office. She’d been to Annie’s house and said that Annie’s recollections of the night hadn’t changed. Before Molly had left, Annie told her that she really hadn’t been kidding, she had burned the clothes she’d been wearing that night, jeans and shirt and underthings and even her shoes. She said she didn’t want to talk about what had happened ever again, with Molly or Jesse or anyone, that the more she talked about it the better the chance that her husband would find out.

  “She does know she was the victim, right?” Jesse said. “Or attempted victim.”

  “You say ‘victim,’” Molly said. “She feels guilty, like she somehow had it coming.”

  Jesse shook his head.

  “She’s still being an idiot.”

  “What did she say about what happened to you?” Jesse said.

  “That she wished she could have been the one to stab the fucker, if it was the same guy,” Molly said. “And not in the leg.”

  They were in the conference room, just the two of them. Suit was at his desk, still looking for any possible financial information on the late Paul Hutton. Jesse and Molly were going over old case files. Not long after he’d become chief in Paradise, all the police departments in Massachusetts had changed over to electronic report systems. The shorthand for them was RMS. Records Management Systems. They were sorted by modus operandi: murder, gun crimes, and domestic violence. It was a long list, more than two dozen possible boxes to check. There were separate categories, case by case, for “interested parties,” people with a nexus to a particular crime, just not as victim or suspect.

  There was no box, Molly said, for people you had pissed off along the way.

  Before RMS, it was all paper, in two boxes at the other end of the table. Molly had already gone through the first one when Jesse had arrived back at the office from the Cains’.

  “I could do this myself,” Molly said. “And you could stay on Paul Hutton.”

  “I’m still not convinced they’re not connected somehow,” Jesse said.

  “Because you don’t believe in coincidence,” Molly said.

  “Neither do you.”

  “Words to live by from the chief?” Molly said.

  “You can drive yourself crazy with what-ifs,” Jesse said.

  “Not just them.”

  “A guy got shot,” Jesse said. “Somebody took a shot at me not long after.”

  “We haven’t found one thing connecting the two events,” Molly said.

  “Doesn’t mean there isn’t one,” he said.

  He’d told her about Bryce Cain knowing Paul’s full name. Molly said that maybe somebody in the department had said something to somebody, and it had gotten back to him, the way things did in a small town. Jesse told her she didn’t believe that and neither did he.

  “You going to call him out on it?” Molly said.

  “Not just yet,” Jesse said. “I’ll wait for that perfect moment.”

 
“I’m guessing it won’t be a perfect moment for him.”

  “Probably not.”

  “You sure you don’t want me to focus on coming up with a list of possibles out of the past so you can focus on your vic?” Molly said.

  “I’ve multitasked before,” Jesse said, and nodded at the boxes.

  Molly had made a list of possible suspects after going through the first box. They began to sort through the next box, case by case. They could both feel the almost kinetic energy in the room, even though this kind of work was always a grind. But cases like these, personal or not, made them forget all the times when the biggest crimes in Paradise involved bar fights, or underaged drinking at the beach, or graffiti on the bridge to Stiles Island, or noise violations when a party at one of the muy grande houses got too loud.

  This was for all the times when being chief, as much as he loved being chief, felt like early retirement, when boredom would set in.

  And could drive a guy to drink.

  The very first name on the list was Hasty Hathaway, former president of the Board of Selectmen who’d hired Jesse thinking he was hiring a drunk he could control. Jesse ended up putting him away for murder and racketeering and a lot of other bad shit produced by the secret militia group the crazy bastard had going for him on the side.

  “How long will Hasty be at Concord?” Molly said.

  “Until the twelfth of never,” Jesse said. “But my math could be slightly off.”

  “Could he still be harboring his grudge against us?” Molly said.

  “I was over there not long ago at his parole hearing,” Jesse said, “telling them that I didn’t think this asshole would ever be rehabilitated, and reminding them that he would have had me killed if I hadn’t taken him down.”

  “Whatever happened to the frisky Mrs. Hathaway, by the way? Have we lost track of that little minx?”

  “I assume she is still looking to bang every guy she can get to stand still long enough,” Jesse said.

  “I’m still amazed she missed you,” Molly said.

  “Not for lack of effort,” Jesse said.

  “Even when your steely will was weakened by drink?”

  “Even I never drank that much,” he said.

  They finished with the second box of paper files and moved on to electronic. When they did, Jesse said, “What about the Marino kid?”

  Bo Marino and a couple of his dumbass high school buddies had raped a Paradise High School girl named Candace Pennington. One had taken naked pictures of her while the other two held her down. But Bo Marino, a jackwagon and son of a jackwagon, had been the ringleader. He had escaped doing time only because he was a minor. Somehow he and his friends had even been lawyered off the sex offender list.

  “I lost track of Bo after he did his community service for me,” Jesse said. “But put him high up on our list. Sunny says that if you’re born round, you don’t die square.”

  “You reference Sunny quite a lot,” Molly said. “Have you noticed that?”

  “She has a lot of interesting things to say,” Jesse said.

  Molly grinned.

  “With or without her clothes on?” Molly said.

  “Hey, she’s your friend, too,” Jesse said.

  “Just without benefits.”

  “I haven’t been the beneficiary of those for a while,” he said.

  “At least outside your dreams,” Molly said.

  They worked through the afternoon and into the early evening. They talked about cases and perps and victims they had forgotten. They remembered the two serial killers, Tony and Brianna Lincoln, who’d finally been caught in Canada after killing Jesse’s friend Abby Taylor and Anthony D’Angelo, a good kid who’d been one of Jesse’s Paradise cops.

  * * *

  —

  It was past six o’clock when they stopped and decided to go over to the Gray Gull and have an early dinner. When they got to their table, Sunny Randall was waiting for them.

  “Say hi to your new roommate,” Jesse said to Molly.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Molly said.

  “Not even a little bit,” Jesse said.

  They were still going around and around on that during dessert when Jesse got the call that somebody had left a pipe bomb at Suit’s front door.

  Twenty-One

  Suit had immediately called the State Police Bomb Squad when he saw how the package looked, so they’d arrived before Jesse and Molly and Sunny had.

  “I remembered the pictures of those packages when that wingnut was sending pipe bombs to politicians a few years ago,” Suit said to Jesse.

  “You did right,” Jesse said.

  “See something, say something,” Suit said.

  Suit and Elena lived at the end of Cypress Lane. Elena had already left for her sister’s house in Salem. Suit had known enough to have the houses closest to his, on both sides of the street, evacuate even before the bomb squad arrived. The neighbors were now milling around outside the yellow crime scene tape, even though the show was over. They’d used a robot to remove the package from Suit’s front porch, place it on the flatbed truck they’d brought with them. The truck was already gone.

  “What the fuck, Jesse?” Suit said.

  “How’s Elena?”

  “Freaked,” Suit said.

  Suit said the bulging envelope was just big enough not to fit in their mailbox, so it was on top of the rest of the mail in the white container their USPS guy had left at the front door. The mail, as it turned out, had come late in the day, after Suit had taken Elena to an early dinner at the Chowder House. When they got home, Suit didn’t like the looks of the envelope. He was on high alert already, because of what had happened to Molly and Jesse.

  “You always tell me that being careful never got anybody killed,” Suit said. “But not being careful could.”

  “Words to live by,” Sunny said.

  “Literally,” Molly said.

  They were standing in the middle of Suit’s front yard.

  “You were right not to wait to call the bomb squad,” Jesse said.

  Jesse’s phone rang. He saw that it was Brian Lundquist, telling him that his guys hadn’t fucked around, they’d already water-blasted the contents, a six-inch bomb filled with shrapnel that had failed to detonate.

  First me, Jesse thought. Then Molly. Now Suit. Suit was right. What the fuck.

  “Did this SOB just want to scare Suit,” Lundquist said, “or did he screw up his homemade bomb?”

  “You save the packaging?” Jesse said.

  “My guys do this for a living,” Lundquist said. “It was mailed two days ago. From Paradise.”

  “Prints?”

  “Lots,” Lundquist said. “Dusted it before the water blasted. Whoever it was must have worn gloves. None of the other prints are in the system. Probably USPS people down the line.”

  “Bad bomb,” Jesse said. “Still bad intentions.”

  Jesse had walked to the street to take Lundquist’s call.

  “What the hell is going on there?” Lundquist said.

  “Beats the hell out of me,” Jesse said.

  “You need reinforcements?”

  “Got Sunny Randall,” Jesse said.

  “I meant from law enforcement.”

  “I know,” Jesse said. “But I’ve got this for now. I can protect my people.”

  “You sure?”

  “Day at a time,” Jesse said.

  “I’ve heard that one,” Lundquist said.

  * * *

  —

  Jesse put a car in front of the house. Suit didn’t argue. When they were back at Molly’s, she agreed to have Sunny stay with her until Michael was back.

  “I’m fun at sleepovers,” Sunny said.

  “So I’ve heard,” Molly said.

  Jesse and
Molly and Sunny were in Molly’s living room. Molly and Sunny were sipping Irish whiskey. Jesse had a club soda. He knew Sunny liked an occasional Irish late at night. There was a time when he’d have joined her. As always, he watched her, fascinated, as she took small sips. Sipping whiskey had always been a skill out of his reach, like playing a musical instrument.

  “He’ll make a mistake,” Sunny said.

  “They always do,” Jesse said.

  She was wearing a black T-shirt, faded jeans, sandals. Her hair, he’d noticed, was shorter than it had been the last time he’d seen her. Jesse had always loved the smell of her hair, no matter how long or short she was wearing it.

  He stared at her. She stared back and smiled, as if everything they knew about each other and everything they felt, whatever they still felt, was in the air between them.

  She sipped some of her whiskey and winked at him, as if telling him that everything he knew, she did, too.

  “If it’s the same guy, he’s no criminal genius,” Jesse said. “He’s missed with two women now. Missed with his bomb. Missed with me.”

  “By sheer chance with you,” Molly said.

  She sipped some of her whiskey. There hadn’t been much in her glass to begin with, but it was still half-full.

  “He’s like this mutt terrorist,” Jesse said. “Just one who hasn’t killed anybody yet.”

  “Can’t let him win,” Sunny said.

  The three of them sat there in silence until Molly said, “I could stay with a friend, Sunny, if you’ve got another friend you’d like to stay with tonight. I have to take orders from the chief of police, but you don’t.” She grinned. “Unless you want to, of course.”

  “I’m not here because he wants me to be here,” Sunny said. “I’m here because I want to be here. You’re my friend, too, girlfriend.”

  Sunny turned to Jesse now and said, “And I can do more than just sleepovers. I can help try to catch the stalker while you catch your killer. Okay?”

  “Okay,” he said.

  Molly said, “You’re absolutely certain you wouldn’t rather Sunny guard you?”