by Mike Lupica
Drake, Jesse knew, had dropped out of school. His parents had left Paradise, same as the Penningtons had. But now Drake was back, looking as if he’d aged thirty years since high school, and as if he’d been living under a bridge somewhere, maybe the one to Stiles Island.
He had long, stringy hair, and a complexion that was at least one of the shades of gray. Even from across the desk, he smelled of booze. There was a hole in the front of his polo shirt, near the shoulder.
Lundquist sat in the chair next to him.
“This is bullshit,” Drake said.
“We’ve been checking hardware stores in the area,” Lundquist said. “Just to feel as if we’re keeping busy. Turns out that a couple of the ingredients used to make the bomb were purchased at Duryea’s Hardware last week on our friend Troy’s credit card.”
“What ingredients?” Jesse said.
“BBs,” Lundquist said. “And the same kind of nails. Purchased the same day. About a week before the bomb showed up at Detective Simpson’s house.”
“I told him already,” Troy Drake said to Jesse, “and now I’ll tell you. I didn’t build a fucking bomb. I didn’t send a bomb. Do I look to you like I could make a bomb?”
“There’s not really a profile for guys who do shit like this,” Lundquist said. “Other than ‘fuckup.’”
“What are you doing back in Paradise, Troy?” Jesse said. “Heard you left a long time ago.”
“Wanted to see if anything in this shithole had changed,” he said.
“Some things haven’t,” Jesse said. He smiled. “I mean, here you and I are. Like old times.”
“This is a setup,” Drake said.
Lundquist said, “Next time you want to build a bomb at home, Sparky, don’t buy your supplies at your local hardware store.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t buy the stuff,” he said.
“What’d you need the nails for?” Jesse said. “You don’t strike me as the home-improvement type.”
“My room needs some fixing up,” he said. “I don’t have the money to hire somebody.”
“What about the BBs?” Jesse said.
“I’ve got a BB gun,” Drake said. “I like to go out and shoot at squirrels. Like for sport. There a law against that?”
“Be more of a sport if the squirrels could shoot back,” Jesse said.
“We didn’t see any work being done at the house,” Lundquist said.
“You went to my fucking house?” Drake said.
“Probable cause,” Lundquist said. He smiled and shrugged. “I know. It’s a bitch.”
“This is a setup,” Drake said.
“You said that already,” Jesse said. “But who’s setting you up, Troy, the guy who sold you the stuff at Duryea’s? It was your card.”
“This is bullshit,” Drake said again.
Jesse thought that if he slid any farther down into his chair, he was going to end up under the desk.
“You said that already,” Jesse said.
“What, I’m the only one who bought BBs and nails the last week?” Drake said.
“Nobody bought both at the same time,” Jesse said. “And you’re the only one who did with a prior grudge against the Paradise Police Department.”
He slid the piece of paper in front of him across the desk.
“Check it out,” he said.
It was a letter Troy Drake sent a few months after the rape of Candace Pennington, addressed to Jesse, Molly, and Suit. It featured bad handwriting, worse spelling, indicating, at least to Jesse, that Troy had lost interest in English classes after he’d mastered personal pronouns.
It was all about what they’d done to ruin his life, that he and Kevin Feeney didn’t even want to go along. Nothing about her, what had happened to her life. He wrote that they knew he wasn’t the real bad guy, but they’d taken him down the same as they’d taken down Bo, shamed him in front of the whole town. He couldn’t stay in Paradise, he couldn’t stay in high school now. Fuck them. Goodbye.
“Maybe somebody will fuck you all over the way you fucked over me” was the way it ended.
“Remember this?” Jesse said.
“You brought me in after I sent it, in case you forgot,” Drake said. “I’m not saying what we did was right. But you know what Bo was like. We were afraid not to go along.”
“Tell me why we should believe you didn’t make the bomb,” Lundquist said.
“Because I didn’t goddamn make it!”
“You own an AR-15?” Jesse said quietly.
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Just curious. Somebody tried to shoot me with one the night of the big storm.”
“I don’t own any kind of gun,” Drake said. He turned to Lundquist. “I thought you searched my house. You find a gun?”
“We did not,” Lundquist said. “And, not to make too fine a point of things, but it’s your parents’ old house. One you could think about cleaning up once in a while.”
“Blow me,” Drake said.
“Good one,” Lundquist said.
Jesse asked where Drake had been the night of the marquee lighting.
“Drunk.”
“Drunk where?”
“Home.”
“Alone?”
“I like drinking alone,” he said. “That way I don’t have to waste time talking to people.”
Jesse thought: At least we have something in common. Not much. But that.
Jesse asked him his whereabouts the night somebody had tried to rape Molly in her backyard.
“Home alone,” Drake said. He laughed suddenly. Jesse really did wonder if he was drunk right now. “I loved that fucking movie.”
“None of this is funny, Troy,” Jesse said. “Hasn’t been funny since you did what you did to Candace.”
Drake didn’t appear to have heard. He looked at Jesse instead. “Answer me this,” he said. “If I wanted to come back and fuck you all up, why’d I wait so long?”
“You wanted to fuck up your own life first?” Jesse said.
“That didn’t take long,” he said. “Trust me.”
He slid farther down into the chair. Jesse thought it was a matter of time before gravity took over and he did end up on the floor.
“I’ve hated your guts since I was seventeen years old,” he said. “But not enough to try to kill you or anybody else. The only person I ever think about killing is myself.” He looked at Jesse. “Trust me on that, too.”
“What are you doing back here, really?” Jesse said.
“I had nowhere else to go.”
“You plan to stick around?” Jesse said.
“Got a better question,” Drake said. “You gonna charge me?”
“I am not,” Jesse said.
Lundquist gave him a look but didn’t say anything.
“You don’t think I did it?”
“Making a bomb, even a shitty one, requires work,” Jesse said. “And some discipline.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Drake said.
“It means you’re free to go,” Jesse said. “But before you go, I want you to do one thing for me.”
“What?”
“Drop your pants.”
“The fuck?”
“Somebody attacked Deputy Chief Crane,” he said. “She got out from underneath him when she tried to stab him with a garden tool. Upper leg. I want to see yours.”
Drake looked at Lundquist. “Can he make me do that?”
“I were you,” Lundquist said, “I’d humor him.”
Drake stood. When he did, Jesse saw the stains on the front of his baggy jeans. Tried not to think too hard on where they might have come from. Drake unbuttoned the pants and dropped them over chicken legs. Turned one way, then the other. No visible bruises.
&nbs
p; “You done messing with me?” Drake said.
“For now,” Jesse said. “But Troy? I find out you lied, about any of this? That’s when I mess with you.”
Drake turned and walked out of Jesse’s office. He left the door open behind him. As he passed Jeff Alonso’s desk, Jesse heard Drake say, “What are you looking at?”
Jesse got up and shut the door.
“You don’t think it’s him?” Lundquist said.
“He’s a punk,” Jesse said. “But I don’t think he was lying. And I do think he’s got about as much chance of building a bomb as he does getting into med school.”
“I still think we should keep an eye on him,” Lundquist said.
Jesse smiled again.
“Like a friend of mine says,” he said. “We’d be fools not to.”
Thirty-One
We need to talk to Kevin Feeney,” Molly said. “And Bo Marino, if we can locate him.”
She and Jesse and Sunny were having breakfast the next morning at Daisy’s. Molly and Sunny had both ordered oatmeal, in the afterglow of just having been to the gym. Jesse ordered eggs over easy, corned beef hash, and English muffins. A short stack of pancakes. If he died, he died.
“We have nothing to tie them to any of this,” Jesse said.
“But they might carry the same old grudge,” Molly said. “Right?”
“Right,” Jesse said.
“We know where Feeney is,” Molly said. “Finding Bo might take some doing.”
“Not for Thelma and Louise,” Sunny said.
“Didn’t they die in the end?” Jesse said.
“I was thinking more along the lines of buddy movie,” Sunny said.
“Which one are you?” Jesse said.
“Thelma,” Sunny said. She shrugged. “Taller.”
Molly said, “Louise was bigger up front.”
“You can say that again,” Jesse said.
* * *
—
Kevin Feeney was a balder, heavier version of the seventeen-year-old Molly remembered. Even though he knew they were coming, he seemed as happy to see them, Molly especially, as he would have a process server. They sat with him now in the reception area of KF Audio Visual Services. The door to what they assumed was his office was closed. Molly asked what he did at KF Audio Visual. He asked if they’d ever heard of TaskRabbit guys. Sunny said she had, that they were the guys you called to install things and fix them and assemble them. Kevin Feeney said he was like that, just with home entertainment systems.
“I have an installation scheduled on Stiles Island,” he said. “I can’t be late.”
“We’ll try not to keep you,” Molly said.
She noticed a picture of an attractive dark-haired woman on the wall behind him.
“Are you with the Paradise police?” Feeney said to Sunny.
“Think of me as her bodyguard.”
“I heard somewhere they made you deputy chief,” Feeney said to Molly. “Wasn’t aware that the position came with a bodyguard.”
“Gets lonely at the top,” Molly said.
“Why are you even here?” Feeney said. “What happened with me happened a long time ago. I’m a different person now. I moved back because I didn’t want to feel as if I were running anymore, even though my parents passed a few years ago.”
Molly knew it had been a car accident, on the Mass Pike near Worcester, she remembered reading about it at the time.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“At least I couldn’t humiliate them anymore,” he said.
Molly let that go.
“I haven’t seen you around town,” Molly said.
“I keep to myself,” he said. “And hope that my customers don’t remember my name.”
Molly said, “Did you know Troy Drake was back in Paradise as well?”
Feeney said, “I haven’t heard from him since he quit school. But it’s not as if I ever had the urge to stay in touch.”
“Would you be able to answer some questions about your whereabouts over the past week?” Molly said.
“Why?” he said.
“There have been some incidents involving me and other members of our department,” Molly said.
“Incidents,” Feeney said.
“Someone seems to be targeting us.”
“Well, it isn’t me,” Feeney said. He shrugged. “I’m a one-man shop, like I said. All I target is good word of mouth.”
Molly gave him the nights in question anyway.
“I was home,” he said.
“With your wife?” Molly said.
“Alone,” he said. “She’s visiting her family in Vermont. It’s where I was living before I came back.”
“Does she know what happened in high school?” Sunny said.
Feeney looked at her as if he’d forgotten she was there.
“She knows because I told her, because I knew she’d find out eventually,” Feeney said. “She didn’t judge me the way everybody else did, or think I should have gotten some kind of death sentence for being a stupid kid.”
“We were all stupid kids,” Molly said. “But hardly any of them ever do what you guys did.”
“Troy made no secret that he used to think about getting even with the Paradise cops,” Sunny said. “Did you have similar urges?”
Feeney leaned forward, his hands clenched tightly on the desk in front of him, his knuckles almost the color of his white shirt.
“I took responsibility,” Feeney said. “I went away for a long time. Now I’m back. There was nothing that should have brought me back. Here I am anyway.”
“What do you know about Bo’s life since high school?” Molly said.
“Don’t know,” he said. “And don’t care.”
He looked at his watch.
“Are we done?”
“For now,” Molly said.
He stood. There was something sad about him, the kid who’d gone along with the others. But he’d stopped running. She had to give him that.
“Anything you’d like us to say to Bo if we talk to him?” Molly said.
“I never had anything to say to him,” Feeney said. “I was just too dumb to know at the time.”
When they were outside Sunny said, “Where to next?”
Molly grinned.
“We need to make a stop at the office of the second-biggest asshole in Paradise, Massachusetts,” she said.
“Only second?”
“I’m just assuming there has to be a bigger one somewhere,” Molly said.
Thirty-Two
Joe Marino, Bo’s father, had expanded his business over time into the largest highway and heavy construction company north of Boston. His new offices were in a corporate mall he’d built just over the line from Marshport. He’d put on a lot of weight since Molly had seen him last, his hair had gone completely white, and he had a big, veiny drinker’s nose.
One thing, though, had remained unchanged with Joe Marino, and was evident to Molly within a few minutes after she and Sunny had taken seats across the desk from him: He was as mean and graceless as he had ever been, and still reminded her of a pit bull. Even his son had admitted to them, after the rape of Candace Pennington, that his father used to smack him around. Trying to make a man out of him.
“I got no time for this shit,” he said.
Molly smiled. “Nevertheless,” she said.
Joe Marino jerked his head in Sunny’s direction. “Tell me why she’s here again,” he said.
“Think of her as kind of my partner,” Molly said. “She’s kind of a cop herself.”
“How are you kind of a cop?” Marino said.
Molly smiled as if she’d just been elected homecoming queen.
“Unlike Molly,” Sunny said, “I can’t simply arrest people, no matter how m
uch I feel the urge to do so.”
“Is that supposed to be funny?” Marino said.
“Apparently not,” Sunny said.
He directed his attention back to Molly.
“You said you wanted to talk about my kid,” he said. “Apple of my fucking eye.”
Molly told him as succinctly as she could about the events of the past week, the attacks on her and directed at Jesse and Suit. She told him they were currently investigating a possible link between those attacks and the rape of Candace Pennington, and that they’d already spoken with Troy Drake and Kevin Feeney.
“Those pissants,” Marino said.
“Nevertheless,” Molly said again, and told him they were now seeking an interview with Bo.
“So you people can do him all over again?” Marino said.
He wore a short-sleeved white shirt straining against his belly, a paisley tie. His face was red. His thick hands were clasped in front of him, hands that looked, Molly thought, as if he’d built his business with them, busting as many heads as he had to along the way.
“What Bo did, he did to himself,” Molly said. “He raped a teenaged girl while his friends watched and then he watched them do it and then he tried to threaten her into silence with naked pictures they took.”
“Yeah,” Marino said. “They got themselves into that Him Too shit ahead of their time.”
“Me Too,” Sunny said.
“Whatever,” Marino said. “Now you spend too much time checking out a woman’s ass you’re looking at a lawsuit.”
“Woke,” Sunny said to Molly. “Definitely woke.”
“Huh?” Marino said.
“Do you know where we could find Bo, Mr. Marino?” Molly said.
“Maine, last I knew.”
“Could you be a bit more specific?”
“Living in Biddeford,” he said. “Working some construction over in Kennebunkport. I offered him work with me. He turned me down.”
Imagine, Molly thought.
“Did he ever marry?” Molly said.
“If he did, I didn’t get the invitation.”
“Would he get married without telling you?” Molly said.
“He was pissed off at me the way he was pissed off at the world,” Marino said. “Because of the thing with the girl. I’d lose track of him for a couple years at a time.”