Fool's Paradise

by Mike Lupica

  “What are you going to do?” Sunny said.

  “Go talk to somebody who wasn’t there that night in high school,” Jesse said.

  Fifty-Two

  Jesse hadn’t mentioned it to Molly or Sunny, but he had seen Jerry Brock at a few AA meetings, in a basement room at the Paradise YMCA. Jesse heard him speak one time, mostly about his drinking days at Boston University, where he said he tried to set binge-drinking records that might never be broken, at least not by anybody wanting to live past the age of thirty.

  But he had never once mentioned a friendship with Bo or Troy Drake or Kevin Feeney. He hadn’t come forward to volunteer information when they were all at Paradise High together. At the time, Jesse and Molly and Suit had spoken to a lot of students at Paradise High, both boys and girls. Just not all, and not him. The first time Jesse had ever heard his name associated with the rape had been from Candace Pennington the day before.

  Jerry was currently a vice president of Cain Real Estate. His father, Ned, was a member of the Board of Selectmen, and had been when Jerry was in high school. Maybe he was the one who had advised his son to keep his mouth shut and head down. Now he was clean and sober, or had been the last time Jesse had seen him at a meeting, with a wife and young son.

  When Jesse had called, Jerry Brock had told him to come right over. Things were quiet these days in the real estate business; it was a buyer’s market in Paradise.

  “What does that really mean, I’ve always wondered?” Jesse had said.

  “It generally means no market,” Brock had said. “The council is thinking about passing a town ordinance making everybody take down their For Sale signs. They think it’s a bad optic.”

  The night Jerry’d spoken at AA, he’d said he replaced going to bars with going to the gym. It showed. His upper body strained against a tight black polo shirt. The tattoos on his upper arms looked as if they’d been chiseled onto him and not inked there. Jesse wondered if the tatts were a product of his drinking days, idly wondering, not for the first time, when tattoos had started taking over the world.

  “Is this about Troy?” Jerry Brock said.

  He’d made them both coffee from his own Keurig.

  “Peripherally,” Jesse said. “It’s actually about all of them.”

  “What a group,” he said.

  “Candace told me that it nearly included you,” Jesse said.

  His cup was nearly to his mouth. He stopped it, put it back down.

  “She told you that?”

  “And that you apologized later.”

  He put a big hand to his forehead and rubbed it hard.

  “I should have said something to her,” he said. “But I was a coward, afraid of Bo the way everybody in school was.” He blew out some air. “It’s amazing now when I think back, and I think back on that a lot, that I didn’t drink about half a bottle of vodka and go along.”

  “Candace was here yesterday to talk to me,” Jesse said. “Later that evening she told her partner that she’d run into a friend. Wasn’t you by any chance, was it?”

  He shook his head.

  “I’d actually like to have seen her,” he said. “But it’s funny. I’d already taken care of step eight with her before I was ever in the program, when I apologized. The one about making things right with people you’d wronged.”

  “Know the drill,” Jesse said.

  Brock frowned at Jesse now. “Wait, what was she doing here?”

  Jesse told him about the attacks on the department, the death of Troy Drake. And about Bo and Candace having gone missing, and perhaps Kevin Feeney, too.

  “Had you seen Troy Drake around town?” Jesse said.

  Brock shook his head.

  “What about Bo?” Jesse said. “Any contact with him since high school?”

  Another shake of the head.

  “Kevin I ran into one time,” he said. “It was the night of the ceremony at the movie theater. Saw him on the street after. Everybody else was going out. I was going home. Almost didn’t recognize him with the beard.”

  Molly and Sunny hadn’t mentioned a beard.

  “So you two talked?”

  “He told me he’d opened some kind of techy business,” Brock said. “Gave me a business card, asked if I could throw him some business. He must have rented his space from some other agency, and I just missed it.”

  “Was he with his wife that night?” Jesse said. “We’re trying to locate her.”

  Brock smiled now.

  “His wife?” he said.

  “He told Molly Crane she was away visiting his in-laws,” Jesse said.

  “Chief,” Jerry Brock said. “Kevin’s not married.”

  “He told Molly he was.”

  Brock shook his head. “That night, he asked me if I was married, and just to be polite I asked him the same. I’d always felt bad for Kevin, at least before what happened to Candace. He was the weak one of the three. Some of the guys used to call him Bo’s bitch. The rumor about him, after what they did to Candace, was that he couldn’t even get it up.”

  Jesse took a deep breath, let it out slowly. A Dix drill for relaxation. Feel it coming in, feel it going out.

  “But he told you he wasn’t married.”

  “Said he’d just gotten dumped,” Brock said. “Tried to make a joke out of it, actually. ‘Same old Feens,’ he said. ‘Even when he can get a girl, can’t hold on to her.’ Then he said he had to bounce, he had to go meet somebody.”

  “So nothing about Vermont?” Jesse said.

  Brock gave Jesse a “What the fuck?” look.

  “Why would he have been talking about Vermont?” he said.

  Fifty-Three

  Jesse and Suit and Molly and Sunny were back in the conference room. Jesse had already put Candace’s name and information into the National Crime Information Center. He’d called Lundquist and told him she was a possible abduction, gave him all of her information. They both knew that the longer you waited when someone was missing, the chances of finding the person safe diminished by the hour.

  “We’re going to find her,” Jesse said.

  “If she’s alive,” Sunny said.

  “She’s alive,” Jesse said.

  “Because?” Suit said.

  “Because she has to be,” Jesse said.

  They had put her license plate number into the system, along with Kevin Feeney’s. And Bo Marino’s. Gabe Weathers was in charge of trying to get a hit on either Feeney’s phone or Candace’s. Jesse had asked Molly and Sunny if Kevin Feeney had a beard. They said he did not. He knew it meant nothing, he could have shaved it off the next morning. But Annie Fallon said the man who’d tried to rape her had a beard.

  “Why would Feeney tell us he was married when he’s not?” Molly said.

  “It was even more elaborate than that,” Sunny said. “He said he’d told her about what had happened in high school.”

  “Sometimes one lie falls apart, the whole thing falls apart,” Jesse said.

  “Do we really think it’s him and not Bo?” Molly said.

  Jesse said, “Candace and Jerry Brock both said he was the weak one. Brock said they called him Bo’s bitch in high school. Maybe it ate him up a long time, until he got tired of being the weak one.”

  “Unless we’re making too much out of a stupid lie from this guy,” Molly said.

  “Or stupid fantasy,” Sunny said.

  “My experience?” Jesse said. “You start lying, you don’t stop. Like a drunk telling himself he’s just going to have one.”

  “So now we think that everything we thought Bo was doing, Feeney might have been doing?” Suit said. “Does that mean he might have gone after Bo, too?”

  Molly was turning her pen over in her fingers.

  “Or it’s still Bo and both Candace and Feeney are in trouble whether F
eeney lied or not,” she said.

  They sat there in silence. They all had their phones on the table in front of them, not one making a sound. Figured, Jesse thought. They never rang when you wanted them to.

  He looked at Sunny.

  “You up for breaking into another house?” he said.

  “Feeney’s?” she said.

  He nodded.

  “You want to aid and abet this time?” Sunny said.

  “I’m going to his office,” Jesse said.

  “And break in there?” Molly said.

  “If the alarm sounds,” he said, “what are they going to do, call the cops?”

  He stood.

  “I hate being lied to,” he said.

  “Technically it was me he lied to,” Molly said.

  Jesse told her it was a distinction without a difference.

  Fifty-Four

  Before he left the station Jesse told Gabe to stay on Feeney’s phone. They both knew how many dead zones there were in Paradise. He could still be in town and holed up, with Candace and the phone, in one of those zones. Feeney was a tech guy, though they had no way of knowing how good he was. Maybe he knew the possibilities of enhanced GPS, whether a phone was turned on or not. Maybe not. Or maybe he was already in some remote area nowhere near Paradise and had ditched his phone and hers.

  Maybe when he said he was going somewhere where Bo couldn’t find him, he meant somewhere they couldn’t find him.

  If it was him, though, he’d make a mistake. These mutts always did. Then they’d find him.

  Check that, Jesse told himself.

  I’ll find him.

  “Lot going on in our sleepy little town,” Gabe Weathers said.

  “Have I ever mentioned that I don’t like being lied to?” Jesse said.

  He still didn’t know where Bo fit. Maybe he’d never been in it. Maybe he was dead like Troy Drake. Or maybe Feeney was still Bo’s bitch and they’d been in on it together. Maybe they’d missed on Jesse, Molly, and Suit and were raising their game as they went along. In the end, Jesse told himself, it didn’t matter. Even Paul Hutton didn’t matter right now.

  All that mattered right now was that Candace Pennington needed saving again.

  * * *

  —

  There was a dumpster in the small parking lot behind Feeney’s office. No other cars. Jesse got out and tried the door handle. Locked. He took his gun out and used the butt end to break the window, reached through, unlocked it. Maybe there was a silent alarm, maybe not, didn’t matter. Jesse didn’t care either way. If it wasn’t Feeney, he’d pay for the window later. If Feeney did have Candace, this was no time to dick around.

  It was just two small, stuffy rooms. No AC. There was an empty desk in what looked like a reception area. Molly and Sunny said there had been no sign of an assistant when they’d been there, no reference to one. They hadn’t seen Feeney’s office. Jesse walked into it now, went through the drawers of his desk. There were some pens and index cards in the top left. In the middle drawer were a couple credit card receipts, both from the Gull. He took them, folded them neatly, and stuck them in the breast pocket of his shirt. More credit card records for Suit to check out. Jesse imagined his excitement.

  Jesse knew Feeney had been in this office as recently as a few days ago, but it still felt abandoned to him. No landline, no laptop, no computer, no iPad. Molly said he’d taken a call while they’d been with him, saying he had to get to a job. But where? With whom? Business did not appear to be booming at KF Audio Visual Services.

  If there was any business at all.

  The picture that Molly had mentioned, of the woman Feeney said was his wife, was on the wall in the reception area. Jesse walked back to study it more closely. Young blond woman, smiling at the camera, standing in front of a tree, more trees behind her. She could have been anywhere.

  Where was she?

  Who was she?

  Maybe someone Kevin Feeney had just photoshopped into his fantasy life.

  Had he cleared out because he was afraid Bo was coming for him? Or had he been hiding in plain sight all along? Maybe it had been Candace Pennington he wanted, and Jesse had done everything except deliver her to him, gift-wrapped?

  Jesse checked the file cabinet next to the window.

  Empty.

  He sat down behind Feeney’s desk. Thinking about lies now, and the way people told them, even when talking to a cop. Knowing from experience how often they folded truth into their lies, making them easier to manage. Almost like they were using truth to prop up the lies.

  Drake was dead. They couldn’t find Bo. Or Candace. For now all they had was Feeney.

  Jesse slammed his right hand hard on the desk, the sound like the crack of a bat in the empty office.

  Think, he told himself.

  You were supposed to think more clearly now that you were clean and sober. That’s what they told you in the books and the meetings. You started to get better as soon as you put down the drink.

  Just maybe not smarter.

  He sat there now and remembered how he’d feel when he’d wake up hungover. One of those mornings when he wasn’t sure if he was waking up or coming to. Knowing that the cop—the chief—who loved being in control had been out of control again. Feeling weak, scared, as afraid of today as he was of last night. Helpless sometimes.

  He felt that way now.

  Think, goddamn it.

  He leaned back in the swivel chair and closed his eyes.

  Feeney’s imaginary wife could have lived anywhere, but he’d said Vermont. Maybe that was where he’d slipped up. Maybe thinking they’d never check.

  Truth in a lie.

  He went out the back door and got behind the wheel of the Explorer. He called Suit and read him the number on the credit card receipt.

  “Another credit card check?” Suit said. “You’re shitting me.”

  “Do I sound like I am?”

  “No, sir,” Suit said. “Looking for anything in particular?”

  He told him, and told him to ask Molly to call the tax people in Vermont, or whoever up there could get her access to property records, and see if Kevin Feeney owned any property in the state.

  “And tell them it’s exigent circumstances, am I right?” Suit said.

  “Look at you,” Jesse said.

  Then Jesse called Dix.

  Fifty-Five

  As usual he was pressed and clean, bald head gleaming, nails looking as if they’d been manicured that morning. Dix looked as if he’d just come out of the box.

  “This is a drive-through,” Jesse said.

  “I can tell.”

  “Thanks for seeing me on short notice.”

  “When you said it was important,” he said, “I moved some things around, because it generally means you’re not screwing around.”

  “Fuckin’ ay.”

  “Tell me.”

  Jesse did. When he finished, Dix said, “So you’re convinced it’s him and not the Marino kid.”

  “Not convinced,” Jesse said. “But leaning hard that way. What I need to know, just off what I know, is if you think Feeney could fit some kind of squirrely profile.”

  “Squirrely,” Dix said. “I don’t remember that from William James.”

  “Rage, revenge, guilt,” Jesse said. “Could all of it have finally exploded the way his bomb didn’t?”

  “I’d like to know a lot more about his life between high school and now,” Dix said, “but, sure. And don’t forget humiliation. This guy got humiliated in front of the school, the town, everybody. That might be the emotion driving the bus.”

  “Could have internalized it for a long time.”

  “Now externalizing,” Dix said.

  “And he could have acted out in all these different ways? Even killed the Drake kid?”<
br />
  “You’re convinced he put him in the water?”

  “Same deal,” Jesse said. “Not convinced, but leaning.”

  “What about the Marino kid?”

  “If he killed Drake,” Jesse said, “maybe he killed him, too. Maybe first.”

  “You think it’s Feeney who tried to rape Molly?” Dix said. “Didn’t you say it was Marino that Molly sprayed with Mace and cuffed in the bus that day?”

  “It was,” Jesse said. “And another woman nearly got raped the night of the marquee lighting. By a guy with a beard. Feeney still had a beard then.” Jesse put out his hands, surrendering. “Maybe it doesn’t all fit neatly into the box.”

  “Sometimes not everything does.”

  “I’m not asking for a full workup,” Jesse said. “But could Feeney be this fucked-up?”

  Dix almost smiled. “More William James,” he said. “But, yeah.”

  “Blaming anyone and everyone for ruining his life because he doesn’t want to blame himself,” Jesse said.

  “You’re pretty observant,” Dix said, “for a small-town cop.”

  “Years of practice finally paid off.”

  “Could be a lot going on with this guy, if he is your guy,” Dix said. “I’m guessing he might never have been able to have a relationship with a woman. Or keep a job for very long. Maybe the marriage and the photograph and all the rest of what he told Molly are a way for him to create the life he once imagined for himself.”

  “And in the modern world,” Jesse said, “any woman he did meet would be able to check out his name online pretty easily.”

  “And find out who he is, and what he did,” Dix said. “You said that they kept him off the sex offender list, correct?”

  “Rita Fiore ended up lawyering all of them on that one,” Jesse said. “She’s very good.”

  Dix said, “But even if he wasn’t on the list, if a woman he was interested in found out . . .”

  “She’d run like hell the other way,” Jesse said.

  “And maybe every time that happened,” Dix said, “the wolf would get a little closer to the door.”