“And even though killing Bascom probably wasn’t part of the original plan—my guess is that was Bella’s idea—Updike still worked as the fall guy because we would assume he and Bascom had been in it together and Updike double-crossed his partner. We would be chasing Updike and our own tails while White, Roscoe, and Bella Lawton were taking baths in ten-dollar bills.”
“But was not seeing the messenger on the security footage enough to convince you it was a scam?”
“I also put in a call to Roscoe’s ex. The story he told me about their divorce was a lie. She divorced him because of his drinking, not because of photos she received in the mail. But White and Roscoe had to play up the feud between them so it would look like Roscoe would have no reason to help White out. It couldn’t look like they were cozy or that Roscoe could somehow benefit. I should have seen it coming. Especially after someone took those shots at me in the woods.”
That refreshed Lundquist’s anger over Jesse not reporting the incident, but he asked why that should have alerted Jesse.
“Because when Roscoe would get really drunk, he would talk about his time in the Marines. ‘I wasn’t always a fat slug,’ he’d say. ‘I could move and I could shoot. They wanted to send me to sniper school, but I was a lover, not a killer.’”
Lundquist shrugged. “If they were all broke, how did they get the money to lease the Wickham place? I hear it costs twenty grand a month to rent.”
“Wickham’s a big Jester fan. He agreed to lower the fee and to let them pay after the party.”
“Was there really going to be a party?”
“No. They were using it as a way to get stories in the paper about Jester’s birthday and rekindle interest in—”
“The missing tape.”
“Exactly.”
“The thing is, Jesse, you’ve got Niles cold for Bascom’s murder and stealing the ransom money, but not much else. You’ve got Niles’s statement and a lot of speculation. You might be able to tie the others to the scam, but not to Bascom’s or Curnutt’s murders. Can you prove any of it?”
“I guess we’re going to find out.”
88
Lundquist dropped Jesse and Niles off at the station. One look at Molly and Jesse knew there was trouble, but first they had to deal with Roscoe Niles.
“Book him. Keep him isolated. No one knows he’s here,” he said. “When that’s done, come into my office. I’m getting some coffee.”
Fifteen minutes later, Molly came into Jesse’s office with a file folder in her hand. Jesse was seated behind his desk, sipping coffee.
“What’s wrong?”
Molly waved the file folder and placed it in front of Jesse.
“Forget it, Crane. I’m so tired I couldn’t make sense of anything.”
“We found a Walther P22 in Bascom’s apartment and an oil filter box in the garbage that will probably match the homemade sound suppressor. The ballistics match the slugs the ME dug out of Curnutt.”
“Anything else?”
Molly shook her head. “Nothing you want to hear. Peter also found a slip of paper with a Vermont phone number on it.”
“And when you called it?”
“No answer.”
“Why am I not surprised? How about Bascom’s cell phone?”
“No.”
“The Vermont cops didn’t find one on his body or in the van. We can subpoena those records.”
“There’s this,” Molly said, more upbeat. “I did a quick background check on Bascom.”
“And . . .”
“Guess who his employer was before he hired on to be the security contractor for Stiles Island.”
“Crane!”
“The Massachusetts Department of Corrections. His last assignment was on the same block as—”
“Curnutt and Bolton. I know, Molly, don’t say it. I should have been a detective.”
Lundquist’s words echoed in Jesse’s head. So far all he could likely prove was that Bascom had hired Curnutt and Bolton, that he’d killed Curnutt, and that Niles had killed Bascom. Niles’s statement was probably enough to implicate White but maybe not convict him. White could claim Niles was lying and point to Evan Updike. To save her own neck, Bella Lawton would back White up and probably walk away. Jesse had an idea about how he might change that, but he had something else to discuss with Molly.
“Take a seat.”
She eyed him suspiciously but sat. “What’s wrong, Jesse?”
“Listen, you know how I joke with you about you becoming chief, but—”
She cut him off. “Oh, no you don’t. You’re not quitting on me, Jesse Stone. I don’t want the job.”
“Depending on how this shakes out, you may not have a choice, but relax, I’m not quitting. I don’t quit. When this is over, I’m taking some time off. I’ve got more than a decade’s worth of vacation time and I’m going to use part of it.”
“Going to travel?”
He thought about being coy but realized that if he owed anybody the truth, he owed it to Molly. “Rehab. I’ve given it a lot of thought over the last few days. If I hadn’t been drinking so much since Diana’s murder, I might’ve been able to see what’s been going on here. I’ve fooled myself long enough that my drinking doesn’t matter. It matters. You and Doc are right, it’s selfish of me and my liver’s not getting any younger.”
“If you’re waiting for me to talk you out of it, forget it. Under those circumstances, I can handle the job of chief until you get back.”
“As far as anyone else knows, I’m going to Tucson to visit family.”
She asked, “You going via Austin?”
“Doc told you she’s leaving?”
“She’s kind of great. I’ll miss her.”
“Me too, Crane. Okay, get out of here.”
Jesse stood, stretching. He picked up his glove, turned to the window, and pounded the ball into the pocket. He had thinking to do.
89
“When you want the guy at the top, you start at the bottom of the totem pole and work your way up” is what Jesse’s first detective partner had said to him. It was advice he heeded every time he’d built a case against someone up the food chain. And that was just what he meant to do now.
“You got it, Molly,” he asked. “When you see me come to the glass and finger-comb my hair, you turn the speaker on in the breakroom. Make sure Roscoe Niles hears it loud and clear. And make sure he’s shackled to the table. If she catches wind of this, she’ll clam up.”
“I heard you the first time, Jesse. We’ll have Gabe and Peter in there with him. He’s going to hear it.”
“Her file?”
“On the table.”
“I’ll be in there,” Jesse said, pointing at the interview room.
Jesse was seated, facing the mirrored glass, when Bella Lawton came into the room. She was dressed in tight white jeans, sandals, and a low-cut black top that accentuated her shape. She was perfectly made up, but there were cracks in her armor. Nobody, not even the most experienced criminals, enjoy a visit to the interview room. Jesse smiled, stood, and pulled out a chair for her. She sat as Jesse went back around the table and also sat.
“Frankly, Jesse, I would have preferred being summoned to a motel or your bedroom, but if this is your style . . . Isn’t this where you interrogate people?”
“We prefer interview to interrogate.” Jesse opened the file in front of him on the table. “Bella Anne Ligari. You even photograph well in mugshots.” He turned her Boston PD mugshot to face her.
She was unintimidated. “I was young and stupid and I needed money,” she said. “None of my patrons left dissatisfied.”
“Except for one,” Jesse said. “The complaint says you stole his wallet, his Rolex, and his ring.”
She laughed. “It was his wedding band. Can you believe it? The guy paid t
o have sex with an eighteen-year-old girl—he thought I was sixteen—and had the nerve to bitch about his wedding ring being lifted. Look, Jesse, people change. I changed. I’ve made a new life for myself, a better life.”
“That’s true. You’ve moved up a few rungs. Your website is beautifully done. I imagine your high-end clientele pay you well enough so that you don’t need to pocket their jewelry anymore. But not quite enough to get you out of the trade completely.”
She turned hard. “Okay, Jesse, what’s this about?” She looked at her watch, made an impatient face. “Tick tock. Things to do.”
“Like spend six million dollars?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Jesse left the room. When he came back in, he thumped a green duffel bag down on the table in front of her and laid a plastic-covered rifle and scope beside it. He opened the duffel and exposed the banded packs of bills.
“We’ve got two more duffels just like it in the evidence locker. Game over, Bella. You lose.”
She tried denial. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jesse. I really don’t. Stan told me the exchange was made and the tape was destroyed. What has any of this to do with me?”
He put his face very close to hers. “Don’t screw around with me, Bella. Just don’t. Like I told that idiot ex-friend of mine, Roscoe Niles, there’s hard time and there’s really hard time. As hot as you are now, what do you think a ten- or twenty-year stretch in prison will do to your looks? At least you’ll be popular inside, really popular. That much I can guarantee you.”
“I want a—”
Jesse cut her off, walking up to the mirrored glass. “Don’t say those words. You say the word lawyer and this stops being a negotiation.” He finger-combed his hair.
“Negotiation?” She perked up. “Why didn’t you say so? What do you want?”
“I have some pretty nasty suspicions about you, but I don’t want you, Bella.”
“Too bad,” she said, standing and coming close to him. “I certainly want you. Even if it wasn’t part of the deal, I would have wanted you, Jesse. You intrigue me. Men or women, they don’t usually turn me down.”
“What would Roscoe have said to that?”
She laughed a particularly cruel laugh. “That fat, limp old drunk? Talk about living in the past. He’s lucky there are drugs for his condition. I thought I’d gotten past having to force myself to be with the likes of him. The Teacher! I taught him some things, all right.”
“But you had the prospect of six million reasons to force yourself to be with him.”
“I’m not saying another word until you put something on the table other than props I may or may not know anything about.”
“By the way, Bella,” Jesse said, “that fat, limp old drunk was ready to roll over on you for a cup of coffee, so don’t give yourself too much credit.” Jesse lied to get under her skin. It worked.
“What are you offering me?”
He explained that given her involvement in extortion, fraud, conspiracy, and other assorted crimes, there was no way she could avoid at least a little time in prison, but that depending on what she gave him, he could probably get her time limited to a few years in minimum security.
“You’d be out in eighteen months and we’d make sure you didn’t get passed around. You say no to me, Bella, and I walk right out of here to Roscoe’s cell and make him an offer. Going once. Going twice.”
“Sold, damn it. Sold. What do you need from me?”
“The whole thing, from start to finish: details, names, dates.” He pulled a legal pad out of the table drawer, pulled a pen out of his pocket, and placed them in front of her. “Everything, Bella. You leave anything out and it’s no deal. I’ve already got Roscoe cold. Bascom’s dead, but I want Stan White and Evan Updike.”
She laughed that cruel laugh again.
Jesse asked, “I say something funny?”
“I can give you Stan, but Updike’s going to be an issue.”
“How’s that?”
“He’s dead. Stan killed him twenty years ago.”
90
Bella’s statement was like a detailed roadmap of the entire conspiracy. She literally knew where the body was buried. In this case, Evan Updike’s. Jesse put in a call to the New York State Police and gave them a location near Saratoga Springs where they might find the buried remains of a white male, approximately thirty-five years of age, and five feet eight inches tall. Three hours later Jesse got a call back. The trooper on the other end said, “He’s there, Chief Stone, right where you said he’d be.”
Bella only fudged one part of her statement, but Jesse expected that she would. People have a hard time implicating themselves in murder. According to her, it had been Roscoe’s idea to kill Bascom and to keep the money. “I attempted several times to talk him out of it and thought I had convinced him not to do it. Only after he went through with it and took the money did he call me to tell me what he had done. I told him I wanted nothing to do with him after that.” Jesse had read that section of her statement aloud to make certain Roscoe Niles got an earful.
—
STAN WHITE WAS SITTING ALONE by the pool, a bottle of vodka at his side and a .38 Smith & Wesson in his lap. When he heard Jesse’s footsteps, he raised the .38 and pressed the muzzle into the bag of flesh that hung beneath his jaw.
“I’ve been expecting you, Jesse,” White said.
“I can see that. Can we talk?”
“Sure, as long as you don’t come any closer to me than right there, we can talk until the cows come home or until The Hangman’s Sonnet comes out on iTunes.” White laughed, but tears rolled down his cheeks. “They say you can’t laugh and cry at the same time. Shows you what ‘they’ know, huh?”
“I’ve never been a big fan of ‘they’ myself.”
“I knew it was going to shit when I couldn’t get hold of anybody today. It’s horrible to be alone in the world. That’s why I did all this, to stop Terry from being alone. I could have just abandoned him to the state a long time ago, but I owed everything I ever had to Terry. I couldn’t abandon him.”
“Tell me about it.”
Stan laughed a joyless laugh. “We really meant to make the album. We really did, but Terry had a complete breakdown before we got started. Meanwhile, the label had already paid us an enormous advance. So I tried stringing it out until Terry got better, but he never got better.” White grabbed the bottle with his free hand and took a slug. As he did, Jesse inched closer. “Where was I? Oh, so I thought up a scheme to keep the money.”
“You created the myth of the album, leaked the names of the musicians who played on the recording, and then faked the theft of the master tape.”
“Just like that, Jesse. Exactly. But I created two monsters: the myth itself and—”
“Evan Updike.”
“That blackmailing little bastard. I needed someone who could give credibility to the myth other than me. He came cheap at first. Ten grand. That was nothing to me and Terry back then. But as the myth grew, Updike kept coming back for more and more, threatening to expose the truth. I couldn’t afford that because the myth had taken on a life of its own. The myth became the engine behind Terry’s sales. Every few years I would get the rumors going again and Terry’s sales would spike.”
“But you killed Updike.”
“With my bare hands,” White said, voice full of pride. “I strangled the life out of that weasel as soon as the lawsuits were settled. Otherwise, he would have kept soaking us. Terry’s care cost so much money.”
“But why this? Why now?” Jesse asked. “That’s the one thing Roscoe and Bella couldn’t tell me.”
“Because I got word Terry’s going to be dead in a few months. Leukemia.” White’s tears were flowing again. “I needed to finally cash out and use the myth one last time to do it.”
&n
bsp; “How’d you get Bascom on board?”
White laughed. “He was easy. He had gambling debts up the wazoo. He’d already blown most of his pension. And who can say no to Bella besides you? Bascom knew all the wrong people, which is what I needed. I planted the safety-deposit box key in the old lady’s house a few months ago under the guise of a prospective buyer. It was my mother’s key. She kept it like that, taped to an index card. Then I needed someone to discover the key and get the whole thing going. Bascom hired those two idiots. We didn’t figure on the old lady dying. I’m sorry about that and the delivery guy.”
“Too late for sorrow now, Stan. And killing Curnutt?”
White shrugged. “He became like another Updike. Once he figured out what was going on, he wanted a lot of money. We didn’t have it. We had used almost every dime we had to set it all up, so what choice did we have? Besides, it gave us an opportunity to get the press involved. That was smart of you, Jesse, trying to force our hand by keeping the press starved for facts. We didn’t count on you being so sharp. Roscoe said you were a drunk and lost after your fiancée’s . . . you know.”
“He was right, Stan.”
“So where does this leave us, Jesse?” White took another big pull on the vodka bottle. Jesse edged a little closer. “I don’t suppose there’s any wiggle room for me here.”
“Not an inch.”
Jesse had hoped that might cause White to go for the vodka bottle again, but instead he went for the .38. Not even Ozzie Smith in his prime could have made up the distance between them and prevented Stan White from beating Terry Jester into the next life.
91
By the end of August, Paradise had fallen back into its usual late-summer rhythms. Suit was home with Elena. It still made Jesse smile remembering how Suit had asked if there was any excitement in town while he was gone.
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