“You think it’s a serial killer, Jesse?”
“Yeah,” Jesse said. “Any fix on when it happened?”
“I talked with the pastor of the church and he says that the church music director came in to practice on the organ at about four,” Perkins said. “And didn’t see anything. So, sometime between four and when the call came in at seven-fifteen. Between four and seven-fifteen there were three commuter trains, the last one at six twenty-three.”
“Who found the body?” Jesse said.
“Couple kids skateboarding.”
“In the dark?”
“The pastor says the parking lot lights are on a timer and they turned on at seven. They never changed the timer for daylight savings.”
“The kids still here?”
“Yeah. They’re in the cruiser with Eddie.”
“Hang on to them.”
Jesse stood up. “Don’t move a thing,” he said. “Everything just the way it is.”
“Sure thing,” Perkins said. “I still got to take my pictures.”
Jesse walked away from the scene, a hundred yards up the railroad tracks to the Paradise Center Station. It was empty and dark. The last train would have been at 6:23. He turned and looked down the tracks. This time of year it would have been dark by six. But if you were used to it, you probably wouldn’t have a problem. He started down the tracks. He wasn’t used to it, but the light from the church parking lot was helpful. Besides, I’m a natural athlete. There was a pathway through the screen of trees into the back of the church parking lot. He walked through this way, carrying his briefcase. Lot was still dark. He’s walking down here, toward Maple Street, and he sees a couple people walking toward him, and he doesn’t pay any attention and then they get close and bang. He falls pretty much straight backward and, unless they weren’t shooting as good as usual, was dead before he was through falling. He stood over the dead man and looked around the parking lot. There was a maroon Chevrolet Cavalier parked close to the church, and a brown Toyota Camry beside it. All the other vehicles were police and fire vehicles, lights on, flashers flashing. I wonder why cops always do that. I wonder why we don’t shut the damn things off when we get there. He turned slowly and looked around the parking lot. Across from him was the exit onto Sea Street. To the right a path led through another small screen of trees to Maple Street. Jesse walked to the exit and looked at Sea Street. To the left took you out of town, heading for Route 1. To the right was downtown and the waterfront. He walked back and through the path to Maple Street. Front lawns, driveways, garrison colonials. To the right, near the end of the street, one of the houses was more brightly lit than the others, with several cars parked out front. Kennedy’s house?
“You know which house is Kennedy’s?” Jesse said.
“No, I can ask Anthony.”
Jesse shook his head.
“Okay,” he said to Perkins. “You can close it up.”
Perkins nodded.
“I’ll talk with those kids,” Jesse said.
“First cruiser,” Perkins said. “Where the skateboards are.”
21
Jesse got into the front seat of the cruiser beside Ed Cox and turned to talk with the boys in back. The boys were about fourteen. They reeked of self-importance. Too bad about the dead guy, but this was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to them.
“My name’s Jesse Stone,” he said.
“We know who you are.”
“Did you tell your story to the officer?” Jesse said.
“Yes.”
“And give him your names and addresses?”
“Sure.”
“Okay, now I want you to tell me.”
“My name’s Richard Owens,” one of the boys said.
He was short and slim and blond with a slacker haircut and a gold stud in his left earlobe.
“What do they call you?” Jesse said.
“You mean like my nickname?”
Jesse nodded.
“Rick,” the boy said. “Or Ricky sometimes.”
“You?” Jesse said to the other boy.
He was an olive-skinned kid, with long black hair that had not fared well in the rain.
“Sidney Lessard,” the boy said. “They call me Sid.”
“Okay, Sid,” Jesse said. “Officer Cox will take you someplace else out of the rain—you can use my car, Eddie.”
“How come we can’t stay together?” Rick said.
“Police procedure,” Jesse said.
“What procedure?” Rick said.
“See if you both tell the same story.”
“You think we’re lying?” Rick said.
“No way to know,” Jesse said. “Yet.”
“For crissake . . .” Rick said.
“I’ll go,” Sid said. “We ain’t lying. I’ll just go with him.”
Cox got out of the driver’s side and opened the back door. Sid got out and they walked toward Jesse’s car. Jesse reached over and shut off the blue light.
“What’d you see, Rick?” Jesse said.
“Me and Sid come over here to skateboard, you know, it’s nice pavement, and they got that handicap ramp, and they turn the lights on every night.”
“Even in the rain?” Jesse said.
“Yeah, sure, we don’t care about rain.”
“You got here after the lights were on.”
“ ’Course, you can’t board in the dark.”
“ ’Course,” Jesse said.
“Anyway, so we’re boarding, maybe five minutes, and I come down the ramp and hit a pebble and fall on my ass and the board goes off into the dark. And I go to get it and I see this guy and I yell for Sid and we can tell he’s dead, and—”
“How?”
“How what?” Ricky was slightly annoyed at the interruption.
“How’d you know he was dead?”
“I . . . I don’t know, you can just tell, you know. Ain’t you ever seen dead people?”
“I have,” Jesse said.
“And he’s got this pink stain like blood on his front,” Rick said. “So we run like hell for the church and tell the minister, and he calls the cops, and you guys show up.”
“You see anything that might be a clue?” Jesse said.
“I told you all we seen,” Rick said.
“Aside from the cop cars,” Jesse said. “There’s a maroon Chevrolet Cavalier and a brown Toyota Camry in the parking lot now. Did you see any other cars?”
“Just the Saab,” Rick said.
“Tell me about the Saab.”
“It was a Saab ninety-five sedan, red, with the custom wheel covers.”
“Where was it?”
“Parked by the driveway over there, when we come by with our boards.”
“Anyone in it?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you noticed the car and model and wheels,” Jesse said.
“Sure, I like cars.”
Jesse smiled. “When did it leave?”
“I don’t know. After we seen the dead guy and run in the church and told the minister, when we come out again it was gone.”
“Okay,” Jesse said. “Thanks for your help. If you want to wait around while I talk with Sid you can sit in my car with Officer Cox.”
“Okay.”
Sid came over and told Jesse essentially the same story. He pumped up his part in it a little, telling Jesse that “we found the dead guy” but most witnesses aggrandize a little, Jesse knew.
When the boys were gone, Jesse stood in the rain with Peter Perkins while the EMTs bundled the body into the back of the ambulance.
“No flashers,” Jesse said to the EMTs. “No sirens. There’s no hurry.”
“Soon,” Jesse said. “Give her a little time.”
“Kids tell you anything?”
“There was a red Saab sedan, a ninety-five the kid told me, with custom wheels, that was parked by the driveway and left after the kids discovered the body.”
“They didn’t get any kind of license number?”
“No one ever gets a license number,” Jesse said.
“I know.”
“But here’s what we’re going to do,” Jesse said. “You remember that we got a list of all the license numbers of cars parked around the woman shot in the mall parking lot.”
“Yeah,” Perkins said. “Sixty-seven cars.”
“We’re going to go through that list and see how many, if any, were red Saab sedans.”
“Half the yuppies in Massachusetts drive red Saabs,” Perkins said.
“So right away we cut the suspect list in half.”
“Kid didn’t see who was in the car,” Perkins said.
“No.”
“Staties come up with a list of twenty-two gun owners yet?”
“Not yet,” Jesse said.
“When they do we could cross-reference that with the car list.”
“We could,” Jesse said.
“I can get on it after I do my shift tomorrow.”
“You can get on it first thing,” Jesse said. “I’ll have somebody else pull your shift.”
“That’s gonna really squeeze us,” Perkins said. “Suit and Molly are already off the roster.”
Jesse looked at Perkins silently for a moment, then he said, “That would not be your worry.”
“No,” Perkins said. “No, ’course not.”
22
“You think we cut it a little close?” he said.
“That’s what makes it work for us,” she said. “I lose the feeling if we don’t stay close to the edge.”
“I know,” he said.
They were silent for a moment, holding hands, on the couch, with a pitcher of martinis.
“As long as we keep control,” he said. “It was difficult to stop touching when those kids showed up.”
“But we did it,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “I thought about killing them too.”
She shook her head emphatically.
“No,” she said. “We’re not doing random slaughter. That would be like a gang bang, you know? Where’s the love in a gang bang.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m just telling you how I nearly lost control.”
“Of course, I always nearly lose control. But that’s part of it, to give ourselves to it, to let it possess us entirely, and then, at the very verge of the abyss, assert our will.”
He sipped his martini.
“It’s sort of like this,” he said. “Martinis. You like them so much you want to drink a dozen, but if you do . . .”
“The precise joy of a perfect martini is gone. You might as well slug gin from the bottle,” she said.
“So we shouldn’t hurry,” he said.
“No, but we can start focusing in on the next one.”
He leaned over and kissed her gently on the mouth.
“Let’s go to the videotape,” he said.
23
The three killings in an affluent suburban town led the local newscasts. The Boston papers gave it front-page coverage. Reporters and camera people hung around outside the police station. Jesse was interviewed twice, to little avail. And his picture was on the front page of the Globe one morning. When he came into the station on a bright Tuesday morning, Arthur Angstrom was at the desk.
“Manny, Moe, and Larry are waiting for you,” Arthur said. “In the conference room.”
“Perfect,” Jesse said.
When Jesse went into the conference room the three town selectmen were sitting at one end of the small conference table. Jesse pushed a pizza box aside and sat in the fourth chair and waited.
Morris Comden cleared his throat. He was the chief selectman.
“Good morning, Jesse.”
“Morris.”
“You’ve been busy,” Comden said.
Jesse nodded. The other selectmen were new to the office. Jesse knew that Comden spoke for them.
“We just thought, Jim and Carter and I, that we probably ought to get up to speed on things.”
Comden had a sharp face and wore bow ties.
Jesse nodded again. Comden smiled and glanced at the other two selectmen.
“I told you he wasn’t a talker,” Comden said to the other selectmen.
Carter Hanson had a dark tan, and silver hair combed straight back and carefully gelled in place. He was the CEO of a software company out on Route 128. He decided to take charge.
He looked straight at Jesse and said, “So what’s going on?”
“Three people have been killed by the same weapons,” Jesse said. “We can find no connection among them and we don’t have any idea who did it.”
“We need more than that,” Hanson said.
“We do,” Jesse said.
“Well, let’s hear it,” Hanson said.
Comden shook his head slightly and Jim Burns, the third selectman, looked uncomfortable. Jesse looked without expression at Hanson for a long moment.
“There’s nothing to hear,” he said.
“That’s all you know?” Hanson said.
“Correct.”
“You don’t have any clues? Nothing?”
“Correct.”
“Well, Jesus Christ,” Hanson said.
Jesse nodded.
“Well,” Hanson said. “What do we tell the press.”
“I like no comment,” Jesse said.
Morris Comden had a yellow legal pad in front of him. He looked down at it.
“Your department is costing a lot of overtime,” he said.
Jesse nodded.
“Perhaps you could allocate your personnel a little better,” Comden said.
He spoke more carefully than Hanson.
Jesse didn’t say anything. Burns spoke for the first time.
“Jesus, don’t you talk?” he said.
“Only when I have something to say.”
“Well, maybe you could stop this undercover drug thing you’ve got going at the high school. We got a damn killer on the loose.”
“Nope.”
“For crissake, who cares if there’s a couple kids smoking dope in the boys’ room,” Hanson said. “Where are your priorities.”
“I’m a cop,” Jesse said. “I been a cop for fifteen, sixteen years now. I’m good at it. I know how to do it. You don’t.”
“So we just stand aside and let you do what you want?”
“Exactly,” Jesse said.
“Jesse,” Morris Comden said. “I know how you don’t like being pushed. But, for God’s sake, you work for us. We have to justify your budget every year at town meeting. We have the right to know what’s going on.”
“I’ve told you what I know about the killings,” Jesse said. “The undercover thing at the high school is just that, undercover.”
“You won’t even tell us?”
“No.”
“And you won’t put the personnel working the high school on the killings.”
“No.”
“Goddamnit,” Hanson said. “We can fire you.”
“You can,” Jesse said. “But you can’t tell me what to do.”
No one said anything for a time. Comden looked down at his yellow pad and drummed the eraser end of a pencil softly on the tabletop.
Finally Comden said, “Well, I think Jim
and Carter and I need to discuss this among ourselves. We’ll let things ride as they are while we do.”
Jesse nodded and stood up.
“Have a nice day,” he said and left the room.
24
Jesse walked around his apartment. Living room, dining area, bedroom, kitchen, and bath. Through the sliding doors to his balcony he could see the harbor. Over the bar, in the corner of his living room, he could look at his picture of Ozzie Smith. On his bedside table, he could look at his picture of Jenn, in a big hat, holding a glass of wine. He walked around the apartment again. There wasn’t anything else to look at. He sat on the edge of his bed for a time looking at Jenn. Then he got up and walked into the living room and stood and looked at the harbor. The apartment was so still he could hear himself breathing. He turned and went to the kitchen and got some ice and soda. He took it to the bar and made himself a tall scotch and soda with a lot of ice and sat at the bar and sipped it. There was nothing like the first one. The feeling of the first one, Jesse sometimes thought, was worth the trouble that ensued. He let the feel of the drink ease through him. Better.
He wasn’t as alone as he felt, Jesse knew: Marcy, the other cops, Jenn, sort of. But that was just reasonable. In the center of himself he felt alone. No one knew him. Even Jenn, though Jenn came close. His cops were good small-town cops. But a serial killer? No one else but him was going to catch the serial killer. No one else was going to protect Candace Pennington. No one else was going to fix it with Jenn. What if he couldn’t? His glass was empty. He filled it with ice and made another drink. What if the serial killer just kept killing people? He looked at the lucent gold color of his drink, the small bubbles rising through it. It looked like that odd golden ginger ale that his father had liked and no one else could stand. He could feel the pleasure of the scotch easing along the nerve paths. He felt its settled comfort in his stomach. Maybe he should walk away from it. Maybe I should just say fuck it and be a drunk, Jesse thought. God knows I’m good at it. It would certainly resolve things with Jenn.
He made a third drink.
If the killings weren’t random, they were certainly connected in a way only the killer or killers understood. Which from Jesse’s point of view was the same as random. He swallowed some scotch. I feel sorry for people, he thought, who have never had this feeling. So far they seemed to have killed only in Paradise. And the killings weren’t random in the sense that the victims were merely those available at the moment. The woman in the mall parking lot could have been merely in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the murder at night on the beach, and the one down the dark tracks at the edge of the not yet lighted church parking lot were unlikely to be of the moment. Those victims probably had been preselected. Or the site had been. It was unlikely that the killer/killers were merely hanging around there. Say the killers had preselected the site. How did they know someone would come along for them to shoot? And how did they know that if they hung around in such unlikely places for long, someone might not get suspicious and a cop might not sooner or later show up and say whaddya doing. No, the least unlikely hypothesis was that he/they had preselected the victim and followed the victim to the site. Elementary, my dear Ozzie. Now that he knew that, what did he know?
Robert B Parker: The Jesse Stone Novels 1-5 Page 71