Robert B Parker: The Jesse Stone Novels 1-5

by Robert B. Parker

“So they could have cabbed to the airport, picked up the rental, drove it to the mall.”

  “Or one of them could have, and the other one could have picked him up and driven him home in the Saab.”

  “They like to do things together,” Jesse said.

  “So you figure they both went for the rental car, and drove it to the mall in time for the shootout?”

  “Yes.”

  “What if they rented it the day before,” Suit said, “and parked it at the mall?”

  “The car would have been parked there overnight. It might have attracted attention. And they’d have had to take a cab to the mall on the day of the shooting.”

  “Why wouldn’t they have just driven the Saab over and left it when they swapped cars?”

  “Don’t know. Maybe they’re so yuppied out that they couldn’t bear to abandon the Saab.”

  “Hell, Jesse, they abandoned it anyway, along with their condo.”

  “Yeah, but it was safely parked in the garage. We are not dealing with entirely rational people here.”

  “You think they’re crazy?”

  “They’ve killed a bunch of people for no apparent reason.”

  “Good point,” Suit said. “Either way we’re looking for cab rides on the day of the shooting.”

  Jesse said, “Isn’t there a subway station near the dog track?”

  “Yeah. On the Blue Line. We used to take it into Boston when I was a kid. Buncha stops: Revere Beach, Orient Heights, the airport, Maverick Square in East Boston.”

  Jesse nodded.

  “Okay,” he said. “Check the cabs to the airport and to Wonderland on that day. Talk to the drivers. See if they can describe who they took, and where they picked them up. Get a list of names from all the rental companies at the airport, who they rented a car to that day.”

  “That’s going to take some time,” Suit said.

  “It might,” Jesse said. “Or you might score the first guy you ask.”

  “Not likely,” Suit said.

  “Just as likely as last,” Jesse said.

  “No,” Suit said. “It never happens like that.”

  Jesse shrugged.

  When Suit was gone, Jesse looked at the fire engines some more.

  So, where would they go? They were free to go anywhere. They clearly had plenty of money. Tony’s ocular scanner made that possible. If it were true. . . . Maybe it was. . . . If it were true, he’d hold a patent on it. . . . If he held a patent on it, they’d have it at the U.S. Patent Office . . . which would have a website.

  Jesse stood and opened his office door and yelled, “Molly.”

  When she came in, he said, “Are you as expert on the Internet as you are at everything else?”

  “You sound like my husband,” Molly said, “when he wants something.”

  “I need crime-fighting help,” Jesse said.

  “You really don’t want to do this yourself,” Molly said. “Do you.”

  “I need you to find the U.S. Patent Office on the Web and see who has patented an optical scanning device.”

  “Everybody?”

  The Lincolns appeared to be in their late forties.

  “Everybody in, oh, say, the last twenty-five years.”

  “And while I’m doing that,” Molly said, “you’ll be in here oiling your baseball glove? Thinking of spring?”

  “Hey,” Jesse said, “I’m the chief of police.”

  Molly smiled and saluted.

  “Of course you are,” she said. “I’ll see what I can find.”

  68

  Jesse sat with Marcy Campbell in the Indigo Apple drinking coffee.

  “Rita Fiore never called me back,” he said.

  “Maybe she’s decided she won’t waste any more time with you.”

  “Even though I’m a sexual athlete?”

  “It sounds like Rita wants, excuse the phrase, a relationship,” Marcy said.

  “And she thinks I’m not a good candidate?”

  “You’re not,” Marcy said.

  “I know.”

  “And she knows.”

  Jesse nodded.

  “She wants a husband,” Jesse said.

  “Or the equivalent,” Marcy said.

  “I think she’s had several of those already.”

  “Give her credit,” Marcy said, “for fierce optimism.”

  “There are women who need a mate, I guess.”

  “People,” Marcy said.

  “People?”

  “Men and women,” Marcy said, “who feel incomplete unless they are mated.”

  “You’re not one of them,” Jesse said.

  “No. I like sex and I like companionship, but not at the expense of my freedom or my self.”

  Jesse broke off a small piece of orange cranberry muffin and ate it. When he had swallowed, he said, “Maybe I’m one of them.”

  “Well,” Marcy said. “You’re an odd case. You’re like me, except for Jenn. You like sex and companionship too. But you won’t commit to a new relationship just to have it. It’s why we get along so well, neither of us requires commitment from the other.”

  Jesse laughed. “Which produces,” he said, “a kind of commitment to each other.”

  “I suppose so,” Marcy said. “But not for the same reasons. I am true to myself. You are true to Jenn.”

  “Which may be a way of being true to myself.”

  Marcy nodded.

  “Or maybe obsessive.”

  “There’s that,” Jesse said.

  Marcy sipped her coffee, holding the mug in both hands.

  “But goddamnit,” she said, “I’ll give you credit, you are true to it, whatever the hell it is.”

  “Well, the thing is,” Jesse said. “I love her.”

  “That simple,” Marcy said.

  Jesse nodded.

  “Is there anything Jenn could do that would make you give her up?” Marcy said.

  “She could tell me that she had no further interest in me,” Jesse said. “If she told me that, I’d move on.”

  “Which gives her control,” Marcy said.

  “I suppose.”

  “That doesn’t bother you?”

  “I don’t care about stuff like that,” Jesse said. “I love her. We’re still connected. I’ll play it out.”

  Marcy drank some coffee, and looked at Jesse for a while, and shook her head slowly. Jesse watched her.

  “You have given over the crucial decision of your life to someone else,” Marcy said. “And what’s so odd is that it seems to be evidence of your autonomy.”

  “Autonomy,” Jesse said.

  “Don’t be cute. You know what it means.”

  “Sort of.”

  “You feel strongly. You trust what you feel. And you proceed with it.”

  “True,” Jesse said.

  “It’s the same in your work. You know what you know, and you do what you do, and you plow along doing it.”

  “Like a mule,” Jesse said.

  “Or a jackass.”

  Jesse smiled.

  “Same thing,” he said. “More or less.”

  “If you ever work it out with Jenn, will we still be pals?”

  “Sure,” Jesse said.

  “And fuck buddies?”

  Jesse breathed slowly in and slowly out. He looked at Marcy for a moment. Then he smiled slightly and shook his head.

  “Probably not,” he said.

  69

  Suit and Molly sat at the long table in the conference room. They were drinking coffee from paper cups. A third cup, with the plastic lid still on it, sat at the head of the table. A box of Dunkin’ Donuts wa
s open on the table. Suit had his notebook open in front of him. Molly had a computer printout. Jesse came in, examined the box of donuts for a moment, took one, and sat at the head of the table and took the lid off the coffee. He took a bite of the donut.

  “Cinnamon,” he said.

  “I know you like them,” Molly said.

  “What’re the ones with no hole and chocolate frosting?”

  “Boston cream,” Molly said.

  “Good God,” Jesse said. “What have you got, Suit?”

  “Okay,” Suit said. He looked at his open notebook.

  “First thing. Nobody took a cab to the mall on the day of the shooting. The two cab rides to the mall were two days earlier and are regulars. Two sisters who live together and go shopping every week.”

  “Okay,” Jesse said. “Anyone picked up at the Lincolns’ condo on the day of the shooting?”

  “No. But the cab company has a log, you know for taxes and shit. There was a fare went from Paradise to Wonderland on the day of the shooting. I know the cabdriver. Mackie Ward, we played football in high school. Mackie says he picked up a couple who fit our description, down in front of the Chinese restaurant on Atlantic Ave., in the morning on the day of the shooting, and took them to Wonderland.”

  “They hail him?”

  “No. They called for a cab and asked to be picked up there.”

  “Probably a cell phone,” Jesse said. “Okay. So they take the cab to Wonderland. They take the train to Logan. Take the bus to one of the terminals. Catch the rental car bus in front of the terminal and go and pick up the rental car.”

  “Pretty elaborate,” Molly said. “They knew if they killed a cop we’d look for them hard.”

  “Too elaborate. It’s what amateurs do. They would have been much better off to drive the Saab to the airport, park it at the airport parking garage, pick up the rental car, and drive to the mall. You got anything else?”

  “There were two other cab fares to the airport the day of the shooting,” Suit said. “Both guys, alone.”

  “We’ll check everything,” Jesse said. “But it’ll turn out to be Wonderland. How’d you make out, Moll?”

  Molly finished chewing some donut, and sipped a little coffee.

  “Piece of cake,” she said. “There are thirteen hundred and twenty-three listings for ocular scanning devices on the Patent Office website.”

  “Names?” Jesse said.

  “Yes, and cities.”

  “Where they live or where they did the invention?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Anybody named Lincoln?”

  “No.”

  “Anybody from Cleveland.”

  “Didn’t check by city, yet.”

  “Okay.”

  Jesse looked at the donuts.

  “Boston cream?” he said to Molly.

  “You know, like Boston cream pie, except it’s a donut.”

  “And Boston cream pie is a cake, isn’t it?”

  “Technically.”

  Jesse took a Boston cream donut from the box and put it on a napkin in front of him and looked at it.

  “I bet it would be easy to get this all over you,” he said.

  “Easier than you can imagine,” Molly said. “It may be that only women can eat them.”

  “The neater species,” Jesse said.

  “Exactly.”

  They were quiet while Jesse took a careful bite of the donut. He chewed and swallowed and nodded slowly.

  “Good body,” Jesse said, “with a hint of insouciance.”

  “Insouciance?” Suit said.

  “I don’t know what it means either,” Jesse said. “Suit, you get hold of Healy. Tell him we need the names of everybody who rented a car the day of the shooting. He’ll have a list. They’ve already told me there’s no one named Lincoln.”

  “And I’ll see how many ocular scanners are listed from Cleveland,” Molly said. “It might narrow the cross-referencing.”

  “Don’t bother,” Jesse said. “We’ll have to check every name against the list of car rentals, anyway. They might not have patented it from Cleveland, or in Cleveland, or whatever the hell one does to get Cleveland mentioned.”

  “And when we’re done?” Suit said.

  “If we get a match we might have their new identity.”

  70

  Before he went to work, Jesse drove out to the Neck to see Candace and the dog. It was early March and still wintry with the ugly snow compacting where the plows had spilled it. The sky was overcast. As he drove across the causeway, the ocean, off to his right, was a sullen gray, with a few seabirds wheeling above it. When he got out of his car, at the top of Candace’s long curved driveway, he could smell the approaching snow. It hadn’t taken him long, when he’d come from Los Angeles, to learn the anticipatory smell of it.

  There were cars in the driveway when Jesse arrived, so he parked on the street and walked up. A sign hanging from the knob on the front door read OPEN HOUSE. BROKERS ONLY. PLEASE COME IN. Below the invitation was a small logo with a house in it, and the words “Pell Real Estate.” Jesse went in. A woman sat on a folding chair at a card table in the hall. She had a pile of brochures on the table in front of her, and a guest book. Jesse could hear voices and movement elsewhere in the house. The sound had the kind of echoed quality that one gets in a house devoid of furniture or rugs.

  “Hi,” the woman said, “here for the open house?”

  “I’m here to see Candace Pennington,” Jesse said.

  “You’re not a broker?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry, the Penningtons have moved.”

  “When?”

  “Last week.”

  “Do you know where they went?”

  “I don’t really know,” the woman said. “I’m just supervising the open house.”

  She was a heavy exuberant woman with short hair colored very blond.

  “Who would know?”

  “Oh, I’m sure the office has their new address,” the woman said. “You could check with Henry.”

  “Henry?”

  “Henry Pell. Are you interested in the house?”

  In the rooms that Jesse could see, the furniture was gone. There were no rugs or drapes. The house was blank, waiting to be re-created.

  “No,” Jesse said, “I’m not.”

  As he walked back down the curving drive toward the street, the snow had begun, a few flakes drifting down. More would follow, he knew. They were saying three to six inches. Weather Girl Jenn would be breaking into the regular programming with weather updates from Storm Center 3. Maybe standing in the parking lot. With her designer wool watch cap pulled down just right over her ears. And the flakes fluttering past. As Jesse drove back across the causeway, the snow came straight in at the windshield. Small flakes, the kind all the old-time townies said meant a heavy snowfall. He wasn’t long enough out of Southern California to argue the point, though in the time he’d been here he’d seen no correlation.

  He could call Henry Pell and get Candace’s new address. He wasn’t sure he would. They’d taken her where they needed to take her. Where she had no history. Where there were no stories about her. No giggles in the hallways. No covert gestures about sex. No fears that a naked picture of her might surface. What did he have to say to her about that? What did anybody?

  The snow had begun to accumulate and the roads were becoming slick as Jesse parked in his spot by the police station, and went in. Bo Marino was mopping the floor in the area of the front desk. Jesse went past him to his office and stopped in the doorway and looked back.

  “Where are the other two?” Jesse said.

  “Cleaning the cells,” Molly said.

  Jesse nodded and continued t
o look at Marino. Was it possible that a jerk like this kid could grow into a decent man? Would the rape follow him and the other two, the way it was following Candace? Marino realized Jesse was looking at him.

  “What?” he said.

  Jesse didn’t answer.

  “What are you looking at me for?” Marino said.

  Jesse didn’t seem to hear him.

  You could protect, Jesse thought, and you could serve. But you couldn’t really save.

  Marino looked at Molly.

  “How come he’s staring at me like that?” he said.

  “Just get the floor clean,” Molly said.

  At least keep the floor clean, Jesse thought. He went into his office and closed the door. Better than nothing.

  71

  Molly and Suit came into Jesse’s office together. They looked pleased with themselves.

  “The seven hundred and twenty-eighth name on the patent list is Arlington Lamont,” Molly said. “The patent was filed from San Mateo, California, wherever that is.”

  “Up by San Francisco,” Jesse said. He sat motionless with the palms of his hands pressed together in front of him, his chin resting on the fingertips.

  “And,” Suit said, “on the day of the murder, Arlington Lamont rented a Volvo Cross Country Wagon from Hertz at the airport.”

  With the palms still pressed, Jesse lowered his hands and pointed his fingers at Suit and dropped his thumbs like the hammer on a gun.

  “Bada bing,” he said.

  They were all quiet.

  “So maybe Lincoln is the phony ID,” Jesse said. “And Lamont is the real one.”

  “Same initials,” Molly said. “Anthony Lincoln, Arlington Lamont.”

  Jesse nodded.

  “Hertz requires driver’s license and credit card,” Jesse said.

  “Mass driver’s license,” Suit said. “American Express card.”

  “How long?” Jesse said.

  “They rented it to him for a week.”

  “Returning it where?”

  “Toronto airport,” Suit said. “You think they’re actually going to return it?”

  “Attract less attention than if they dumped it,” Jesse said. “They don’t expect us to have their name.”