“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 to 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.”
“The credit card number will help us track them,” Molly said.
“You want me to hop on the phone and see what I can do?”
“No,” Jesse said.
“I’ll let Healy do that. They’ve got more resources and more clout than we have.”
“You think they’re going to settle in Canada?”
“Maybe, or maybe it’s just a big city with a big airport. Molly,
find out how many airlines fly out of Toronto and call all of them and see if any of them have reservations for Mr. and Mrs. Arlington Lamont.”
“Every airline?” Molly said.
“That’s a lot of time to be on
hold.”
“And keep checking with Hertz,” Jesse said. “To see if the car
got returned anywhere.”
“We could ask them to call us when the car showed up.”
Jesse looked at her without speaking.
“Or not,” Molly said.
“Call them every day,” Jesse said.
“Give you something to do
while you’re on hold with the airlines.”
“If I time it right,” Molly said,
“I can be on hold with both at
the same time.”
“Lucky we have two lines,” Jesse said.
“Suit, you call the San
Mateo cops, see if you can find anything at all about Mr. or Mrs.
Arlington Lamont. If they can’t give you anything try San Francisco.”
“While we’re doing all this
phoning,” Suit said, “what are you
going to do?”
“I have several donuts to eat,” Jesse said.
72
“How’s the
drinking?” Dixsaid.
“I haven’t had a drink in three weeks and four days,” Jesse
said.
Dix smiled. “And there are several minutes every day when you
don’t miss it.”
“Not that many,” Jesse said.
“And you recently escaped death,” Dix said.
“I did. Anthony deAngelo didn’t.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“I should have had more cops on the
scene,” Jesse
said.
“Tell me about that,” Dix said.
“I could have had state police support. I chose not to. I wanted
to do it ourselves.”
“Because they had done their crimes in your town?”
“Because they had killed Abby Taylor.”
Dix nodded.
“I took it personally,” Jesse said.
“You’re a person,” Dix said.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning it is impossible not to take things, at some level,
personally.”
“So what about professional?” Jesse said.
“Things exist simultaneously,” Dix said.
“Meaning I can take it personally and be professional?”
“Meaning you need to be two contradictory things at the same
time.”
Jesse sat quietly.
Then he said, “You know about that.”
“Of course.”
“It’s what you have to deal
with.”
“What do you think all the rigmarole of psychotherapy is
about.”
“You have to care about your patient,”
Jesse said. “But you
can’t let the caring interfere with your treatment.”
Dix made a movement with his head that might have been a nod.
Jesse was quiet again.
“You know the kid that got raped?” he said after a
while.
Dix did the head movement again.
“She’s gone. The family put the house up for sale and moved
away.”
“Do you know why they moved?” Dix said.
“I assume it was too tough on her in school. You know what kids
are like.”
Dix smiled faintly and waited.
“I couldn’t save her,” Jesse
said.
“Why would you think you could? You did what you are able to do.
You caught her rapists and brought them to justice.”
“Yeah. A few months swabbing floors after school in the police
station.”
“That’s the justice that was
available,” Dix said. “You couldn’t
prevent her rape. You can’t prevent her peers from alluding to
it.”
Jesse looked past Dix out the window. It was a fresh bright day,
intensified by the new snow.
“It seems to me that nobody can protect anybody.”
“Risk can be reduced,” Dix said.
“But not eliminated.”
Dix was quiet, waiting. Jesse said nothing, still looking out the window.
“There’s a point,” Dix said
after a while, “where security and
freedom begin to clash.”
At midday the sun was strong enough to melt the snow where it lay on dark surfaces. The tree limbs had begun to drip. Jesse turned his gaze back onto Dix.
“You’re not just talking about police work,” Jesse
said.
Dix tilted his head a little and said nothing. The rigmarole
of psychotherapy.
“People need to live the life they want to live,” Jesse said.
“They can’t live it the way somebody else wants them
to.”
Dix smiled and raised his eyebrows.
“Everybody knows that,” Jesse said.
Dix nodded.
“And few people actually believe it,”
Jesse said.
“There’s often a gap between what we know and what we do,” Dix
said.
“Let me write that down,” Jesse said.
“Psychotherapy is not snake dancing,” Dix said. “Mainly it’s
just trying to close the gap.”
Jesse’s lungs seemed to expand and take in deeper breaths of
air.
“Jenn,” he said.
Dix looked noncommittal.
73
When Jesse came into the station Molly was making coffee.
“Hertz says the Volvo got turned in at the Toronto airport,” she
said.
“Nice to know we can trust them,” Jesse said.
Molly poured water into the green Mr. Coffee machine.
“And,” Molly said, “nobody who
flies out of Toronto has any
reservations for Arlington Lamont.”
“They could just show up and buy a ticket.”
“Doesn’t seem like their style,”
Molly said. “They reserved the
rental ahead of time. They think they’re safe.”
“Did they rent another car?”
“Not from Hertz,” Molly said.
“Call the other rental companies and check,” Jesse
said.
“Soon as I make us coffee,” Molly said.
She spooned ground coffee into the filter.
“I will also expect the department to pay all medical bills
related to getting concrete information in a human voice from twenty-three airlines,” Molly said.
Jesse nodded.
“Beyond the call of duty,” Jesse said
.
“I’m sure we can do
something for you.”
“Suit’s in a car today, seven to three, but he says tell you
that he’s talked with San Mateo and the only thing they could tell
him was that, according to the 1993 telephone directory, Arlington Lamont lived there. And by 1996 he didn’t.”
“Any unsolved homicides?” Jesse said.
“Suit asked them that. They said they’d get back to
him.”
“He talk to San Francisco?”
“Yes. They have nothing.”
“Do me one other favor?” he said.
“Maybe,” Molly said.
“Let me know when the coffee’s
done,” Jesse said.
“Better than that,” Molly said.
“I’ll bring you
some.”
“Thank you,” Jesse said.
“I’m sucking up to you,” Molly
said. “‘Cause you’re the
chief.”
“Good a reason as any,” Jesse said and went into his
office.
He sat at his desk and put his feet up and looked out the window
at the relentless cluster of media. It was about a ten-hour drive to Toronto if you went out the thruway and crossed near Buffalo.
They could have gone up 81 through Watertown, about the same distance. He’d check with customs. But the border was an easy one,
and an attractive couple driving a Volvo wagon wasn’t too likely to
be questioned. There were 2.3 million people in Toronto. It wasn’t
exactly like having them cornered. Jesse tapped the desktop with his fingertips. Molly came in with two cups of coffee.
“Two?” Jesse said.
“One for you,” she said. “One
for Captain Healy.”
Jesse glanced past Molly toward the doorway.
“I saw him parking outside,” Molly said.
“I figured he wasn’t
coming to see me.”
She put one cup down in front of Jesse, and one cup on the edge
of the desk near the guest chair, and went back to the front desk.
In about thirty seconds Healy came in.
Jesse pointed at the second cup.
“Coffee,” he said.
Healy hung his coat on a rack in the corner, sat down, and picked up the coffee.
“You run a hell of a department,” he said.
Jesse nodded. They both sipped some coffee. When he had swallowed and put his cup down, Healy said, “Mr. and Mrs.
Arlington
Lamont reserved a room at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto and guaranteed it with their American Express card.”
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