Robert B. Parker's The Devil Wins

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “Which one of . . . you . . . is Chief . . . Stone?” he asked, bending over, gasping for breath.

  Jesse stepped forward. “I’m Chief Stone.”

  “You . . . gotta come . . . quick . . . There’s . . . there’s . . .” He was too out of breath to finish.

  “Healy, Molly, you’re with me. The rest of you stay put.”

  Robbie Wilson didn’t like it. “But I’m—”

  “Stay put. This is a police matter now,” Jesse said.

  The three cops hurried down Trench Alley, around the crooked elbow in the street, and up toward the site of the demolished building. They didn’t have their weapons drawn, but kept their hands close to their holsters. The fat man hadn’t indicated there was any immediate threat. They hadn’t heard any shots. No one was screaming. No one was running in their direction. When they got to where the abandoned building had stood, all the workmen wore the same shocked expression on their faces. The debris from the old factory building was completely gone: bricks, rebar, tar, plywood, glass, steel columns, all of it. All that remained was the cracked concrete slab, though a fine cloud of dust hung in the air. Thirty feet beyond the slab, Sawtooth Creek, swelled with melted snow, flowed by.

  “Who’s in charge here?” Jesse asked.

  A lanky, middle-aged black man in an orange reflective vest walked up to Jesse. FOREMAN was written neatly in permanent marker across the front of his blue hard hat. PETTIGREW was written in the same marker in the same block lettering across the name strip on his vest. He held a radio in his left hand.

  “That’d be me, James Pettigrew.”

  “Jesse Stone. You wanted me?”

  Pettigrew removed his glove and shook Jesse’s hand.

  “We got a situation here, Chief. I think you better come have a look.”

  Jesse pointed at Healy and Molly. “Is it safe for all of us?”

  “Not a problem,” Pettigrew said. “The slab is damaged but stable. This way.”

  “What’s the problem?” Jesse asked.

  “You better just see for yourself.”

  The metal plate that had been dislodged during Tuesday morning’s partial collapse had been removed. Bent and twisted by the debris, it sat close off to the side. The body in the blue tarp was clear to see in the morning light. It smelled, too, though not nearly as bad as it would if the temperatures had gotten above the week’s high of thirty-seven degrees. Molly was right. Whoever the man in the tarp was, he’d been tall and broad across the chest and shoulders. Loops of red-and-white synthetic rope were tied tightly around the ankles, knees, waist, chest, and neck of the body. But Jesse didn’t see what the fuss was about.

  “I’m confused,” Jesse said, turning to Pettigrew. “Everybody knows about the body.”

  Pettigrew shook his head. He put his radio in a vest pocket, moved to his left, and pointed at another metal plate a few feet away from the blue tarp. “That’s not it. Here, Chief, give me a hand. Help me lift this up.”

  Jesse and Healy went around to the other side of the plate. Molly helped Pettigrew.

  The foreman said, “Ready? Now!”

  And with that, they lifted and slid the second metal plate up and back, resting it on the slab next to the other damaged metal plate. Then they looked down into the hole it had covered and saw a frayed, filthy blanket. Jesse knelt down and slowly pulled back the blanket, pieces of it disintegrating in his fingers.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” Healy crossed himself.

  Molly dropped to her knees, crossing herself, too. “Oh my God.” She clamped her hand over her mouth.

  “You think it’s them, Officer Crane?” Healy asked.

  She did not answer. He wasn’t sure she’d even heard him.

  “Them who?” Jesse asked, peering down at the two skeletons.

  “Mary Kate O’Hara and Ginny Connolly,” Healy said.

  Molly pulled the small flashlight off her belt and laid flat on her stomach. She shined it down into the hole. The skeletons were different sizes. One was about five feet in length. The other five-six or -seven. Then Molly gasped. She pushed herself up and ran. She stumbled, fell forward, ripping the knees of her uniform pants. Got up again, limped outside, fell to her knees, and vomited.

  When Jesse reached Molly, tears were pouring out of her. He got down beside her, threw his arm around her shoulders.

  Healy came and stood over the both of them.

  “What is it, Officer Crane?”

  “It’s them, Captain. It’s Mary Kate and Ginny.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “The ring,” she said. “Look at the ring.”

  6

  There had been very few times after his rookie year on the LAPD that Jesse Stone was at a loss. This was one of those times. Jesse wasn’t drinking, but Healy was. He was working on his second Jameson, pacing in front of Jesse’s desk.

  “How’s Crane holding up?” Healy asked.

  “She’ll be fine. I sent her home to get cleaned up. She’ll be back here in a little while. You want to fill me in?”

  “I was still in uniform back then, just starting out,” the captain said. “You were probably taking infield practice in your first season in A ball.”

  “Long time ago.”

  “Feels like yesterday, Jesse. Two sixteen-year-old girls, Mary Kate O’Hara and Virginia Connolly, went missing on the Fourth of July. They were supposed to meet a bunch of friends at Kennedy Park to see the fireworks and hang around for a concert by a local band afterward. Their parents said they left their houses around eight. The friends said that Mary Kate and Ginny were there for the fireworks, but that both of the girls skipped out during the concert. They never made it home. Nobody realized they were missing until about three a.m. If I remember right, the parents didn’t notify the Paradise PD until they had called all of the girls’ friends. So it was maybe five or six before the cops had any idea what was going on. Your department was smaller then. I think it was eight men and the chief. His name was—”

  “Frederick W. Tillis,” Jesse said, pointing at the wall to his right. “Someday my picture will be up there staring down at the poor fool who inherits this job.”

  “I knew Freddy Tillis a little bit after I got the bump to detective. Nice enough fella, I guess. Not the most competent policeman I ever came across. I think his major qualification for the job was that he came cheap.”

  “They hired me because they thought I was a bumbling drunk.”

  Healy laughed. “They were half right.”

  “The wrong half. But what about the girls?”

  “Tillis waited two days before he called us staties in. By then the trail was icy cold, not that there was much of a trail to begin with. The girls seemed to have vanished. There weren’t even many tips. You know, the usual crazies. One said he’d seen them abducted by a spacecraft. There was one credible lead, I think, a drunk guy eating at the Gray Gull. He said he saw a few kids in an overcrowded boat rowing out to Stiles at a time that would fit. His name will be in your files somewhere. It’s something like Sabo or Laszlov, like that. Nothing came of it. The guy was plastered.”

  “The ring,” Jesse said. “Molly kept talking about the ring.”

  “Mary Kate O’Hara’s ring. Her class ring from Sacred Heart Girls Catholic. The ring company made a mistake in sizing it. It was too large for her ring finger, so she always wore it on the middle finger of her right hand. Both of the skeletons had Sacred Heart rings on, the smaller one on its right middle finger. Be a hell of a coincidence.”

  “I don’t believe in coincidence, but let’s wait for the autopsies before we get ahead of ourselves.”

  “It’s them, Jesse.” Healy gulped the rest of his drink. Held the empty cup out for another. “Don’t make the same mistake Freddy Tillis did. Go dig the file out and start working it.”

  Jesse p
oured.

  “Why is this the first I’m hearing about these girls, Healy? I’ve been chief here for over a decade now. I’ve heard about almost everything else that’s come down the sewer pipe in this town. Why not this?”

  “You’re from where? Tucson, right? You played ball in Albuquerque. Worked LAPD for ten years. Paradise is a small town. I been in all sorts of small towns since I came on the job. And if there’s one thing small towns protect, it’s their darkest secrets. It’s shame. They’re ashamed, Jesse. You may be chief, you may live here, but you didn’t grow up here. It’s one thing to be from a place. Something else to be of a place. Talk to Crane about it. She’ll tell you.”

  Jesse nodded.

  “What do you make of the guy in the blue tarp?” he asked.

  Healy laughed. It was a laugh that had no relationship to joy. “You just said you don’t believe in coincidences.”

  “Would be a hell of a coincidence for three bodies to end up in the same abandoned building, buried in utility holes ten feet apart.”

  Healy shook his head. “So you think there’s a connection?”

  “One way or the other.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Healy asked.

  “That the bodies being ten feet apart means more to me than the passage of time.”

  “We’ll know soon enough.”

  “Uh-huh,” Jesse said, finally pouring himself a drink.

  7

  The files were buried and forgotten, much as their bodies had been. It had taken him nearly a half hour to dig them out of a back storage room, a room Jesse had spent precious little time in since his arrival in Paradise. He didn’t want to think about the other secrets Paradise kept buried there. Now he sat with an array of the girls’ photos laid out on his desktop, the photos dulled by time and carelessness. In spite of their faded images, Jesse could see enough to get a sense of the girls and to glimpse the past.

  Mary Kate O’Hara was the smaller of the two girls. Copper-haired and freckle-faced, more cute than pretty, she had fire in her eyes. They looked hazel in the faded photographs. The paperwork said they were green. What did it matter now? Virginia “Ginny” Connolly was the taller of the pair. She was strawberry blond and blue-eyed. In her tenth-grade graduation picture—taken in February of that year—there was still some awkwardness in her features. A nose a bit too big for her face, a mouth full of braces, slumped shoulders to hide her height. But in the photos of her taken in the months leading up to her July fourth disappearance, she’d shed her braces, grown into her face and body. She would have been a beautiful woman, Jesse thought. Both girls had been good if not remarkable students at Sacred Heart. Both had been good athletes, particularly Ginny. Neither had gotten into much trouble, though Mary Kate was a bit of a pistol. She’d been a prankster, according to her school records.

  When Jesse took out the other photos from the files, the ones that weren’t just of the two dead girls, he was taken aback. Several of those pictures featured Ginny and Mary Kate with their arms around a third girl. That girl was quite pretty, with dark, wavy hair and an infectious smile. She had a look in her eyes that was quite familiar to Jesse. He had gazed at that expression, at that face, for five or six days a week, for more than ten years. It was a face more familiar to him than Jenn’s, his ex-wife, or Sunny Randall’s, or Diana Evans’s, or any of his other lovers, recent or past. It was Molly’s face.

  He put the photos aside and began seriously reading through the files, such as they were. Jesse shook his head at how haphazardly the investigation seemed to have been handled, at least at the start. He knew he shouldn’t judge a small-town PD’s investigation the way he would judge one handled by a big-city police department, but he couldn’t help but compare his LAPD experiences to what had gone down in Paradise when the girls went missing. He recalled how he had been taught to keep extensive and thorough notes, especially during a homicide investigation. Jesse’s murder books were legend. No detail was too small to escape mention, because you just never knew what would lead you to the killer.

  That didn’t seem to be the philosophy of the Paradise PD back in the day. Of course, he had to allow that it was never really a murder investigation. In fact, from what he could glean, there didn’t seem to have been a working theory of the case or, more accurately, there seemed to be any number of working theories. From the interview notes, Jesse could infer the questions the cops were asking and could thereby reconstruct what the cops were thinking. Early on, they apparently believed Ginny and Mary Kate went off on an adventure together, possibly hitching down to Boston or to New York City. Then that shifted to a runaway scenario based on the fact that Ginny and her mother had recently been at odds. It was only after the state police came in to help that the girls’ bank records were checked—something a big-city department would have done immediately. And only when no unusual activity turned up, no big withdrawals the week before they vanished, did the working theories take a darker turn.

  When the state came into it, they rounded up all the usual suspects: local sex offenders, ex-cons with a history of violence, especially a history of violence toward women. There were a few suspects the state police kept an eye on, but it came to nothing. And it took the better part of a week for a physical search to be mounted. It was a pretty thorough search, too. People had combed over the Bluffs, Stiles Island, the marina, and the rest of town. Unfortunately, there had been a few days of heavy rains in the interim and the feeling was that if there had been any less-than-obvious physical evidence to be found, it had been washed away with the rains.

  The most fascinating parts of the reading for Jesse were the interviews with the teenagers of Paradise. It was fascinating on many levels because the kids interviewed back then were people Jesse had known only as adults. Molly and her husband among them. In fact, Molly had been interviewed three times. Bill Marchand and two other selectmen, Robbie Wilson, the mayor, and several of Paradise’s other citizens had been interviewed. Just as fascinating for Jesse was seeing names he didn’t recognize. A good number of the teens back then had stayed and made their lives here, but many had not. He wondered where those kids had gone and why they had gone and what they were up to now. The bottom line was that the interviews, like everything else in the case, led the cops nowhere. No one knew who Ginny and Mary Kate were meeting in the park. No one remembered seeing them.

  Jesse had little difficulty believing what he read. He had been through several Fourth of July celebrations in Paradise and it could get pretty chaotic. There were always fireworks and bands in the park, usually Aerosmith, Boston, or the Cars tribute bands. Drugs and underage drinking were never much of a problem in town, but the one exception to that rule was the Fourth celebration. He could only imagine how chaotic it was twenty-five years earlier when the department was even smaller than it is now. When he was done reading through the files, he was drawn back to the old photos, especially the ones of Molly. Then, as he looked up from the photos on his desk, the grown-up version of that girl was standing in front of him.

  “Sit down, Molly. You want a drink?”

  “More than you know, but I don’t think my stomach can take it,” she said, sitting across from him.

  He handed Molly all the pictures from the two files and watched her in silence for the next ten minutes. Watched her as she traveled back in time. For a few moments, Molly looked sixteen again, the years melting off her, the lines on her face fading away. But when she finally looked back up, she was herself again, the lines etched into her face more deeply than they’d been when she had come into Jesse’s office. She tried handing the photos back to Jesse, but he waved her off.

  “Make plenty of copies of those. If it turns out that we’ve found Mary Kate and Ginny and that they were, in fact, murdered—”

  “It’s them. I’m telling you, it’s them. And what do you mean, if they were murdered?” Molly said, her voice loud enough to be heard in the
squad room. “They didn’t bury themselves under that blanket under that metal plate.”

  Jesse stayed calm. “If it’s them and they were murdered, we’re going to be working an old double homicide. We’re going to have to re-interview people. Those pictures may help refresh memories, maybe spark new ones.”

  “What about the guy in the tarp?”

  “No doubt about his being murdered,” Jesse said. “When they got him back to the ME’s and unwrapped him, half his face was blown off. There was an entry wound behind his left ear and one right in back of his head. Until we get an ID, he’s another John Doe.”

  “But it’s no accident, us finding his body there next to Mary Kate and Ginny.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “What do you think it means, Jesse?”

  “We follow the evidence around here.”

  She wasn’t going to let it go. “But if you had to guess.”

  Jesse said, “You already know the answer to that, too.”

  “He’s connected to Mary Kate’s and Ginny’s murders.”

  “That’s where the smart money would be.”

  “You think the guy who murdered the girls murdered—”

  Jesse walked around his desk, stood close to Molly, and brushed his hand across her cheek.

  “Listen, Molly,” he said, his hand resting on her shoulder. “I can only guess at how hard this is for you. As fine a cop as you are—and you’re the best I’ve got—you need to be an even better, more professional cop than usual. If I could afford to, I wouldn’t let you anywhere near these cases, but I can’t. Even if I could, you wouldn’t stay away.”

  “Mary Kate was my best friend, Jesse. Ginny Connolly grew up two houses away from me. Their disappearing the way they did helped make me want to be a cop.”