Robert B. Parker's The Devil Wins

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “Then use that, Molly. Don’t let it cloud your judgment. I’ve always trusted you. Don’t give me a reason to start doubting you now.”

  “I’m sorry . . . about before, I mean, at the building site, losing it like that. It was unprofessional.”

  “That badge and uniform don’t make you immune.”

  “It made me look weak.”

  “It made you look human.”

  “What do we do first?” she asked.

  “We wait until the identities are confirmed and CODs are established.”

  Molly stood up. “Okay. I better make some copies of these photos and get back on patrol.”

  “Not so fast,” he said. “Sit another minute.”

  She didn’t sit. “What is it?”

  “Unless I’m way off, these missing girls were the biggest unsolved mystery in Paradise’s history.”

  “I guess that’s right. It’s also probably the only unsolved mystery in Paradise’s history.” She laughed. It was a nervous, staccato laugh.

  “Then why is today the first I’m hearing about them?”

  Molly looked everywhere but at Jesse. Her face reddened.

  “I can’t answer that, Jesse. I don’t know.”

  Jesse got the sense there was something Molly wasn’t saying, but he let it go. Pushing her now wouldn’t do either of them any good.

  8

  After Molly left, Jesse went out to talk to Suit. But Suit spoke first.

  “Molly okay? She’s acting weird.”

  Jesse nodded.

  “Word’s spreading, Jesse . . . about the bodies. Stu Cromwell from the paper just called for you.”

  “I figure we’ve got about an hour before it goes national. Then the phone’s going to ring off the hook.”

  “What am I supposed to say?”

  “For now, say that there won’t be any comment until we get autopsy results and official IDs on the bodies. I’ll scribble something out that we can release as an official statement. I’ll call over to the mayor’s office to see if we can’t get someone to answer the station house line, so you can do your job. I’ll handle Cromwell.”

  “Thanks, Jesse.”

  “How old were you when the girls disappeared?”

  “I was a kid. I wasn’t even sure what was going on, really. All I can remember about it was how freaked-out my mom and all the other moms on the block were. She made all of us stay close to the house that summer, especially my big sister.”

  “Did your mom or dad talk to you guys about what happened?”

  Suit laughed. “My folks weren’t great communicators, Jesse. But you know how grandmas talk about bad things? You know, like when they talk about cancer and they whisper it or call it the C word? It was like that. We could always tell when the parents on the block were talking about what happened to those girls because they would whisper or look . . . I don’t know.”

  “Ashamed?”

  Suit shrugged his big shoulders. “Like I said, I don’t know.”

  “Anybody ever talk about it after that summer?”

  “The next summer, I think. Around the Fourth, maybe. But after that, I can’t remember people ever bringing it up. Until this morning I had forgotten about it. I guess there’s some shame in that.”

  “You look hard enough at anything,” Jesse said, “and you’ll find some shame in it. You recall anything else about that summer, you come to me with it.”

  “You mean don’t talk to Molly about it.”

  “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  “Guess I’m not as dumb as I look,” Suit said, but only half jokingly.

  “You keep handing me straight lines like that and I’m going to start calling you Luther. And no, Suit, I never thought you were dumb.”

  “Thanks, Jesse.”

  “Forget it. Do me a favor.”

  “Sure.”

  “Call the paper and get Stu Cromwell over here.”

  Suit tilted his head, furrowed his brow. “I thought you hated the press.”

  “They have their uses,” Jesse said, a smile on his face.

  “You going to give him an interview?”

  “We’ll let him think that.”

  Suit punched the paper’s number into the phone.

  9

  There was a knock at Jesse’s door. He knew who it was just by the size of the shadow behind the pebbled glass.

  “Come on in, Stu,” he said, standing to greet the newspaperman.

  Stu Cromwell strode into the office. He was in his sixties, but still an imposing figure. Tall, lean, and fit, he had piercing blue eyes and a mop of white hair. He was a favorite son of Paradise, a local boy who’d made a name for himself on the world stage and come back home to settle down. Unfortunately, the local papers he’d most recently worked for failed as regularly as Hollywood marriages. He’d gotten so fed up with his employers going under that he and his wife had bought out the last failing paper with their own money. Now the Paradise Herald belonged to them.

  Jesse waved his arm at the chair across from his desk. “Sit.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Cromwell said, shaking Jesse’s hand. “I appreciate the invitation.”

  Jesse liked that about Cromwell. He had manners.

  “How’s Martha?”

  “Not so good. The chemo’s been rough on her and the prognosis isn’t great.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “Thanks, Jesse, but I suspect you didn’t call me over here to ask about my wife.”

  Jesse shook his head.

  “Is it them, Jesse, Mary Kate O’Hara and Ginny Connolly?” Cromwell asked, easing into the chair. As he sat, he flipped open a notepad.

  “Officially or off the record?”

  Cromwell said, “Let’s start with officially.”

  “Until the medical examiner determines their identities, it would be foolish of me to speculate.”

  Cromwell laughed. He closed his notepad. “Okay, how about off the record?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe what?”

  “Maybe it’s the missing girls.”

  “Maybe probably or maybe unlikely?”

  “Maybe probably.”

  Cromwell rubbed his clean-shaven chin, opened his notepad. “Their remains are skeletal, so why probably?”

  “Nice try, Stu.” Jesse clapped his hands together. “If I answered the question in that form, I’d be confirming something that’s not been officially acknowledged.”

  “It was worth a shot,” Cromwell said. “But everybody in town knows you found two skeletons in close proximity to the body in the blue tarp. If you’re not going to talk to me about this stuff, why did you call me over here?”

  “Did I say I wasn’t going to talk to you?”

  Cromwell closed his notepad again. Laughed again. “A little squid pro quo, huh, Jesse? You scratch my octopus and I’ll scratch yours.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Who’s going to scratch whose octopus first?” Cromwell asked.

  Jesse never had much use for the press. And his attitude toward the media only got worse after his ex, Jenn, a failed actress, had risen from the weather girl at a Boston TV station to a reporter on a syndicated magazine show. Jenn was smart, but she wasn’t the most savvy person about world affairs and politics. The only subject Jenn was an expert on was herself, but it wasn’t only Jenn’s narrow focus that fueled Jesse’s contempt for the press. He had found her colleagues to be a bunch of self-important boobs. Stu Cromwell was neither self-important nor a boob. And it was Jesse’s sense of things that reporters, especially newspaper reporters, always knew more than they would or could say. They were like cops in that way.

  “I wasn’t here when the girls went missing,” Jesse said, “so I’m operating in the dark. I could use som
eone who knew the landscape back then the way you would have known it.”

  “What about your cops? Some of them grew up here and have never left.”

  “I’ll talk to them. I have talked to some of them already.”

  Cromwell cleared his throat. “You are aware, then, that Molly Crane was close to both girls?”

  Jesse nodded.

  “I heard she pretty much fell apart this morning.”

  “Please, Stu, don’t put that—”

  Cromwell raised his palm up. “It has no bearing on the story, Jesse. Don’t worry. It won’t be in the paper tomorrow—not mine, anyway. But I still don’t know what you want from me.”

  “Your notes from back then,” Jesse said. “Your files.”

  “Sorry, Jesse. That’s a nonstarter. I’ve never shown anyone my notes and files outside of my editors, and not always then. Even if you were willing to show me all the official files, local and state, I wouldn’t make that trade.”

  “How about this, then. You act as an unofficial consultant to the department.”

  “In what unofficial capacity exactly?” Cromwell drew air quotes around the word unofficial.

  “First, I’d like to sit down with you and talk about how Paradise was back around the time the girls went missing. After I start doing my investigation, I’d like to be able to run things by you. I’ll need a way to test what I’m being told against what the reality of Paradise was. I am not going to know the players like you know them or knew them.”

  Cromwell was curious. “And for this I get what?”

  “Exclusives.”

  “You do realize that you’re going to get swamped by the media once this gets out there. You’ll have more satellite trucks here than ever before. You sure you want to go promising exclusives to a small-town paper?”

  Jesse nodded.

  “Okay, then,” Cromwell said. “Exclusives like . . . ?”

  “Sacred Heart Girls Catholic class rings were found among the remains.”

  “Did one of them have the ring on the middle finger of its right hand?”

  Jesse said, “Possibly.”

  Stu Cromwell stood up and stuck his right hand out to Jesse. “Aren’t you going to shake the hand of your new unofficial consultant?”

  Jesse shook Stu’s hand.

  “About the ring . . .” Cromwell said.

  “Middle finger of the right hand.”

  Cromwell smiled.

  “Until I say different, Stu, quote me only as an unnamed police source. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  Cromwell stood, thanked Jesse, and left.

  10

  He had seen human bodies in all states of disrepair, but the face of the man in the blue tarp was a particular mess. Jesse was beyond sickness or disgust. He accepted that about himself. He found looking at bodies in the morgue to be more difficult than doing so at the crime scene. A body was just one element of a crime scene, one part of the activity. The morgue, with its somber, antiseptic chill and stainless steel, was a different experience. Somehow the sterility of the place, the forced distancing of the bodies from their humanity, had a paradoxical effect on Jesse. They became more than cases to him here.

  Jesse found himself looking from the near-faceless body on the metal table to the face of the ME. Hers was an attractive face, somewhere between pretty and striking, not beautiful. She had high cheekbones, a strong, square chin, and polished-copper eyes. Her nose was slightly flattened, her lips were thin, but nicely shaped. She wore her dark brown, impossibly curly hair pulled back so tightly that it seemed as if she was trying to make a statement. It was hard for Jesse to know what she was trying to say. And he wondered if her spare use of makeup was part of the same statement or whether there was a different message in that.

  He’d run into Tamara Elkin a few times since she’d taken the job in early summer, but they hadn’t really exchanged more than hellos. Their conversations had been such that Jesse hadn’t gotten any sense of her. It wasn’t easy getting a sense of her, though there was a hint of mischief and flirt in her eyes. She didn’t talk much and she seemed pleased to wait for him to speak first.

  “His face is in bad shape,” Jesse said.

  “Your powers of observation are keen ones, Chief Stone. Next you’ll point out the victim’s farmer tan.”

  “I did notice that. And it’s Jesse, not Chief Stone.”

  “How nice for you.”

  “I could live without the sarcasm, Doc.”

  “And I could do without the flirting.”

  Jesse laughed. “If asking you to call me by my first name is flirting, you’ve got a low threshold, Doc.”

  She smiled, and there it was, he thought, that mischief in her eyes.

  “Whatever. Entrance wounds from very near the rear of the skull here,” she said, tapping the back of Jesse’s head with the tip of her index finger, “and here.” She touched Jesse behind his left ear. “The shots were from very close range.”

  Her touch was gentle and lingered a beat longer than he expected. In spite of her denial, it felt like flirting. If it was, he was flattered by it. Under a different set of circumstances, Jesse might have encouraged her and pursued things. But he was still carrying a torch for Diana Evans, the former FBI agent he had been involved with last spring. She was back in the D.C. area, still getting her life back in order. He’d been with a lot of women during his long breakup with Jenn, but before Diana, only Sunny Randall had really lit the spark in him. Unfortunately, Sunny had been as entangled with her ex as Jesse had been with Jenn. He wasn’t about to throw another chance at love away, whether Tamara Elkin was flirting with him or not.

  “We found charred and soot-laden canvas fibers in the entrance wounds and bloodied canvas fibers elsewhere. We’ve sent it all to the state crime lab.”

  “The shooter didn’t want a mess,” Jesse said. “Two wounds and all that damage, must have been large-caliber. Maybe hollow-points.”

  “Definitely hollow-points. Sounds like you’ve done this once or twice.”

  “Once or twice.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard all about you, Chief Stone,” she said, and left it at that. “Unless your department is willing to pay for forensic facial reconstruction, there’s little hope of photo identification.”

  “Or dental. What’s left of his mouth is a train wreck,” Jesse said. He pointed to an indentation and nasty dark mark on John Doe’s lower jaw. “That wasn’t caused by gunshots.”

  “Blunt-instrument trauma prior to death. He was bound as well. Look at his wrists and ankles.”

  “Ligature marks.”

  She nodded. “It’s in the report. Other marks, too, but of his own making,” she said, running her gloved fingertip along the body’s left forearm. “Intravenous drug user, but not recently. The scarring looks to be several years old. He had been a heavy drinker at some point as well. His liver was almost as much of a mess as his face.”

  “Any identifying marks, Doc?”

  She smiled. It was a crooked smile, one with a surprising amount of playfulness in it, Jesse thought.

  She said, “Lift up his left arm.”

  Jesse saw the tattoo: a two-headed rattlesnake, forked tongues extended, its body wrapped around the horizontal beam of a cross, the snake’s rattle sticking skyward at one end of the cross. The snake’s heads hung below the other end. The cross was done in dark blue ink, the snake in bright red. It was about four inches long by three inches wide and ran from the bottom of the dead man’s left armpit along the top of his rib cage.

  “That can’t be a very common tattoo,” she said.

  “We’ll find out soon enough. Can I get a photograph of—”

  “Already done. There’s a hard copy with the file and I can send you a JPEG. Let’s go into my office and I’ll get you the reports of the girls.”
>
  As Jesse followed Tamara Elkin down the hall, he found he had as many questions in his head about her as he did the dead.

  11

  In his capacity as police chief of the Paradise PD and as the catching detective on cases for the LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Division, Jesse Stone had done this sad Kabuki dozens of times. Sometimes he was forced to do it over the phone. More frequently, he performed the soul-crushing duty in person. Today it would be done face-to-face with Molly Crane at his side.

  The O’Hara house wasn’t much. Like many of the older homes in that part of Paradise, it had started out as a simple, cedar-shingled cottage. Then, over the decades, rooms and dormers had been added to meet the owners’ needs or whims. The O’Hara place, with its split shingles gone almost black with age and a garage sagging with snow and neglect, was the poor relation on the street. The kind of place the old neighbors shook their heads at in pity and new neighbors shook their heads at in contempt.

  Jesse, riding shotgun, flung open the cruiser door but didn’t get out of the cruiser.

  “How long since you’ve been here, Molly?”

  “Feels like forever.”

  “You sure you’re up for this?”

  Her jaw clenched. “No, I’m not sure, but I have to be here with you. It’s the right thing to do.”

  “For the O’Haras or for you?”

  “Both.”

  Jesse had no intention of arguing with her. Of course Molly was here because she felt it was right. He sensed it was more than that. Way more. Guilt probably only a fraction of it. They got out of the cruiser. Molly came around and stood by Jesse.

  “Both parents still alive?” Jesse asked.

  “I think so. I know her mom is. Mary Kate’s parents split up about a year after she went missing. Mr. O’Hara, Mary Kate’s dad, couldn’t take staying here, being surrounded by reminders of his favorite girl. My mom told me he felt like he was drowning. Mom said she didn’t blame him for leaving. I don’t think anyone did. He was a great guy, Mr. O’Hara. We used to call him Johnny. He’d pile all of us girls into his big old station wagon with the fake wood on the sides and take us to the park or to the beach. He taught us how to play ball and catch frogs. How to fish. We all loved Johnny.”