Robert B. Parker's The Devil Wins

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  Marchand nodded. “The photo on the wall behind my desk. The one my wife took of me and my kids on the deck of my boat. It’s been there so long, I forgot about it.”

  “You can erase your present, but you can’t erase your past.”

  “Don’t get cryptic on me, Jesse. It’s not like you.”

  “How would you know what I’m like? It’s pretty clear that we didn’t know each other at all.”

  “Fair point, but I still want to know what that thing about the past and present means.”

  “Once we identified Warren Zebriski, you were finished. Even with killing Dragoa and Millner, even with that tidy little confession, which, planted typewriter or not, I didn’t buy for a second, you were done. Though I’ve got to say it took some nerve for you to risk running down Jameson in broad daylight with Alexio’s truck.”

  “What choice did I have?” Marchand shrugged. “Besides, the attempt on Jameson’s life gave me cover. As long as no one got a good look at me, I figured it was worth the risk. I almost got away with it.”

  Jesse shook his head. “I spoke to Robbie Wilson and Zebriski’s brother in New York. I looked at the Sacred Heart yearbook. You and Zebriski were friends and you were forever connected to Dragoa and Millner, you were all teammates. I know something about old teammates. Once I was suspicious of you, I did some checking. Found out that your dad was big in commercial real estate around here. Seems that twenty-five years ago he owned the building where the girls were buried. You couldn’t erase any of that.”

  Marchand laughed.

  “Something funny?”

  “The confession,” Marchand said. “It’s almost all there. Most of it happened just like I wrote that it did. Only it was me who had a thing for Ginny, not John, and if we’d only ditched Alexio at the park, we probably would’ve been fine. John was a lowlife, but he wouldn’t have forced himself on Mary Kate like Alexio did. Once Alexio got alcohol in him . . . You know how it is with him. How many times have you had to arrest him? John was fine, smoking a joint and drinking, staring out at the ocean, but when Ginny and me were getting it on, Alexio lost it. It happened so fast. He just kept stabbing her. It was John that hit Ginny with the rock the first time. I think she was already dead, but I hit her again to make sure. I mean, we couldn’t leave her alive, not after what Alexio did. I didn’t have a choice, Jesse. All we meant to do was to go out to Stiles and celebrate the Fourth, I swear.”

  Marchand went silent, slumped in the chair, and hung his head.

  Jesse said, “What’s going on with you?”

  “Zevon,” Marchand said, as if that explained it.

  “Zebriski? What about him? Was he part of what happened on the island?”

  “No, no way. Warren was a great guy.” Marchand was offended. “I asked him what he was doing that night, but he said he already had plans that he wasn’t going to change for anything or anybody.”

  “I take it that it was you who confessed to him, not Millner,” Jesse said, hearing sirens in the distance.

  Marchand nodded. “When Zevon got back from college the next summer, we got really hammered one night and he asked me if the cops had made any progress finding the girls. I blew up at him. I told him that Mary Kate and Ginny Connolly were dead. I told him everything, every fucking detail. I begged him not to go to the cops. I kept saying how it was his fault, that if he had been there to make Mary Kate happy, none of it would have happened the way it did. That they were dead and that all of us spending our lives in jail wasn’t going to bring them back. If only I hadn’t confessed to him, it wouldn’t have come back on me. But I guess it always comes back, right? You always have to pay in the end.”

  Jesse didn’t answer, because the truth was that not nearly enough people paid in the end.

  85

  Molly and Healy were pacing around Jesse’s office. Suit was firmly planted in Jesse’s chair.

  “Get up and do some pacing,” Molly said.

  “I’m pacing in spirit.”

  “Lazy.”

  “I just got hit by a truck.”

  “Whiner. Next thing you know, you’ll be bringing up the gunshot wounds.”

  They all three laughed at that.

  Then Molly turned to Healy. “What’s taking so long?”

  Healy said, “The man in there has twenty-five years’ worth of confessing to do.”

  “But he’s got a lawyer in there with him. Maybe he’s changed his mind and—”

  Jesse walked in before she could finish. Suit made to stand up, but Jesse waved him back down.

  “So?” Healy said.

  “Relax. He copped to everything. It’s all on videotape. Bill Marchand is never going to see another day on the outside.”

  Molly asked, “Did he kill Warren?”

  “Millner,” Jesse said.

  “So who was driving the truck that hit me?” Suit asked.

  “Marchand. Both Millner and Dragoa were already dead by then.”

  Healy shook his head. “How did he think he was going to get away with that?”

  “He almost did. Everyone in town knows Dragoa’s truck and that’s what he was counting on, that people would focus on the truck and not the guy driving it. But he took precautions. Remember, he had access to Dragoa’s spare clothes on the boat and he was about the same size as Alexio. With a watch cap pulled down low and the truck streaking by, he figured to get away with it.”

  “But what about the timing, Jesse?” Suit asked. “If Dragoa and Millner were already dead—”

  “That’s why he placed their bodies on the beach and didn’t just dump them in the ocean,” Jesse said. “It was cold but not freezing the last few days. He figured to confuse us with the time of death.”

  “Like that Lutz guy did with the bodies of Walton Weeks and his girlfriend a few years back.”

  “That’s right, Suit, but Marchand only needed to buy himself about a twenty-four-hour window where Dragoa and Millner could have still been alive.”

  Molly said, “Why’d he try to run Jameson over.”

  “Two reasons: to fool us that Dragoa was still alive, and he couldn’t risk Jameson talking to us if he really did know something. It’s why my trap worked. After all the killing he’d done to cover his tracks, the only possible loose end was Jameson. He had to risk killing him, too.”

  “Speaking of Jameson, where is he?” Suit wanted to know.

  “He’s safe and with a friend.”

  Healy asked, “Who set the fires?”

  “Marchand. He was at the wake for Maxie and Ginny, but made it a point to tell me he couldn’t be at the church service because of business. Millner left the truck for him in Commonwealth Woods, and after he was done torching the houses, he drove back there and burned the van. Both Dragoa and Millner trusted Marchand implicitly. They always had, from the days they played ball together. Marchand was the point guard, the leader. He was the smart one, the successful one, and he was the one who had saved their asses the night they killed the girls. Up until the bodies were found, they had a common agenda. Once the bodies were discovered and Dragoa started acting guilty and unstable, Marchand decided it was too dangerous to let Dragoa and Millner keep breathing. After he made up his mind, everything he did was to make Dragoa and Millner look guilty and to draw our attention to them. Oh, yeah, the gun he used to kill Dragoa will match the gun used to kill Zebriski, and the knife your guys found on the boat will match the knife that killed Mary Kate O’Hara. He was thorough. I’ll give him that.”

  Molly looked shaken. “If Jameson hadn’t turned up, he would have gotten away with it.”

  “Maybe,” Jesse said. “But like I told him, he could erase his present, but not his past. I would have looked at him eventually. Now, if you guys don’t mind, I’d like a word with Suit.”

  Molly gave Jesse a wary look as she held the door open f
or Healy, but she didn’t say anything. Suit was visibly worried and got up from Jesse’s chair in pieces. It was painful to watch. Jesse sat in his chair and gestured for Suit to sit across from him. The pain forced him to sit, though it seemed to Jesse that Suit would rather have run.

  “What’d I do now, Jesse?”

  “Take it easy, Suit. I just want to say some stuff to you I should have said before this.”

  “Stuff like what?”

  “Like thank you for having my back last spring. I should have thanked you then.”

  “Didn’t turn out so good.”

  “I guess it didn’t, but you didn’t know you were going to get shot. It was a brave thing to do, Suit, following me like that even though you knew it might be dangerous and that I’d get mad at you. Easy to do things when you know you’ll get rewarded for it. Hard to do them when you know you’re going to catch hell.”

  Suit reddened. “That all, Jesse?”

  “Almost. You know you saved Jameson’s life, putting yourself between that truck and him?”

  “I was only doing my job.”

  “Maybe. But you acted fast, without thinking of yourself. You saved a person’s life. A lot of cops, good cops, go through a whole career without being able to make that claim. I thought about giving you a medal for what you did.”

  “No disrespect, Jesse, but I don’t want a medal. I got lots of trophies and awards at my folks’ house and they just collect dust.”

  “I know you don’t, so I decided to give you something that has meant a lot to me.” Jesse stood, unholstered his .38, emptied the cylinder, and placed it in Suit’s hand. “Luther, I would be honored if you would accept this from me as a measure of my respect for you.”

  Suit stared at the .38 as if he’d just been given a Super Bowl ring. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “‘Thanks’ will do.”

  “Thank you, Jesse. This means everything to me.” Suit saluted his boss.

  “You ever salute me again and I’ll fire your ass.”

  “Stop calling me Luther and I’ll stop saluting you.”

  “Deal.”

  They shook on it, their hands staying together a little longer than usual.

  “One more thing, Suit,” Jesse said when Suit had gotten to the office door. “When you come back on duty, you’re on patrol. Now, get out of here and heal up.”

  86

  When Tamara Elkin pulled back her front door, she looked exhausted and worried. He was exhausted himself, but the worries, at least for now, were gone. Jesse hugged her long and tightly.

  When they broke their embrace, she asked, “Is everything all right? I was watching the news and fell asleep on the couch. Is it done?”

  “It was him.”

  “Marchand?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You arrested him?”

  “After he broke into my house and killed the hell out of the dummy we use to teach CPR.”

  “But you’re—”

  “Fine. Marchand confessed to everything. There won’t be a trial.”

  She smiled at him.

  “He almost got away with it,” Jesse said.

  She shook her head. “You would have gotten him eventually.”

  “Maybe.”

  She smiled again, but this was a different smile.

  “What’s that smile about?”

  “Water in the lungs,” she said.

  “What about it?”

  “There wasn’t any in either Dragoa or Millner. So unless they just happened to fall overboard the second after they both stopped breathing, someone would have had to push them overboard. You would have followed it back to Marchand.”

  “We’ll never know. Tomorrow, compare the knife wounds in Millner to the wounds you found on Mary Kate’s ribs. Marchand says it was the same knife.”

  “Will do.”

  He kissed her softly on the forehead. “Thank you for doing this for me. How’s Jameson?”

  “He’s asleep in the spare bedroom. God, I was so nervous. Jesse Stone, do you know how long it’s been since I’ve had a living patient? Don’t you ever do this to me again.”

  Now it was his turn to smile. “Should I take him back to the hospital now?”

  “He’ll be fine until tomorrow. I gave him something for the headache, but he’s not showing any other symptoms. That man’s had a rough life. The story his body tells is very sad.”

  “That’s a pretty unclinical analysis, Doc.”

  “There’s a reason I’m more comfortable working with the dead, Jesse.”

  He didn’t say anything to that. “Can I get a drink?”

  “For a price,” she said.

  “Like?”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “In the meantime, how about that drink?”

  She hugged him. When she let go, she said, “This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

  “Depends.”

  “On?”

  “If I ever get that drink.”

  “You are a persistent SOB, Jesse Stone.”

  “My most charming feature.”

  Without another word, she walked to her cabinet and twisted off the cap of a new bottle of Black Label.

  87

  There was a false spring that late February. Temperatures hovered in the fifties and southern New England hadn’t seen snow since mid-January. Jesse had the softball team out for an early practice at the park. Mostly he wanted to see what he had with this year’s team. Things had changed since last season. They had new uniforms, just not the ones Bill Marchand had ordered. Their new sponsor, the Paradise Credit Union, had supplied them. Suit, who, owing to the gunshot wounds, had missed the bulk of last season, was back at first base. Jesse liked having him there even though Suit’s footwork around the bag wasn’t quite what it used to be. Jesse had been forced to shift Tommy Deutsch to shortstop to take Marchand’s place. Connor Cavanaugh had taken Deutsch’s spot at second. Cavanaugh was all hit and no field, but on a softball team full of aging jocks, wannabes, and never-will-bes, there were only so many places to hide weak links.

  After practice, when they were at the Lobster Claw drinking beers and moaning about all the things that ached and speculating about how much worse they would ache tomorrow, Molly came into the Claw to join them. A few months back, Jesse thought, he would have dreaded Molly showing up unexpectedly. But after a few rough weeks of grief and regret, she had returned to her old self. And he was glad of that. It wasn’t only Molly who had returned to normal. Paradise itself had been quiet through the winter and now seemed to be the same little town it was before the trauma of the fall. It had put the murders and scandal behind it and resumed the natural rhythm of things. In L.A., he understood how that worked. Big cities are rife with tragedy so that one just swallowed up the next. Then he recalled Healy’s words about small-town secrets and shame. And now Jesse guessed he understood about that, too.

  Molly waved for Jesse to come over to the end of the bar to talk.

  “Beer?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  Jesse grabbed a pitcher and poured her a pint of Harpoon lager. “What’s up?”

  “I heard from Drew Jameson today.”

  Jesse asked, “How is he?”

  “He says he’s better and asked me to have you thank your friend Dix for getting him into the program.”

  “I’ll do that. What did you guys talk about?”

  Molly smiled that sad smile he hadn’t seen on her face since the fall. “Warren. It feels good to be able to talk about him again. He was lost to me and Jameson brought him back.”

  Jesse was hesitant to say it but, in the end, didn’t hold back. “Warren covered up a murder for twenty-four years.”

  “I know he did,” she said, sipping her beer. “I’m not
excusing that.”

  “I guess in the end he tried to do the right thing. He sure paid for it.”

  “A lot of people paid for it, Jesse. But what Jameson brought back to me was the Warren I knew for those few weeks before the world went upside down. Those were special days that are mine again.”

  “I’ll drink to that.”

  They clinked glasses and finished their beers in silence. When he was done, Jesse said his good-byes. Molly caught up to him at the door.

  “Jesse, I almost forgot.”

  “What?”

  “Remember the missing cabdriver?”

  “Wiethop? Sure. What about him?”

  “The Connecticut State Police called. They found him dead in his car in a small lake that thawed early. They e-mailed over the full report as an attachment.”

  “Drowned?” Jesse asked.

  “Broken neck.”

  “Broken neck, huh? Just like Maxie Connolly.”

  “Maxie Connolly threw herself off the Bluffs, Jesse.”

  “Or not.”

  “We back to that again?”

  “It’s suspicious. Thanks, Molly.”

  Jesse felt as achy as the rest of his team and his shoulder was killing him. Nothing like the combination of stabbing pain and burning to let you know you’re alive. He didn’t go home. Instead he walked back to the station and looked at the report from the Connecticut staties. It was all there: the written report of the troopers, the detective’s report, the ME’s report, autopsy photos, photos of the car, photos of the items found in the car with Wiethop’s body. If he hadn’t been a little buzzed from the beers, he would have spotted it the first time he looked at the photos. Then, when he scrolled through the photos a second time, he saw it. When he saw it, he knew. And the last unexplained bit of business from last fall fell cruelly into place.

  88