by Linda Barnes
McHenry’s smile widened and Mooney thought he’d never seen a less attractive grin.
“Got the vehicle,” the big man said proudly. “Impounding it now, some garage in Allston. So we’ll contact the feds. They’ll want in on this baby.”
“She doesn’t have a car.” Mooney wanted to recall the words the minute they left his tongue, but he didn’t bother to amend them, to turn the self-incriminating statement into, “I heard she didn’t have a car.” Let the Macs think what they wanted to think.
The big man said, “Vehicle’s registered to Gianelli. How do you like them apples? Judy’s gonna work it, and I’m betting she’ll not only make the match with the vic, she’ll put the lady in the driver’s seat.”
Judy Bisset, a criminalist in the CLU, specialized in trace evidence. She was good, but she wasn’t a miracle worker. She couldn’t leave all her other work to concentrate on a single hit and run. It would take time to make the match.
“No reason Carlyle wouldn’t be in the vehicle, if it belongs to Gianelli.” Mooney spoke calmly but his mind was racing. “What does she say about it?”
“Can’t find her. Nobody seems to know where she is.” McHenry made the words into a challenge.
“Well, when you pick her up—”
“We’ve got enough to talk to the feds,” the big man said stubbornly. “If there’s a link between the cases—”
“That’s okay, McHenry, good work. Get your report on my desk and I’ll take it from here.”
“But we were—”
“I’m already on my way across the street, so I’ll handle things with the bureau. McDonough, why don’t you hang on a minute?”
McHenry lingered a beat too long, then pivoted on his heel. As soon as his footsteps died, Mooney said, “I was looking through the personnel files. You’re up for a department citation on the trash-fire thing. Congratulations.”
“Thank you, sir.” The smaller officer ducked his head and turned to go.
“So how did you get onto the car?” Mooney hoped he had made the question sound like an afterthought.
“We did the hotline thing in the papers. Got it on the news.”
“Guy leave a number?” Mooney wasn’t talking about a phone number. Often, tipsters didn’t want to be identified, but if there was reward money involved, there was a department protocol. The caller would leave a five-digit number instead of a name. If the tip panned out, the tipster could use the number to collect the cash.
“No name, no number,” McDonough said.
“A do-gooder,” Mooney said.
“I guess.”
TWENTY-TWO
Outdoors in the bracing chill, Mooney didn’t bother to pretend he was on his way to some mythical confab with the bureau at the JFK Building across the street. He moved like a man on autopilot, backing the Buick out of the lot, racing down busy streets to the Central Artery, the underground maze of the Dig, and headed south.
He drove skillfully, weaving the lanes with a sense of purpose as well as speed. He hadn’t gone to the feds. Instead he had made his choice. This was it. Now was the time to take time. He had it coming, hadn’t taken a vacation in years. He was going to go back to what he was good at: street work.
In Boston, too many local bad guys knew him by sight. More and more, he was the wrong color, the wrong nationality. He spoke the wrong language. He didn’t blend in; he stood out. All that would be different on the Cape.
The crush of traffic temporarily defeated the urge for speed. He accepted bumper-to-bumper traffic on summer Friday afternoons when Bostonians rushed to the Cape, but now, midweek in winter, he wondered what the deal was. Were people slipping off to open summer homes with no hint of spring in the air? Were they fleeing the city for some unknown reason, following the evacuation routes that had sprung up post-9/11?
As he drove, Mooney tallied his mistakes. He had believed Magda when she’d relayed the news about Gianelli, but he hadn’t pressed for details. Mistake number one. Once he knew more about the case, he had continued to keep quiet, to protect Magda, to protect himself. That was number two. Then he had avoided Carlotta, knowing the feds suspected him of leaking to Gianelli, aware that Agent Dailey was on his tail. Mistake number three.
But the biggest mistake was this: Because he had wanted Gianelli arrested and out of the way, he had never questioned the case. Not his jurisdiction; not his problem, he had told himself. Now, with Carlotta involved, it was.
He considered McHenry’s take on the hit and run. Julie Farmer, the girl who’d been killed by a car in the North End, was Wilder’s friend, and in the Macs’ scenario, she had come to Carlyle not as a client, but as a blackmailer: I am a witness; I saw what your fiancé did. To the Macs, the story made sense. To Mooney, it had all the hallmarks of a frame. He doubted the Macs or the feds would see it his way.
Carlotta wasn’t where she ought to be, wasn’t answering her cell phone, wasn’t picking up her home phone. Roz was answering, but she wasn’t talking, and Gloria, who always talked, wasn’t talking either. Mooney couldn’t sit calmly at his desk and watch the chips fall. He needed to move, take action, make waves. The Wilder case was the beginning, the place to start, and this much he knew: The investigation had been bigfooted. The Nausett cops and the state troopers had barely had a chance to sink their hooks into the case before they had been ordered to give way to the FBI.
A blue Pontiac cut him off. The driver gave him the finger and Mooney smiled. He thought they ought to display the finger on the Massachusetts state seal.
With his own criminalists and evidence techs working full-speed, Mooney thought a week might do the trick. It would take at least a week to study paint chips and glass fragments, make the necessary microscopic lab comparisons, decide whether or not they had the right vehicle. If the Macs went to the bureau, the feds might steamroller the job through their own facilities. Could they do it faster? Would they try? Putting Gianelli away would be a feather in somebody’s cap. Mooney wondered if the cap would belong to the red-faced agent Dailey.
Hingham. Marshfield. Duxbury. Traffic thinned the farther south he drove. The Sagamore Bridge, a notorious summer bottleneck, was easy sailing and once past it, he didn’t need to consult any maps. Mooney’s family, dozens of aunts, uncles, and cousins, used to gather on the Cape when he was a kid, back when it was affordable. They’d pile into the backs of pickup trucks, drive to Dennis or Falmouth or Yarmouthport, watch Cape Cod league baseball games. The price was right: free for all; bring your own beach chairs. If you caught a foul ball, you had to give it back.
Route 6 had been a narrow two-lane road then. Suicide Alley, they had dubbed it. Now he took the third exit off the divided highway, heading south to Nausett. He told himself he’d need to watch it, not come on as the city cop visiting the country cousins, avoid any wiseass remarks about sweeping up dead animals off the roads or babysitting drunken tourists, as though these cops weren’t real cops, just traffic enforcers, guys with easy, placid jobs.
He had a big-city chip on his shoulder, but at least he knew it. Most of these guys were okay, guys who’d grown up in the places they served, the best kind of cops, with the pulse of the town in their blood, who knew names and families and history going back three, four generations. Sometimes the intimacy backfired: Kids from bad families had it held against them, became the usual suspects rounded up for every petty offense, but mostly it worked out fine.
Jesus, he was nervous. Nervous about a case, playing with his head, going around the investigation instead of plunging into it. He had told himself for years that all his cases were personal, but now this one was, and it felt different.
He thought he knew her, knew Carlotta, but how far would she go? If she had crossed the line with a lover, how far would she go? Women in jail, most of them were there because they’d joined forces with the wrong man.
Gianelli was the wrong man. Moon felt his jaw tighten. He knew Gianelli was the wrong man because he, Mooney, was the right man. But if h
e was the right man, if he’d always been the right man, why didn’t she see it, too? Why hadn’t he done something to make her see it?
He remembered her in uniform, the first day. Defiant because it was no use pretending to be demure, not with the hair and the height. There early; there late. Reliable, reasonable, always passed over, always given the crap assignments, never complaining. When he’d given her a break, she’d given him suspicion in return.
The timing had never been right.
Signs caught his eye, multisyllabic Indian place names: Attaquin, Ashumet, Santuit. Placards urged him to vote for Proposition 6, to vote against it. A vote against Proposition 6 would KEEP NAUSETT SAFE. A vote in favor would MOVE NAUSETT INTO THE 2IST CENTURY!
Long after she had left the department, when he was alone on stakeout, he’d hear her voice in his head, low and clear, with a husky undertone, a faint hint of smoke. They would engage in imaginary dialogues, alone in the dark, but whenever he picked up the phone, determined to reconnect with the real woman, the ring went unanswered. She was dating some other man. She didn’t want to get involved with a cop. She was so damn stubborn.
When she had been part of his team, he had felt younger, more alive. Maybe it was the feeling rather than the woman he yearned for, the moment relived, youth and promise before they yielded to age and compromise.
As a child he’d mispronounced that word, compromise, in school. Reading aloud, he’d said compromise and the teacher had corrected him. His cheeks had burned with crimson fire; a girl had giggled. Now he thought he’d been right about the word: an undelivered promise.
He scanned the roadside, the low trees, the cranberry bogs, the stunted, wind-scoured foliage. A square brownish sign read, HISTORICAL SITE: NAUSETT BURIAL GROUND. There was an arrow pointing at a diagonal to the right. He turned before he thought.
It might not be the scene of the crime, but it was the scene of the discovery of the crime. A place to begin, a sidetrip that would satisfy an itch and delay the visit to the Nausett cop house, the questions he should have asked weeks ago and hadn’t.
The small building with the scaffolding, the one in the photos, turned out to be a church, which puzzled him. He had assumed the Indians of the Cape weren’t churchgoing Christians, but he had been wrong. They were “praying Indians,” early converts to Puritan and Pilgrim ways, he learned from a sign affixed to the boarded-up house. Beyond the scaffolding, the graveyard seemed haphazard and disorganized. No neat rows of crosses, just meandering circles of stones, clumps of trees, occasional tombstones. Few of the stones had carving; few bore names. The crime-scene tape was long gone. The rains had come and gone; the snow, too.
There was more than one circle of stones. He was scanning the trees, the small church, trying to make the scene in front of him match the photos, when a dour-looking man, wearing a heavy wool jacket, chinos, and workboots, emerged from a distant guard shack.
“He’p you any?” The man’s jaws worked a wad of gum.
“This place private?”
“Nah, open to the public, dawn to dusk. Get a lot of picture-takers, grave-rubbers, tourists. In season.”
It wasn’t exactly a question, but the man seemed curious.
“This where that woman was killed?”
The guard smiled through the gum wad. “Yep. I’m the one found her.”
Calvin Gordon. The man matched the stats in the file: sixty-three-year-old army vet; partially disabled; shoulder injury. The bad shoulder wasn’t noticeable under the heavy jacket.
“Musta been something,” Mooney said.
“Believe it.” Small and wiry, the man looked every one of his years. His seamed outdoor skin had seen too much sun.
“You mind talking about it?” Mooney said.
“You a reporter?”
“Hey, if you’ve got other stuff to do …” Mooney let the sentence die. Gordon would have to be bored, bored and cold, he thought. Talking would be better than standing around thinking about how cold it was.
“Where ya want me to start?” the man said. “The beginning? Well, ya know, this here’s a quiet place, mostly someplace tourists stop in the summer and it sure wasn’t no summer, back December. I spent my time in the guardhouse up yonder.”
“Bad night?”
“Cold, misty. Didn’t hear nothing; no kids giggling. Weren’t no beer cans in the morning. When there’s beer cans, I go right out, pick ’em up. Only respectful. Folks buried here.”
“Not much you can do about kids.”
“You got that right. They drink beer and they’re lookin’ for someplace to do it. Some of ’em like to sit on the gravestones and drink, but mostly the only trouble I have is on Halloween.”
“But the day you found the girl?”
“Can’t rightly say why I left the guardhouse when I did, but I always walk around near dawn. There ain’t no schedule to it. I don’t have none of those key-in-the-lock deals like they got over to the army barracks. Nobody comes and checks up on me if I don’t turn a key right to the minute. I wouldn’t work a place like that, where they don’t trust a man.”
While Gordon spoke, Mooney reviewed the man’s background. Honorable discharge, he recalled. Employment history: paint factory, fishing boat, trash collection. Dismissed once for fighting, once for drunkenness.
“First off, I thought somebody drunk a few too many. Then, when I got closer— Man, it was that ribbon. That horrible face and then that loopy, curly ribbon.” The guard stopped abruptly and Mooney remembered that the guard’s footprints and vomit had contaminated the crime scene.
“Where did you find her?”
Gordon gazed at Mooney speculatively, then beckoned him to a small rectangle of out-of-the-way grass, leading him respectfully around stones and markers.
Mooney sighted on the scaffolded church, moved left till the angles lined up. Why here? he wondered. Why not behind that scrub oak? What made this the best spot to dump a body?
The guard shack stood at the mouth of a narrow road. The small meetinghouse church, the scaffolding, blocked the sightlines. The guard wouldn’t be able to see this area.
“There another road over there?” Mooney nodded his head to the left. A car seemed essential.
“Yep. Through the trees. That’s how they must a come.”
“They?”
“He. Whoever. Whatever.”
The grass near the stone circle was mashed flat— by the body, by the feet of the investigators, by raccoons, for all he knew. Mooney wondered what he had thought he’d see that nobody else could see.
“You didn’t hear them? No engine, no car doors slamming?”
“Hey, I used to hear pretty good, you know? Now? Too much loud music, I guess, and I’m not really supposed to talk about this stuff. Cops already figure I’m the one blabbed about the ribbon. That ribbon shit got in all the papers.”
“Did you recognize her?”
“Hey, people don’t hardly even look like people when they’re dead like that. This wasn’t no casket viewing where they’re all prettied up. The light wasn’t good either, kind of cloudy and broken.” Gordon paused. “She wasn’t wearing clothes, none at all. But that don’t mean it was a sex thing.”
Mooney raised an eyebrow.
“Well, I figured sex, right at first, but then I said to myself if it’s some kinda sex thing, why aren’t they in some hotel or her place or his? I mean, he didn’t jump her and rape her here. No way, not with no noise, not with weather like that. And why’s he gonna dump her here? This here is an Indian burial ground, right?”
“Right,” Mooney said, because the man seemed to want an answer.
“And she sure ain’t one of them, blond girl like that. Blond all the way down, you know? I figure she was put here for a reason.”
“You do?” Mooney tried not to sound pushy, just encouraging.
“Good as saying, You live with ’em, you die with ’em. Dead girl hung with the Indians, she did, friends with the tribe. I figure that’s why t
he FBI took over. They do all that hate crime stuff.”
“Somebody killed her because she hung around with Indians?”
“You don’t believe me, but that’s ’cause you’re not from around here. Proposition Six, you probably don’t even know what it means.”
“You’re right there.”
“It’s no big deal, the tribe says, just is the town gonna sell them a chunk of land.”
“But you think it is a big deal.”
“Well, hell yeah. First off, where’s a bunch of poor Indians—they’re always crying poor-mouth, too— gonna get all this money to buy the land? And then, look at it, you sell the Nausett a chunk of land, you might as well say they gotta right to be a tribe. That’s one of the things they look at, the government. Does the town recognize the tribe? Selling land to ’em, that’s flat-out recognition.”
“It makes a difference, this recognition business?”
The guard gave Mooney a look like he’d just landed on the planet. “You’re not from around here, all right. Casino gambling, man! Slot machines and dice, and all the trouble that brings on this earth and in the kingdom to come. Oh, they got a church here, but take my word, most of the Indians don’t belong to any church but the holy church of money, high church of the dollar bill. They get themselves recognized as a tribe, next thing you know, this place is all gonna be a parking lot. Pave paradise, put up a parking lot. Folks round here don’t like that.”
Mooney didn’t think Calvin Gordon had just come up with the words, “holy church of money, high church of the dollar bill.” The man sounded like he was reciting lines from a speech, maybe a sermon.
“Once they get the land,” the guard said solemnly, “they’ll build a casino and it will be part of the Indian nation. It won’t even be Nausett anymore.”
TWENTY-THREE
Bobby Thurlow strode down the corridor into the light and Mooney knew he’d caught his break. It was the same man he had known half a lifetime ago, still slim and fit, hair shorter, flecked with gray in sharp contrast with his ebony skin. A good cop who’d seen things he didn’t want to see, started drinking a little too much, wised up, and gotten out when the getting was good. Bobby Thurlow had known who he was and how much he could take, a rare combination in a cop.