The Bitterest Pill

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “He probably kept them somewhere else,” Jesse said. “Okay, I’ll send Gabe over to help finish the search. In the meantime, I’m arresting the husband on weapons charges. Come downstairs and witness the Miranda. I don’t want this guy slipping through our fingers.”

  Thirty-one

  After the arrest, Jesse had Gabe Weathers take Joe Walters to the hospital to get his nose reset and have him checked out. The last thing Jesse wanted was to give a belligerent abuser like Walters a way to game the system and hand him a get-out-of-jail-free card. So it was all by the book.

  “Stay with him, Gabe. He doesn’t leave your sight until we book him and put him in a cell.”

  Jesse drove back to the station and asked Molly to come into his office. She sat opposite him. Jesse explained what had gone on at the Walterses’ house and what they’d found in the kid’s room.

  “So you think Chris Grimm was Heather’s connection?” Molly asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But you didn’t find any drugs in the kid’s room.”

  “None, but that just means the kid wasn’t stupid.”

  “He was stupid enough to keep stolen property in his room.”

  Jesse smiled a sad smile.

  “What’s that smile about, Jesse?”

  “I’m smiling because I heard your voice in my head, Molly.”

  “And what did my voice say?”

  “It said that Chris Grimm wasn’t stupid, he was just being a kid.”

  “A kid selling drugs.”

  “I didn’t say I thought he was a saint or that he was even a good kid. My guess, he pawned a lot of the stuff he got in trade for the drugs and held on to the stuff he thought was cool, like the stolen bass and the Rolex. We have to remember, this is a kid with a kid’s sense of the world. A pro wouldn’t have kept any of it, would have unloaded it immediately for ten, twenty cents on the dollar if necessary. One thing I can say, there did seem to be something between Heather Mackey and him.”

  “Yeah,” Molly said. “The kind between a user and a dealer.”

  “It was more than that. Why else would the kid show up outside the funeral home and at the cemetery?”

  “Fear. Guilt.”

  “Maybe. Doesn’t matter now.”

  “I guess we’ll find out when we get him.”

  Jesse shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  Molly was confused. “He’s a seventeen-year-old kid scared out of his mind. Where’s he going to run? We’ll get him or the Staties will.”

  “My guess, the kid’s already dead. He was working for someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “You tell me, Molly. But he wasn’t a criminal mastermind. He must have been recruited for the job. He was the school-level connection. There’s always layers of insulation between the real supplier and the users.”

  Molly didn’t love hearing that. It reminded her how easily her own daughters might have come in contact with Chris Grimm or someone like him.

  Jesse said, “First thing we have to do is go through the stuff we collected at the kid’s house. When Peter gets back and logs in the evidence, I want you to carefully go through it and call all the phone numbers on every slip of paper and every business card. Most will be dead ends, but maybe not all. I need you to individually catalog every piece of jewelry we found so we can put it up on the PPD website. And I need you to pull the reports on the theft of the Fender guitar and a Rolex.”

  Molly’s expression turned down. “Do you really think the kid’s dead?”

  “If not already, he soon will be. Selling such potent stuff to Heather was a bad mistake. We didn’t even know there was a ring in our area until Heather’s death. The people the kid was working for can’t afford to have him roll over on them to save his own neck. Not if they want to keep their operation going. That’s the other thing.”

  “What is?”

  “Assign someone on the night shift to collect all the digital surveillance footage from the town’s cameras and see what the private security cameras captured.”

  “Will do. But, Jesse, if the kid really is dead, what do you hope to find?”

  “The next person up the food chain from Chris Grimm. I think that’s the best we can hope for now. I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong and the kid got away. Maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll turn himself in, but we have to work on the assumption that we’re not going to get much help from Chris Grimm. Drug cases are built one step at a time.”

  Molly left. A minute later, Jesse grabbed his new baseball mitt off his desk, stood, and turned to face the window. He stared out at Stiles Island and the sun shimmering on the ocean as he pounded a baseball into the too-stiff pocket of the glove. The last of his old gloves had finally collapsed, the kangaroo leather beyond rescue or repair. Rawlings no longer made the model he’d used throughout his minor-league career. He’d been forced to buy a similar model online from a Japanese company, and it just didn’t fit his hand the way his old gloves did. For the moment, it wasn’t about the glove, but about concentrating on how to move forward with the case.

  Thirty-two

  Jesse put the glove back on his desk when he heard Joe Walters being hauled into the station. Molly printed him and photographed him, and Gabe brought him to a cell.

  “Did you Breathalyze him?” Jesse asked Gabe, when he returned from the jail section of the station.

  “Refused, but the doctors at the hospital drew some blood from him just in case. Molly will send it over to the lab.”

  “If the gun charges don’t stick, his refusing to be Breathalyzed should stand up. Get him off the streets and away from his wife for a while. Good work. How’d he check out otherwise?”

  Gabe laughed. “He puked a few times in the hospital. Not sure what made him more nauseated, the shot to his nose or the one to his—”

  Jesse interrupted. “He ask for a lawyer?”

  “Said he didn’t have one.”

  “Thanks, Gabe. Get back out there.” Jesse turned to Molly. “Call the public defender’s office and get Mr. Walters some representation. Then call Lundquist and ask him to drop by.”

  * * *

  —

  BRIAN LUNDQUIST HAD taken the step up into Captain Healy’s old job as the area’s chief homicide investigator for the state police. Although Jesse and Lundquist had known each other for years, Jesse could never quite reconcile Lundquist’s Minnesota farm-boy looks with his skill as an investigator. Always seemed to Jesse that Lundquist would have been a more natural fit as a guy out on a lake somewhere, ice fishing, drinking beer, and eating lutefisk. Then again, Jesse Stone, born in Tucson, wasn’t much of a Yankee, either. It was odd that the two of them should end up knee-deep in murder in eastern Massachusetts.

  Lundquist’s hand didn’t quite swallow Jesse’s, but it was pretty big. The Statie plopped himself down into the chair opposite Jesse, but his attention was elsewhere.

  “That a new glove?”

  “It is.”

  Lundquist shook his head. “What’s the world coming to? Jesse Stone bought a new glove.”

  “I also have a son I didn’t know about until a few months ago. If that didn’t make the world spin off its axis, my buying a glove isn’t going to do it.”

  “Great news about your son, huh?”

  Jesse was puzzled. “What?”

  “The kid, Cole, didn’t he tell you yet?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Oh, no.” Lundquist held his palms up to Jesse like a traffic cop. “I’m not saying another word. But if you didn’t call me about Cole, what am I doing here?”

  Jesse thought about pressing him on the thing with Cole but decided to let it go for now.

  “We had a teenage girl OD,” Jesse said. “Fentanyl and heroin.”

  “Was she a user?”

  “She was
opioid-addicted, but this was the first time she did it intravenously. Didn’t stand a chance. Mom found her in her bed, cold and unresponsive.”

  Lundquist shook his bowed head. “A shame, but more and more frequent. Still, Jesse, what’s it got to do with me? You want me to act as liaison between you and our narcotics team?”

  “Nothing like that. I think we’ve tracked down her supplier. A Paradise kid named Christopher Grimm.”

  “Arrest him?”

  “No, and I don’t think we ever will.”

  “How’s that?” Lundquist asked.

  “My guess, the kid’s already dead. So I need you to be alert for any John Does that turn up. Molly has all the particulars for you.”

  “How do you know the kid was her connection?”

  Jesse explained about the stolen goods, the passbook account, and about how the kid showed up at the funeral home and cemetery.

  Lundquist agreed. “Yeah, the people he was involved with have probably cut their losses and moved on. Victimless crimes, my ass. Sometimes I wish I could make people understand how crime shakes things up. If people who were thinking about murder ever had to do a family notification, I wonder if it would make them think twice about it. And their own damn families . . . Jeez, if they could only see how murder can destroy the killer’s family the same way it destroys the victim’s family . . . If, sometimes I think I’ll choke on that word. You ever think about that stuff, Jesse?”

  “Not as much as I used to.”

  “That it?” Lundquist asked, standing up.

  “It is. Remember to stop and talk to Molly.”

  “Of course. A new glove . . . Will wonders never cease?”

  “Get out of here.”

  At the door, Lundquist turned. “Listen, Jesse, don’t spoil it for the kid. Let him tell you.”

  Jesse nodded.

  Thirty-three

  When Jesse arrived in Paradise, there weren’t many African American families in town, except for a few who lived in and around the Swap. That was no longer the case, and the new diversity of Paradise was part of what Jesse enjoyed about Boston’s encroachment. Although Paradise was relatively small, there were now developing communities of Indians, Chinese, and Hispanics, along with the Portuguese fishermen and their families who had lived in Paradise for a hundred years. Nor were African Americans consigned now solely to the Swap.

  Moss Carpenter was a famous jazz guitarist who had lived on Stiles Island since before Jesse’s arrival in town. Carpenter had always been the one prominent African American who the town fathers pointed to when outsiders complained about Paradise’s lack of diversity. Their tone-deafness used to make Jesse cringe, because to him it always sounded like “Some of my best friends are black.”

  It was Moss who had filed the report of the missing Fender jazz bass. He had supplied enough detail in the report so that Jesse was one hundred percent sure the bass they had retrieved from Chris Grimm’s closet was Moss’s stolen guitar. Jesse had brought the guitar with him just the same. The idea wasn’t really to have Moss confirm the guitar was his, but to use it to get closer to the truth about Chris Grimm and the people who employed him.

  Jesse pulled his Explorer up the stone driveway and parked next to Moss’s Range Rover. Jesse had always liked the Carpenters’ place, a large but simple farmhouse design with cut cedar shingles that the salt air had turned a lovely shade of silver. Many of the houses on Stiles were designed by famous architects and exuded about as much warmth as a dull steel blade. But Moss’s house, garage, and studio seemed natural to their surroundings, almost as if they had grown up out of the ground on which they stood.

  By the time Jesse got to the door, it was already open and Etta Carpenter was standing on the front step.

  “Jesse Stone,” she said, smiling at him. She was a lovely, dark-skinned woman with an oval face that was beginning, finally, to show her age. Etta, an English lit professor at the local community college, had that eternally young quality about her. Even now, with her age more obvious, she had a youthful exuberance. “Get in here and let me fix you some coffee and some breakfast.”

  Unlike the previous day, Jesse was in the mood for coffee and confessed to Etta that breakfast sounded great. She put a mug in front of Jesse and got to work at the stove.

  “I’d like to think you came to flirt with me, Jesse, but I guess you’re here to talk to Moss.”

  “Never could fool you, Etta.”

  She placed a fork and a plate of scrambled eggs, peppers, onions, and cheese next to Jesse’s mug and sat across from him with her own mug of coffee.

  “Now, what have you come to talk about with my husband?”

  “The guitar he reported stolen last spring . . . We recovered it.”

  But instead of Etta reacting joyfully at the news, she stood up and went back to the stove, then to the kitchen sink, to be busy and not to face Jesse.

  “You did?” she asked, washing the pan she’d cooked the eggs in. “Where?”

  “In the closet of a missing teenager.”

  That stopped Etta cold. She turned to Jesse. “Moss will be pleased.”

  But there was nothing about her expression or the tone of her voice that reinforced the words coming out of her mouth. Mostly she just looked and sounded unnerved.

  “Excuse me, Jesse, I’ve got to go upstairs for a moment. Finish up your eggs. There’s more coffee in the pot if you’d like. Good seeing your handsome face again.” She tried but failed to put a positive spin on her demeanor.

  Jesse finished his eggs and coffee, retrieved the bass from the back of his SUV, and headed over to Moss Carpenter’s studio.

  Jesse knocked, but no one answered. He could hear the music coming from inside. He took a moment to let the beautifully complex guitar work wash over him as Moss would play a long riff, stop, start again. It was as if he was searching for something he just couldn’t yet find. When there was a long pause, Jesse let himself in. There, on a high stool in the middle of the room, sat Moss Carpenter. His bald scalp and ears were covered with headphones. He held a blond-bodied Gibson Super 400 on his knee. Jesse waited for him to again stop playing before he approached.

  “Jesse, man. How are you?” Moss said, carefully placing the guitar down and removing his headphones. But before Jesse could answer, Moss noticed the Fender bass in the evidence bag. His expression was a little bit more positive than Etta’s had been, but it was clearly mixed. “You got it back?”

  “Uh-huh.” Jesse was careful to let Moss talk.

  “If the people who had it only knew its value. That bass there used to be owned and played by the great James Jamerson, most talented rock bass player I ever knew. All those Motown hits from the sixties, that’s him playing. But the man had demons.”

  “Older I get, Moss, the more I realize we all have them.”

  “True that. So are you here to return it to me?”

  Jesse shook his head. “Still evidence. It will be returned to you, probably within a few months.”

  “If you’re not here to return it and you could’ve just called me to let me know, then there must be another reason why you’re standing in my studio.”

  “There is.”

  “I like solving musical mysteries, Jesse, like finding just the right key or chord. That’s what I was doing when you came in, but generally, I just want things straight out.”

  “Fair enough. I came here for the truth about how this got stolen.” He held up the bass. “And before you twist yourself up, let me say I’m not looking to hurt anyone or get anyone into trouble with the law.”

  Jesse then explained about Heather Mackey and what they had found in Chris Grimm’s room. Moss, a slender man with a handsome face that might’ve looked like Sam Cooke’s if he had lived long enough to make it into middle age, listened intently.

  “Shame about the girl,” Moss said when Jess
e was finished.

  “There’s nothing either one of us can do for her, but I can’t let it happen again in my town, in our town. I noticed that three weeks after you reported the bass stolen, Etta came down to the station and claimed the bass had just been misplaced. Yet here it is, Moss. I know your boy Django’s down at Berklee, studying trumpet. He’s nineteen and I don’t need your permission to talk to him, but I’d like to go armed with the truth, so I don’t have to waste time.”

  “You give me your word you’re not looking to get anyone into trouble.”

  Jesse stuck out his right hand. “Unless he dealt the drugs, I’m not interested in him. I just need to find out as much as I can about what’s going on with the stuff in town.”

  Moss took Jesse’s hand and shook it. Then he detailed for Jesse how Django hurt his shoulder playing pickup basketball the previous autumn. Like Heather, he’d seen Doc Goldfine, who referred him to another doctor at the hospital. From there it followed almost exactly the same pattern as it had with Heather. The initial treatments didn’t work and the pain got intolerable. Oxycontin had been prescribed and things seemed to have improved. Eventually, Etta discovered that Django was hooked and tried to wean him off the drugs. She thought she had done it and that Django was fine, but things started going missing from the house. Moss had been too absorbed in his work to notice until his James Jamerson bass had vanished.

  “We got him help, Jesse. He did rehab over the summer. Thank God, it never got to where he was shooting heroin. I’ve seen what that does to people, close up.”

  “He ever tell you who was supplying him with his pills?”

  Moss hung his head. “No, and we never asked. We just wanted our boy back and healthy. You got a boy now, so you understand.”

  “Moss, I would have understood anyway. I’m just glad you got Django some help. I know how hard it is to beat something alone. Tell him I’ll be down in a day or two to talk to him and tell him not to worry. One thing I ask is that he doesn’t hold anything back. You can tell Etta everything is cool. She looked scared.”