Final Cut

by Colin Campbell

  “When was I supposed to bring it up? It’s where this started.” McNulty fought back his impatience. “This started long before the fire.”

  Armstrong placed his hands flat on the table.

  “Not for you. For you it was when you found the dog.” He leaned forward for emphasis. “So you say.”

  Armstrong sat back in his chair.

  “The same dog that came from the house you were at. Where a man took a dive and a girl’s gone missing.”

  McNulty tapped the table with one finger.

  “It’s the girl going missing you should be concentrating on.”

  Armstrong looked at McNulty with hard eyes.

  “Oh, I am. That’s why I’m talking to the prime suspect.”

  McNulty slapped the table.

  “Prime suspect, my arse. I’m the one who told you she was missing.”

  Armstrong nodded.

  “After a man got killed in the bay and a gunshot alerted the neighbors.”

  McNulty held his hands out and shrugged.

  “It was his gun.”

  Armstrong frowned.

  “In a quiet neighborhood like that. Police were always going to get called. So you got your call in first.”

  “That’s how you see it?”

  “How I see it is this: You’ve been involved in every part of this investigation. Maybe that’s because you’re the one we should be investigating.”

  McNulty leaned back in his chair.

  “Investigate all you want. Just get looking for Suzanne Cipolletti.”

  Armstrong kept his eyes on McNulty.

  “You were a cop. You know that’s exactly what we’re doing.”

  McNulty stared back at him.

  “Yeah, well, given the length of time it took you to set up the raid, what I know is that Quincy PD’s the slowest force I’ve ever seen.”

  Armstrong toyed with his pen but kept his eyes on the man across the table.

  “And I know that you’re the guy who rescued the dog at the fire, chased a man who got killed by a hit-and-run driver, had a guy butt-fucked at the gay club, and killed another in the bay. Plus, you’ve been sniffing around the missing girls and you’re in possession of a dog owned by the last one to disappear.”

  He stopped toying with the pen. “Tell me when any of that starts sounding suspicious.”

  McNulty had to concede there were more coincidences than you could shake a stick at, but he wasn’t going to admit that to Armstrong. Instead he concentrated on practicalities.

  “The guy called his boss. When you find his phone, check it out.”

  Armstrong snorted a disbelieving laugh.

  “We haven’t even found the guy yet. That mud might have sucked him all the way to Australia by now.”

  McNulty stood up.

  “Well if you haven’t got a body you haven’t got a murder.”

  “Sit down.”

  It was the first time Armstrong had raised his voice. McNulty sat down. The detective’s patience had run out. The uniform cop outside the door looked through the window to make sure everything was okay. It was far from okay for McNulty. Armstrong waved the cop aside.

  “You’re not going anywhere until I get to the bottom of this.”

  He patted the manila folder with one hand.

  “And the bottom starts with the fire at Bridgewater Photo Lab.”

  He opened the folder and slid out a single sheet of paper.

  “And the woman at Dunkin’ Donuts who saw you go in.”

  McNulty’s mind raced back through the times of day and the lighting conditions and came up with nothing. It had been dark when he broke into the photo lab and the waitress had been long gone. She hadn’t seen him go through the window. There had been no witnesses at all. This was a bluff.

  “She saw me save the dog? She should tell the paper. They’d give her her own by-line.”

  Armstrong was smiling. Good interview technique.

  “Not when the fire started. Before. When you told me you’d never been inside.”

  Bad interview technique. Wait until you get a denial before giving information about what the witness saw. McNulty seized the lifeline.

  “I never said I hadn’t been inside.”

  Armstrong tapped the file.

  “You said you were stretching your legs.”

  McNulty nodded. “After the diner. Yes. Didn’t say it was the first time I’d been there.”

  Armstrong slapped the folder shut.

  “I’m still booking you until I sort this out. Empty your pockets.”

  The interview room went quiet. The cop outside kept his back to the door. McNulty sat trying to dredge up a thought that wouldn’t come. Something in the last five minutes had prompted a connection, but he couldn’t think what it was. He began to empty his pockets onto the table. Wallet. Keys. Wristwatch.

  His fingers touched the cell phone in his pocket and froze. “The guy called his boss. When you find his phone, check it out.” It had been the last call the gunman had made. Brad Semenoff’s final call had been to the guy who was supposed to pick him up at the motel—the car that had been waiting to drive him away but had run him down instead. The stoop-shouldered motherfucker from South Shore Hardcore. And McNulty had copied Semenoff’s data onto his own phone. If Armstrong checked it, he’d be in even deeper shit. He turned the phone off before he put it on the table. At least the detective would have to get a court order or hack the security pin before he could turn it back on.

  Armstrong began to move the property into a line so the custody sergeant could list it. Standard items. Nothing unusual. He paused briefly when he saw the phone but didn’t seem interested at the moment. McNulty knew it wouldn’t take long before he would though. He continued to empty his pockets. Trouser pockets first. Back pockets next. Belt from his trousers to follow his watch. Then his jacket. His fingers paused again on the inside pocket. This time he knew he was in trouble. He patted his jacket as if that were everything. Armstrong stood up.

  “Stand up. You know the drill.”

  McNulty stood with his legs apart and his arms held wide. His only hope was if Armstrong gave him only a cursory search. He didn’t. He checked McNulty’s arms and legs and waist and back. He scrunched his jacket pockets to make sure they were empty. His hands stopped when they came to the inside pocket. He didn’t speak. Jenny Eynon’s photos were mixed in with Suzanne Cipolletti’s. Pictures of the missing girls having underage sex with the man McNulty had chased to his death.

  FORTY-ONE

  There are times for being open and upfront and times to keep your mouth shut. McNulty had been a cop for twenty years before teaching actors how to not walk like a duck. Being a cop meant you believed that people who were not being open and upfront were lying. It didn’t always work out that way, but for him, keeping quiet was no longer an option. So he told Armstrong where he’d found the photos and got ready to take the flack.

  “Well, you just fell in shit deeper than the mud guy.”

  Armstrong sorted through the four-by-sixes then laid them on the table one-by-one like a man playing patience. The glossy prints butted up against one another in neat rows from top to bottom and side-to-side. They covered half the table. Laying them out like that made it easy to see which ones belonged to Jenny Eynon and which ones were Suzanne Cipolletti’s. Armstrong shifted them around until all the clean and straight-edged prints were on the left and the dog-eared ones were on the right, the same order in which they’d been found; the same order in which the girls had gone missing.

  Armstrong took a deep breath and blew it out slowly.

  “And these guys are?”

  McNulty tapped the photos that showed the men’s faces, the clean and sharp prints first. “Brad Semenoff.”

  Then McNulty tapped one of the creased photos. “Semenoff.”

  Then a different one. “The man from the photo lab.”

  Armstrong
looked at that one.

  “The guy with the hook nose?”

  “Yes.”

  Armstrong drummed his fingers on the table.

  “So, we’ve got your guy from the movie shoot and the guy processing the film.”

  McNulty held up a hand.

  “Not the film from Titanic Productions. The porn stuff.”

  Armstrong stopped drumming and looked up from the photos.

  “The porn stuff that’s shot on film stolen from Titanic Productions.”

  He leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table.

  “The same Titanic Productions that you work security for.”

  The interview room fell silent. The walls were lined with soundproofing tiles to aid recording quality. None of this was being recorded. Yet. McNulty had been read his rights when he’d been brought in, but Armstrong hadn’t yet invoked the formality of recording the interview. There was no yellow legal pad for notes or a confession. That might be the detective cutting McNulty some slack because of his previous service, or it could just be bad police practice. Whichever, it was Armstrong who was attempting to get to the heart of the matter now.

  “Let’s put all our cards on the table.”

  Not like playing patience. He leaned back in his chair. He didn’t tick off each item on his fingers. He didn’t need to.

  “We’ve got underage girls having sex on camera, being filmed using stock from Titanic Productions. Probably using cameras from Titanic Productions. With the camera guy from Titanic Productions and the guy processing the film at the Bridgewater Photo Lab—the lab where you went in during the fire and saved a dog belonging to one of the underage girls. One of several girls reported missing.”

  He paused to see how McNulty was taking this. McNulty didn’t fill the void, so Armstrong continued.

  “Then the camera guy gets run down while you’re chasing him by a car that you’d already seen with the processing guy at the photo lab. And you go climbing all over South Shore Hardcore where you get the hit-and-run driver, probably, butt-fucked at the gay club. When the police raid the studio, it’s been cleared out, and then you turn up at both of the homes of two missing girls and clear out their photos. Not to mention killing a guy in the bargain.”

  He paused again. McNulty still didn’t respond. There was some commotion outside the door, but the uniform cop kept his back to the window. Armstrong let out a sigh and kept steady eyes on McNulty.

  “Can you see what deep shit you’re in?”

  McNulty stared back at him. His breathing was slow and even. His eyes showed no signs of stress. When he looked at Armstrong, he could see that he and the detective knew exactly the same thing.

  “What I see is that you haven’t got jack shit. Everything you just said is either conjecture or coincidence. Your only evidence is a body you can’t find and a dog I told you about. The photographs come from places I’ve admitted visiting. The missing girl is something I reported to the police. And this last girl needs finding before she disappears like the rest.”

  The commotion outside the door grew louder. Raised voices sounded and then the door was yanked open. The uniform cop held his hands up in apology as a sharp-suited man with a briefcase came in.

  “My client has nothing further to say. And anything he may have said already is inadmissible until he consults with his attorney. Me.”

  Springing McNulty this time took longer than it had when Kincaid had come to the rescue, but he still managed to be out by late afternoon. McNulty found out how that had happened while Kincaid drove him back to pick up his car from Snug Harbor Elementary School.

  Kincaid had called Flip Livingstone when the Quincy PD took McNulty away and Livingstone had called Larry Unger. Unger had blown a fuse, but Livingstone used his calming influence to bring the producer back down to earth. Between them they had contacted the law firm that the Boston Film Office kept on retainer for any legal wrangling and contracts and engaged the best criminal lawyer in Boston.

  McNulty was right, Armstrong had jack shit but there was still enough to keep him tied up most of the afternoon before statements and promises not to leave the state had secured his freedom. Kincaid explained all that on the short drive from police headquarters. That and the reason he’d called McNulty at the shack. The you-won’t-believe-what I’ve-just-found call. Discovering that young girls had been reported missing all across Boston only added to the burden of finding the latest one who’d been taken.

  The sun had crossed the sky by the time Kincaid pulled into the driveway in front of the school. McNulty’s car was still there. The police had gone, the only police presence being an underwater search unit still trying to find the body in the bay behind the groundskeeper’s shack. Both the jetty and the shack were cordoned off with crime-scene tape. The divers were struggling because the tide had come back in, making the mud even softer and the sinkhole the gunman had been sucked into even deeper. They might never find the body.

  Or his phone.

  That reminded McNulty. He thanked Kincaid and got out of the car. Kincaid spun around and drove off. McNulty took out his phone and turned it on. He was sick and tired of being second-guessed by police and pornographers. It was time to go straight to the horse’s mouth—the last person Semenoff had called before he was killed.

  He leaned against the car with the sun on his back and scrolled through the screens until he found the copied files. It was a slow and ponderous process, mainly because McNulty wasn’t computer savvy. He’d read somewhere that modern phones had enough processing power to run the space shuttle. He wasn’t looking to pilot the space shuttle, but it still took him fifteen minutes to find what he was looking for. Brad Semenoff’s call log.

  He clicked on the recent incoming calls and then on outgoing calls.

  The last number popped up.

  The time and date showed he had the right number.

  He was about to hit redial when something occurred to him. A delayed reaction to something he’d seen while scrolling through the screens to get to the call log. He clicked back. Two screens. Three. There. Photos and videos had been saved into separate files. He clicked on videos. There were several, all dated and timed. He clicked on the latest and the screen went blank as it loaded the video. The circle kept turning then an arrow indicated it was ready to play.

  He clicked on the arrow.

  FORTY-TWO

  McNulty was beyond angry when he went to see Larry Unger. He was crushed to the point where he wanted to rip somebody’s head off. That somebody wasn’t Larry Unger but if this turned out badly the producer would come a close second. It was dark by the time McNulty calmed down enough to confront his boss. At Blacks Creek Motel. In a room overlooking the production compound.

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  Larry opened the door to let McNulty in, but it was McNulty who closed it. He stood with his back against the door and raised a finger. Larry saw the look on the technical adviser’s face and shut up. McNulty pointed at the table near the window. Larry pulled out a chair and sat down. Without a word McNulty rested his phone at an angle against a cut-glass vase and pressed play.

  Larry watched the video.

  McNulty watched Larry.

  The producer’s expression started out nonplussed then curious then something else. His eyes widened in horror. His nostrils flared. He swallowed hard to keep himself from whimpering. He blinked twice in shock. He tried to look away, but the images onscreen hooked him like a fish on a spike. He wriggled and squirmed and began to cry. Pretty much exactly what McNulty had done when he’d watched the teenage girl being gang raped and murdered on camera.

  The video ended.

  McNulty clicked his phone to home screen and put it back into his pocket. He didn’t sit down. He stood over the producer with his legs braced and his fists balled and spoke as quietly as his anger would allow.

  “Tell me.”

  He didn’t explain further. The
producer knew what McNulty was asking. He knew what the consequences of not answering would be. McNulty still thought of himself as a cop, that’s why had Unger employed him, but he was a cop without the restrictions of the law. That meant there was no point in Larry’s asking for his lawyer. He held his hands up in surrender.

  “I didn’t know.”

  McNulty stood still.

  “You knew something. That’s why you had me chasing stolen film.”

  Larry was still shaken from the video. His eyes were wide, and his breath came in short gasps. He began to hyperventilate. He couldn’t speak. McNulty realized that Larry was slipping into shock. He pulled out the other chair and sat opposite the producer. He took all the confrontation out of his voice.

  “Deep breaths. Take it in deep. Let it out slowly.”

  He demonstrated. Taking in a long deep breath through his nose then letting it out slowly through his mouth.

  “In through the nose, out through the mouth.”

  He demonstrated again then repeated the advice like a mantra.

  “In through the nose, out through the mouth.”

  Pause.

  “In through the nose, out through the mouth.”

  Pause.

  “In through the nose, out through the mouth.”

  Slowly Larry began to calm down. His eyes relaxed. His breathing returned to normal. He was still visibly shaken. That suggested the producer wasn’t in on all of this, but he was involved somehow. McNulty let out a sigh and softened his tone.

  “Tell me.”

  What it boiled down to was this: Larry Unger had started out in the porn industry. Small-time movies with minimal plotting and maximum fucking. Not so much low budget as no budget. Handheld video going back to the VHS days. He’d been involved with some shady characters who financed the movies. Criminals with fingers in many pies. In Boston that meant fingers that could be cut off if you didn’t do as you were told.