Mystic River

by Dennis Lehane

  “Gun could have jammed,” Sean said. And then to the narrowing eyes in the room, he said, “It’s something we haven’t considered. The gun jams, Katherine Marcus reacts. She knocks the guy down and takes off running.”

  That quieted the room for a bit, Friel thinking into the steeple he’d made of his index fingers. “It’s possible,” he said eventually. “Possible. But why beat her with a stick or a bat or whatever it was? That doesn’t speak of a professional to me.”

  “I don’t know that O’Donnell and Fallow run with that professional a crowd just yet,” Whitey said. “They could have hired it out to some pipehead for a couple of rocks and a Bic.”

  “But you said that the old woman heard the Marcus girl greet her killer. Would she do that if a crack addict was approaching her car, all jacked up?”

  Whitey gave what could have been a nod. “That’s a point.”

  Maggie Mason leaned into the table. “We are going on the assumption that she knew her killer. Correct?”

  Sean and Whitey looked at each other, then back at the head of the table, and nodded.

  “So, not that East Bucky doesn’t have its share of crack addicts, particularly in the Flats, but would a girl like Katherine Marcus have associated with them?”

  “Another good point.” Whitey sighed. “Yeah.”

  Friel said, “I wish for everyone’s sake this was a hit. But the bludgeoning? That says rage to me. That says lack of control.”

  Whitey nodded. “But we can’t rule it out entirely. All I’m saying.”

  “Agreed, Sergeant.”

  Friel looked back at Souza, who seemed a bit pissed by the digression.

  He cleared his throat and took his time looking back at his notes. “Anyway, we talked to this one guy—a Thomas Moldanado—who was drinking at the Last Drop, the last bar where Katherine Marcus went before she dropped off her friends. Seems they got one toilet in the whole place, and Moldanado said there was a line for it just as he noticed the three girls leaving. So he goes out back into the parking lot to take a piss, and he saw a guy sitting in a car, lights off. Moldanado said this was at one-thirty, on the dot. Said his watch was new and he checked to see if it glowed in the dark.”

  “Did it?”

  “Apparently.”

  “The guy in the car, though,” Robert Burke said, “could’ve been sleeping off a drunk.”

  “First point we made, Sergeant. Moldanado said that’s what he thought at first, too, but, no, the guy was sitting upright, eyes open. Moldanado said he would have taken him for a cop, but the guy drove a small foreign car, like a Honda or a Subaru.”

  “A little banged up,” Connolly said. “Dent in the front passenger quarter.”

  “Right,” Souza said. “So then Moldanado figured he was a john. Said that area’s popular at night for hookers. But if that was the case, what was the guy doing in a parking lot? Why not just cruise the avenue?”

  Whitey said, “Okay, so—”

  Souza held up a hand. “One sec, Sarge.” He looked over at Connolly, his eyes bright and jumpy. “We took another look around the parking lot, and we found blood.”

  “Blood.”

  He nodded. “If you walked past it, you’d figure it for some guy was changing his oil in the lot. It was that thick, all pooled in mostly one place. We start looking around, we find a drop here, a drop there, all moving away from the spot. Find a few more drops on the walls and the floor of the alley behind the bar.”

  “Trooper,” Friel said, “what the fuck are you telling us?”

  “Someone else got hurt outside the Last Drop that night.”

  “How do you know it was the same night?” Whitey said.

  “CSS confirmed. A night watchman parked his car in the lot that night, covered the blood, but also kept it from most of the heavy rain. Look, whoever the vic was, he’s hurt bad. And the guy who attacked him? He’s hurt, too. We found two types of blood in the lot. We’re checking hospitals now, and cab companies, in case the victim hopped a ride. We found bloody hair fibers, skin, and some skull tissue. We’re waiting on callbacks from six ERs. The rest have turned out negative, but I’m still betting we find a victim who walked into an ER somewhere with blunt head trauma on Saturday night, early Sunday morning.”

  Sean held up a hand. “The same night Katherine Marcus walks out of the Last Drop, you’re telling us someone caved in someone’s skull in the parking lot of the same bar?”

  Souza smiled. “Yup.”

  Connolly picked up the ball. “CSS found dried blood, types A and B neg. A lot more A than B neg, so we figure the victim was A.”

  “Katherine Marcus’s blood was type O,” Whitey said.

  Connolly nodded. “Hair fibers indicate the victim was male.”

  Friel said, “What’s the operating theory here?”

  “We don’t have one. We just know that on the night Katherine Marcus was killed, someone else got his head handed to him in the parking lot of the last bar she went to.”

  Maggie Mason said, “There was a bar fight in the parking lot. So what?”

  “None of the patrons at the bar remember any fights—in or out of the place. Between one-thirty and one-fifty, the only people to leave the bar were Katherine Marcus, her two friends, and this witness, Moldanado, who went right back in when his piss was finished. No one else entered. Moldanado sees someone staking out the parking lot at approximately one-thirty, guy he describes as ‘regular-looking,’ maybe mid-thirties, dark hair. Guy was gone when Moldanado exited the bar at one-fifty.”

  “At which point the Marcus girl was running through Pen Park.”

  Souza nodded. “We’re not saying there’s a clear connection. Maybe there’s none at all. But it seems pretty coincidental.”

  “But again,” Friel said, “what’s your operating theory?”

  Souza shrugged. “I don’t know, sir. Let’s say it was a hit. The guy in the parking lot, he’s watching for the Marcus girl to leave. She does, he makes a phone call to the perp. The perp’s waiting for her from that point on.”

  “And then what?” Sean said.

  “Then what? He kills her.”

  “No, the guy in the car. The lookout. What’s he doing? He just up and decides to beat some guy with a rock or something? Just for the hell of it?”

  “Maybe someone came up on him.”

  “Doing what?” Whitey said. “Talking on his cell phone? Shit. We don’t know if this has anything to do with the Marcus homicide.”

  “Sarge,” Souza said, “you want we should just blow it off? Say, fuck it, there’s nothing there?”

  “Did I say that?”

  “Well—”

  “Did I say that?” Whitey repeated.

  “No.”

  “No, I did not. Show some respect for your elders, Joseph, or we might send you back to working the crystal meth corridor around Springfield, hanging out with bikers and chicks who smell bad, eat lard straight from the can.”

  Souza checked himself with a slow exhalation. “I just think there’s something to this. That’s all.”

  “Not disagreeing, Trooper. Just saying you’ve got to bring us that something before we redirect manpower on what could turn out to be an isolated, unrelated incident. Also, the Last Drop’s in BPD jurisdiction.”

  “We made contact,” Souza said.

  “They tell you it’s their case?”

  He nodded.

  Whitey spread his hands. “There you go. Keep in touch with the detective in charge and keep us posted, but otherwise, leave it be for now.”

  Friel said, “Since we’re on the subject of operating theories, Sergeant, what’s yours?”

  Whitey shrugged. “I got a couple, but that’s all they are. Katherine Marcus died from the GSW to the back of her head. None of her other injuries, including the bullet wound to her left biceps, were considered life-threatening. Bludgeoning was committed by a wooden instrument with flat edges—some kind of stick or two-by-four. ME has conclusively stated th
at she was not sexually assaulted. From our own legwork, we know she was planning to elope with the Harris kid. Bobby O’Donnell was her ex-boyfriend. Problem was he hadn’t accepted the ‘ex’ part yet. The father didn’t like either O’Donnell or the Harris kid.”

  “Why not the Harris kid?”

  “We don’t know.” Whitey glanced over at Sean and then back again. “We’re working on it, though. So, best we can figure, she’s planning to boogie on out of town in the morning. She has a pseudo-bachelorette party with her two friends, gets run out of a bar by Roman Fallow, and drives her friends home. It’s starting to rain now and her wipers are for shit, the windshield dirty. She either misjudges where the curb is because she’s drunk, nods off for a second at the wheel for the same reason, or swerves to avoid something in the road. Whatever the cause, she drives her car into the curb. Car stalls and someone approaches the car. According to our old lady witness, Katherine Marcus says, ‘Hi.’ That’s when we think the perp fired his first shot. She manages to hit him with her car door—maybe his gun did jam, I dunno—and she takes off running into the park. She grew up there, maybe she thought she had a better chance of losing him there. Again, we can’t even surmise why she chose to run for the park, except for it being a straight run in either direction on Sydney and not a lot in the way of neighbors to help her out for at least four blocks. If she’d stepped out into the open, the perp could have run her down with her own car or shot her pretty easily. So, she bolts for the park. She goes in a pretty consistent southeast pattern from that point on, cutting through the garden co-op, then attempting to hide in the ravine under the footbridge, then making a final beeline for the drive-in screen. She—”

  “Her path consistently brought her deeper into the park,” Maggie Mason said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?”

  “Yes, Sergeant.” She removed her glasses and placed them on the table in front of her. “If I’m a woman being chased through a city park, whose terrain I’m familiar with, I may begin by leading my pursuer into it in the hopes he’ll get lost or held up. But the moment I can, I’m going to start heading back out. Why didn’t she cut north toward Roseclair, or double back toward Sydney? Why keep going deeper into the park?”

  “Shock, maybe. And fear. Fear makes people forget how to think. Let’s remember, too, her blood alcohol level was at point-oh-nine. She was drunk.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t buy it. And here’s something else—from your reports, am I to surmise that Miss Marcus was, in fact, faster than her pursuer?”

  Whitey’s mouth opened a bit, but he seemed to forget what he was going to say.

  “Your report, Sergeant. It states that on at least two occasions, Miss Marcus seemed to choose hiding over running. She hid in the garden co-op. And she hid under the footbridge. That tells me two things—one, that she was faster than her pursuer, otherwise she wouldn’t have had the time necessary to attempt to hide. And two, that she paradoxically felt that keeping ahead of her pursuer wasn’t enough. You add that in with her lack of attempt to run back out of the park, and what does it tell you?”

  No one had an answer for that.

  Eventually, Friel said, “What does it tell you, Maggie?”

  “It presents the possibility to me, anyway, that she felt surrounded.”

  For a minute, it seemed to Sean like the air in the room went static, popping with electrical currents.

  “A gang or something?” Whitey said eventually.

  “Or something,” she said. “I don’t know, Sergeant. I’m just going on your report. I can’t for the life of me understand why this woman, who apparently was faster than her attacker, would elect not to just run right back out of the park unless she thought someone else was flanking her.”

  Whitey hung his head. “All due respect, ma’am, but there’d have been a hell of a lot more physical evidence on-scene in such a scenario.”

  “You yourself cite the rain in your report several times.”

  “Yes,” Whitey said. “But if you got a gang of people—or hell, even two—chasing Katherine Marcus, we’re going to see more than we did. At least a few more footprints. Something, ma’am.”

  Maggie Mason put her glasses back on and looked down at the report in her hand. Eventually, she said, “It’s a theory, Sergeant. One that I think, on the basis of your own report, bears looking into.”

  Whitey kept his head down, though Sean could feel the contempt rising off his shoulders like sewer gas.

  “What about it, Sergeant?” Friel said.

  Whitey raised his head and gave them an exhausted smile. “I’ll bear it in mind. I will. But gang activity in that neighborhood’s at an all-time low. We pass on that, then we consider two guys as the perps, which brings us back to the possibility of a contract hit.”

  “Okay…”

  “But if that’s the case—and we all agreed at the outset here today that it was a long shot—then the second shooter would have emptied his piece the moment Katherine Marcus hit his partner with the door. The only way this makes sense is if it’s one shooter and a panicked, drunken woman maybe growing faint with blood loss, not thinking clearly, and having a lot of bad luck.”

  “But you’ll bear my theory in mind, of course,” Maggie Mason said with a bitter smile, her eyes on the table.

  “I will,” Whitey said. “I’ll take anything right about now. Honest to God. She knew her killer. Okay. Anyone with a reasonably logical motive, thus far, has been all but discounted. Every minute more that we work this case, it seems all that more likely the attack was random. The rain destroyed two-thirds of our physical evidence, the Marcus girl didn’t have enemy-goddamned-one, no financial secrets, no drug dependency, nor was she a witness to any crimes on record. Her murder, as far as we can tell, benefited no one.”

  “Except O’Donnell,” Burke said, “who didn’t want her leaving town.”

  “Except him,” Whitey agreed. “But his alibi’s tight and it doesn’t look like a hit. So who’s that leave for enemies? No one.”

  “And yet she’s dead,” Friel said.

  “And yet she’s dead,” Whitey said. “Which is why I’m thinking it’s random. You take away money or love and hate as possible motives, you’re not left with much. You’re left with some dumb fucking stalker type who might have a Web site devoted to the victim or something stupid like that.”

  Friel raised his eyebrows.

  Shira Rosenthal chimed in: “We’re already checking that, sir. So far, nada.”

  “So you don’t know what you’re looking for,” Friel said eventually.

  “Sure,” Whitey said. “A guy with a gun. Oh, yeah, and a stick.”

  18

  WORDS HE ONCE KNEW

  AFTER HE’D LEFT DAVE on the porch, his face and eyes dry again, Jimmy took his second shower of the day. He could feel it in there with him, that need to weep. It welled up inside his chest like a balloon until he grew short of breath.

  He’d gone into the shower because he wanted privacy in case it flooded out of him in gushes, as opposed to the few drops that had slid down his cheeks on the porch. He feared he might turn into a trembling puddle, end up weeping like he’d wept in the dark of his bedroom as a little boy, certain his being born had nearly killed his mother and that’s why his father hated him.

  In the shower, he felt it coming again—that old wave of sadness, the one that felt ancient and had been with him since he could remember, an awareness that tragedy loomed somewhere in his future, tragedy as heavy as limestone blocks. As if an angel had told him his future while he was still in the womb, and Jimmy had emerged from his mother with the angel’s words planted somewhere in his mind, but faded from his lips.

  Jimmy raised his eyes to the shower spray. He said without speaking: I know in my soul I contributed to my child’s death. I can feel it. But I don’t know how.

  And the calm voice said, You will.

  Tell me.

 
No.

  Fuck you.

  I wasn’t finished.

  Oh.

  The knowledge will come.

  And damn me?

  That’s your choice.

  Jimmy lowered his head and thought of Dave seeing Katie not long before she’d died. Katie alive and drunk and dancing. Dancing and happy.

  It was this knowledge—that someone other than Jimmy possessed an image of Katie that postdated Jimmy’s own—that had finally allowed him to weep in the first place.

  The last time Jimmy had seen her, Katie had been walking out of the store at the end of her Saturday shift. It had been five past four, and Jimmy had been on the phone with his Frito-Lay vendor, placing orders and distracted, as Katie leaned in to kiss his cheek and said, “Later, Daddy.”

  “Later,” he’d said, and watched her walk out of the back room.

  But, no. That was bullshit. He hadn’t watched her. He’d heard her walk out, but his eyes had been on the order sheet lying in front of him on the desk blotter.

  So really, his final visual image of her had been of the side of her face as she’d pulled her lips from his cheek and said, “Later, Daddy.”

  Later, Daddy.

  Jimmy realized it was the “later”—the later part of the evening, the later minutes of her life—that would stab him. If he’d been there, if he’d been able to share a little more time a little later into the evening with his daughter, maybe he’d be able to hold on to a more recent image of her.

  But he wouldn’t. Dave would. And Eve and Diane. And her killer.

  If you had to die, Jimmy thought, if such things really are preordained, then I wish that somehow you could have died looking into my face. It would have hurt me to watch you die, Katie, but at least I would know that you felt a little less alone looking into my eyes.

  I love you. I love you so much. I love you, in truth, more than I loved your mother, more than I love your sisters, more than I love Annabeth, so help me God. And I love them deeply, but I love you most because when I came back from prison and sat with you in the kitchen, we were the last two people on earth. Forgotten and unwanted. And we were both so afraid and confused and so utterly fucking forlorn. But we rose from that, didn’t we? We built our lives into something good enough so that one day we weren’t afraid, we weren’t forlorn. And I couldn’t have done that without you. I couldn’t have. I’m not that strong.