Robert B. Parker's Blind Spot

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  The lawyer was something else altogether. While not exactly out of central casting, he was close. Forty, maybe a little younger, athletic, handsome, with black hair and perfect white teeth, he was all the things Harlan Salter IV wasn’t and probably all the things his client despised. From the light gray Armani suit to the fat Rolex to the tan, he was a flashy SOB. Jesse knew the type from L.A. Probably drove a cherry-red BMW 635 and played tennis with his dentist’s wife. While the lawyer didn’t think he was the most important man in the room, he thought he was the smartest.

  “Gentlemen,” Jesse said, retreating behind his desk but keeping his feet. “I’m Chief Stone.”

  The lawyer stepped forward, right hand extended. “I’m Monty Bernstein, and this is my client, Harlan Salter the Fourth. That’s my card on your desk there.”

  Jesse shook the lawyer’s hand. Nice firm handshake. Salter didn’t seem interested in hand shaking, so Jesse sat down. Bernstein sat opposite Jesse. Salter wasn’t in the mood for sitting, either. He just stared out the window. Jesse looked at Bernstein’s card, waiting for the lawyer to speak again. He didn’t have long to wait.

  “Chief Stone, my client is well aware of the tragic circumstances surrounding the death of Martina Penworth.”

  Jesse said, “Is he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then perhaps he can save us all a lot of trouble.”

  Bernstein was skeptical. “And how can Mr. Salter do that?”

  “By telling me where his son Ben is.”

  “Chief Stone—”

  “Jesse.”

  The lawyer cocked his head. “What?”

  “That’s my name . . . Jesse,” he said. “Makes it easier than starting all your sentences with ‘Chief Stone.’”

  His information on Stone was spot-on, Monty Bernstein thought. The chief was no idiot. He’d have to be careful with this cop.

  “Jesse, I can assure you that my client has no idea of the whereabouts of his son. It is precisely out of concern for Ben’s safety that Mr. Salter has come here to offer his full cooperation to your department. We are particularly concerned that Ben not be considered a suspect and that you are careful not to endanger his life if you should locate him.”

  Jesse ignored that last part. Waved the lawyer’s card between his fingers. “If Mr. Salter is so interested in cooperating, why did he feel the need to bring a criminal defense attorney with him?” Jesse didn’t let the lawyer answer and spoke directly to Harlan Salter. “Is that correct, sir, you’ve come to offer your help?”

  “Please direct your questions to me, Chief Stone,” Bernstein said, emphasizing Chief Stone.

  Jesse could tell that Harlan Salter was losing patience. Salter’s mouth was clenched and there was a tightening of the muscles around his jaw. The veins in his neck were emerging. That all suited Jesse just fine. He thought with just one more little push, he could get the investigation started in earnest, so he pushed.

  “Look behind you, Mr. Bernstein.”

  “What?”

  “Read what it says on the glass there,” Jesse said.

  “What?”

  “Let me help you. It says ‘Chief.’ This is my office in my station in my town.”

  “I don’t know what you’re playing at, Chief Stone, but I—”

  “Enough!” Harlan Salter had been sufficiently pushed. “Enough. My son is missing, Chief Stone, and I want him back safely. As Mr. Bernstein has stated, I fear your department may consider my son a suspect in that poor girl’s murder and that you or your subordinates might shoot first and ask questions later. If my answering your questions will assist you in apprehending the man actually responsible for this heinous act, I will answer them to the best of my ability. But first, if you’ll indulge me, you must answer a question for me.” He pointed the stem of his pipe at Jesse.

  “Ask your question.”

  “Is my son Ben a suspect in the homicide of Martina Penworth?”

  “The truth?”

  “Always, sir.”

  “Yes, your son is a suspect,” Jesse said.

  “Thank you for that, but I detect some hesitancy on your part, Chief.”

  “Do you?”

  Salter pressed. “I do. I wonder why that is?”

  “I answered your question, Mr. Salter, and you’ve promised to cooperate.”

  Harlan Salter IV was a man who didn’t like being told what to do. “Ask your questions, Chief Stone.”

  Twenty-five minutes later, Harlan Salter IV and Monty Bernstein walked out of Jesse Stone’s office. Jesse accompanied them. Luther “Suitcase” Simpson watched the procession from the front desk. To his eye, none of them looked pleased. He guessed that made sense. When the station door closed behind Salter and the lawyer, Jesse stopped to talk to Simpson. Simpson was a big man with a round face who would always look years younger than he actually was.

  “You play basketball, Suit?”

  “You know football was my game, Jesse. Why?”

  “You ever hear of the four corners offense?”

  “Only four corners I know about is that Indian reservation where Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico meet. I guess it doesn’t have anything to do with that.”

  “No, Suit, it doesn’t. The old University of North Carolina basketball coach, Dean Smith—”

  “I heard of him.”

  Jesse smiled. “In a time before college basketball had a shot clock, Coach Smith devised the four corners offense. It was a way for his team to waste time and run out the clock when they had a lead. It was boring but effective.”

  “Sorry, Jesse, but is there something I’m missing here?”

  “Funny thing, Suit, that’s what I keep asking myself. Feels to me like those two are just playing out the clock.”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind. The father says the kid doesn’t know how to shoot. Never even owned a BB rifle. Check it out.”

  Jesse Stone walked back into his office and closed the door. He still didn’t like Ben Salter as a suspect. What he couldn’t get a grip on was the father’s priorities. If the kid hadn’t killed the girl and he hadn’t run, he’d probably been abducted. But all the father seemed concerned about was that a cop not shoot his son. Jesse got that Harlan Salter was about as warm and fuzzy as a metal casket, but according to Ethan Farley, the Salters’ handyman, Harlan loved Ben to a fault. He was the good son, the one who was doted on. It just didn’t feel right, not any of it. Jesse knew better than most that there wasn’t anything about the murder of an eighteen-year-old girl that was right or would ever be right.

  18

  The woman the folks in Scottsdale knew as Dee Harrington stared long and hard in the mirror. She understood that her reflection was pleasing, that any modesty about her appearance would be false. And while she wouldn’t say that her beauty was a curse, it hadn’t always been a blessing, either, especially not at the Bureau. Men and women alike were always eager to take her, but never took her seriously. They were always willing to pay her attention, but never heed. As she tried to look through her own naked reflection to what lay beneath, she wondered if that’s what this had all been about: the need to be taken seriously. When she began this sojourn fourteen months ago, she didn’t think so. Then it felt like it was about getting the bad guys, about getting justice even if everyone else looked away. Now that her resources were nearly depleted and she’d only scratched the surface of Vic Prado’s criminal enterprise, an enterprise her supervisors at the FBI dismissed as fantasy or stupidity, she wasn’t so sure it had been worth the risk. More and more she felt like the desperate gambler who had gone all in with only a pair of deuces to play. At the moment, she was questioning every decision she’d made, from taking medical leave to sleeping with Jesse Stone.

  She liked Jesse well enough. He was certainly a good-looking man, and while no one would ever confuse
his dinner repartee for Churchill’s, he had an edge and a vulnerability about him she couldn’t quite make sense of. The sex had been mind-blowing, but had she slept with him purely out of desire or because she hoped Jesse might finally be her way to get to Vic Prado? Had she slept with him as a kind of fuck-you to the Prados? Or was sleeping with Jesse a wave of the white flag? Did she just want to grab a little bit of joy for herself before surrendering, before going back home to D.C. and trying to rebuild her life? She just wasn’t sure of anything anymore. What she knew was that she’d been invited along to New York to keep Kayla company and to entertain Jesse. For reasons she only vaguely understood, it seemed that Jesse Stone’s pleasure was of paramount importance to both Vic and Kayla. Both spouses had separate agendas, and both prominently featured Jesse Stone. Now, because he’d been called back to Paradise on what his note had called police business, even Jesse Stone was a dead end. One of a hundred dead ends she’d steered down since she began tilting at this particular windmill.

  With Jesse gone and last hopes gone with him, she’d feigned illness, opting out of another night of hand-holding with Kayla while Vic acted the part of grand pooh-bah to his minor-league baseball buddies. She supposed she could have dealt with Kayla. She sometimes enjoyed her company. Apart from her vague melancholy, Kayla could be fun. Kayla understood better than most what it felt like not to be taken seriously. There was one night back in Scottsdale, when they’d both had a little too much tequila, that she’d almost confessed to Kayla about coming after Vic. That what galled her more than anything else was that her female bosses had been the most dismissive of her. But the words never made it past the tip of her tongue. Had their paths crossed by chance rather than by plan, she and Kayla might have been friends. No. She shook her head at the mirror and watched her blond hair sweep back and forth over the tanned skin of her bare shoulders. Not only wouldn’t she and Kayla have moved in the same orbits, they wouldn’t have even moved in the same galaxy. Who was she fooling?

  She knew she was fooling no one, especially not herself, not any longer. Although it felt as if she had pushed all her chips to the center of the table with a fatally weak hand, she knew she had one last chip in reserve. She could finally give Vic the only thing he really wanted: her. She had toyed with the idea for the last month or two as her money ran low and time grew short. Once that barrier had been crossed, she was sure he would tell her things. Nothing else had worked. No matter how she had coaxed or cajoled, flirted or badgered, he had refused to let her invest money with one of the firms she was sure he was fronting for. It would have been so easy. Her money would have been like a dye marker in the blood. She had downloaded everything off the hard drive of Vic’s home PC, off Kayla’s laptop. She had asked Kayla a thousand different questions in a thousand different ways. She had talked to all of Vic’s closest friends in Scottsdale. All it got her was eyestrain and a few lurid propositions. At least Vic hadn’t been crude about it. He had made his desires known to her, but without pretense, without pushing. She had to give him that. There was that one time six months ago when they were going to play tennis. A storm blew up and they wound up drinking instead. He had kissed her, slipped his hand under her skirt before she pulled away. Now she wished she hadn’t. She wished she had just got it over with. Now it was way beyond wishes. It would be about desperation.

  She noticed tears in the mirror and turned away. She had played the part of Dee Harrington for so long, she wasn’t sure of who she really was anymore. She threw on a robe and reached for her phone to call Abe, the only person at the Bureau who knew what she was doing during her medical leave. But before she could dial, the phone rang in her hand. She recognized Kayla’s ringtone, saw Kayla’s sad and lovely face on the screen. She thought about not answering, but Dee Harrington was feeling so empty at the moment, she picked up.

  “Dee! Dee!” Kayla said, nearly breathless. There was a lot of background noise, as if she was calling from a bar. “Vic says he’s got to go to Boston and then to Paradise. Wanna come?”

  Dee couldn’t answer for the sense of relief she felt. Then, almost immediately, the relief was replaced by the memory of Jesse Stone’s touch. “Just try and stop me, darlin’.”

  19

  You’re never as tough as other people believe you are. That’s what Jesse Stone was thinking when he spotted Molly’s unit pulling into a lined spot outside the morgue. He got a sick feeling in the pit of his belly and reminded himself that these were the moments when a cop earned his pay. There were a lot of things about the job the public considered hard that weren’t nearly as difficult as this was likely to be. Not by a long shot. Back in L.A., where he’d been a Homicide detective, he had done this gut-wrenching Kabuki dozens of times. Unfortunately, he hadn’t left that aspect of the job behind him and had been forced to do it several times since becoming chief of police in Paradise. It was, in its way, very much like a dance: The steps were the same, but because the partners changed, it was a different experience each time. Never a pleasant one.

  Jesse went outside to greet the parents. He wanted to establish some rapport before they stepped inside. It was his experience that once they got inside the building, the parents would be beyond his reach. He couldn’t let that happen. He needed to say some things to them that they would need to hear. He stood on the curb, watching Molly open the rear door for the Penworths. He watched the parents force themselves out of the car. There it was, Jesse thought, that expression on their faces. He’d seen it before, a jumbled look of intense denial, of desperate hope, of shock. A look that would vanish soon enough in favor of something much, much worse.

  Forty-five, tanned, and fit, with wide, deep blue eyes, the father stood about six feet tall, maybe six-one. His posture was unnaturally stiff as he tried to hold himself together and keep strong for his wife. His wife had blond hair just like her daughter’s. She was already falling apart, fiercely clutching at her husband’s right arm. Without him to hold her up, it seemed she might collapse and disintegrate into a wet stain there on the pavement. Jesse didn’t blame her. This was another one of those times he was thankful he didn’t have kids. Mrs. Penworth’s eyes were so bloodshot that Jesse couldn’t make out their color. Her grief was so palpable that it was difficult for Jesse to judge her height or her appearance for the pain. Molly, stoic, also stiff, stood next to the wife. This was hard for Molly, too. She had kids at home and knew better than most how dangerous the world could be. Paradise or Boston, it didn’t matter. Danger could find you anywhere. They stepped up onto the sidewalk, where Jesse waited for them.

  Molly said, “Chief, these are Martina’s parents, Jim and Jan Penworth.”

  Jesse had sent Molly to get the Penworths precisely because she was good at understanding how to handle difficult situations. She knew to refer to the dead girl by her name in front of the parents. He recalled the times in L.A. when his partner or another cop would refer to the deceased as the vic, or the victim, or the dead kid, or the body in front of the relative who’d come to make the ID. It wasn’t out of malice or callousness. Jesse knew that. It’s just what the job did to you. You had to self-protect, to create a little distance between yourself and the victims, or you couldn’t do your job with a clear head. But Jesse was always careful with the families. He shook the father’s hand and then placed his left hand on Jan Penworth’s shoulder. He remained silent. The last thing he wanted to do was say something patronizing or hurtful.

  Then, after a moment, he said, “A hard day.”

  Jan Penworth took a deep breath but didn’t say anything.

  Jim Penworth smiled a wounded smile at Jesse and said, “Hardest day of our lives. Martina’s an only child . . . was an—she—” He stopped talking.

  “It’s going to get harder. I want you to understand that there’s no way for me or Molly to make this part any easier on you. We wish we could, but I won’t lie to you. I won’t ever lie to you.”

  “Thank you,” Jan Penwo
rth said, her voice barely audible.

  “Would you like for Molly to come inside with us?”

  Jan Penworth nodded. Jim Penworth smiled again. He started to speak, but the words caught in his throat and he, too, began to crumble. Molly spotted it and propped him up. The will and strength the Penworths had summoned to make the trip was at an end. So, too, was the unreality of the situation. Denial and hope can take a person only so far. This far.

  Jesse took a minute to explain the procedure and to prepare them for the shock of how Martina might look.

  “You only need to look at her as long as it takes for you to be certain it’s her. You can spend a few minutes with her after that. Do you understand?”

  “We do,” said Jim.

  Jesse knew at least one of them would say that, but the truth was there was no understanding what they were about to go through. As many times as he had been a part of this process, Jesse still wasn’t sure he understood it. He stepped forward, and the automatic door pulled back. He took measured steps as he entered the building, Molly and the Penworths following slowly behind.

  20

  Monty Bernstein wasn’t looking his bright, chipper self as he walked into the dining room of the bed-and-breakfast. The lawyer had been chauffeured back to his Boston town house after the meeting with the chief of police and had driven himself back in time to meet Harlan Salter IV for breakfast. He hadn’t had more than two hours of sleep. Instead, Monty had been a busy boy, spending most of his time on the phone. But there was some business to be done that people felt uncomfortable doing over the phone, the kind of business that required words spoken in dimly lit rooms between men of less- than-honorable intention. Words spoken so that there could be no misunderstandings and from which there could be no safe retreats. Words sealed with cold stares and rough handshakes held a beat too long. Words sealed with cash and dark promises.