Fool's Paradise

by Mike Lupica

  “Midwest, technically,” Jesse said.

  “Whatever,” Suit said. “So I had nothing. I decided to start from scratch, go back through the list again. Lot of bars, all of them in pretty much the same area in Florida, around Palm Beach. A few in Miami, but not many. There were some of those middle-man accounts that cover porn sites.”

  “And you know about those accounts . . . how?” Jesse said, grinning at him.

  “I wasn’t always married,” Suit said. He pointed at the top paper. “But I got curious about how he’d end up in North Dakota. It didn’t make sense. Geographically, you know. And it turns out that even though there is a 4 Bears casino, it’s also the name of one of those DNA ancestry companies. That was where he got charged.”

  “The guy took a DNA test,” Jesse said.

  “Yup.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Month or so before we found him at the lake,” Suit said.

  Jesse looked down at the paper. Suit had circled “4Bears.com” in red. Twice.

  “That’s why we thought he might have a shot at finding out who he was,” Jesse said.

  “Looking for relatives,” Suit said.

  “So he takes a DNA test and then he shows up here,” Jesse said.

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Suit said. “But you know who else lived at that house? That nurse who came up here from Florida.”

  “Or maybe the DNA test had nothing to do with him coming here, and he had another reason for going there that night,” Jesse said.

  “Buzz killer,” Suit said.

  “Just thinking out loud.”

  “You’re the one who keeps talking about how much time Old Man Cain always spent down in Florida.”

  “And apparently kept it in his pants about as often as Epstein did,” Jesse said.

  “Or the movie guy,” Suit said.

  Jesse drank some of the coffee he’d made when he’d gotten back to the office. Then he reached for his pen and drew another circle around 4Bears.com.

  “You think the old man might be our dead guy’s father?” Suit said. “Or, holy shit, that Mrs. Cain could be his mother?”

  Jesse said, “Be nice to know. I just don’t know how.”

  “You gonna ask Lily about this?” Suit said.

  “Not quite yet,” Jesse said.

  He tapped a finger on the papers in front of him.

  “I’m hopeful the offices of this 4Bears isn’t located in North Dakota,” Jesse said.

  Suit smiled.

  “State Street, Boston, Massachusetts,” Suit said.

  “Boom.”

  “You really understand how all this DNA voodoo works?” Suit said.

  “Nope,” Jesse said. “But hoping to find out.”

  Suit grinned.

  “You think there are any more little Jesse Stones out there running around?” he said.

  Jesse told him to get out of his office.

  Sixty-Three

  Cole had called from the road and told Jesse he was going to surprise him and take him out to dinner, but that when he’d thought about it, he didn’t want to surprise him and Sunny. Jesse told him Sunny had gone back to Boston.

  “Hoping that doesn’t mean permanently,” Cole said.

  “Same,” Jesse said.

  Now they were seated at the kitchen table, eating truck-stop burgers, with fried potatoes and onions on the side and green beans lathered in Parmesan sauce. Jesse had said he could put together a salad. Cole had grinned and said, “What the hell for? Our health?”

  Jesse had called on his way back from Vermont and given Cole the bumper-sticker version of what had happened the night before. Now his son wanted to hear all about it.

  “You trusted you had time to get across the room,” Cole said.

  “Ever hopeful,” Jesse said.

  “So she emptied the gun,” Cole said.

  “If she could have reloaded somehow and kept shooting,” Jesse said, “I believe she would have.”

  “So it’s over.”

  “On to the next,” Jesse said.

  “Your vic at the lake.”

  Jesse told him about Paul Hutton and the DNA test.

  “I took one of those,” Cole said.

  “Seriously?” Jesse said. “You never told me.”

  “It was after I got here,” Cole said. “Got curious if there might be somebody else out there.”

  Jesse laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Your friend Suit asked me a little while ago if I ever wondered if there might be other Jesses out there. Great minds,” Cole said.

  “Both of you wish.”

  Cole had cut his hair short, shaved off the beard he’d had the last time they were together. He was handsome and young and happy and tougher than an ultimate fighter. Not for the first time, Jesse thought about how well his mother had done with him. And wondered, also not for the first time, if the kid would have turned out this well if Jesse had been in his life from the start.

  “Which site did you use?” Jesse said.

  “Ancestry.com.”

  “Not that I’m worried,” Jesse said. “But any hits?”

  “Nope. You got unlucky just the one time.”

  “Lucky is more like it,” he said, “even if it took as long as it did for me to find out.”

  Jesse said, “You understand how it works?”

  “Kind of,” Cole said, telling him what happened once you opened an account and sent them your money. They sent you a sample kit in the mail, you took a swab, sent it to them, and filled out what he described as an entrance exam worth of paperwork. Then you waited to see the results, and any relations in the system. Said that was the shorthand version.

  “What if there had been one?” Jesse said.

  “Then you have the option of using the company’s messaging system,” Cole said, “and trying to contact the person, or persons, you’ve matched up with. And then they have the option of responding or not.”

  “I need to find out if Paul Hutton got a match,” Jesse said, “and if it might have been with Whit Cain.”

  “Can you get into Hutton’s laptop?”

  “Didn’t have one.”

  “He had to use a laptop somewhere to access their site.”

  “Well, it beats the hell out of me where it was,” Jesse says. “But it won’t matter if I can get the company to hand over the results.”

  “Good luck with that,” Cole said.

  “If they’re resistant to the notion,” Jesse said, “I’ll have to turn on the charm.”

  His son said, “You’d be better off threatening to shoot them.”

  Sixty-Four

  The headquarters for 4Bears.com was at 70 State Street, which Jesse knew wasn’t all that far from where Sunny lived on River Street Place, over on the other side of the Common and the Public Garden. He hadn’t been to Sunny’s home since she’d moved there from Fort Point. Maybe after he finished on State Street he’d swing by. Or maybe he’d wait for her to make the first move.

  Or maybe he could stop acting like a scared high school kid waiting for the girl he liked to pass him a note.

  The offices of 4Bears were on the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth floors. When he got out of the elevator and looked past the receptionist’s desk at all the cubicles behind her, he could have been looking at an insurance company. Or a tech firm, which he supposed this place really was. Lots of young people tapping away at computer screens, or talking into their mics attached to their earpieces. Or both.

  What he was really looking at, he thought, was the modern world. People younger and more tech-savvy than him and able to find things out faster and solve problems quicker. Maybe he should walk in there and tap one of them on the shoulder and tell him or her everything Jesse knew and
didn’t know about Paul Hutton. Maybe they’d figure out what happened to him before somebody made the next coffee run.

  The receptionist was more age-appropriate for him, streaked hair cut short, big black framed glasses. Pretty. SALLY CAMERON, her placard read.

  “May I help you?” she said.

  He identified himself, showed her his badge, said that he was here investigating the murder of a 4Bears client.

  “Oh, my,” she said. “I’m not even sure who you should be talking to about that.”

  Jesse smiled. Might as well start the charm offensive.

  “I’m sure you’ll make the right decision,” he said.

  She stood and said, “Excuse me for just one moment.”

  She walked into the large, sunny area where the cubicles were, toward actual offices Jesse could see in the back. She came back about five minutes later with a tall redheaded woman in a short summer dress. Long hair, long legs. She reminded Jesse of Rita Fiore, lawyer friend, once with benefits.

  “Gwen Hadley,” she said. Smiled. “Vice president in charge of something or other.”

  She put out her hand. Jesse shook it.

  “Should I call you Chief?” she said.

  “Not unless you want me to arrest you in front of Ms. Cameron.”

  She laughed.

  “Follow me,” she said.

  She led him down to a corner office with a spectacular eastern view that stretched all the way to the waterfront.

  “Does the president have a better view than this?” Jesse said.

  “He does,” she said. “Higher, too.”

  No wedding ring, Jesse noticed. Telling himself he was the chief and trained to be a visual person. She motioned him into a chair to the right of her door. She sat down on the small sofa next to it and crossed her legs.

  Sunny, Jesse thought.

  “Sally told me about the murder,” Gwen Hadley said. “Maybe you can explain how I can help you.”

  Jesse told her about Paul Hutton: him being orphaned, about his last job, about him getting sober, about him showing up in Paradise not long after the charge from 4Bears appeared on his credit card.

  “Why do you suppose he took the test now?” she said.

  “No idea.”

  “But it doesn’t really matter, does it?” she said.

  “It matters to me,” he said. “I believe that if I can find out if there was a match, it might help me find out who killed him.”

  She sighed.

  “That doesn’t sound good,” he said.

  “I’d love to help you out, Jesse,” she said. Smiled at him again. “But I’m afraid I can’t.”

  “Can’t or won’t?’

  “If our customers don’t trust our confidentiality policies,” she said, “then before long we won’t have any customers, because they’re on their way to Ancestry or 23andMe or somebody else who will honor their confidentiality policies.”

  Jesse smiled now.

  “All due respect?” he said.

  “That never sounds good,” she said.

  “Bullshit,” Jesse said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Bull. Shit.”

  “We don’t happen to think our privacy policies are.”

  “Maybe for people who are still alive,” Jesse said.

  “There’s a place on the form for people to be contacted in the event of the customer’s death,” she said. “Almost always a family member. But you just told me he had no family.”

  “You could check,” Jesse said.

  “But if there’s no contact listed,” she said, “then we’re back to where we started. If one person’s information isn’t safe, no one’s is. Dead or alive, I’m afraid.”

  “Here’s how I’d like this to go,” Jesse said. “I’d like you to talk to whomever you need to talk to, all the way to the twenty-sixth floor if necessary. I’d like you to go into Paul Hutton’s records and see if there’s a contact. And if there’s not? You do the right thing and turn over his information to me so I can get some justice for him. If not, I am going to call Wayne Cosgrove at the Globe and tell him Paul Hutton’s sad story and how 4Bears isn’t interested in justice for him, because they think the letter of the law is more important than the spirit of the law.”

  She sighed again.

  “Well, then,” she said.

  He waited.

  “I may have underestimated you, Jesse Stone.”

  “You’re not the first,” he said. “Pretty sure you won’t be the last.”

  She stared at him with green eyes. They seemed to work for her the way just about everything else did.

  “I’m not promising anything,” she said. “If we didn’t have protocols in place, I’d be doing a deep dive into the system right now.”

  “I believe you.”

  “I want to help,” she said. “I really do.”

  “I believe that, too.”

  She got up, walked over to her desk, came back with her phone.

  “Can you give me your number?” she said.

  He did. She read it back to make sure she had it right.

  “This may take some time,” she said. “And some arm-twisting.”

  “My money’s on you,” Jesse said.

  She stood. So did he. She shook his hand again, and said she’d be in touch. Probably his imagination that she held on a beat longer this time. Maybe more.

  “Sunny,” he said as he withdrew his hand from hers.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Nothing,” Jesse said.

  He was the one carrying the gun and badge, after all. No reason for her to know that he needed a safe word, too.

  Sixty-Five

  Jesse had no idea how long it would take Gwen Hadley to get the information he wanted and, even if she did, how long it would take for her to get permission from the twenty-sixth floor to release it. But he had the sense that she didn’t want to be on the wrong side of this. He had been a cop too long to expect everybody to always do the right thing. But he still thought most people wanted to, especially if it didn’t cost them anything.

  He decided to take a walk, even though he never felt completely at home in downtown Boston, not when Jenn had been working in local television and living here, not when he’d come down to visit Sunny. It wasn’t about feeling out of place in a big city. He’d been a big-city cop in Los Angeles before he got to Paradise. He just always felt like a tourist here, no matter how many times he was downtown. Like no matter where he was, on Commonwealth Avenue walking toward Fenway Park or Back Bay or Government Center or over at the Seaport, there was just too much traffic for him now. Cars. People. The whole goddamn thing.

  He had decided he didn’t want to see Sunny today, that he wouldn’t walk over to River Street Place and ring the doorbell. Why? Because he was afraid her ex-husband would be there? Jesse knew her well enough to know that she had as much problem disengaging from Richie Burke as he had from Jenn, at least until Jenn had finally remarried and moved away. It didn’t mean that the feelings she still had for Richie were stronger than the ones she had for Jesse. They had history.

  Jesse and Sunny had . . . what? He knew he loved her, even if he had not come out and told her that, at least not lately. It was good, whatever it was. They were happy when they were together. But maybe they were too much alike to ever sustain a full-time relationship with each other, one built to last.

  He walked over to the Boston Common, then down Boylston to the Four Seasons, where he and Sunny had once sat on a winter night, during a Nor’easter, and sipped martinis and listened to the piano player and talked about getting a room.

  He stood now and looked in the window at the Bristol Bar, saw a few afternoon drinkers in there, wondered if he might again be one of them someday. He thought about it every goddamn day, whether he had s
topped for good. Whether he wanted to stop for good. Or if he was just taking a long break between drinks. Dix told him he should go to more meetings than he did. A way, Dix said, to keep the wolf away from the door, one day at a time.

  Jesse had an AA app on his phone. He knew enough about Boston to know there was always a meeting going on somewhere in the Back Bay. He looked through the window now and saw a waiter making his way across the Bristol Bar, two martinis on a tray, placing them on a table in front of two guys in business suits. Were they starting a long, wet lunch? They toasted themselves.

  One of them saw Jesse looking in the window and toasted him.

  Jesse lifted an imaginary glass, turned his back on them, and headed back toward Boylston.

  He felt his phone buzzing in the front pocket of his jeans, took it out, and heard Gwen Hadley say, “It’s me.”

  “You got permission,” he said.

  “Not so’s you’d notice,” she said. “You just convinced me that finding out was the right thing to do.”

  “So did you?” Jesse said. “Find out?”

  “I did.”

  “Paul Hutton found a match.”

  “He did,” she said.

  “Who with?”

  “Well, the credit card on the matching account is in the name of Mr. Bryce Cain,” she said. “He lives in . . .”

  “Paradise, Massachusetts,” Jesse said.

  “You know him?”

  “Better than I ever hoped to,” Jesse said.

  “But thing is, the match isn’t with him,” Gwen Hadley said. “At least he’s not the one who sent in the sample.”

  Even over the sound of Boylston Street traffic, Jesse could hear his own breathing.

  “Who did?”

  “Someone named Samantha Cain.”

  “Bryce’s daughter.”

  Sixty-Six

  Over the phone Gwen Hadley had given him a brief tutorial on matches. Jesse called it “DNA for Dummies.” Matches and percentages and probabilities. Centimorgans. She spelled out centimorgans. Said the shorthand was “cM.” Units of measure for how much DNA you shared with someone. The higher the percentage of centimorgans, the more closely you were related.