Fool's Paradise

by Mike Lupica

  “You never took my phone.”

  “I didn’t need to. All I needed was the number to track your calls, and where you made them from. And who you made them to. The modern world, Lily. Sometimes it’s a beautiful thing.”

  “Dog with a bone,” she said.

  “The last he called you was right about the time he got dropped at your gate. That one lasted a few minutes. You were still in town then. Not long after that, from the car, you called Bryce and Nora Hayes.”

  “Simply replaying a wonderful evening for our town,” she said.

  “But you were on your way to pick Hutton up and get him away from the house and to the lake,” Jesse said.

  He sat back down.

  “What I can’t figure is why you had to kill him,” he said. “Why you couldn’t just pay him off and tell him to go away.”

  “I didn’t kill him,” she said.

  “I’ve actually got a witness saying somebody fitting your description was running from the lake after he heard the gunshot,” he said. “Tall and skinny. Ball cap. Long blond hair. I thought it might be Bryce when I heard that. But it was you. The long-distance runner.”

  “It wasn’t me,” she said.

  No need to tell her that his witness was dead. He was just trying to bait her into a mistake. All he had.

  She didn’t bite. Just smiled at him.

  “Let’s say all of this is true, Jesse,” she said. “Or some of it is. If you had any real proof you would have arrested me, at which point the best lawyers money can buy would already be stuck to you like ticks. I don’t know what you hoped to accomplish here, but I didn’t shoot anybody.” Still smiling, she said, “Are you sure you haven’t started drinking again?”

  He let that one go.

  “Are we still speaking hypothetically?”

  “Have at it,” Jesse said.

  Keep them talking. Whether it was Bo Marino or Lily Cain. Just because you never knew.

  “You have no idea,” she said.

  “About what?” Jesse said. “Who you were?”

  “No, goddamn you!” she said, spitting out the words. “What I had to do to become who I am. To become Lily Cain. And neither you nor anyone else is going to destroy that with your little story.”

  Now she stood.

  “And now I have heard enough and said enough,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  Jesse got the call from Peter Perkins at about three in the morning that they’d found Lily Cain’s body not far from where they’d found the body of Paul Hutton—her first child—near the lake.

  Single shot to the head, Peter said.

  Peter said he’d had to wake some people up and piss them off, but it turned out that the gun found next to the body, a .22, was registered to Whit Cain.

  Jesse told him he was on his way. He got dressed and was walking through the living room when he saw the bottle of Crown Royal that Lily had left on the table. A third of it left, maybe less. He picked it up and stared at the amber liquid. Didn’t have to smell it, because he knew the scent and the taste. He stood there for what felt like a long time and then walked into the kitchen and poured the rest of it into the sink and then headed for the lake, where it had all started, for the end of it.

  Seventy

  There was no funeral for Lily Cain. Bryce Cain said there would be a memorial service later. At the theater. The cover story in Paradise was that Lily was more grief-stricken than anybody knew over the death of her husband. And as far as Jesse could tell, enough of the town seemed willing to buy that, or at least to pretend to in public. He didn’t care, either way. He wasn’t sure what he felt. He knew he couldn’t make a case against Lily. She knew it, too. But there was a part of him feeling as if he’d somehow given her the death penalty anyway.

  “You couldn’t have known how it was going to turn out when you set everything in motion,” Molly said.

  “But I did set everything in motion.”

  “You were still the only one who knew,” Molly said.

  “It must have been one person too many,” Jesse said.

  They were at her desk out in the bullpen, drinking coffee. Molly had just told him to get his feet off her desk. He’d refused. She seemed to accept that they were at an impasse.

  “I feel sorry for her,” Jesse said. “Even though I know I shouldn’t. She’d carried around this secret for forty years. No indication that she ever tried to find out if the baby was dead or alive. Now here the guy was on her doorstep. It must have panicked her.”

  “Who the hell was she?” Molly said. “Really?”

  “We’re never gonna know,” he said. “A lot we’re never gonna know, though. Maybe just one more thing that gets buried.”

  “I can’t feel badly about this,” Molly said. “Not as a mother.”

  “You’re a harder case than me.”

  “And don’t ever forget it,” she said.

  They had made a plan to have dinner. Molly said he should see if Sunny wanted to come up. Jesse went back to his office and called her. She said she was having dinner with Richie.

  “So he’s back,” Jesse said.

  “So he is.”

  “Back meaning back in your life?” Jesse said.

  “Never out of it,” she said.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Not like that,” Sunny said. “We just need to have a face-to-face. Then straight home to bed. Alone.”

  “So no sucking face,” he said.

  She laughed. The sound of it came out of the phone like a summer breeze.

  “In this case, Chief Stone,” she said. “My lips really are sealed.”

  Jesse told Molly he’d see her later at the Gull, that he was going home early, going for a long run to clear his head.

  “You’d have to run all the way to L.A. and back to do that,” she said.

  He drove home and got into sweatpants and the running shoes he’d bought after rehab and an even older Dodgers sweatshirt, a cold front off the Atlantic having dropped the temperature into the low 50s the last couple days. He started out through town, on his way to the water. Passed that movie theater, ran under the marquee that now read: REST IN PEACE, LILY CAIN. Wondering if she finally was at peace, or if the chance of that had come off the books a long time ago.

  He finally made the turn toward the bridge at Stiles Island and was on his way back over the bridge when he saw Bryce Cain coming in the other direction. He hadn’t seen Cain since he’d identified his mother’s body at the hospital.

  “I’m sorry,” Jesse had said that day.

  “The hell you are,” Cain said.

  Cain stared briefly at Jesse now, looked like he might say something but didn’t, just smiled and gave Jesse the finger. Then put his head down and kept going, picking up the pace as if suddenly being chased.

  But Jesse stopped now, stared at his back until he disappeared, Brad Pitt hair blowing in the cold wind off the water. Then he was on his way home himself. Running a lot faster now than he had when he’d started. Like he was the one being chased.

  Seventy-One

  Bryce Cain opened his front door a few minutes after six the next day, saw it was Jesse, and started to close it, saying, “I’ve said everything I need to say to you.”

  Jesse stopped the door with his right hand.

  “Not quite,” he said.

  He handed Cain the envelope in his other hand.

  “What’s this?”

  “A search warrant,” Jesse said.

  “Get lost,” Cain said.

  “Bryce,” Jesse said, stepping past him. “We can do this the hard way, which is how I’m rooting. Or the easy way. Totally up to you.”

  They were standing very close to each other. Cain was holding an empty glass in his hand. Jesse could see him making
a calculation about whether to stand down or not. He bought himself some time by opening the envelope and studying the warrant.

  “I’ll have Judge Victor’s ass for this,” he said.

  “Nice to think so.”

  “What are you searching for, exactly?”

  “Just one item of clothing,” Jesse said. “Your Patriots hoodie. The one you were wearing yesterday when you flipped me off on the bridge.”

  “And why do you want that?”

  “Because I believe it’s the one you were wearing the night you shot Paul Hutton,” Jesse said. “Your brother. Almost biblical, Bryce. Little like a Cain murdering Abel.”

  “Lily shot him.”

  “That’s what I thought, too,” Jesse said. “And what you were happy to have me think, especially now that, with her gone, all that fucking money goes to you.”

  “You’re full of shit until the end,” Cain said.

  “Maybe so,” Jesse said. “But let’s go get the hoodie. See, here’s the thing most civilians don’t know, even smart lawyers like you. Gun residue stays on articles of clothing a long time. Lot of times it leaves a stain that won’t come out even after a good washing. Kind of stain a lab can test.”

  Cain stared at him. His mother’s icy blue eyes. Maybe trying to decide if Jesse was playing him.

  “I’ll go get it,” he said.

  “I’ll go with you,” Jesse said.

  “Where do you think I’m going?”

  “Hopefully jail,” Jesse said.

  Jesse took a Ziploc bag out of his back pocket now and opened it.

  “What’s that for?” Cain said.

  “Drop the glass in here if you don’t mind,” Jesse said. “Most people also don’t know how to properly wipe down a gun. Got a feeling the partial print on the gun we found next to Lily might just turn out to be yours.”

  They were still standing just inside the door. Bryce Cain finally shrugged and placed the glass in the plastic bag. Jesse set it on a small table in the foyer.

  “Knock yourself out,” he said, and led Jesse up the stairs to his bedroom. The walk-in closet was as big as Jesse’s office. On top of one of the bureaus was the Patriots hoodie, the old-school one Bo Marino said he’d seen the runner wearing, minuteman in a tricorne hat getting ready to snap a football. Cain grabbed it and tossed it at Jesse.

  “More circumstantial evidence for you to knock yourself out with,” Cain said. “We both know if you had enough to charge me, I’d be in fucking cuffs already.” He crossed his arms in front of him. “And if you ever do charge me on flimsy shit like this, all that means is I’ll finally have your ass.”

  “Your mother called you that night and told you to go pick him up,” Jesse said. “The timing lines up.”

  “She called,” Cain said. “Not about that.”

  “But you were careful enough to leave your phone here.”

  “My phone was here because I was here after I came home from the theater,” Cain said. “How would you even know that, by the way?”

  He told her what he’d told his mother about the modern world.

  “Whatever,” Cain said.

  He walked out of the closet and back down the stairs and through the foyer, opened the front door.

  “Now get out,” he said.

  “What I’m curious about,” Jesse said, “is what Lily told you before you did it. That he was here after your money? She tried to sell me that the old man might have had him killed. But it was you.”

  Cain smiled and shook his head slowly.

  “Pass,” he said.

  “That’s the ironic part, don’t you think?” Jesse said. “The guy wasn’t really after money. Just a family. Even one as fucked-up as yours.”

  “Let me explain something to you that my father explained to me one time,” Cain said. “When they say it’s not about the money, it’s always about the money.”

  He walked over now to where Jesse was standing in the middle of the room. Not all the way into Jesse’s space. But close enough that Jesse was hoping he was about to do something stupid.

  “Do you have any idea how much shit I’ve had to eat in my life?” he said in a quiet voice. “Lily always talked about having to do that, because of the way the old man screwed around. Well, she had no idea what it was like being me. None. Do you know what it’s like your whole life being told you’ll never measure up, get out of the way and let the old man show you how it’s done? But I took it, and I waited, and then I took over the business, knowing I was going to cash in when he finally did the world a favor and died.”

  Jesse noticed a slight sheen of sweat on his upper lip.

  “Just for the sake of conversation?” Bryce said.

  “Sure,” Jesse said. “Just you and me here, couple of boys chopping it up.”

  Bryce said, “You think someone who had taken that kind of shit his whole life was going to let some drunk show up and claim a share, whatever he was saying about family? Fuck him. And fuck you.”

  Jesse could feel himself smiling now.

  “So you’re finally Cain Enterprises, free and clear,” he said.

  “Bet your ass,” he said. “President, chairman of the board, keeper of the flame.”

  “Well, for now,” Jesse said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Means that even though what I have on you might not stand up in court, there still might be enough to charge you,” Jesse said. “And if I do that, it sure as shit will get the board’s attention, don’t you think?”

  He reached over and patted Cain on the shoulder.

  “There’s all kinds of jail, Bryce,” Jesse said on his way past him and out the door.

  Seventy-Two

  Look at me,” Sunny said. “Two dates in one night.”

  “I am looking at you,” Jesse said.

  They were in the bed that had once belonged to the owner of her house at River Street Place, a writer named Melanie Joan Hall. Sunny had once described the bed as being big enough on which to land a jetliner.

  He had dropped off the sweatshirt and the glass with Dev, knowing that Cain had been right, knowing that gunpowder residue wasn’t weapon-specific, and that even if Cain had wiped the gun with a dry cloth before returning it to Whit Cain’s gun cabinet first chance he got, a lawyer like Rita Fiore could come up with fifty reasons why his prints might have been on the .22.

  “So you went there trying to bluff him and he called yours,” Sunny said.

  “Hell yeah.”

  “You knew you couldn’t make it stick?”

  “Not unless he confessed,” he said. “I just needed to know for sure it was him.”

  “Now you do.”

  “Hell yeah,” he said again.

  “Is it enough?”

  “Hell no.”

  He’d texted Sunny after he left Bryce Cain and asked if there was a chance he could see her after her dinner with Richie, that he needed to talk through some things with somebody other than Molly. She’d told him to come over.

  She’d been resting her head on his shoulder. Now she pulled back and sat up, making no attempt to cover herself. She rarely did.

  “You’re not happy.”

  “Happy being here,” he said.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I keep thinking there should be a way for me to nail the bastard,” he said. “I keep thinking that even after everything Lily did, starting with what she did to that baby, she didn’t have to die. Hell, I was even thinking on my way down here how close I came to getting Candace Pennington killed.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  She reached over, touched his cheek with her hand, left it there.

  “Let’s change the subject,” he said.

  “Fine by me.”

  “Want to talk about
us?”

  Sunny smiled and slowly shook her head.

  “How’s Richie?”

  “Not tonight, dear,” she said. “I know it’s a big bed. But two people in it is more than enough.”

  Now she kissed him where her hand had been.

  “I wanted a drink tonight after I left Cain,” he said. “Wolf was right back there at the door. I’m pissed off at Bryce Cain. Pissed off at myself.” He exhaled. Loudly. “Same old same old. I just wanted to take the edge off.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “You responded to my text,” he said.

  “You need to let this go,” Sunny said.

  “Hard to do,” he said.

  “The last Boy Scout,” Sunny said.

  He turned to her, grinning, and told her a known criminal had called him the same thing not long ago.

  “I never told you,” he said. “But I actually was a Boy Scout once. For about a week.”

  “No way.”

  “Cains aren’t the only ones with secrets,” he said.

  He reached over and pulled her closer to him.

  “I can still recite the Scout’s Oath,” he said. “Want to hear it?”

  “Not tonight, dear,” she said.

  “The key part is about being physically strong,” he said.

  She smiled a wicked smile.

  “I can tell,” she said.

  Acknowledgments

  I could not write these books without the skill and talent—and patience—of my guide through the world of Robert B. Parker: Sara Minnich.

  About the Authors

  Robert B. Parker was the author of seventy books, including the legendary Spenser detective series, the novels featuring Chief Jesse Stone, and the acclaimed Virgil Cole/Everett Hitch westerns, as well as the Sunny Randall novels. Winner of the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award and long considered the undisputed dean of American crime fiction, he died in January 2010. Mike Lupica is a prominent sports journalist and the New York Times--bestselling author of more than forty works of fiction and nonfiction. A longtime friend to Robert B. Parker, he was selected by the Parker estate to continue the Sunny Randall and Jesse Stone series.