a pitcher of martinis.
“As long as we keep control,” he said.
“It was difficult to stop
touching when those kids showed up.”
“But we did it,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “I thought about
killing them
too.”
She shook her head emphatically.
“No,” she said. “We’re
not doing random slaughter. That would be like a gang bang, you know? Where’s the love in a gang bang.”
“I know,” he said.
“I’m just telling you how I nearly lost control.”
“Of course, I always nearly lose control. But that’s part of it,
to give ourselves to it, to let it possess us entirely, and then, at the very verge of the abyss, assert our will.”
He sipped his martini.
“It’s sort of like this,” he
said. “Martinis. You like them so
much you want to drink a dozen, but if you do
…”
“The precise joy of a perfect martini is gone. You might as well
slug gin from the bottle,” she said.
“So we shouldn’t hurry,” he said.
“No, but we can start focusing in on the next one.”
He leaned over and kissed her gently on the mouth.
“Let’s go to the videotape,” he
said.
23
The three killings in an affluent suburban town led the local newscasts. The Boston papers gave it front-page coverage. Reporters and camera people hung around outside the police station. Jesse was interviewed twice, to little avail. And his picture was on the front page of the Globe one morning. When he came into the
station on a bright Tuesday morning, Arthur Angstrom was at the desk.
“Manny, Moe, and Larry are waiting for you,” Arthur said. “In
the conference room.”
“Perfect,” Jesse said.
When Jesse went into the conference room the three town selectmen were sitting at one end of the small conference table.
Jesse pushed a pizza box aside and sat in the fourth chair and waited.
Morris Comden cleared his throat. He was the chief selectman.
“Good morning, Jesse.”
“Morris.”
“You’ve been busy,” Comden said.
Jesse nodded. The other selectmen were new to the office.
Jesse
knew that Comden spoke for them.
“We just thought, Jim and Carter and I, that we probably ought
to get up to speed on things.”
Comden had a sharp face and wore bow ties.
Jesse nodded again. Comden smiled and glanced at the other two selectmen.
“I told you he wasn’t a talker,”
Comden said to the other
selectmen.
Carter Hanson had a dark tan, and silver hair combed straight back and carefully gelled in place. He was the CEO of a software company out on Route 128. He decided to take charge.
He looked straight at Jesse and said, “So what’s going
on?”
“Three people have been killed by the same weapons,” Jesse said.
“We can find no connection among them and we don’t have any idea
who did it.”
“We need more than that,” Hanson said.
“We do,” Jesse said.
“Well, let’s hear it,” Hanson
said.
Comden shook his head slightly and Jim Burns, the third selectman, looked uncomfortable. Jesse looked without expression at Hanson for a long moment.
“There’s nothing to hear,” he
said.
“That’s all you know?” Hanson
said.
“Correct.”
“You don’t have any clues?
Nothing?”
“Correct.”
“Well, Jesus Christ,” Hanson said.
Jesse nodded.
“Well,” Hanson said. “What do we
tell the press.”
“I like no comment,”
Jesse said.
Morris Comden had a yellow legal pad in front of him. He looked
down at it.
“Your department is costing a lot of overtime,” he
said.
Jesse nodded.
“Perhaps you could allocate your personnel a little better,”
Comden said.
He spoke more carefully than Hanson.
Jesse didn’t say anything. Burns spoke for the first time.
“Jesus, don’t you talk?” he said.
“Only when I have something to say.”
“Well, maybe you could stop this undercover drug thing you’ve
got going at the high school. We got a damn killer on the loose.”
“Nope.”
“For crissake, who cares if there’s a couple kids smoking dope
in the boys’ room,” Hanson said. “Where are your
priorities.”
“I’m a cop,” Jesse said.
“I been a cop for fifteen, sixteen
years now. I’m good at it. I know how to do it. You don’t.”
“So we just stand aside and let you do what you want?”
“Exactly,” Jesse said.
“Jesse,” Morris Comden said. “I
know how you don’t like being
pushed. But, for God’s sake, you work for us. We have to justify
your budget every year at town meeting. We have the right to know what’s going on.”
“I’ve told you what I know about the killings,” Jesse said. “The
undercover thing at the high school is just that, undercover.”
“You won’t even tell us?”
“No.”
“And you won’t put the personnel working the high school on the
killings.”
“No.”
“Goddamnit,” Hanson said. “We
can fire you.”
“You can,” Jesse said. “But you
can’t tell me what to
do.”
No one said anything for a time. Comden looked down at his yellow pad and drummed the eraser end of a pencil softly on the tabletop.
Finally Comden said, “Well, I think Jim and Carter and I need to
discuss this among ourselves. We’ll let things ride as they are
while we do.”
Jesse nodded and stood up.
“Have a nice day,” he said and left the room.
24
Jesse walked around his apartment. Living room, dining area, bedroom, kitchen, and bath. Through the sliding doors to his balcony he could see the harbor. Over the bar, in the corner of his living room, he could look at his picture of Ozzie Smith. On his bedside table, he could look at his picture of Jenn, in a big hat, holding a glass of wine. He walked around the apartment again.
There wasn’t anything else to look at. He sat on the edge of his
bed for a time looking at Jenn. Then he got up and walked into the living room and stood and looked at the harbor. The apartment was so still he could hear himself breathing. He turned and went to the kitchen and got some ice and soda. He took it to the bar and made himself a tall scotch and soda with a lot of ice and sat at the bar and sipped it. There was nothing like the first one. The feeling of the first one, Jesse sometimes thought, was worth the trouble that ensued. He let the feel of the drink ease through him.
Better.
He wasn’t as alone as he felt, Jesse knew: Marcy, the other
cops, Jenn, sort of. But that was just reasonable. In the center of himself he felt alone. No one knew him. Even Jenn, though Jenn came close. His cops were good small-town cops. But a serial killer? No one else but him was going to catch the serial killer. No one else was going to protect Candace Pennington. No one else was going to fix it with Jenn. What if he couldn’t? His gl
ass was empty.
He
filled it with ice and made another drink. What if the serial killer just kept killing people? He looked at the lucent gold color of his drink, the small bubbles rising through it. It looked like that odd golden ginger ale that his father had liked and no one else could stand. He could feel the pleasure of the scotch easing along the nerve paths. He felt its settled comfort in his stomach.
Maybe he should walk away from it. Maybe I should just say fuck
it and be a drunk, Jesse thought. God knows I’m good at
it. It would certainly resolve things with Jenn.
He made a third drink.
If the killings weren’t random, they were certainly connected in
a way only the killer or killers understood. Which from Jesse’s
point of view was the same as random. He swallowed some scotch.
I feel sorry for people, he thought, who have never
had this feeling. So far they seemed to have killed only in Paradise. And the killings weren’t random in the sense that the
victims were merely those available at the moment. The woman in the mall parking lot could have been merely in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the murder at night on the beach, and the one down the dark tracks at the edge of the not yet lighted church parking lot were unlikely to be of the moment. Those victims probably had been preselected. Or the site had been. It was unlikely that the killer/killers were merely hanging around there. Say the killers had preselected the site. How did they know someone would come along for them to shoot? And how did they know that if they hung around in such unlikely places for long, someone might not get suspicious and a cop might not sooner or later show up and say whaddya doing. No, the least unlikely hypothesis was that he/they had preselected the victim and followed the victim to the site.
Elementary, my dear Ozzie. Now that he knew that, what did
he know?
Nothing.
He held the glass up and looked at the light shining through it.
He wondered if Ozzie Smith had been a drinker. Probably not. Hard to do what Ozzie had done with a hangover.
The bastards weren’t going to ruin that girl’s life, though. If
he did no other thing he was going to save Candace Pennington. He wasn’t clear yet how he was going to do that, but as the alcohol
worked its happy way, he knew that he could, and that he would, no matter what else.
Be good to save something.
25
At 8:10 in the morning, Bo Marino sat alone in the back of the school bus with his feet up on the seat next to him, smoking a joint. The smell of weed slowly filled the bus and several kids turned to look and a couple of them giggled. Bo took a deep drag and let it out slowly toward the front of the bus. The driver was a woman. Bo wondered if she even knew what pot was when she smelled it. Bo looked older than he was. He was already shaving regularly.
He had been lifting weights since junior high, and it showed. His neck was short and thick, and his upper body was muscular. He was the tailback in the USC-style offense that Coach Zambello used.
Several small colleges had recruited him, and he was very pleased with himself.
In the rearview mirror, Molly could see Bo smoking. She smelled
the marijuana. Well, well, she thought, Bo Marino
appears to be breaking the law. She called Jesse on her cell phone and spoke softly.
“One of the three young men we’re
interested in is inhaling a
controlled substance in the back of the bus,” Molly said.
Jesse was silent for a moment.
Then he said, “When you get to school, arrest him.
I’ll have
Suit meet the bus.”
“Okeydokey,” Molly said.
“Aren’t you supposed to say something like
‘roger that,’” Jesse
said.
“I like okeydokey,” Molly said, and smiled and shut off the
phone.
The bus pulled into the circular driveway in front of the high school and the kids got off. Bo stayed until last, smoking his joint, and pinched it out when there was no one else on the bus. He dropped the roach in his shirt pocket, swung his feet contemptuously off the seat, and stood.
As he got off the bus, the lady bus driver said,
“Hold it there
for a minute, Bo.”
He stared at her.
“Hold what?” he said.
The lady bus driver took a badge out of her purse and showed it
to him.
“I observed you using a controlled
substance,” Molly said. “We’d
like you to come down to the station.”
Bo stared at her. Peripherally he saw the janitor that everybody
knew was a cop walking toward the bus.
“A what?”
“A controlled substance. You were observed smoking a joint on
the bus. The snipe is still in your shirt pocket.”
“You’re fucking crazy,” Bo said.
“We can go in my car,” Molly said.
“It’s parked over
here.”
“Fuck you, lady,” Bo said.
He started to walk past her. Molly stepped in his way.
“Don’t make me arrest you,”
Molly said.
“You?” Bo said. “Get out of my
way or I’ll fuck
you.”
He tried to move past her again, and again Molly blocked him.
Bo
covered her left breast with his right hand and shoved her out of the way. Molly took a canister from her purse and sprayed him in the face. Bo made a sound that might have been a scream and clasped his hands to his face.
“Ow,” he said. “Jesus Christ,
ow, ow! You fucking blinded
me.”
Molly put the Mace away, took her handcuffs and snapped a cuff on Bo’s left wrist. Suit came around the front of the bus in his
janitor’s outfit and pulled Bo’s right hand down, and together they
cuffed him.
Red-eyed, coughing, and head down, Bo was dragged into Jesse’s
office and put in a chair.
“My eyes are killing me,” he said.
“I need something for my
eyes. The bitch sprayed me for no reason. Gimme something for my eyes. My father’s gonna sue your ass.”
“Uncuff him,” Jesse said. “And
leave him with
me.”
Molly took the cuffs off and put them in her purse. Bo immediately began to rub his eyes.
“It’ll stop in a while,” Jesse
said. “Rubbing them won’t help.
We’ll go down and wash them.”
Molly put a bag on Jesse’s desk.
“When we arrested him,” Simpson said,
“naturally, we patted him
down for concealed weapons. Found this in his backpack.”
Bo stopped coughing just long enough to say,
“That’s not mine,
the bastards planted that.”
“Be my guess that there’s enough
here,” Molly said, “to support
possession with intent.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Jesse
said. “Anything
else?”
“No weapon,” Simpson said. “But
we didn’t look at
everything.”
Simpson put Bo’s backpack on top of the file cabinet next to the
window behind Jesse’s desk.
“You guys may as well go back to what you were doing,” Jesse
said.
“Cover’s pretty well blown,”
Molly said.
“Stay on it anyway,” Jesse said.
“I never had any cover to start with,”
Simpson
said.
Mo
lly and Simpson went out. Jesse sat quietly looking at Bo.
“I need something for my eyes,” Bo said between coughs. “I need
a doctor.”
Jesse didn’t say anything for a while. Then he stood.
“Okay, let’s go wash you off,”
he said.
Rinsed and dried, Bo was still red-eyed and puffy-looking, and he still coughed sporadically.
“You call my father?” Bo said.
“We’re working on it,” Jesse
said. “Right now we got you on
possession of a controlled substance with intent to sell, failure to obey a lawful command, threatening a police officer, assaulting a police officer, and being a general major-league fucking jerk.”
“That bitch can’t get away with spraying me like that,” Bo
said.
Jesse smiled. He didn’t say anything. Bo sat in the chair across
the desk staring hard at Jesse.
“So you gonna arrest me?” he said.
“Or what?”
Jesse didn’t answer him. Bo stood up.
“Fuck this,” he said.
“I’m walking out of here.”
“Nope,” Jesse said.
“You think you can stop me?” Bo said.
Jesse laughed. “Of course I can stop you,”
he said. “For
crissake a hundred-and-twenty-pound woman hauled you in here in handcuffs.”
“If you weren’t a cop
…”
“But I am a cop,” Jesse said.
“Sit down.”
Jesse’s voice was still pleasant, but there was a sudden
undertone in it that made Bo uncomfortable. He didn’t want to sit
down. He tried looking hard at Jesse. If Jesse noticed, it didn’t
show. Bo sat down. Jesse picked up the backpack and put it on the desk in front of him and dumped it out. He looked at what he had. A notebook, three ballpoint pens, some Kleenex, a packet of condoms, a ruler, a protractor, two packs of spearmint gum, and a white envelope. He opened the envelope and found four prints of Candace Pennington, lying naked on the ground. Bingo! Her face was
distorted by crying, someone out of the picture was holding her ankles, and Kevin Feeney was holding her wrists. Feeney was smiling. Jesse looked carefully at each print, then he put them faceup on his desk, facing toward Bo, and smiled at him and waited.
Bo didn’t look at the pictures. Jesse let the silence thicken.
Then he said, “Who’s the young
lady?”
“I don’t know,” Bo said.
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