Robert B. Parker's The Devil Wins

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “The furnace in the church.”

  “His duffel bag?”

  “It’s a big furnace. Burnt that up, too. Nothing but old, smelly clothes and a Bible, anyways.”

  “Okay, drag that canvas over here and wrap it around his head.”

  “You really gonna do this?”

  “We are.”

  “But that’s Zevon, man. He was our friend once.”

  “Friends don’t come back to town to fuck up everyone else’s lives. If he wanted to stay my friend, he should have stayed lost. You may not have anything to lose, but I do.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing. We talked this through. We all agreed. It’s too late now, anyway. He’s already more than half-dead. Now, get the canvas and do what I told you. The storm’s blowing in faster than we thought and he’s going to be here soon to get rid of the body. C’mon.”

  The unconscious man moaned a little as the coarse, mildewed fabric was wrapped around his head.

  “What’s the canvas for, anyways?”

  “Think about it.”

  “Oh.”

  “Exactly. You got the tarp ready for him? The rope?”

  “Yeah.”

  Outside, there was already six inches on the ground and the roads were slick from the layer of sleet that had come before the snow. As he swung around to back up to the bay door, he checked his rearview mirror and saw two quick flashes of lightning and heard two muted claps of thunder. It was done. Zevon was dead. Now the time had come to play his part in keeping the past buried. Yet he understood that this particular episode of thunder and lightning, like their prior sins, was of their own doing and pushed them even further away from heaven than they already were. That the past was unrelenting and that no grave was deep enough to keep it buried forever.

  3

  Jesse hadn’t slept a wink after getting home. He hadn’t tried. He did manage to polish off two Black Labels. That’s why he’d headed home in the first place. Sleep hadn’t ever been a part of the plan, not really. It was always about the drinks. Drinkers are great rationalizers, spinning tales that only they will hear. Tales only they would believe. Jesse kept a bottle of something in his desk drawer at the station, but he didn’t generally prefer drink at work or when the sun was up. Coming home, having a drink before dinner, then one or two afterward, was sometimes how he got through the day. He knew his bottle of Johnnie Walker was home waiting for him like a faithful wife. He’d had a wife once, just not a faithful one.

  His ritual entailed pouring the drink—sometimes on the rocks, sometimes in a tall glass with soda—stirring it with his finger, licking the scotch off his finger, raising a toast to his poster of Ozzie Smith, and taking that first sip. Sometimes he savored it. Sometimes, like that night, it was open wide and down the hatch. Any confirmed drinker knows that ritual is as integral to the addiction as the drinking itself. Dix was fond of saying that ritual was a secondary reinforcement. Jesse laughed at the notion of secondary reinforcement. He liked the drinking well enough all by itself. He enjoyed the ritual on its own merits. He’d gotten some food in him, taken a shower, and watched a half hour of weather reports before heading back to work.

  Whatever sleep Jesse had managed came on the cot in his office. He was still on the cot, staring up at the ceiling, when the first dull rays of light filtered in through his window. He noticed the window was no longer being pelted and the howl of the wind had been reduced to a whisper. Morning had brought with it a soft hush. Then there was a knock at his office door.

  “Come,” he said.

  Luther “Suitcase” Simpson came into the office, a lack of sleep evident on his puffy, still-boyish face and in his bloodshot eyes. He was moving more slowly these days, and not from lack of sleep. It was painful for Jesse to watch. A big man, Suit had been quite the high school football player in his day. But he’d been gut-shot last spring and was only now getting back to work.

  “Any coffee out there?” Jesse asked, swinging his legs off the cot.

  “Sure, but I wouldn’t drink it. Better to save what’s left and use it to strip paint.”

  Jesse stood, stretched the tension out of his muscles. His right shoulder aching from the damp air.

  “Making a fresh pot of coffee against your religion?”

  Suit reddened. “I’m not Molly, Jesse. You know I’m no good at this stuff. You got to get me back on the street.”

  Simpson had been on light duty since his return and chafed at working the front desk. Worse, Molly Crane had taken Suit’s place in the patrol rotation.

  “I know this is tough for you, Suit. I already stuck my neck out by bringing you back this soon.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No need. I’d be mad at you if you didn’t want to get back out there.”

  Suit smiled that broad, goofy smile of his. Jesse’s opinion meant everything to him. He’d always dreamed of living up to Jesse Stone’s standards, of being a cop good enough to work in a big city like L.A. Living up to Jesse is what had gotten him shot. He knew it. Jesse knew it, too. That’s what worried him.

  Jesse asked, “You going to the counseling sessions?”

  The smile vanished from Suit’s face. He reddened again.

  “Yeah, Jesse.”

  “Getting shot is a serious thing, Suit. It screws with your head. I can’t put you back out there if you’re going to doubt yourself.”

  “I’m going. I said I was going.”

  “Okay, let’s talk real police work. The donut shop open?”

  Simpson laughed.

  “I went and got some at five o’clock on the nose. They’re last night’s leftovers, but they’re good.”

  Jesse put up a new pot of coffee, ate a hardened jelly donut, and asked Suit to fill him in on the storm damage.

  “Storm’s almost blown itself out already,” Suit said. “We had gusts up to sixty-five, but nothing now. Dumped lots of snow. About a foot, give or take. And it’s that real wet, heavy snow. You know.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You get a lot of that wet snow back in L.A., Jesse?”

  “Cute. You want to earn some more time on the desk?”

  For a second, Suit thought Jesse was serious.

  “Anyway, there were a few trees and power lines down. I had to dispatch some cars to block roads off and put down some flares while the repair crews did their thing. There were three fender benders. Reports already filed. Only serious thing was a partial building collapse.”

  “Anybody injured?”

  “Nah. It was one of those old abandoned factory buildings on Trench Alley. Molly’s over there handling it with the fire department.”

  Then, as if on cue, Molly’s voice crackled through the desk speaker.

  “Unit Four to dispatch, over.”

  “Dispatch, over,” Suit said.

  “Is Jesse up yet? Over.”

  “Unit Four, Jesse’s right here, over.”

  Jesse dispensed with protocol. “What’s up, Molly?”

  “You better get over here, Jesse. Right now.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “We’ve got a body.”

  “Someone was killed in the collapse?”

  “Someone was killed, all right, but not in the collapse. The body’s in a tarp.”

  4

  Trench Alley was a dingy, crooked street in the ass end of the Swap. Backed up against Sawtooth Creek and dead-ended by Pennacook Inlet, it was as Dickensian as Paradise got. Even scenic New England villages need garages, body shops, cabinetmakers, plumbing supply houses, welders, and self-storage units.

  Jesse pulled up behind a fire truck. Molly Crane’s cruiser was parked across the street, half on the sidewalk. The fire chief’s red Jeep Cherokee was parked behind Molly’s unit. When Jesse walked around the fire truck he was surprised to see
Molly, Robbie Wilson, and the entire crew of firemen standing in the middle of the street, boot-deep in snow. But when he looked at the building in question, Jesse’s surprise faded away. The building was a squat red-brick affair with plywood where windows used to be, the plywood covered in generations of frayed handbills and posters about forgotten bands and closed musicals at the Village Playhouse. The building’s front right corner had collapsed into the street. You could look into the building and see that part of the back wall had collapsed inward as well.

  “Robbie,” Jesse said.

  “Chief Stone.”

  “Unstable, huh?”

  “Badly. If I didn’t get your girl out of there when I did, you might’ve had two bodies on your hands.”

  Molly bristled at being called a girl. She was only two or three years younger than Wilson and disliked him even more than Jesse did. Jesse could see Molly was about to let Wilson have it. He shook his head no at her.

  “Robbie, excuse us. I need to talk to Officer Crane for a minute.”

  “Take your time. I’m not letting anyone in there, stiff or no stiff.”

  As they walked toward Molly’s cruiser, she kept turning back to stare at Robbie Wilson. Wilson was pretty lucky that looks couldn’t actually kill.

  “That obnoxious little bastard,” Molly said. “I should’ve kicked his ass in front of his men. Then we’d see who he’d be calling a girl.”

  They sat in the front of Jesse’s Explorer, the heater blowing full blast.

  “Relax, Molly. Two weeks back on the street and you’re already cursing like a sailor.”

  She smiled in spite of herself. Jesse could do that to her.

  “And no matter what he called you, he was right to get you out of that building. I can’t afford you getting hurt.”

  “So you really do love me,” she said.

  “You know I do, but that’s not it. With Suit on desk duty and Gabe Weathers still in rehab for his injuries, the department’s two men short.”

  She punched him in his left biceps. Now it was his turn to smile. Then he wiped it away.

  “The body in the tarp,” he said.

  “A passerby called the building collapse in to the desk. I had the Swap, so Suit sent me over here. It was still pretty dark when I arrived on scene. I had to look inside to see if anyone was hurt. When I got into the building I saw that another part of the roof, toward the left rear of the building, had collapsed onto some metal plates. One of the plates had been dislodged by the debris so that the plate was forced upward like one end of a seesaw. When I shined my flash in behind the plate, I saw the tarp. At first I didn’t think anything of it. Maybe some forgotten equipment or building supplies or something. But when I looked at it under the flash for a minute, I saw that it was bound up with rope and shaped like a body. When I kneeled down and stuck my head into the hole, it was pretty obviously a body. I couldn’t tell much about it from looking. I pushed the tarp and it felt like flesh underneath. And before you say anything, Jesse, my hand was gloved.”

  Jesse put up his palms. “I didn’t say anything.”

  “But you would have. I know you, Jesse.”

  “Maybe. Back to the body in the tarp.”

  “Funny thing,” Molly said.

  “What?”

  “The tarp was pretty clean and the flesh gave when I pushed, but pushed back. It didn’t seem frozen or in rigor.”

  “That’s a lot to tell from one push with your hand. No insult, Molly, but—”

  “Did I say it was one push? I pushed a few times. Then . . .” She hesitated.

  “Do I even want to hear this?”

  “Probably not.” She said it anyway. “I climbed down into the hole.”

  “You what? It’s a crime scene, Molly. You know better than—”

  “I had to check to see if the victim might be alive.”

  “Molly!”

  “I swear, Jesse. I wasn’t trying to be a hero. I thought I was doing the right thing.”

  “And . . .”

  “That’s when Napoleon showed up. Suit must have called the FD after he sent me over here. Robbie ordered me out of the building. He had his guys practically drag me out of the hole when I didn’t hop to. But for what it’s worth, I don’t think the victim was alive. He was physically unresponsive to my touch and to my verbal commands. No movement that I could detect. And when I put my hand on where I thought the chest was, there didn’t seem to be any respiration.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I think the vic’s a male. Would be pretty tall if you stood him upright. Maybe six-three or -four. Broad across the shoulders.”

  “But you don’t think he’d been there very long?” Jesse asked.

  “That’s my gut feeling. Of course, I don’t know these things like you would. In L.A. you must have seen bodies in all sorts of places.”

  “Not in a snow-covered factory, Molly. We didn’t get much of that sort of thing in L.A. All right, let’s get back over there and see if we can’t get Chief Robbie to let us retrieve the body.”

  But she didn’t move. There was something else besides Robbie Wilson bothering her. Jesse could see it on her face. He put a hand on her shoulder.

  “It’s okay, Molly. You did good. I’m proud of you for—”

  “It’s not that, Jesse.”

  “Then what?”

  “I can’t put it in words. It’s just when I was down there with the vic . . . I . . . it was just strange. It felt like I had a connection to him.”

  Jesse nodded. It was like that sometimes. On most occasions, a body was just a body to a cop. It wasn’t callousness. It was an attitude born of repeated exposure and self-protection. But there were moments when you couldn’t help but feel a kind of weird connection to the victim.

  “It happens. I know. Don’t beat yourself up over it. Now, let’s go,” he said.

  They got out of the SUV. Just then an inhuman groan filled the air.

  “Watch it!” one of the firemen shouted. “Stand back. She’s going!”

  The ground shook beneath their feet. Jesse and Molly ran around the fire truck and saw that the building was gone. The roof lay halfway into Trench Alley. It had taken down the rusted cyclone fence that had surrounded the empty, rubble-filled lot next door.

  “Everybody okay, Robbie?” Jesse said.

  “Fine. We’re all clear. You both all right, Chief Stone?”

  “We’re good.”

  “That stiff of yours is good and buried now.”

  Not for long, Jesse Stone thought. Not for long.

  5

  Jesse was wrong. It was Friday morning before the body in the blue tarp could be retrieved. The nor’easter had blown in Monday evening. The building had gone down Tuesday morning. It was late Thursday afternoon before the building inspector gave the go-ahead for the site to be cleared. Whoever said that there was less red tape to deal with in small towns was wrong. It had taken a full-court press by Jesse, the medical examiner, and Captain Healy to get the village selectmen to push the building inspector into action. As usual, it was Bill Marchand who did the last bit of persuading.

  Now Jesse, Molly Crane, Captain Healy, Chief Wilson, and the medical examiner’s crew stood on the corner of Algonquin Street and Trench Alley, just beyond the safety barrier set up by the demolition crew. Technically, there was no reason for Molly’s presence, but Jesse knew she would have found an excuse to be there anyway. For all the ass-covering Molly had done for him over the years, for how she looked out for him, he owed her more than he could say. Allowing her to be there was the least he could do, though he was ambivalent about her being back on the street.

  Most of it was selfishness. He liked having her at the station with him. They were good together. More than that, he trusted her. She was organized. Unlike Suit and the other guys who worked the desk
and dispatch, Molly could do her job and brew a pot of coffee without being overwhelmed. Having her at the station house also made dealing with female suspects much easier. But the truth was that when it came to Molly, Jesse’s attitudes were a little old-fashioned. Although she was as good a cop as there was on the Paradise PD, Molly had four kids and a husband at home. Jesse had too many officers killed in the line of duty during his tenure. He had almost lost two more in the last six months and he didn’t think he could face Molly’s family if anything happened to her on his watch.

  Molly had been willing to trade off her desire to be on patrol for a job with a regular schedule, one that allowed her to cook dinner for her family and participate in some of the kids’ after-school activities. Now that the kids were older, Molly had been itching to get on the street again. With Suit and Gabe out and no money in the budget for new hires, Jesse had no choice but to let Molly scratch that itch. He only hoped she wouldn’t develop a taste for the street.

  “Come on, come on,” Molly said aloud without meaning to.

  “Relax,” Jesse said, looking at his watch. “Your pal in the blue tarp isn’t going anywhere. Should only be a few more minutes.”

  “What’s your girl even doing here, Chief?” Robbie Wilson wanted to know.

  “She’s not my girl, Robbie. She’s the best cop I’ve got. Maybe you want to start showing her some respect.”

  Wilson threw up his hands. “Jeez, so sensitive. All right. All right. I’m sorry, Mol—Officer Crane.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “You realize any crime scene evidence is probably screwed beyond hope,” Healy said to Jesse. “And what hasn’t been tainted has been carted away with the line of dump trucks that have been passing us for the last hour.”

  Jesse nodded. “That’s why I asked your forensics team to handle the crime scene. If there’s anything left, your team is better equipped to find it.”

  A heavyset man in a blue hard hat and reflective lime-green vest over a dust-covered Carhartt jacket came running up Trench Alley. He nearly slipped on the slick pavement. He yammered into a black microphone as he ran. It squawked back at him. By the time he got to the barrier, the fat man was sweating and panting. There was a shocked look on his face.