by Linda Barnes
“What now?” Gloria asked. “How much are you gonna share with the Macs?”
“Yeah, here’s the problem: They were pretty nasty when I didn’t get Jessica—my client—Julie’s ID right. So how are they going to react when they find out she’s related, even in a very oblique way, to me?”
“It was a car accident.”
“Hit and run. But only after the guy ran over her two or three times to make sure she was dead. They’re treating it as a homicide and I don’t like it. I mean, this woman comes to me out of the blue and hires me under an alias, and then it turns out she just happens to be the best friend of a woman Sam’s supposed to have killed? If I were a cop, I’d say that stinks.”
“Put it like that, I can see why you don’t want to run it by the cops.”
“Hostile cops.”
“Why not go to Mooney?”
“What I want—what I need is to find out everything I can about Danielle Wilder. How she died and exactly when she died and why Sam’s on the hook for her death, if he actually is. What the feds think they’ve got on him. Why they haven’t made it public.”
“Politics,” Gloria said. “Feds, they got their own agenda.”
Someone tapped lightly on the glass door and Leroy came in smiling. Even smiling, he looks threatening. It’s his size.
“Hey,” he said with a nod at me. “You’re in the money.”
“Me?”
“You gonna drive it around here? In this stinking weather?”
“I rented it, Leroy. I know it’s a piece of junk, but I’m gonna make up my mind soon and buy something serious.”
I wanted a fire engine red Miata. I wanted to live someplace where the weather was always sixty-five degrees with sunny skies and a gentle offshore breeze.
“No, no, I’m talking about the Jag,” Leroy said cheerfully. “I’m talking about that deep blue chunk of heaven. Gianelli’s XK smooth-ass ride.”
“I don’t know where it is.”
He gave me a look. “Well, I do. You didn’t park it in the garage, the old garage? I figured you put it there for safekeeping. I wasn’t gonna tell anybody else.”
“Wait a frickin’ minute. Sam’s Jaguar is in the back garage?” Gloria said.
“Come see. Either that or I’m having some kind of weird delusions, hallucinating and shit. Ask me have I been drinking, why don’t you?”
Gloria couldn’t leave the phones. I followed Leroy out the door and down the gravel path.
When Gloria had the garage rebuilt, only one part of the old building was salvageable, a brick three-door garage that she kept mainly to remember how ugly the place used to be. It was currently used for storage, mostly tools and old records. I hadn’t been inside it in months.
While Leroy yanked up the old-fashioned garage door, my cell rang.
“Cops are here,” Roz said. “Outside in an unmarked, waiting.”
“You know them?”
“Same guys here before, to ask about Jessica Franklin. One black, one white.”
“They didn’t ring the bell?”
“No, just waiting.”
Sam’s car was dusty. I circled around to the front of the Jag. The bumper was bent.
Roz’s voice seemed to reach me from a distance. “Carlotta?”
“Don’t tell them you talked to me,” I said. “You don’t know where I am or when I’ll come back.”
I hung up without waiting for a reply.
The bumper was crumpled where it might have hit something or someone. The car was where I might have parked it. I had the car keys.
There was a connection between my phony Jessica Franklin and the woman Sam was supposed to have killed.
There were cops parked outside my house.
I couldn’t go home.
PART FOUR
TWENTY-ONE
No lock on the office door. Mooney considered wedging a chair under the offending doorknob. He decided against it, eased the folder out of the second drawer on the right, and emptied it on his desktop. Afternoon sunshine, slanting through the grimy window blinds, felt like prying eyes.
He patted the breast pocket of his shirt, stuck the despised reading glasses on his nose, and began, never skipping a word, working slowly, the way he always worked, but conscious that his heart was pounding too quickly in his chest. He wanted to move, not sit. He had a gift for street work, but paperwork was different, a slow, plodding task, sifting and resifting other officers’ reports for tiny golden nuggets. Still, he kept going, because occasionally, mercifully, there came a click, a moment of grace, when a fact shifted in time or space and he saw the case in a new light.
Danielle Wilder’s death wasn’t his case. It hadn’t occurred in his jurisdiction. He’d had to call in favors just to obtain the paper. The resulting file was incomplete; he didn’t even know what was missing, and that made him edgy.
Not so edgy as he had felt doing nothing, not so edgy as he had felt when the Macs barged in with the news: the hit-and-run vic identified, and get this, she was a witness—no, maybe not a wit—but the best friend of that broad got herself killed over in Nausett. TV called it the “Red Ribbon Killing”? Remember? FBI snatched the case; something major, something to do with organized crime.
There were news clips from Cape Cod and Boston papers. The initial stories made Danielle Wilder’s death seem the sort of lurid sex crime that kept mothers up nights waiting till they heard the familiar tread on the steps or got the reluctant, dutiful phone call: I’m home, Ma, safe and sound. What did you think would happen to me, huh?
Mooney had no children, but in some way he didn’t understand or particularly want to examine, he thought of them all as his kids. He was glad he hadn’t been called out to look at the body.
At twenty-seven, Wilder would have been insulted by the word kid. The photo in the Cape Cod Times, probably a high school graduation shot, made her look demure and utterly defenseless, blond and lovely. Young and never to grow old; Mooney hoped there was some kind of grace in that, but the longer he stayed on the force, the more he doubted the Catholic certainties of his childhood. And he was sure as sure could be that when he finally lost his faith, he’d lose his calling, too.
It was a calling, the blue brotherhood, a variation on the priesthood his mother would have chosen for him. If he lost his calling now, after so many years on the force—well, it was late in the day for alternatives.
The Macs were not his favorite team, but they were decent cops. It wouldn’t take them long to make the connection. The FBI had labeled the Nausett killing mob-related. Nausett was mob; mob was Gianelli; the hit and run was Carlyle; Carlyle and Gianelli were an item. Once they followed the dots, Mooney expected an explosion: Red Ribbon Killing linked to Boston hit and run.
He pushed the clippings aside, turned to the slim section labeled NAUSETT. The first officer at the scene, Jerold Heaney, dispatched in response to a 911, Wednesday morning, 6:17 A.M. December 20. Five days before Christmas, it would have been barely light. Cold. Heaney had called for backup, strung yellow crime-scene tape. Heaney’s superior, R. Thurlow, had arrived at 6:29 and set the machine in motion, making the call to the state police. A smalltown force like Nausett’s knew its limitations. When it came to murder, they called in the troopers. The state police had the CSU, the personnel.
Thurlow. Mooney pondered the name, wondered if he’d caught a break.
The scene had been sketched, diagrammed, photographed, videotaped, and searched by a four-man state team. Mooney studied the diagram, committing it to memory. The three-by-five color glossies were divided into three packets. The photographer had set the scene with wide shots showing sparse grass and gravel, dotted with old tombstones. In the distance, a small wooden building was sheathed in scaffolding, undergoing repairs. As Mooney flipped through the first packet, the focus narrowed to a small circle of rocks. The second packet detailed the placement of the body.
Mooney inspected the last packet, the close-ups, seeing them as from a dist
ance, turning the ravaged body into a test dummy instead of a father’s child. Later, after he had cleared the case, he could bring back her personhood, her outraged self. Whether he could bring himself back, he no longer knew.
Both knees raised and bent to her left side. Naked, except for black thong panties dangling from her right ankle. Part of him, the part that could never have taken the vows, noted the curves of breast and thigh, the faded tan lines from last summer’s bikini. The cop in him said: no sexual positioning. So easy to spread those lifeless knees, but the killer had moved them, almost modestly, to the side. Mooney noted the dark bruising along the left side of the body, the swollen and distorted face, the thin red ribbon looped around the neck.
Mooney fingered the video; he didn’t want to requisition a viewing room only to have some eager rookie, or worse, one of the Macs, ask which case he was reviewing.
He wasn’t much of a believer, but he believed this: If a homicide wasn’t cleared in the first twenty-four hours, the chances were good it would never get cleared. The first twenty-four were crucial. In the first twenty-four, if cops moved quickly, identifying the vic, collecting the evidence, interviewing the witnesses, they had their best shot.
A few of the cases that stayed stubbornly unsolved were whodunnits, but most of Boston’s open uncleared cases were nothing of the kind. Mooney was in political trouble and he knew it. Last year’s stats were bad and this year’s likely to be worse. He couldn’t guarantee even a forty percent clear rate, and anything under forty was unacceptable. Seventy-eight percent of his cases came from the same neighborhoods, from Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan, and figured in brief newspaper paragraphs where the victims went unnamed, referred to as young black males. The stories didn’t make the nightly news. Witnesses openly refused to speak to cops. Last week, the family of a fourteen-year-old victim had refused to allow the police in the house.
Mooney realized his lips were pressed into a thin line, his hands clenched. He sucked in a deep breath and made an effort to relax his neck muscles. This Cape thing wasn’t one of those cases. The paper on his desk showed initial progress: the vic ID’d right off the bat, identification made at the scene by the responding officers. That was the thing about small towns: The cops knew the locals.
But evidence at the scene had been sparse; the winter ground rocky and hard. No useful footprints. The man who had called in the body, a cemetery worker named Gordon, hadn’t seen the crime. There were no nearby doors to bang, seeking witnesses.
Mooney paged through the state police documents. Troopers had interviewed the decedent’s acquaintances, but Mooney found no mention of any argument, any violent conflict that might predictably end in murder. Smalltown residents, unafraid of gang retribution, they had seemed eager enough to talk about Danielle Wilder. Still, the clock had ticked past deadline on this one; the case had taken on a refrigerator chill. The FBI had abruptly taken over. Then silence.
Mooney had learned about the secret indictment by luck: A woman he used to date, Magda, was a court reporter. Daily, he had anticipated the arrest warrant, the headlines: MOB BOSS GIANELLI NAMED IN CAPE KILLING.
The headlines never came. The feds might have been hoping that if they kept silent, Gianelli would reenter the country, get caught before he knew they were on to him.
That wouldn’t happen. Mooney had seen to it personally. Not because he owed Gianelli; he didn’t owe Gianelli an ounce of spit. He’d done it for Carlotta, so she wouldn’t prove her stubborn loyalty by giving her lover a phony alibi. Failing that—Mooney had to admit, even given her remarkable blind spot about Sam, she probably wouldn’t go so far as perjury—failing that, so she wouldn’t spend her days at Cedar Junction, never quitting the man who lived for her visits.
At the time, he’d thought he could live with it. Now he wasn’t sure.
When he’d made the split-second decision, he hadn’t known the facts. Mobster and murder; that was all Magda had told him, that Gianelli was connected to a murder, and Mooney had made the easy link and assumed the murder was a mob affair. Murder was murder, sure, but the crooked men who worked the game knew the risks. His informant hadn’t mentioned that this victim was young, female, and lived outside the world of organized crime. She had never hinted that the case was Nausett’s “red ribbon” murder.
Did he know the facts now?
He squinted at the close-ups of the corpse. Was it plausible that the cops had made the ID? He reread the statements, both uncertain, both grounding the identification on a small rose-shaped tattoo on the woman’s ankle. He could buy it; men noticed women’s legs. The woman worked as a paralegal; she’d visited the station on business.
He fingered the piles of paper. No notification of grieving parents, no interviews with stunned siblings. He separated the reports, dividing the interviewees into groups, grouping them by category: family, friends, neighbors, colleagues.
Colleague, colleague, neighbor, colleague. If the mix spoke to the vic’s life, it said she’d worked too many hours.
She had been a legal assistant. Most of those interviewed were personnel from the law office of Hastings and Muir, one of the oldest Cape Cod firms, headed by a Hastings still. Bradley J. Hastings, forty-eight years old, former town selectman, had made the formal ID. Again, Mooney wondered about the girl’s lack of family.
Wilder had worked at Hastings, Muir, three years, almost four, excellent worker, energetic, a go-getter. Hastings was shocked, aggrieved, angry, as if the murder were an insult to the community, to the smalltown expectation of law and order. The interviewer, a trooper named Thorpe, had led the man down expected pathways: When did you last see the victim? Were you aware of any enemies, any arguments, any disputes?
Mooney read a second interview, a third, with increasing frustration. He didn’t know Thorpe or the other troopers who’d conducted the sessions. He didn’t like the pattern of the questions, the follow-ups, the gaps. No one had mentioned Gianelli, much less accused him.
Julie Farmer. The name of the hit-and-run vic stood out like it was printed in neon. Age: twenty-one. So she was even younger than the Nausett vic, Danielle Wilder, who had been her best friend. Danielle had been Julie’s mentor, her idol. He read the brief transcript twice. Julie Farmer had voluntarily come to the Nausett station, consented to the taping. Even with her own words on the page, Mooney found he wasn’t getting what he needed. Had she hesitated before answering, spoken freely, kept things back? She didn’t mention Gianelli by name, but she did talk about a man, an older man, Danielle’s ex-lover, a guy with a reputation as a tough guy…. Maybe the feds had interviewed her again. Maybe she’d remembered the name.
Mooney raised his fingers to the bridge of his nose, adjusted his glasses, massaging the tender area underneath the nose pads. He needed a copy of the federal file, but he didn’t have a single friend left at the bureau who’d be likely to pass it over. He couldn’t risk a formal request. If the feds found out he’d requested the file, their suspicion that he was involved in the leak to Gianelli would harden into certainty.
Dammit, why were the feds even involved? Because Gianelli was organized crime? Mooney tapped his desktop with his pencil point until the lead snapped. The Boston feds were in the doghouse, had been ever since mobster Whitey Bulger had skipped town leaving a legacy of outrage and lawsuits. The revelations kept coming: Senior agents had used Whitey as an informer. In return, they had kept him apprised of government moves against him, including the names of potential witnesses, several of whom had been subsequently murdered. Transfers, trials, and dismissals had followed swiftly.
He could see why the bureau would want to take down Gianelli. Taking down Gianelli would lift their grimy reputation out of the gutter. But how had they made the connection? Where was the evidence linking him to the “red ribbon” crime?
Mooney went back to the photos. Given the lividity, the obvious bruising on the left side, the victim hadn’t been killed in the graveyard. She’d been killed someplace else, then moved
, her body repositioned, the red ribbon and black panties left behind to fuel tabloid headlines.
Where had she died? Where was her car? Why had she been dumped in a cemetery? Was it close, convenient, meaningful? Nausett, on the ocean, had plenty of boats, and a mile or so of shoreline. Why not take the body out to sea?
All Mooney had, besides the piles of paper on his desk, were questions. He didn’t even have a copy of the ME’s report. His trooper buddy hadn’t included it in the file and no way could he request it and not get somebody from the bureau demanding to know why.
He eyed the thin red ribbon, looped around the vic’s neck like an untied bow on a Christmas gift. Had the doer loosened it? When and why? Again why?
He pulled the phone closer, tugging the long cord. He would have to go for the ME’s report, take his chances. The ME might have nothing; the feds might have gone with their own lab, but he doubted it. They were quick enough to take advantage of local resources, the state police lab in Sudbury if not the ME’s office in Boston. He might have to make several calls—
The knock on the door was followed so closely by the two officers, he barely had a chance to cover the file, let alone sweep it into a drawer.
“I must have said, ‘Come in.’ ” Mooney had never liked McHenry, the big man. Too much arrogance there, an old-fashioned bull.
McHenry opened his mouth, but McDonough spoke first. “We got something here, thought we ought to tell you.” The smaller man, ill at ease, rocked slowly on the balls of his feet.
“I knew there had to be more to it, a private eye making a dud ID!” McHenry, pleased with himself, jumped into a rundown of the Nausett case: Sam Gianelli was the mobster the dead girl had dated. Not only was the hit-and-run vic a bosom buddy of the Nausett vic, but Gianelli was cozy with Carlyle. The hit-and-run vic must have been blackmailing Carlyle, threatening to take what she knew about the murder to the cops—
“Motive’s for lawyers.” Mooney kept his voice even, like they were talking about the weather, the remote possibility of snow. “Motive doesn’t put Carlyle behind the wheel.”
