Stone's Throw

by Mike Lupica

  “I know you don’t need my guys,” Lundquist had said on the phone. “But my boss got the ass last time we didn’t have our people there first thing.”

  It had been when Lily Cain had shot herself, on the other side of town. A member of one of Paradise’s royal families, the way Thomas Lawton was.

  “We’ve all got bosses,” Jesse said.

  “You don’t,” Lundquist said.

  Jesse had called Dev Chadha, the medical examiner. Called Molly Crane, knowing there would be holy hell to pay later in the morning if he didn’t, and Suit, and Gabe Weathers. They all knew how crucial the first two hours were, that missed evidence—whether it was a suicide or a homicide—could be devastating to an investigation later on. Suit liked to tell Jesse that he didn’t just do things by the book, he acted sometimes like he’d written the book.

  It was past two in the morning now, a couple hours after Jesse had discovered the body and the SIG P365, the expensive XL model, next to Neil’s right hand in the dirt.

  R.I.P., Jesse thought.

  The body of Neil O’Hara had finally been bagged and loaded into the van and taken to Dev’s lab. Jesse had once again reminded Suit and Molly that only amateurs wanted a body transported away from the scene as quickly as possible.

  “Can I do the rest of it?” Molly Crane said, grinning at him. “By now, pretty sure I know it by heart.”

  “Knock yourself out,” Jesse said.

  “You want your ME’s eyes on the scene as long as possible,” Molly said.

  Suit picked it up from there.

  “Can’t have too many sets of eyes,” Suit said.

  “Am I really that entertaining to the two of you?” Jesse said.

  “Endlessly,” Molly said.

  They had been through this enough times by now, Jesse and Molly and Suit, to know that they weren’t disrespecting the victim, or his memory, with humor or snark. They weren’t trying to normalize what had happened, whatever had happened, and how Neil O’Hara, a good guy, had ended up here. But Neil wasn’t Jesse’s friend now, or mayor. Or husband of Kate. He was their vic. He was whatever case number Molly would give him when they were at the station later, and what was going to be a shitshow began almost immediately.

  Molly said, “Why would Neil kill himself?”

  “If he killed himself,” Jesse said.

  “Sorry,” she said. “If.”

  “You want the whole list, or just a partial?” Jesse said. “Problems at home. He got caught embezzling money. He found out he was sick. He found out Kate was sick. Or she’d been cheating on him. He found out her secrets, or had some of his own. Or just one big one. Maybe it was just depression.”

  They’d stepped away from the grave.

  “Twenty-five million people in this country suffer from depression every year,” he said. Almost talking to himself now. “Half of the people who kill themselves suffer from major depression. If you include alcoholics who are goddamn depressed, it goes from fifty percent to seventy-five.”

  He stopped and smiled at both of them.

  “You learn a lot about depression in rehab,” he said. “Their position is that safe is a hell of a lot better than sorry.”

  “He’s the chief,” Suit said to Molly. “He even knows shit he didn’t learn in rehab.”

  Gabe had taken foot castings from the grass around the grave. Dev had cut Neil O’Hara’s fingernails before he left, and checked them, and his hands, for gunpowder residue. Jesse had been the one to bag the SIG, and handed it over to Lundquist’s detectives, Crandall and Scoppetta, both solid cops with whom he had worked before.

  Jesse walked away from Molly and Suit, wanting to think, wanting to absorb the scene, making a long, slow circle, walking toward the ocean and then back around, toward the woods. The Throw. Not prime real estate now. This was a crime scene, involving a man who, even before he became mayor, when he was just a member of the Board, had saved Jesse’s job more than once when Jesse was still a drunk.

  With all that, Jesse couldn’t help himself, he felt the way he did when he was a kid before the first pitch of a game, a combination of excitement and adrenaline and even fear. If it was suicide, he would find out why. If it was murder, made to look like suicide, he would find out who did that to Neil O’Hara, because he owed him that.

  He didn’t need Dix, his therapist, to explain why something as bad as this made the cop in him feel this good. Dix knew. He’d been a cop himself. A cop was who Jesse was now. Sometimes all he was.

  Peter Perkins came walking over to them, from the west side of the property. He’d been over to Neil’s house, said his car was in the garage.

  “You go through the house?” Jesse said.

  “I was waiting for you to give me the go-ahead.”

  “Go ahead,” Jesse said.

  Jesse told Molly and Suit to make another sweep of the property, and then another one after that. Jesse told them he was going to drive over to Neil’s old house, the one on Stiles Island in which he’d lived before he and his wife separated, and break the news to his wife.

  “Estranged wife,” Molly said.

  “Still his wife,” Jesse said.

  “You sure you want to be the one?” Molly said.

  Jesse knew what she meant. Jesse had been involved with Kate O’Hara once, the last relationship she’d had before she’d married Neil. It hadn’t lasted long, but had been fairly intense while it did. He was still drinking then. Sometimes he wondered if it was as intense as he remembered, or if it just felt that way because he was still a drunk.

  “It should be me,” Jesse said. “He was my friend. She’s still my friend, even though I haven’t seen much of her lately.”

  He noticed Molly staring past him then, out toward the woods in the distance, her eyes suddenly wide, her focus nearly fervid, everything about her completely alert. He had seen this look from her plenty of times before, the full force of her directed at someone, or something.

  “What’s wrong?” Jesse said.

  “Thought I saw a ghost,” Molly Crane said.

  THREE

  Sometimes Jesse thought he would rather find a dead body, bullet through the eye, than talk to the survivors, especially when they were survivors he knew.

  Not only knew.

  But with whom he had history.

  He assumed by now, because Paradise was such a small town, that the only people who didn’t know he had history with Kate Alexander O’Hara were either dead or in Europe.

  Jesse and Kate had broken off their relationship long before she started seeing Neil. After that, Neil and Kate had gotten very serious, very quickly. Both of them had been married before. Jesse knew how much Kate wanted to be married again. Six months after she and Neil had started dating, they were holding a Paradise wedding, with all the trimmings, in that Episcopal church on Main Street. Then he heard they separated about six months ago. She was still living in the house on Stiles Island, in a small gated community called The Bluffs, even though there weren’t any bluffs within a couple miles. Neil had moved to a house in town.

  Jesse had been to the Stiles Island house for dinner after Neil had been elected, and drove there now, over the Stiles Island Bridge, not needing Waze, remembering where Neil and Kate had lived when they were together. He had considered waiting until the sun was up, but then couldn’t think of one good reason why that would make what he had to do any easier. This was the modern world of social media, after all. No matter how much you tried to button up news like this, it would get out. Why? Because it always did, because trying to stop Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and all the rest of it was like trying to stop a speeding train.

  The information highway, Jesse thought. What a joy.

  As he got out of the car, he wished now he had brought Molly with him.

  There were no lights from inside the house, but wh
y would there be at this time of night? Jesse took in a lot of air, felt as if he let out even more, headed up the walk.

  As he did, there was a splash of light in front of the house, and Kate O’Hara had opened the front door.

  “I was afraid I might startle you,” he said.

  “You live alone,” she said, “you go with a doorbell cam these days.”

  Then she said, “Something’s happened to Neil, hasn’t it?”

  She was as beautiful as ever, even with her senses clearly on high alert now, even having just been awakened, hair shorter than it was the last time he’d seen her, wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt that read NOT ARGUING. EXPLAINING.

  “Let’s go inside,” Jesse said.

  “Was he in some kind of accident?” she said.

  “Not out here,” Jesse said.

  “You can tell me out here as well as you can tell me inside,” she said. “Goddamn it, Jesse, what happened?”

  He stood there on the front porch and told her what he’d found. It was as if all the air came out of her once he did, and she started to slide down the doorframe. He caught her before she fell and walked her inside and sat her down on the couch in the living room and turned on the antique light at one end of it. She curled into a corner of the couch and hugged herself, gently rocking from side to side. Jesse sat at the other end of the couch. Everyone reacted differently, with both shock and grief. Some cried, some got hysterical. Some people collapsed within themselves the way Kate had. Some showed no reaction at all.

  “Tell me what you found,” she said.

  He told her what he’d discovered in the shallow grave. The gun next to him. He asked when the last time she’d seen him was. She said three or four days ago, she couldn’t remember exactly which one, he was stopping around all the time, always talking about wanting them to try again. She was rambling. Jesse let her go.

  Just like that, she stopped herself.

  “Neil killed himself?” she said. “Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “I’m telling you that he might have,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean he did. This all just happened.”

  He thought of a case Sunny had worked on, one of the principals in it made to look like a suicide victim. But it wasn’t one. And it didn’t matter.

  “Say it was,” Jesse said. “Could you possibly have seen it?”

  She waited before answering.

  “Could I possibly have seen it?” she said. “You mean if I’d tried a little harder or cared a little more?”

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” Jesse said.

  “He’d been under a lot of pressure because of the land deal, but he was always under some kind of pressure,” she said. “Maybe he was showing signs of depression and I just missed them. But then he’d always done a good job of hiding that side of himself.”

  “He was depressed about not being able to stop the deal from going through?”

  “That, mostly,” Kate O’Hara said. “But there was more. He kept thinking we were going to get back together, no matter how many times I told him, as gently as I could, that wasn’t going to happen. His world had gotten smaller. I wanted mine to expand, and not here. My honest opinion? I think events were just ganging up on him.” She rubbed her eyes, hard. “Is it impossible for me to believe that he might have killed himself? It’s not.”

  She sighed.

  “Neil was a pleaser, Jesse,” she said. “But it didn’t help him this time. The majority of the people in town wanted this sale. He felt he should have done more to persuade them they were wrong.”

  “He told me one time that he thought he knew what it would be like to be mayor,” Jesse said. “But he hadn’t signed on to feel like a real estate agent closing a deal.”

  “He was almost morally opposed to this deal,” she said. “But he was a politician, too, which made him a pragmatist. It was another reason why this was eating him up inside.”

  “Might there have been money problems in his life?”

  She said, “Not having to do with me.”

  Jesse shook his head. “Didn’t mean that, either.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’m still trying to process this.”

  “Lot to process,” Jesse said.

  “Maybe he got tired of fighting,” she said. “I feel guilty now that I couldn’t get as obsessed about the deal as he was. But when we did get together, it was all he wanted to talk about. He even wanted to have dinner last night, as a matter-of-fact. I’ll always regret turning him down.”

  “No way you could have known.”

  “I just didn’t want to hear about The Throw all over again,” she said. “Does that make me a bad person?”

  Jesse was already thinking he should leave now, talk to her again later. They hadn’t been alone together in a long time. But whatever they’d had, for as long as they’d had it, there was still something in the air they were breathing, and he wondered if she still felt it as well. Or maybe he had it all wrong. The older he got, the less he knew about women. Proof being Sunny. He’d thought what he and Sunny had was damn near perfect, until it wasn’t.

  Suddenly a single tear appeared on her cheek. She reached up absently and brushed it away.

  “Neil . . . ,” she said. She stopped, then started again. “Neil is what this town is supposed to be, as quaint a notion as that is.”

  “I know,” Jesse said, because he did know.

  There was nothing more for now. Jesse stood. So did she. She covered the few feet between them and gently kissed him on the cheek. Everything was familiar again as soon as she did, the feel of her, the smell of her. He started to put his arms around her, almost by habit, but did not.

  “It was nice of you to tell me in person,” she said.

  “I felt I owed it to you.”

  “You never owed me anything,” she said.

  She walked him to the door.

  “I owe him,” Jesse said.

  “Somebody once said Neil was a friend behind your back,” Kate said.

  He smiled at her now, and shrugged.

  “I feel like there’s something more I should say,” he said. “But beats the hell out of me what it might be.”

  “I couldn’t live with him any longer,” she said. “But I still loved him.”

  Jesse gave her a long look.

  “Do you think he killed himself?” Kate O’Hara said.

  “Beats the hell out of me,” Jesse said again.

  FOUR

  Molly sat across from Jesse, their usual window table at Daisy Dyke’s diner, just after seven in the morning, neither one of them having slept. They were meeting the new mayor, Gary Armistead, at the station in an hour.

  Overture to the shitshow, Jesse thought.

  Daisy was waiting on them. She already knew what had happened to Neil O’Hara, whom she said had eaten breakfast here almost every morning, including yesterday. Jesse asked what they had talked about. Daisy said Neil had wanted to know if she might be the last person in the state of Massachusetts calling herself a dyke. Daisy had informed them there were still Dyke Marches in various locations across the country every June.

  “He told me he’d pay if I had one down Main Street,” Daisy said. She shook her head.

  “Goddamn, this is a kick in the nuts,” Daisy said.

  Her hair was streaked with blue this spring. When Molly remarked on it, Daisy said she’d seen an old picture of Lady Gaga with blue hair and decided to go for it, what the hell, you were only gay once.

  She poured both of them more coffee.

  “How’s Sunny?” she said to Jesse now.

  “In L.A.,” he said. “But we’d decided to take a time-out before she left.”

  “You think I didn’t already know that, putz?” she said.

  When she walked away, Molly said, “Did you ask Kate
if Neil owned a gun?”

  “Right before I pulled away,” Jesse said. “She said he hated guns. But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t have put his hands on one. She said anybody could these days.”

  “The staties already ran the one we found,” she said. “Not even a 4473.”

  Proof of ownership.

  “So it came from where most guns come from,” Jesse said.

  “Somewhere,” Molly said.

  Jesse drank coffee. “I can’t see him doing this,” he said.

  “I knew him practically my whole life,” Molly said. “Neither can I.”

  Jesse stared out the window.

  “Something’s bothering you,” she said.

  “A lot is bothering me,” he said.

  “Personal or professional?” she said.

  “Professional,” he said.

  “That means you don’t want to talk about Sunny,” Molly said.

  “Daisy took care of that.”

  “So she did,” Molly said. “Putz.”

  “Seems to be the consensus,” he said.

  “So what’s the professional?” she said.

  “Where were the footprints?” he said. “That’s one thing. Other than mine, there were no footprints around that grave.”

  “It had rained earlier in the evening,” Molly said. “Maybe he did it before it rained.”

  “Or somebody just dumped him there and then brought something with him to cover his tracks, from the end of the dirt road and back,” Jesse said. “Especially back, if he’d carried the body to the grave.”

  “Lot of work,” Molly said.