Stone's Throw

by Mike Lupica

  Now here he was.

  Go to Paradise, Billy said, find out who can be bought and who can’t, who needs to be persuaded—that’s the word Billy used, persuaded—to come around to Billy’s side on this land deal. Make this easy just so it doesn’t get hard.

  With a handshake on Crow getting a piece of the deal when it went through.

  “We go back, Crow,” Billy said. “The reason we don’t have to write things down is because I know how this goes if I try to screw you on the back end.”

  Just like that, Crow was on his way back to Paradise. But was he doing it because he was betting on the come, or because he wanted to see Molly Crane again?

  He’d been watching her for a few days before he showed himself to her that night at The Throw. She didn’t know he was watching her. No one ever saw Crow if he didn’t want them to. He finally wanted her to see him that night, even if he knew it would land him in Stone’s office. Crow didn’t care. It would get him into the room with her, even though Stone would be there, too.

  Crow had never felt this way about a woman in his life, even after just one night with her.

  One night in Paradise.

  Thinking of it that way should have been funny, or dumbassed. Only it wasn’t.

  For now he sat in his rented car down the street from Kate O’Hara’s house on Stiles Island, having bluffed his way past the guy at the gate, wondering how he wanted to play it with her, thinking that maybe she knew more than she said she knew that night before Stone found the body. She’d told him that night that she thought her estranged husband—she called him that every time, stepping on “estranged” pretty hard—had grown increasingly skeptical that the land deal, even with the money involved, was the best thing for the town. Something about her, though, he liked. Maybe because she was smart. The way Molly was smart.

  “It’s as if Neil can’t see beyond the town line anymore,” Kate told Crow that night he went to her house. “Or past the Paradise in which he grew up. Then he ended in the middle of all this. And in a lot more pain than he lets on.”

  “Was it the land deal causing it?” Crow had said.

  She’d given him a long look and finally said, “Ask him when you catch up with him.”

  Crow could tell sometimes when a woman wanted it. Not always. Any man who told you they always knew was full of shit. Did Kate O’Hara want something to happen that night? Did it really matter? Crow wouldn’t be around long enough to find out.

  He thought Molly still wanted it, though. No matter how much she smart-mouthed him.

  He drank coffee out of his thermos and watched the house. Something had brought him here today the way something told him that Kate O’Hara might have been holding back. Maybe if she came out of the house he would follow her. Give him something else to do.

  Molly.

  He couldn’t keep her out of his head for long. He wanted to see her again, he knew that. He didn’t like most women, even the ones he’d slept with. He’d always liked her, though, even before they’d ended up together. He liked Stone, too, even though he trusted Jesse Stone about as much as Stone trusted him.

  What a place.

  There were other cars parked on the street. He was between two of them. Nothing to see for the people walking the street, the mailman, people walking their dogs. Move along.

  He had been there about an hour when the black Jag pulled up in front of Kate O’Hara’s house.

  Then Ed Barrone got out and walked straight to her front door. When Kate O’Hara opened it, he went inside.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The corner of The Throw to which Thomas Lawton directed Jesse was at the far northwest corner of the property, where it backed up to the golf club Ed Barrone wanted to expand as part of his vision for this land.

  Lawton was staring at Jesse, hands on hips, when Jesse pulled up on the dirt road and got out of his Explorer.

  “Took you long enough,” Lawton said.

  “What,” Jesse said, “you didn’t hear the siren over the sound of the waves?”

  Thomas Lawton was taller than Jesse, clearly a gym rat from the way he was ripped underneath the tight polo shirts he favored. Blond hair cropped close to his head. Rolex watch as big as a baseball.

  When Jesse was close enough to him, Lawton pointed at a new headstone and said, “Look at this shit.”

  The headstone was splattered with red paint, but still visible underneath was Lawton’s name, his date of birth, and what they both knew was the date when the members of the Board would vote on whether to approve the sale of the land or not. Then they’d open the envelope with the sealed bids inside and announce the winner of the land. Like an awards ceremony.

  Or a game show.

  For a guy like Lawton, who talked very big and acted just as tough, Jesse thought he might cry.

  “I thought you’d hired security,” Jesse said.

  “Not twenty-four/seven,” he said.

  “Shame,” Jesse said.

  “Maybe I ought to put up one of these stones myself,” Lawton said. “Put that little shit Ben Gage’s name on it. And use his real blood.”

  “You know he and his girlfriend are missing, right?” Jesse said.

  “You want me to feel bad about that, the grief they’ve caused me?” Lawton said. “You know what I’d call the loss of a couple of tree huggers? A start.”

  Jesse knelt down and looked at the letters and the numbers. They looked like all the rest. Same size. Same style with the inscription. Ben Gage and Blair Richmond weren’t around. The resistance work went on, clearly.

  Jesse looked up at Lawton.

  “You always have a lot to say about them,” he said. “You got any thought on what might have happened to them?”

  He stood so they were facing each other. Probably closer than Lawton liked. But he didn’t back up.

  “Yeah, Stone,” Lawton said. “I’m this close to hitting the jackpot, but I’m suddenly going to start bumping off people in my way. You can’t possibly be looking at me for Neil O’Hara.”

  Jesse smiled. “Should I be?”

  “Kiss my ass,” Lawton said.

  He walked over to the headstone, maybe as a way of getting out of Jesse’s airspace, and pointed to it and said, “So what are you going to do about this?”

  “Treat it like what it is,” Jesse said. “A threat. Interview all the other members of SOB. Tell them that whoever did this just upped the ante.”

  He knew he was lying. It didn’t mean Lawton had to know. He was just telling Lawton what he wanted to hear.

  “Do these idiots really think they can stop us at this point?” Lawton said. “The sale is going to go through, and there’s nothing they can do about it.”

  “How come your father never put the land up for sale?” Jesse said.

  “I think he loved this town more than he loved me,” Lawton said. “But I don’t. Love the town, I mean. He made me promise to him, when he was dying, that I’d keep it protected and keep it in the family. I swore I would.” Lawton shrugged. “But the old man screwed up. He trusted me.”

  “You don’t have enough money already?” Jesse said.

  “Are you drunk?” Lawton said, then grinned and added, “No offense.”

  “None taken,” Jesse said.

  “You never have enough,” Lawton said.

  “You think selling it is the right thing for the town?”

  Lawton barked out a laugh that sounded more than somewhat like a growl to Jesse.

  “Little late in the game to start worrying about the rich getting richer in Paradise, wouldn’t you say?”

  He walked over to the motorbike he’d left leaning against a tree near the road, the one on which Jesse would sometimes see him tooling around town, much too fast.

  “And so you know?” Lawton called out to Jesse. “As soon as the deal
is done, I will put this town in my rearview mirror forever.”

  Jesse saluted him.

  “Who doesn’t love a happy ending?” he said to Lawton.

  He had gotten back behind the wheel of the Explorer when Crow called and said, “It’s your trusty sidekick.”

  Jesse told him he was neither trusty nor a sidekick.

  “Figure of speech, Kemosabe,” Crow said.

  TWENTY-THREE

  They were on a stretch of beach near where Jesse lived. Jesse had brought coffee from Daisy Dyke’s. When he ordered two, Daisy had asked who the other was for and Jesse had told her Crow.

  Daisy said, “Let me get him another cup so I can spit in it.”

  “He swears he’s a law-abiding citizen now,” Jesse had said, “and friend of the local police.”

  “Yeah,” Daisy said, “and I’m straighter than the Duchess of Cambridge.”

  Jesse and Crow sat on a piece of driftwood. When Jesse told him what Daisy Dyke had said, Crow grinned and made a tomahawk chop with his free hand.

  “How’s Molly feeling?” Crow said.

  “You heard.”

  “Small town,” Crow said. “Big mouths.”

  “I run into a lot of that,” Jesse said. “When we find out who hit her, she is quite anxious to get at least one free swing in.”

  He sipped some coffee. Crow had poured his into his fancy thermos. Jesse stared out at the water and said, “You need to stay away from Molly.”

  “Be Molly’s call on something like that, wouldn’t it?”

  “Not with me around.”

  Crow was staring out at the water himself.

  “Always wanted to ask you,” he said. “If it came down to it, would you have shot me the way you did Jimmy Macklin?”

  “If you’d drawn down on me the way he did, sure.”

  “I would have known better.”

  “So why’d you call?” Jesse said.

  “Ed Barrone visited the widow O’Hara a little while ago,” Crow said.

  “Really.”

  “Really,” Crow said.

  “And as a concerned member of the community,” Jesse said, “you wanted me to know first thing.”

  “You were with her once,” Crow said.

  Jesse grinned. “This is a small town.”

  “You curious about what business Barrone had with the widow?” Crow said.

  “You should know by now that my curiosity is practically boundless,” Jesse said.

  “I don’t know why it would matter to him at this point,” Crow said. “But maybe she picked a side even though her husband wouldn’t. Though once those bids are sealed, I don’t see as how it would matter.”

  “Maybe they could get unsealed and adjusted before the big reveal,” Jesse said.

  “That’s a very cynical attitude,” Crow said.

  “So shoot me,” Jesse said.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Neil O’Hara had bought a small, two-story house between the shopping district and the first houses that were high enough up on Beach Avenue to actually see some of the harbor. Jesse didn’t know if Kate had a key to the house, and hadn’t asked. Assumed she probably did, but didn’t want to wait, so he did what any industrious chief of police would do and picked the lock, just the way Sunny Randall had showed him. One of her many and varied and impressive talents.

  Suit and Molly had come here the first morning, telling Jesse afterward that as far as they could tell, after a thorough search, that things looked to them the way Neil must have left them the last time he was in the house. They had taken Neil’s laptop with them and turned it over to Gabe Weathers, the best techy in the department, but he said there was nothing in the browsing history that looked to him like a smoking gun. So to speak, Gabe had said. He was still working on what he called cloud extraction, which he said was about as easy as learning how to build a rocket from scratch without a password.

  Jesse stood in the small den in the back of the house now, the one that Neil had used as a home office. There was a decent view of the harbor through the bay window back here.

  What had Neil been thinking about the last time he’d looked out this window?

  There wasn’t much bare space on the walls. Law diploma. A posed shot of Neil with the other members of the current Board of Selectmen. Team photos from his high school baseball team, year by varsity year. There was a series of photographs, black-and-white, of Neil’s father with his crew from the B-24 Liberators in which his dad, Jesse knew, had been a bombardier during World War II. And one of Neil’s grandfather, who’d himself been police chief in Paradise once.

  Mostly there was baseball stuff in the office. A lot of it. An old photograph of Babe Ruth in a Red Sox uniform. A signed Ted Williams poster that somebody had given him. A similar poster, just as big, framed, of David Ortiz. A Boston Globe front page from 2004, when the Red Sox won a World Series that felt like their first since tribes had roamed the land. A much bigger display of signed baseballs under glass. A drawing of the original Fenway Park. Photographs from the day he’d been signed in as mayor. An ancient-looking black-and-white photograph of an Indian chief. Or should Jesse think of him as Native American, even though he was probably called an Indian in the old days? A photograph of Neil’s parents’ wedding. A replica of the Town Charter.

  Just stuff. But stuff that mattered to Neil. Jesse felt as if he were taking a brief tour through the man’s history. Which also had mattered in Paradise, Mass.

  Jesse went through the drawers now, and the one floor-to-ceiling bookcase. Looked underneath the desk for some kind of hidden compartment. He lifted a little stone bowl being used as a paperweight for the printout record of the last Board meeting over which he’d presided.

  Then Jesse went through the rest of the house as if going through it for the first time. Room by room. Cupboard by cupboard in the kitchen. The closet and the drawers and the bedside table in the bedroom. What was he looking for? Something. Anything that would help him understand how his friend had been the one to end up in one of those shallow graves.

  But came up with nothing. It bothered him that he couldn’t find a cell phone, not in the house, not in the old Chevy parked in the garage. The car had been here the night he died, they’d checked. It meant someone had taken Neil to The Throw, either dead or alive. Curiouser and curiouser. Which character in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland had said that? Jesse was pretty sure it had been Alice. Molly would know. Sunny would know. Crow had asked if Jesse was curious about Kate knowing Ed Barrone. Normally that would have been her business, except when it intersected with Jesse’s.

  He knew this: If Ben Gage and Neil O’Hara had been seen as a threat, so, too, was Jesse now. Small town, Crow kept saying. Small enough for all involved parties to know Jesse’s history, that he would eventually find out who had done it, and why.

  He went back to the study one last time, stood in the middle of the room, and said, “Talk to me.”

  Nothing in there did.

  He wondered again if someone had searched this place the night Neil died, just not tossing it the way Ben and Blair’s house had been tossed. Or maybe it was different people doing the searching. Another possibility. Maybe, Jesse thought, he should put a car out front, all day every day in the short run, on the chance they might come back. Whoever they were. Whatever they were looking for. But knew he didn’t have the manpower for that. So he went back to the Explorer now and got the motion sensor out of the glove compartment and came back and set it in the front room. Cost him twenty bucks on Amazon. He’d been waiting to use it. CSI Paradise, he thought.

  He made his way back home eventually, fried himself some chicken sausage and potatoes, fell asleep in front of another Red Sox game, went to bed for good around eleven o’clock, and slept until Molly called him a little before five in the morning to tell him that they’d found Ben Gage’s bo
dy in some woods over near the Marshport ravine.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The body was already gone by the time Jesse got there. He still wanted to see where a couple hikers had discovered the grave somebody had dug, covering it with dirt and branches. Knowing it would be discovered eventually, but perhaps not for a while.

  Another grave, Jesse thought, this time with the kid who’d been digging them in Paradise in it.

  He was standing with Brian Lundquist’s number two in the Homicide division of the state cops, an ex-UMass tight end named Booker Mays.

  “He still had his wallet on him,” Mays said. “When I told Lundquist who it was, he said I should call you.”

  “He’s a big fan of mine,” Jesse said.

  “Not sure I’d put it that way,” Mays said. “But he’s been following what you got going on over there in your town.”

  “All of which just got worse,” Jesse said.

  “We called in one of our examiners,” Mays said. “She said she couldn’t be sure, but it looked like the kid had been dead a couple of days.”

  Mays turned and spit some tobacco.

  “He looked like he got beat up pretty bad,” he said. “Before they put one through the back of his head.”

  Jesse said, “Where’s your boss, by the way?”

  “Hangin’ out down there in Beacon Hill with the fancy people,” he said.

  Sunny’s neighborhood.

  Not everybody was fancy down there.

  “Somebody shot a judge,” Mays said. “In bed with another judge’s wife.”