The Bitterest Pill

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  Molly got up from the table and hugged Toni.

  * * *

  —

  THINGS WENT VERY DIFFERENTLY at the North house. It was difficult enough for Molly to get in the house, let alone to talk directly to Petra. Things got loud and heated in spite of Molly remaining calm. There were threats of lawsuits, complaints about harassment . . . the usual stuff. Even in a place like Paradise, police frequently heard this kind of rhetoric. People hate the police until they need them.

  “Tell Chief Stone we have had quite enough of this,” said Ambrose North, returned from Boston. “Annette told me of Jesse’s unwelcome and unappreciated visit.”

  Molly caught sight of Petra listening at the top of the stairs, so she raised her voice loud enough to make certain Petra heard clearly what was going on.

  “Mr. North, Jesse’s visit was to inform you that we had recovered your missing watch from the room of a suspected drug dealer. We were curious if you could tell us how your watch might’ve found its way there.”

  “Preposterous! How would we know the answer to that?”

  “Well, since the news will be out tomorrow, I can tell you that the alleged drug dealer was Petra’s classmate, Chris Grimm. His body was found this morning after—”

  That got Ambrose North’s attention. “His body?”

  “Yes, he disappeared on the day Heather Mackey was buried. This morning his body was found in a shallow grave outside of Helton. He had been tortured and shot to death.”

  “None of this has anything to do with anyone in this house. I can assure you, Officer Crane.”

  “We would still like to speak with your daughter. As I said before, this was only going to be a casual conversation. But it’s now an official request for her to appear at the station for questioning by Chief Stone in regards to any knowledge she may have concerning Heather Mackey’s death and Chris Grimm’s murder. We will be in touch to set a time that is convenient for you and to give you an opportunity to seek legal representation. Thank you.”

  Molly didn’t wait to be shown out.

  * * *

  —

  AT BOB MARK’S HOUSE and at Lidell Thomas’s, it was the same story as at the Yorks’. They had been caught by their parents and sent to rehab. Bob Mark had had a slip, but was now back in rehab. Lidell was supposed to go to the University of Maryland, but his parents had kept him local. If he got through two years at the community college, he could pick the college of his choice at which to finish his degree. He was doing well, so far. He was on a program with group sessions and counseling much like Sara York’s. He was also tested to make sure he didn’t backslide.

  When she got in her car to head over to the address she had for the Parkinsons, her cell phone rang.

  “Mrs. Crane . . . Molly, it’s me, Sara.”

  “Hi, Sara.”

  “My mom says you came by and you guys talked. She says I’m not going to get in trouble. Is that right?”

  “We only want you to be healthy and safe, Sara. Did she tell you about Chris?”

  “She did. There’s some stuff I need to say to you about Chris, Mrs.—Molly.” Sara’s voice was strained and brittle. “I told my mom he forced me to do stuff, because I was ashamed. He never forced me to do anything I didn’t want to do. Believe me, I would have done anything, much worse things than I did. He was a little weird, but he wasn’t a bad person. I need you to know that.”

  “Okay.”

  “And I’m pretty sure he wasn’t doing this by himself. There was a teacher, I think, who he had a thing for.”

  “A woman?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t know who. He never said, but he got calls from her when I was with him, and the way he talked to her . . . you could just tell it was a woman who was older than him and he’d say stuff like ‘I’ll see you tomorrow at school.’ I guess he wasn’t thinking I could hear him or that I would get it.”

  Molly tried to get more information about the teacher from Sara, but there was none to be had. She thanked the girl and hung up. She had to call Jesse.

  Fifty-seven

  Jesse had learned over the last several months that AA meetings were for self-maintenance as well as for the crises. Of course, when you were close to falling off the wagon, meetings were crucial. The thing was, since you could never be sure of what would set you off to want to drink again, you couldn’t let yourself get lulled into going to meetings only when the thirst hit. The meetings weren’t a Band-Aid to apply when the bleeding started. As Jesse had witnessed, it was often too late. How many stories of regret and guilt had he listened to from people who’d gotten complacent, returning to meetings only after they had fallen down and taken the dive back into the bottle? He wasn’t judging them. Who was he to judge? But he took their backsliding seriously.

  As he drove from Salem over to Maryglenn’s he called in to the station to check with Suit to see if the kid’s autopsy results were in or if there had been any developments.

  “Nothing yet, Jesse,” Suit said. “Molly told me to have the guys keep an eye on the Walterses’ house. It’s quiet.”

  “Good. Listen, Suit, unless it’s an emergency, I’d like a few hours of peace.”

  “I got you, Jesse.”

  He parked around the corner from Maryglenn’s as he always did and took the slow walk down Newton Alley. This time he wasn’t so much haunted by the events of months past as he was by what seemed to be happening to his town at the moment. He had had experience with drug scourges in the past. First there was the wave of cocaine that had crashed over L.A. like high-tide waves during a nor’easter. Worse was the crack epidemic. Cheap and dirty, it was a drug of the poor. People already suffering at the bottom end of things had their lives and the lives of their families destroyed by little vials of rock. But it was more than that. It was the associated crime and violence that came with the epidemic that Jesse had been forced to deal with, first in uniform and then as a detective.

  This thing with opioids had the same feel about it, like the heat coming at you from a fast-spreading wildfire. What disgusted Jesse most of all about these drug scourges was the complicity of the people at the top of the food chain. The same people who had lit the fire, the big pharma companies, their stockholders, doctors, drugstores, were now screaming for everyone else to put it out. He knew that the fire would claim many more victims before it would come under control. It was always the way.

  As Jesse reached the door to the warehouse and Maryglenn’s loft apartment, his cell buzzed. He saw that the call was from Molly and let it go to voicemail. If it was an emergency, she would get in touch with Suit and Suit would get in touch with him. Anything else would hold until morning.

  “Hello, Jesse,” Maryglenn said as she came to open the door.

  She stepped out, closing the door behind her. She was not dressed in her usual black-on-black, paint-speckled uniform. Instead she wore a long peasant skirt of several shades of red, a white satiny blouse, and a red bolero jacket. As was always his reaction to her, Jesse thought how different she was from the women he was usually drawn to. Her looks, her dress, so different from Kayla, Jenn, and Diana. Although he loved how they had been so careful about their appearance and dress, he admired Maryglenn for her unique sense of style and for not letting her self-image be so bound up in those other things.

  “The Gull,” she said, grabbing his arm and looping hers through his elbow. “Dinner is on me. I insist.” Noticing his expression, she asked, “What is it?”

  He didn’t quite know how to explain it so that it wouldn’t sound insulting to her, so he punted. “Nothing.”

  She didn’t believe him, but that was okay.

  * * *

  —

  THEY SAT AT A TABLE at the rear of the Gull, one that afforded them a view of the marina, the ocean, and Stiles Island. He had sat at this table many times since his arrival in Paradise. The Gu
ll had once been his go-to place, but in recent years the quality of the food had tailed off and it had pleased Jesse to do more of his drinking alone at his old house at the edge of town. Now he no longer drank at all and his house had been sold.

  “What is it, Jesse?” Maryglenn asked again, as she noticed him gazing out the glass.

  But this time, Jesse had something to say and it wasn’t about Maryglenn’s looks or her choice of restaurant.

  “I couldn’t help but notice the . . . I don’t know, vibe, I guess, between you and Daisy. Even my son noticed it. Cole said he thought Daisy seemed jealous of me. I thought he was wrong, but now I’m not so sure.”

  Maryglenn squirmed a little in her chair but didn’t turn away. “Did you ask Daisy about it?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And?”

  “She asked me if I’d heard of Swingline Sue’s.”

  “Had you?”

  Jesse said, “I have now. Google is magical.”

  “Do you have questions you want to ask?”

  “No. But I would still like to know what it is with you two. Daisy’s been a friend and ally for a long time, and we’re . . . we’re something to each other. I don’t want that to change.”

  She held her lips tightly together as she thought. Then said, “I don’t usually feel like I need to explain myself.”

  “That’s fair. I don’t, either.”

  “At art school, all of us used to go out partying together, dancing. No offense, but straight places suck for dancing. That hasn’t changed since I got out of school. So when I feel like dancing, I head up to Tipton. One night I was there with an old girlfriend from school and Daisy asked me to dance. I didn’t know who she was then. I danced with her. But when she kissed me, I backed her off by telling her I was already with my girlfriend. So you can imagine that she probably doesn’t think too highly of me with the man in town she’s closest to.”

  Jesse laughed, shaking his head. “Daisy’s a pit bull to begin with. You sure pushed her buttons.”

  Between courses, he explained about why he and his cops had done what they did at the high school.

  “I know we don’t agree about some things, but I can’t let it stop me from doing my job the way I feel I need to do it. We can argue about drugs like marijuana. My bet, it will be legal in this state in a few years. But opioids are a plague and it’s not right.”

  Maryglenn didn’t push back. What she did was pay the bill, grab Jesse by the hand, and make sure to have him speed back to her bed.

  Fifty-eight

  The next morning, while Maryglenn was just rousing, he noticed a scar on her right leg he hadn’t seen before. Given the ferocity of their lovemaking, he wasn’t sure he would have noticed it if they had been in full sunlight. It was a long vertical scar on the front of her shin that ran from the base of her knee to the top of her ankle. On either side of the scar were tiny, faint dots of faded pink scar tissue.

  “I was riding my bike,” she said, noticing him staring at her leg.

  “You’re up.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What happened?”

  “Car turned right into me. My leg was caught under the front tire. Compound fracture of my tibia, broken fibula, broken bones in my foot.” She gathered the blanket around her, clutched herself, and rocked gently as if to calm herself. “I had three surgeries and they had me in all sorts of gadgets to hold the bones in place while I healed. The scarring actually used to be much worse, but I had some cosmetic work done. I’m a little self-conscious about it, Jesse, so if you could stop staring . . .”

  He kissed the top of her head. “You must’ve been in a lot of pain.”

  “You can’t imagine. It’s a good thing we can’t remember pain. We can remember having it, but not the pain itself.”

  Jesse realized he was rubbing his right shoulder. “Does it hurt anymore?”

  “Sometimes, in damp weather,” she said. “But nothing like when it happened. I was drugged up for months. I don’t even like thinking about it.”

  Before Jesse could respond, his cell phone buzzed in his pants pocket. His pants were on the floor next to the bed and the wood amplified the buzzing. He grabbed his pants, retrieved the phone, and saw the call was from Molly. Unlike the night before, Molly was about to go on duty now. If she was calling him this early, he couldn’t blow her off again.

  “I’ve got to take this,” he said, walked into the bathroom, and closed the door behind him.

  “Molly, what’s up?”

  “Did you get my message last night?”

  “No, sorry. What is it?”

  Molly explained about her interviews and told Jesse that Ambrose North protested way too much.

  “He didn’t let me get within twenty yards of Petra, but I saw her listening at the top of the stairs. She heard everything. When do you want to speak with her?”

  “Asap. Call them up and tell them I want her and her lawyer in tonight.”

  “You want me to call at this hour? It’s six-fifteen.”

  “Time for polite manners is over,” he said. “How did the other interviews go?”

  Molly detailed the call she received from Sara York.

  “She says that Chris Grimm was involved with a female teacher at the high school.”

  “That’s what my source says Heather Mackey told him.”

  Molly was furious. “Why didn’t you tell me about that, Jesse?”

  “Think, Crane. I heard this secondhand from a kid. I didn’t know if I could trust it. If it was true, we needed it to come out independently. I didn’t want any of your questions to lead the kids to a false conclusion or to spook them into silence. I also didn’t want to have them run back to the teacher to warn her. One of these kids knows who she is.”

  “Okay, Jesse.”

  “I’ll be in by seven.”

  When he clicked off, he recalled the image of the scar on Maryglenn’s leg, remembered her admission that she had been drugged up for months following the accident. The alarm bells were blaring in his head. She fit the profile.

  When he came out of the bathroom a few minutes later, he began gathering up his clothing to get dressed. She got out of bed, letting the blankets fall away from her body. She pressed herself against him, kissed his neck. He kissed her back.

  “Aren’t you going to shower?” she asked when the kissing was done. “I can put up some coffee and join you.”

  “Won’t you be late?”

  “I’ll call in.”

  “Sorry,” he said, buttoning his shirt. “I can’t. Duty calls. I’ll shower at home and then I’ve got to get to work.”

  She looked at him sideways. “This about Chris Grimm?”

  He half smiled at her, pulling on his pants. “I’ve already told you more than I should have.”

  “One of the perks of sleeping with the police chief.”

  Just now, Jesse didn’t find that particularly funny.

  Fifty-nine

  Although Molly understood Jesse’s reasoning for not sharing the information about the potential involvement of a female teacher in the drug distribution network at the school, she was still POed at him. But seeing the expression on Jesse’s face as he walked through the stationhouse door changed that. Molly’s wounded pride suddenly seemed less important. Reading a self-contained man like Jesse Stone was no mean feat. When he openly showed he was upset, as he did entering the station, it raised a red flag.

  “What is it, Jesse? What’s wrong?”

  “My office in five,” he said, blowing past her.

  In the meantime, Jesse made a call Molly wouldn’t have approved of.

  Vinnie Morris picked up on the second ring. “Jesse Stone. What’s up?”

  “How would you like me to treat you to a meal? Lunch?”

  “Today?”

  �
��That’s when I’ll be in town.”

  “What’s the catch? Not that I don’t like your company, but this is short notice.”

  “Remember that pawn shop I—”

  Vinnie said, “Precious Pawn and Loan. Like I told you, I know them.”

  “Should I ask how you know them?”

  “Take a guess.”

  “I’d like to do more than use your name,” Jesse said. “How about you meet me there at noon.”

  “You ask a lot. I getting anything out of this besides steak?”

  “Creamed spinach.”

  Vinnie laughed. “Seriously, Jesse.”

  “I think the drug syndicate we were discussing might be using them,” Jesse said, though he had proof that only Chris Grimm had actually done business with them. “You want your business tied to them if the DEA gets wind of things? They’ll give you up in a second if it helps knock time off their sentence.”

  “Noon. Don’t be late.” Vinnie was off the line.

  Jesse still had the phone pressed to his ear when Molly knocked and came into his office.

  He put the phone down. “Sit.”

  “What is it, Jesse?”

  “Call someone in to take the desk today.”

  “Do we have that kind of money for overtime in the budget?”

  “Yeah, but for all the wrong reasons,” Jesse said. “Since I was forced to let Alisha go, we’re one officer down.”

  “But why do you need me to be off the desk?”

  “I need you to do research without being interrupted.”

  “What kind of research?”

  “Get the names of all the female teachers at the high school. That should be easy enough to do. The names are public record. Then I want you to find out everything you can about them.”

  Molly stood. “Okay, I’ll get to it.”

  “And, Molly,” Jesse said, stopping her in her tracks. “Start with Maryglenn.”