“This isn’t like always,” he said, and mopped up the spill with his napkin.
Jesse waited until he finished with his tidying up, Suit making it look as if drying the table was the most important thing he’d do all day.
“Suit, I need to know, right here, from you, if you can work this case with a clear head. Because if you can’t, I’ll understand. So will Molly.”
“Jesse, you know me. I have to be in on this. Not being in on it is what would make me lose it.”
Jesse looked across the table at Suit. Even knowing his actual age, and knowing full well how long they’d worked together, what he saw was the same sweet, open-faced kid who’d been sitting outside when Jesse had first walked through the door and become his boss. Suit wanted to be a cop as much as any young guy — or young woman — Jesse had ever known, all the way back to when he was starting out as a young cop in L.A. More than that, and from that very first day, he’d wanted to make Jesse proud of him.
Suit ducked his head, then looked up at Jesse. “I promise I won’t let you down.”
“I believe you.”
Because I know how much he wants me to.
Jesse said, “Just to reset: You two are going to run point on our investigation of Jack’s death. But everything you do and anything you find out, it all runs through me.”
Molly grinned.
“You being the chief,” she said. “Always so easy for both of us to lose sight of that in our impulsive moments. Or any moments.”
“Is that supposed to be amusing?”
“As Sunny says, if you have to ask.”
“Sunny who?”
“Is that supposed to be amusing, Chief?”
“And I want to make it clear that it wouldn’t hurt to keep the lines of communication open between this department and Nellie Shofner.”
“Does she need another friend in the department?” Molly asked. “How many does one girl need?”
“She has this way of occasionally finding out things before we do,” Jesse said.
“All due respect, Jesse?” Suit said. “The rest of the time we find out things before she does.”
“If I didn’t think she could help us, I wouldn’t have brought it up,” Jesse said. “And I think she can help us.”
“I stand corrected,” Molly said. “She’s not Gidget. Now she’s Nancy Drew.”
Then Jesse told them Nellie’s theory that the players on the team were hiding something, and that she had also heard that Ainsley Walsh might have been involved with Scott Ford.
“That would mean Ford lied and the girl lied,” Suit said.
“To officers of the law,” Jesse said. “Almost makes you question your core beliefs, doesn’t it?”
“What are there, fifteen players on the team?” Molly said. “We need to talk to them one by one, see if one of them breaks ranks if Nellie is right.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Suit said, “but do you trust Nellie on this?”
“Getting things right is a thing with her, same as it is us,” Jesse said. “And like I keep saying, I’ll take all the help we can get.”
“Too soon to give her a badge and uniform?” Molly asked.
“Only if she promises to wear it on Halloween,” Jesse said.
“Pig,” she said.
“No way to talk to a cop,” Jesse said.
Twenty-Two
Jesse spent most of the afternoon in his office with Healy, going through Charlie Farrell’s call records. Jesse still couldn’t believe, after all these years and the times when he’d done work like this before on a case, that you could do it without the phone in your possession, just knowing the number. You could, though. They did. Incoming and outgoing calls.
They did the same with incoming and outgoing calls from his landline. Normally you needed a subpoena for landlines. Jesse could still remember the hoops through which he’d had to jump with Mayor Neil O’Hara’s home phone after what appeared to be his suicide turned out to be murder. This time the district attorney’s office went along with the request, even though the request for Jack Carlisle’s phone records was still swimming upstream through the system. It was an election year for Ellis Munroe, and the victim was Charlie Farrell, an even more beloved figure in the town than Neil had been. When Munroe had briefly hesitated, going through the motions of citing the precedent of the O’Hara case, Jesse had mentioned that if Munroe tried to slow-walk him this time, he was going to read about it in the Crier.
“You remember a time when all detective work didn’t run through somebody’s goddamn phone?” Healy asked Jesse now. “Before people started turning phones on us like they were guns?”
“Does make the work easier sometimes, you gotta admit,” Jesse said. “Gives you a better road map than GPS.”
Healy looked at him over his reading glasses. “You feel that way right now with all these fake numbers?”
“There’s even an app now that helps you create fake numbers,” Jesse said.
“Technology,” Healy said. “Truly such a freaking joy.”
Jesse took off his own reading glasses, placing them on the spreadsheet in front of him. “You like cop work better when you and Charlie were young? Or with all the bells and whistles we got going with the technology now?”
“Like you keep saying,” Healy said. “I’ll take all the help we can get.”
“Charlie used to say that the only time he was interested in an app is when it was short for appetizer.”
Every time they thought they might have a lead, it would quickly turn into a dead end. They either couldn’t place a call to a number or would find out it belonged to a dry-cleaning store in Marshport, or Salem, and had simply been ghosted. Perfect, Jesse thought, just because he and Healy felt like they were chasing ghosts.
They stayed at it until six o’clock. After that Jesse took Healy over to the Gull and bought him a lobster dinner. When they were finished they toasted Charlie, Healy with a Jack Daniel’s, Jesse with iced tea. He always found it fascinating how tea so closely resembled the color of the booze, even if only one could try to ruin your fucking life.
Jesse drove home, called Nellie, got her voicemail, left a message for her to call if she’d come up with anything interesting across her day. Molly called and said that she and Suit had gotten nothing at all interesting out of the Paradise High baseball team, nothing they hadn’t heard before, the players’ answers almost sounding rehearsed.
Tonight Jesse managed to make it through the entire Red Sox game, even though it turned into one of those four-hour, nine-inning jobs that tried to challenge, mightily, his love for the game.
When it finally ended, and to his great surprise, he was still wide awake.
So he got his gun, the keys to the Explorer, put on a relax cap that Sunny had given him as a joke, then did the same thing he’d done one time already this week.
Took a ride over to Charlie Farrell’s house.
Twenty-Three
They were still treating it as an active crime scene. But Jesse still had the key to the house that Charlie had given him a long time ago.
“Why do I need a key when you insist on leaving your door unlocked?” Jesse had asked him once.
“I want you to have it in case it is locked the night the Messenger of Death beats you here one night.”
“Messenger of Death?” Jesse had said.
“You never had a tarot card reading?” the old man had said.
“Wait, you did?”
Charlie had winked. “Miss Emma made me.”
Now Jesse stood just inside the door, in a darkness so profound, a quiet that made it difficult for Jesse to get enough air into him once he was inside. All he could think of was that, son of a bitch, the Messenger of Death had beaten him here the other night.