The way kids playing ball had done it from the beginning of time.
Still no app that could do that if you wanted to get a glove broken in right.
He went through the books in the small standing bookcase. A lot of baseball books on the top shelf. And Playwriting: Structure, Character, How and What to Write, by Stephen Jeffreys. There was A Separate Peace, too, Jesse’s one true favorite, above all others, when he was in high school. He’d even named the one dog he had in high school Phineas, after one of the main characters.
If he had finished his play, why hide it, even if he was his mother’s secret boy?
Say the kid had taken his own life, and knew he was going to do it, would he have written about that, like a last will and testament, even for a high school senior?
His mother was right about one thing.
This room was a very sad place. Like the saddest place in the whole town. Jesse understood why Laura Carlisle didn’t want to be in here any longer, even though Jesse knew she would come back, again and again. And again. He wondered how long she would keep things the way they were in here. Or if she was already thinking about selling the house and moving to another one in Paradise. Or just moving out of town for good, even though Suit was all the family she had left.
Jesse went to the door, which Laura had closed behind him.
Turned around.
Something wasn’t right.
Didn’t fit.
He went back and sat down at the swivel chair at Jack’s desk and went through the drawers again.
Then knew what was bothering him.
Too neat.
Way, way too neat.
Jack Carlisle was a high school senior. He was a guy. Even if he’d been neater than most guys his age, no one was this neat, or this organized. He could be wrong. But didn’t think he was. Jesse was sure the mother had neatened things up before he came. Or had done that in the days after Jack was found in the water.
But everything in these drawers was too neat and too organized.
Would his mother have done that?
Or would she have just cleaned up the room, and not the inside of the desk?
Go ask her.
Jesse went back downstairs and found Laura Carlisle at the kitchen table, writing in a journal of her own. She smiled up at Jesse. “Like mother, like son.”
“Need to ask you something,” Jesse said. “Other than you and my people, has anybody else been alone in Jack’s room lately?”
She shook her head. “Sorry, no.”
“I’m sorry to have intruded,” Jesse said.
“Take care of Luther.”
“I will.”
She started to get up. Jesse told her to stay where she was, he could see himself out. He was already outside when Laura Carlisle opened the front door and called out to him.
“There was one other person,” she said.
Forty
Before Jesse left the office for the day, Molly came in and sat down and said, “You need to listen to me.”
“When have I not?” he said.
“When you do whatever you want to do without caring what anybody else thinks,” she said. “That’s when.”
He waited, knowing she was just getting started. Because he knew her. Jesse wondered if Michael Crane knew her this well, even being married to her. Wondered at the same time if anybody would ever know him as well as Molly Crane knew her boss.
“I know how well you are at compartmentalizing,” she said. “Maybe as good at it as anybody I’ve ever met. And I know how you want to be the one to find out who killed Charlie — you’re on one of your missions.”
“Wouldn’t you be?”
“Hush and listen,” she said.
He did.
“But we’ve got three bodies now,” she said. “And we are a team. And there is no reason on God’s earth why we all shouldn’t be working together on everything, the way we always have. So if you can help us with Jack Carlisle’s death, we can also help you with Charlie’s. And we all have enough time to work together to find out who put that guy in the wheelchair in the water.”
She blew out some air.
“All I got.”
Jesse felt himself smiling.
“You’re right,” he said.
Molly smiled.
“Excuse me?”
“I said, you’re right.”
“Would you mind putting that in writing?” she said. “Then I could take a picture of it and use it as my screen saver.”
“You’ve made your point.”
“I know.”
Jesse said, “You and Suit head over to that apartment Waterfield shared with this guy Marin, and see what you can find.”
She stood. “On it.”
“Hey, Mols? Thank you.”
“You never have to thank me.”
“Yeah,” Jesse said. “I do. Because sometimes I forget.”
She asked what he was up to. He told her where he was going, and why.
“You gonna tell the mom?”
Jesse shook his head.
“I don’t have to ask for her permission.”
Molly slapped her forehead. “I forgot! You’re the chief!”
“Fuck, yeah.”
He got into the Explorer and made the short drive to one of the older sections of Paradise, near where the Strand Theater used to be on Washington Street. Over the last few years, a lot of town houses like this had gone up in Paradise for people who didn’t require a view of the water.
Jesse parked on the street and walked up to the door. There was an old silver Cherokee parked in the driveway, with a Paradise High sticker on the back bumper.
Jesse walked up and rang the doorbell and the blond kid answered the door, still dressed in tennis shorts and a gray PHS T-shirt, a head taller than Jesse at least. When Jesse would occasionally watch tennis on television, it struck him that the star players were getting bigger. Men and women.
“Kevin,” Jesse said, “I’m Chief Stone.”
“I know who you are,” Hillary More’s son said.
“May I come in?” Jesse said.
“Am I in trouble?”
“You’re not,” Jesse said. “But I might be for not calling your mom before I came over here.”
“What do you want to talk to me about?” Kevin More said.
“What you were doing in Jack Carlisle’s room the other day,” Jesse said.
Forty-One
They sat in the living room. Kevin More stretched out long legs from an antique chair, and from his teenage slouch. Jesse took the sofa. Somehow the kid managed to look even taller sitting down. He reminded Jesse a little bit of a young Brad Pitt, but then most really good-looking young blond guys did, even though Pitt wasn’t a young guy anymore.
“You on the tennis team at the high school?” Jesse said.
He wasn’t sure the kid was going to relax with the chief of police in his living room, but he had to try to break the ice, now that he’d essentially ambushed him by showing up here.
“I finally realized I wasn’t ever going to be more than Jack’s backup in baseball, and gave it up,” he said. “I really only went out for the team because so many of my friends were on it.”
“Like Jack.”
“Not just Jack,” Kevin More said. “It was my last year of high school, and I just wanted another excuse to hang with them. But Coach finally told me I was wasting my time, and his.”
“A sweetheart, your coach.”
“You’ve met him, then.”
Jesse nodded.
“It pissed me off, but he was right,” Kevin said.