“No,” Jesse said.
“No, I didn’t get a call like that?”
“This number wasn’t ghosted,” Jesse said. “I checked with your carrier, and finally got the answer I needed after threatening to subpoena everybody at the company in alphabetical order.”
He asked her then if she understood how VoIP worked.
“Voice over Internet Protocol,” she said. “I’m aware what it is, from when we put our phone system into place.”
“So you know that your calls are placed over the Internet,” he said. “Same as ours are at the PPD.”
He folded the phone bill and put it back into the inside pocket of the blazer he kept in the office and had worn here. Sometimes he didn’t want to look the part. Even if they both knew he was all cop today.
“Charlie, I’m guessing, recognized the number when he saw it on the bill for the same reason I did,” Jesse said. “Because of Nicholas. And maybe, just maybe, the old chief was smart enough to track down the IP address, same as I did. Even at his advanced age.”
She sat with her hands in her lap. Not looking at him as she spoke. “Please tell me you don’t think I had something to do with this.”
“I don’t.”
“I still think that this is the modern-day version of wires getting crossed,” she said.
“It’s not. Sorry.”
“Not as sorry as I am if this is actually true.”
Jesse put some snap in his voice now.
“No more qualifiers,” he said. “It’s true. Somebody made that call. Using your Wi-Fi. Now I’m going to find out who.”
She was still staring straight ahead.
“I sell chocolate,” she said in a small, tired voice.
“Hillary,” Jesse said quietly. “Look at me.”
She did. Beige jacket today, black T-shirt underneath, black jeans, black ankle boots. Jesse had stopped commenting on women’s appearances in front of Molly, and in general. When he would slip occasionally, she would remind him that verbalizing about a woman’s looks was as old as he was. Maybe older.
“Sam Waterfield ended up in the water, a homicide to which I am about to pay much closer attention. His roommate, a former juvie guest of the state, is missing. I’m starting to wonder if they were the ones shaking people down over the telephone. And if the missing guy might be the same one who killed Charlie and went after his grandson until his grandson shot him.”
She started to speak. Jesse held up a hand to stop her. “You always look for a nexus. The nexus in this case might be two of your former employees, thinking they could work their scam from your office without ever being caught, probably using burner phones. But they got sloppy, or lazy, or both. And made a call using your Wi-Fi.”
“May I speak now?” Hillary asked.
He nodded.
“Just what do you expect me to do about it?”
“For starters, I’m going to want my best tech guy, Gabe, to take another look at Sam Waterfield’s computer at work,” Jesse said. “And then go through the other computers upstairs, one by one. The sooner the better.”
“That whole section gets one Friday a month off,” she said. “This happens to be it.”
“Gabe will be there in the morning then,” Jesse said. “You just have to help him with the log-ons and whatever else he needs rather than make everybody come in on a Saturday.”
“We still don’t know if any of this is tied to Sam, or to Steve, who didn’t even work in Sam’s section,” she said. “That’s just a theory of yours.”
“You’re right,” Jesse said. “For now, that’s exactly what it is. And if there’s no proof that they were involved, we cross their names off my list and move on.”
“Am I on your list?”
“Just the one of people helping me get to the truth.”
“Okay,” she said. “What else do you need?”
“I want to know who might have been in the office the other night just before ten,” he said, and explained why.
“You really are making a series of assumptions here, Jesse,” she said.
“Well, to be honest, I’ve done more with a lot less, Ms. More,” he said.
“Clever. But not funny.”
“Not trying to be,” he said. “None of this shit is funny.”
“If this gets out, just why you’re looking into my company, this would be extremely hurtful,” she said. “You know we’re heroes in this town.”
“And will likely be again once I find out who got sloppy when they called Miss Emma,” Jesse said.
“Could it have been somebody in a neighboring building hijacking our Wi-Fi, or whatever they call it?”
“Not unless you were giving out your password with chocolate samples.”
“You believe Charlie might have figured it out?” she said.
“Molly Crane, good Catholic girl, says faith is believing in what you can’t see,” Jesse told her.
“Are you religious?” Hillary More asked him.
“Not if I can help it.”
When he got home, there was a black Lincoln Navigator, tinted windows, looking fully loaded, parked in front.
The rear window rolled down, and a familiar face smiled at him.
“What’s happening, motherfucker?” Tony Marcus said.
Sixty-Five
They were all in Jesse’s living room: Jesse, Tony, his body man, Junior. And his shooter, Ty Bop.
Junior remained the general size of a battleship. Ty Bop, even standing still in his oversized David Ortiz jersey, still seemed twitchy as a hummingbird. Tony, as always, looked as if he’d just come from his tailor. Powder-blue suit today, white shirt, navy tie with polka dots, pocket handkerchief matching the color of his tie. He’d informed Jesse from the car that he was here to collect a favor Jesse owed him, but that they’d get to that.
“Just curious,” Jesse asked Tony now. “Does Junior or Ty Bop drive the Navigator?”
“Ty,” he said.
To Ty Bop Jesse said, “So you passed driver’s ed and everything, Ty? Good for you.”
Ty Bop just fixed him with a sleepy, dead-eyed look, as indifferent as a snake.
“You need to know that Ty here’s where irony goes to die,” Tony Marcus said. “If he hasn’t shot it already.”
“To bring this back to that favor you say I owe you,” Jesse said. “It seems to me that when we last spoke, I suggested I might pay you back someday for the help you gave me on the whole land thing up here, but you told me that you didn’t believe me. And we sort of left it there.”
Marcus smiled. He looked a little thinner than he had when they’d met last year at Buddy’s Fox, the bar and restaurant in downtown Boston that served as his office.
“Also I believe I told you not to appeal to my better angels, on account I got none,” Marcus said. “But I know you got ’em, playing Eliot Ness up here for the Podunk PD.”
Jesse smiled, couldn’t help himself. As dangerous as he knew Tony Marcus was, he could be a funny bastard. Sunny used to say that all the time.
“So what kind of help are you looking for from my better angels?”
“By helping me get Liam Roarke out my shit once and for all,” Marcus said.
“Sorry,” Jesse said. “Can’t help you with Roarke.”
“The fuck you can’t.”
Marcus asked if Jesse had any tea. Jesse told him he had some English breakfast, which he kept in the house for Nellie. Tony said that would be fine, maybe a little cream and sugar if he had it.
When Jesse came back with the tea he said, “If I had something that could help me bust Roarke’s ass, even outside of his, uh, jurisdiction, I’d use it. But I don’t have it.”
“What about what he did to your new Sunny?”
Jesse grinned. Of course he knew.
He watched Tony sip some tea.