“You okay?” he said to Suit.
Jesse saw him swallow hard.
“He should have told me,” Suit said. “Or I should have known. Either way. I could have helped him with it.”
He was wearing the same outfit he pretty much always wore once Jesse promoted him to detective. Maybe the only nice blazer he owned. White shirt. Jeans. Dressing the way Jesse dressed a lot of the time. Getting out of uniform had been one of the happiest days of Suit’s life. Which had been a mostly happy life. Until now.
Jesse said, “Maybe the best part of this, if there is a best part, is that the friends of his who did know seemed to have been cool with it. Which, by the way, they should have been.”
“So why’d he get into a fight that night?”
“Kevin told Molly that Scott Ford wanted Jack to just come out with it,” Jesse said. “No more sneaking around. They were about to graduate. Only idiots would really care. But according to what the Ford kid told Kevin later, that made Jack snap, and it escalated from there, and Jack threw the first punch. Ford was the one who’d had a few by then, and slugged him back, even though he thought he was trying to help.”
“But then why did Ford catch a beating from Matt Loes?”
“To be determined, now that new information is rolling in,” Jesse said. “How’s your sis?”
“She’s just sorry that she wasn’t there for him,” Suit said. “She talked about how hard it must have been for him, being a jock, to come to terms with it. But it was one more part of his life he kept bottled up.”
Suit took out his phone. “While I was sitting up here by myself, I looked it up,” he said. “You know how many openly gay players there are in the big leagues right now?”
Jesse said, “As many as there were on the Paradise High baseball team.”
They went several moments without either one of them saying anything. Both of them staring out at the ballfield.
Suit turned to Jesse. “Don’t you feel like we ought to be out there throwing a ball around?”
He had been a first baseman when he’d been at Paradise High, playing because his friends did, always more of a football player.
“I always feel that way,” Jesse said, “even when I’m nowhere near a field.”
Grass had just been cut. Infield dragged recently from the looks of it. New white lines for the softball season.
“You know, just because he was gay doesn’t mean he killed himself,” Suit said.
“Hell no.”
“Somebody still could have done it.”
“Still an open investigation, even with what Kevin More told Molly this morning.”
He’d tell him about Hillary More’s visit to Roarke when they were back at the office. Right now, just the two of them here, this was all about Suit’s nephew. Athlete who’d died young.
“If his friends were cool with it,” Suit said, “and they’ve only just been trying to protect him, I like them a lot more today than I did yesterday.”
Suit sighed and leaned forward, elbows on his knees, eyes still fixed on the field.
“Maybe I owe the Ford kid an apology,” he said.
“For doing your job?” Jesse said. “You looking to get busted down to desk duty, Detective?”
Suit turned to him. Not a kid. A grown-ass man, the way he kept reminding Jesse.
“So let me detect for a second,” he said. “Did Molly ask Kevin More if he was with Jack after the party at the Bluff that night?”
“She did. He said he was not.”
“Molly believe him?”
Jesse nodded.
“So I’ve still got a question we haven’t answered,” Suit said. “Where was Jack between his fight with Scott Ford and when he ended up in the water? And who might he have been with?”
Seventy-Two
They were in the conference room in the middle of the afternoon, still no callback from Hillary More. Her son wasn’t answering his phone.
Jesse sat at the table with Molly, Suit, Healy.
And Crow.
“Does he really need to be here?” Healy said, jerking his head at Crow.
Crow was at the far end of the table.
“I come in peace,” he said.
“Maybe today you do,” Healy said.
“We’re having this meeting because of Crow,” Jesse said. “He’s the one who put Hillary More with Roarke.”
“Doesn’t mean I have to like it,” Healy said.
“If it helps you at all,” Molly said, “he does grow on you after a while.”
“I do?” Crow said to her.
“I was talking about you growing on Jesse,” she said.
Healy had spent the last several hours talking to his old friends at the State Police, the Boston PD, and any Fed who still owed him a favor, whether he was retired or not.
They were establishing one timeline for Hillary More and another for Liam Roarke, looking for periods when their lives, or business careers, or both, may have intersected.
Molly had already checked with Town Hall, and discovered that the only owner listed for More Chocolate was Hillary McConnell More.
“Now, that doesn’t mean other people’s money wasn’t propping her up,” Molly said.
“But if it’s Roarke’s money we’re talking about,” Jesse said, “I suspect we’d need an army of forensic accountants to trace it back to him.”
“Good luck with that,” Crow said.
“But we still don’t know for sure if they are business associates,” Suit said.
“What is verifiable for now,” Healy said from his end of the table, next to the easel he’d set up, “is that she went running for Roarke the minute she thought Jesse might be squeezing her.”
Molly said, “Just not the kind of squeezing she wanted from the chief, of course.”
Healy had drawn a line down the middle of the oversized whiteboard. Hillary More’s name at the top on one side, Roarke’s on the other. Old school.
“Let’s focus on her for a moment,” Healy said. “She’s forty-four years old. Born in Shaker Heights, Ohio. Graduated from Northwestern. The Medill School. Journalism.”
“Speaking of which,” Molly said to Jesse. “Why isn’t Nellie here for our team meeting?”
“Not invited.”
“She even know there’s a team meeting?” Molly asked.
“Only if she found out with her own independent reporting,” Jesse said.
“She’s going to be pissed,” Molly said.
“I expect,” Jesse said. “Pissed off and better off.” He made a gesture that took in all of them. “Everybody in this room can take care of themselves.”
“Nellie can’t?” Suit said.
“Not like we can,” Crow said.
“Not saying it wasn’t the case before,” Jesse said. “But this shit is about to get real.”
Healy cleared his throat.
“May I continue?” he said.
“Least he asked,” Crow said to Jesse.
“Please stop talking,” Healy said to Crow.
Most of what Healy told them about Hillary More matched up with what Jesse had read in pieces written about her when she arrived in Paradise. Brief career on the air with the CBS affiliate in Chicago after she graduated. Still Hillary McConnell at that point. Both parents deceased by then. Ended up going into marketing at the same station. Moved from there to a VP position with Hershey. Next thing she was in Boston, working PR for a small chocolate company based in Cambridge. Married a lawyer. Justin More. They had a son.
“She told me she had a husband who died,” Jesse said.
“She mention how?” Healy asked.
“No.”
“Single-car accident, as it turns out,” Healy said. “Falmouth. You ever been down there?”
“To the Cape,” Jesse said. “Not there.”
“We used to rent there,” Healy said. “Justin More was driving too fast on Central Ave., blew through a stop sign, crossed over Menauhant Beach and down into the ocean.”