King would make sure Hump got his share, not the pot-of-gold share. He’d pay him his half of the ten grand they’d been promised to do the job. He owed that much to his ex-cellmate. Poor, dumb Hump, he had no clue that King had found the key taped to the underside of a dresser in a second-floor bedroom. Good thing Hump had missed it on his first pass. Truth was that until King had scanned the papers looking for word on whether the cops had found the old lady, he wasn’t even sure he’d be able to squeeze the original ten grand out of the guy who’d hired them to search the house. The old lady dying on them the way she had put them in a weak bargaining position. It was one thing for the cops to want you for assault and breaking and entering. Murder was a different beast altogether.
King was no lawyer, but he knew that even if they got it knocked down to manslaughter, the two of them were looking at a long bid. King didn’t think he could deal with even another year back inside. Anything longer and he’d hang himself with a bedsheet or just cut his own throat. He’d thought about suicide many times during his life inside, but he was never more serious about it than he was right then. He’d already spent too much of his life in concrete-and-steel boxes, already depleted most of whatever soul he’d come into the world with.
He laughed at himself for his dark thoughts, given his turn of good fortune. He pushed the image of himself hanging from a makeshift noose out of his head. If he hadn’t stumbled across the piece in the paper, King might’ve been willing to throw Hump to the wolves and barter the key away for a few grand and help getting out of the state. But now he didn’t have to worry about sacrificing Hump to the cops or begging for scraps from his employer. His begging-for-scraps days were over.
King stood up and slid the index card into his back pocket. He ripped the article out of the paper, the one that answered his decades of unanswered prayers, and folded it into a neat little square. He put that in his other back pocket. He popped open another can of Coors, stared at it, and smiled. Before sucking it down, he thought, No more Coors for me. No more Coors for the King. Then he scooped up all the papers and went to find the Dumpster. Hump wasn’t usually the newspaper-reading type, but King wasn’t going to take any chances, not when he could almost feel the wind blowing through the new hair he would have transplanted with the money left over from the blondes and the Porsche.
After the papers were disposed of, King headed to the motel office as Hump had done not a half-hour earlier. Only he wasn’t going there to Google local churches. He was going to Google blond girls and German sports cars. He imagined the price of both had gone up since the last time he’d thought there was a serious chance he might get close to either one.
Just as he got back to the room, his cell phone rang. The man on the other end was anxious.
“Write down this number.”
King found the motel notepad and pencil and wrote the number down. “I got the number.”
“How did it go?” the man asked. “Did you locate the package?”
But King didn’t answer. He hung up. The Porsche and the blondes were now almost close enough to touch.
14
As Jesse passed Molly on the way out of the house, he told her to have someone start looking into locating the next of kin.
“She didn’t have any family left that I know of, Jesse. She might have had an older sister, but she’s probably dead, I’m thinking. Maude was in her nineties. Her husband died a long time ago. They never had any kids.”
“We’ve got to try.”
“Can’t we officially ID her with dental records if we have to?”
“True, but we can’t ask her dentist what the guys who wrecked the house were looking for. Maybe there’s a relative who can shed some light on it.”
“I never thought of that. I guess that’s why they pay you the big money and you get to wear that fancy uniform.”
Of course Molly was referring to the fact that her boss used the privilege of his title to make every day his version of casual Friday. Full uniform for Jesse usually consisted of his cop shirt — tucked in — with jeans, work boots or running shoes, and a blue baseball cap with the letters PPD stitched across the crown in white. In colder weather he wore his lined cop jacket.
“When the mayor cans my ass and you inherit the job,” Jesse said, “you can dress however you like. You can wear your old high-school uniform for all I care.”
Molly got a sick look on her face as if it never occurred to her that she would be Jesse’s natural successor.
“No, thanks, Jesse. I’m happy right where I am. Besides, I gave away all my old clothes a long time ago.”
“Shame.” He winked at her, a smile on his face.
Still smiling, Jesse shook his head at her and immediately regretted it. His initial adrenaline rush was fading into a distant memory and the pills Tamara had given him were no longer doing the trick. If the mayor wasn’t right outside, he would have gone back upstairs and begged a few more Fiorinal from the ME. Even with Her Honor so close, Jesse didn’t exactly snap into action. Molly noticed.
“Jesse, don’t you think you better get out there?”
“It’s a crime scene. She can’t come in without my say-so.”
“Can’t avoid her forever, and you really don’t look any worse than anyone else who was at the wedding reception. The mayor was putting it away pretty good herself before she split.”
Jesse said, “I didn’t notice. Let me get out there. Remember, have—”
“I know, Jesse. I’ll get someone working on next of kin.”
Jesse stepped out onto the old wooden porch and noticed that the crowd around the crime scene tape had grown considerably since he’d entered the house. He also noticed the mayor scowling at Alisha, who was refusing to allow Her Honor to come beneath the tape. The mayor’s new assistant and political adviser, Nita Thompson, a slick-looking early-thirtysomething out of Harvard who was working her way up the consultant ladder, was staring up at Jesse shaking her head at him. There’d been a bull’s-eye on Jesse’s back since she arrived.
Things between Mayor Walker and Jesse hadn’t been great over the last several years. First there was the discovery of the remains of two teenage girls who’d gone missing from Paradise twenty-five years earlier, and an ugly spate of violence that followed. The violence had nothing to do with Jesse, who, in the end, solved the case and brought the last remaining killer to justice. It didn’t seem to matter to the mayor. Crime focused the wrong kind of attention on Paradise, and whatever made Paradise look bad made her look bad. Their relationship really deteriorated after Diana’s murder. That violence was directly tied to Jesse. When rumors about Mayor Walker’s political ambitions began circulating and a political consultant showed up in town, Jesse knew he was in for a hard time. It was pretty clear that Nita Thompson meant to hang as much bad baggage around Jesse’s neck as possible.
He called down from the porch. “Alisha, let the mayor up. Only the mayor.”
Jesse didn’t have to see the look on Thompson’s face to know her eyes were burning a hole right through him. He had other things to worry about, like the mayor racing up to him, a less-than-friendly expression on her face.
“Chief Stone, why is your officer keeping me off—”
“Chief Stone?” He cut her off. “Yesterday during our dance it was Jesse. Have we broken up?”
“Not funny, Chief. Not funny. And as I was saying, why—”
He cut her off again. “Because Alisha was doing her job as she’s been trained to do it. This is a crime scene, almost certainly the scene of a homicide and a serious assault. Evidence is being gathered by our people and the state Forensics Unit. The ME is still upstairs with the body. We need to limit the number of people who might unknowingly contaminate the scene.”