When Jesse got back to the table, dinner was waiting for him. Tamara, too. A brick-sized hunk of lemon-scented salmon over arugula and watercress was in front of the ME and a skirt steak over mashed sweet potatoes was at Jesse’s place. The ball of rosemary butter atop his steak had nearly melted away. Tamara took one look at Jesse and knew. She also knew it wasn’t another homicide or her cell would have gone off as well.
“Don’t worry,” she said, waving the waitress over. “Can we have these wrapped separately to go?”
“I’m sorry, Doc. It’s business.”
“I figured. You mind telling me what’s up.”
He leaned over and whispered in her ear the information he’d received about the two likely suspects. She made a face halfway between a smile and a frown. When the waitress returned, Tamara said, “I’ll take care of the bill. Take yours and go on and git.”
Jesse Stone was old-school, and the thought of Tamara paying bugged him, though he knew better than to show it. Instead he focused on something else Tamara had said.
“‘Git’! Your Texas is showing.”
She folded down her middle and ring fingers on her left hand, holding them down with her thumb, and raised her index finger and pinkie. “Hook ’em horns. I bleed burnt orange.”
33
Jesse’s first stop was the station. Alisha had already done as he had asked, putting together two packets on the suspects and two photo arrays. What Alisha didn’t do was ask Jesse where he’d gotten his information from. She was wise that way, and every time she displayed those good cop instincts, he felt better about hiring her instead of some old-pro city cop. Gabe Weathers was good, but he’d been on the job in Boston for only five years before hiring on in Paradise. The problem with who the selectmen and the mayor had wanted him to hire was that retired big-city cops came with all sorts of baggage. They always knew better and their attitudes were hardwired. You had to spend as much time untraining them as training them, and even then you couldn’t beat the big city out of them. And if the last few years had taught him anything, it was that policing a small town came with different challenges. To Jesse, the savings on pension and benefits wasn’t worth it.
“What should I do now, Jesse?”
“Call the mayor and tell her I’ve got two potential suspects, but that I have to talk to Rudy Walsh first.”
“The MassEx deliveryman? To get a positive ID?”
“Exactly. Tell Her Honor that if Walsh IDs them, I’ll be by first thing in the morning. By the way, Alisha, you’ve got an admirer over on Stiles.”
She turned away from Jesse in embarrassment.
“Dylan seems like a good kid,” Jesse said. “Maybe you should give him a chance.”
She smiled at him. “Maybe I already have.”
Jesse plucked one of the two packets on the suspects and a photo array from in front of Alisha and headed out the door.
Before he had gotten a block, the radio went off and the ringing of a phone came through the speakers of his Explorer. It was Lundquist.
“Jesse Stone.”
“You want to tell me where you came up with these two guys?” Lundquist asked, sounding a little bit annoyed. “We haven’t gotten the DNA results back and we didn’t find a single fingerprint. You’d also be amazed at how many cons have the nicknames King and Hump. Still somehow you found out it was these mutts.”
“Does it matter how? I’m on my way over to the hospital to see if Walsh can pick them out of photo arrays.”
“Healy always said you had connections. Never bothered him, but I always wondered what price you had to pay or what you had to trade for their information.”
“Healy never let it bother him too much, Brian. You’ve been at this long enough to know that good information doesn’t come from the sunny side of the street.”
Lundquist let that go. “So what’s the plan if he IDs them?”
“Then I have to go to Mayor Walker with it. She’ll want to do a press conference, but if Walsh IDs them, I’ll give you a heads-up. We can’t let these guys get away because of my mayor’s political aspirations.”
“I’ll be here.”
But then he wasn’t. The familiar two-tone hang-up chime sounded in the Explorer and the music came back on. It was Terry Jester singing “King to Pawn,” one of Jesse’s favorites. He even caught himself singing along.
Deborah Holt, the nurse in charge of Rudy Walsh’s floor, was less than pleased to see Jesse Stone. They’d crossed paths before, usually when Jesse wanted to break hospital rules.
“I’m sorry, Chief Stone,” she said, putting her palm up to cut him off, “but Mr. Walsh is probably asleep and his concussion symptoms haven’t abated as quickly as Dr. Marx had hoped.”
Jesse took a deep breath. Normally he wouldn’t have pushed, but this wasn’t normally.
“I’m sorry, but I’ve got two potential murder suspects out there, the two men who put Mr. Walsh in here to begin with. I need him to make a positive ID so we can get after them.”
She didn’t like it and it showed. This was always the nature of her interactions with Jesse Stone. He always wanted to cut corners but always came armed with a valid reason to do so. The last time they’d done business, she had had to help the chief sneak a man who’d been hit by a truck out of his room.
“The best I can do is to call Dr. Marx. If he says you can go in, then I won’t stop you.”
“Fair enough.”
Jesse waited. He could tell by the expression on Nurse Holt’s face that Marx had given his blessing for him to show the photo arrays to Walsh. And if that didn’t give her away, her slamming down the phone certainly did. Even her stride was angry.
“The doctor says that if Mr. Walsh is awake and agrees to see you, then you are to be permitted to talk with him, but that if he is asleep or doesn’t feel up to it, you are to come back in the morning. Understood?”
“Uh-huh.”
Sixty seconds later, she waved Jesse into Walsh’s room.
The room was dark. Jesse had had a concussion or two and knew that bright light and loud noises could trigger awful headaches. But he couldn’t risk Walsh misidentifying the suspects or leaving any doubt in his identifications because the lighting was poor. So he stood beside Walsh, laid out each array on the movable food table, and shone his keychain LED flash onto the photos. He made sure to keep direct light out of Walsh’s eyes. The photos were all the same size and were all in color. The subjects were all roughly the same size in the photos, the same race, and within a fair age range. Jesse had seen judges throw out IDs because the arrays had been done in such a way as to influence the witness’s choices. Not in Paradise, not on Jesse’s watch. And just to make doubly sure, he had Nurse Holt stay to confirm the IDs.
“This guy was the guy who clocked me,” Walsh said, pounding his index finger on Kirk Kingston Curnutt’s photo. “He tried to hide his face with his shirt, but it slipped off him and I got a good look. And this fella here, he’s the one who tied me up.” This time Walsh was pounding Humphrey Bolton’s head shot. “I hope you find an excuse to shoot these two bastards.”
Jesse let that pass without comment. Instead he wished Walsh a speedy recovery, thanked Nurse Holt, and left. He had calls to make and business to do.
34
King was on his way to the meet, visions of blondes and Porsches dancing in his head. The man on the other end of the phone hadn’t sounded pleased at having to cough up all that money. That was just too damned bad for him, King thought, smiling as he downshifted the stolen Outback and turned past the WELCOME TO PARADISE sign at the edge of town. When his contractor demanded they get together back in Paradise, King was tempted to up the payoff back to a million dollars. But impulsiveness had gotten him into trouble before and he wasn’t going down that path again. Not this time, not when he was finally going to hit it out of the park. He shook his head, remembering how he’d done time in various state pens for boosting cars on the spur of the moment or the one time he pistol-whipped a gas-station attendant over seventy-eight dollars. Seventy-eight freakin’ dollars! Even his greed had been small-time. Petty and small-time... not anymore.