“Aside from the cop cars,” Jesse said.
“There’s a maroon
Chevrolet Cavalier and a brown Toyota Camry in the parking lot now.
Did you see any other cars?”
“Just the Saab,” Rick said.
“Tell me about the Saab.”
“It was a Saab ninety-five sedan, red, with the custom wheel
covers.”
“Where was it?”
“Parked by the driveway over there, when we come by with our
boards.”
“Anyone in it?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you noticed the car and model and wheels,” Jesse
said.
“Sure, I like cars.”
Jesse smiled. “When did it leave?”
“I don’t know. After we seen the dead guy and run in the church
and told the minister, when we come out again it was gone.”
“Okay,” Jesse said. “Thanks for
your help. If you want to wait
around while I talk with Sid you can sit in my car with Officer Cox.”
“Okay.”
Sid came over and told Jesse essentially the same story. He pumped up his part in it a little, telling Jesse that “we found the
dead guy” but most witnesses aggrandize a little, Jesse knew.
When the boys were gone, Jesse stood in the rain with Peter Perkins while the EMTs bundled the body into the back of the ambulance.
“No flashers,” Jesse said to the EMTs.
“No sirens. There’s no
hurry.”
“You going to talk with his wife?” Perkins said.
“Soon,” Jesse said. “Give her a
little time.”
“Kids tell you anything?”
“There was a red Saab sedan, a ninety-five the kid told me, with
custom wheels, that was parked by the driveway and left after the kids discovered the body.”
“They didn’t get any kind of license number?”
“No one ever gets a license number,” Jesse said.
“I know.”
“But here’s what we’re going to
do,” Jesse said. “You remember
that we got a list of all the license numbers of cars parked around the woman shot in the mall parking lot.”
“Yeah,” Perkins said.
“Sixty-seven cars.”
“We’re going to go through that list and see how many, if any,
were red Saab sedans.”
“Half the yuppies in Massachusetts drive red Saabs,” Perkins
said.
“So right away we cut the suspect list in half.”
“Kid didn’t see who was in the
car,” Perkins
said.
“No.”
“Staties come up with a list of twenty-two gun owners
yet?”
“Not yet,” Jesse said.
“When they do we could cross-reference that with the car
list.”
“We could,” Jesse said.
“I can get on it after I do my shift tomorrow.”
“You can get on it first thing,” Jesse said. “I’ll have somebody
else pull your shift.”
“That’s gonna really squeeze
us,” Perkins said. “Suit and Molly
are already off the roster.”
Jesse looked at Perkins silently for a moment, then he said,
“That would not be your worry.”
“No,” Perkins said. “No,
‘course not.”
22
“You think we cut it a little
close?” he
said.
“That’s what makes it work for
us,” she said. “I lose the
feeling if we don’t stay close to the edge.”
“I know,” he said.
They were silent for a moment, holding hands, on the couch, with
a pitcher of martinis.
“As long as we keep control,” he said.
“It was difficult to stop
touching when those kids showed up.”
“But we did it,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “I thought about
killing them
too.”
She shook her head emphatically.
“No,” she said. “We’re
not doing random slaughter. That would be like a gang bang, you know? Where’s the love in a gang bang.”
“I know,” he said.
“I’m just telling you how I nearly lost control.”
“Of course, I always nearly lose control. But that’s part of it,
to give ourselves to it, to let it possess us entirely, and then, at the very verge of the abyss, assert our will.”
He sipped his martini.
“It’s sort of like this,” he
said. “Martinis. You like them so
much you want to drink a dozen, but if you do
…”
“The precise joy of a perfect martini is gone. You might as well
slug gin from the bottle,” she said.
“So we shouldn’t hurry,” he said.
“No, but we can start focusing in on the next one.”
He leaned over and kissed her gently on the mouth.
“Let’s go to the videotape,” he
said.
23
The three killings in an affluent suburban town led the local newscasts. The Boston papers gave it front-page coverage. Reporters and camera people hung around outside the police station. Jesse was interviewed twice, to little avail. And his picture was on the front page of the Globe one morning. When he came into the
station on a bright Tuesday morning, Arthur Angstrom was at the desk.
“Manny, Moe, and Larry are waiting for you,” Arthur said. “In
the conference room.”
“Perfect,” Jesse said.
When Jesse went into the conference room the three town selectmen were sitting at one end of the small conference table.
Jesse pushed a pizza box aside and sat in the fourth chair and waited.
Morris Comden cleared his throat. He was the chief selectman.
“Good morning, Jesse.”
“Morris.”
“You’ve been busy,” Comden said.
Jesse nodded. The other selectmen were new to the office.
Jesse
knew that Comden spoke for them.
“We just thought, Jim and Carter and I, that we probably ought
to get up to speed on things.”
Comden had a sharp face and wore bow ties.
Jesse nodded again. Comden smiled and glanced at the other two selectmen.
“I told you he wasn’t a talker,”
Comden said to the other
selectmen.
Carter Hanson had a dark tan, and silver hair combed straight back and carefully gelled in place. He was the CEO of a software company out on Route 128. He decided to take charge.
He looked straight at Jesse and said, “So what’s going
on?”
“Three people have been killed by the same weapons,” Jesse said.
“We can find no connection among them and we don’t have any idea
who did it.”
“We need more than that,” Hanson said.
“We do,” Jesse said.
“Well, let’s hear it,” Hanson
said.
Comden shook his head slightly and Jim Burns, the third selectman, looked uncomfortable. Jesse looked without expression at Hanson for a long moment.
“There’s nothing to hear,” he
said.
“That’s all you know?” Hanson
said.
“Correct.”
“You don’t have any clues?
Nothing?”
“Correct.”
“Well, Jesus Christ,” Hanson said.
Jesse nodded.
“Well,” Hanson said. “What do we
tell the press.”
“I like no comment,”
Jesse said.
Morris Comden had a yellow legal pad in front of him. He looked
down at it.
“Your department is costing a lot of overtime,” he
said.
Jesse nodded.
“Perhaps you could allocate your personnel a little better,”
Comden said.
He spoke more carefully than Hanson.
Jesse didn’t say anything. Burns spoke for the first time.
“Jesus, don’t you talk?” he said.
“Only when I have something to say.”
“Well, maybe you could stop this undercover drug thing you’ve
got going at the high school. We got a damn killer on the loose.”
“Nope.”
“For crissake, who cares if there’s a couple kids smoking dope