They both nodded. And as Jesse walked toward Buddy Hall’s cruiser, parked behind Jesse’s car, they both took out flashlights and began to walk the lawn, carefully.
“What happened,” Jesse said to Buddy Hall.
“She must have snuck out the back,” Buddy said. “I’m parked right outside her house all night until I hear the radio call about a body on Paradise Neck. So I call in, and Bobby Martin’s working the desk, and he tells me Molly called it in to him, and that it’s the Franklin broad. And I said, ‘Jesus, she hasn’t left the house.’ And I call Moll on her cell phone and she says yes it is Franklin and she’s been shot and I better get over there. So here I am.”
“You check her house?” Jesse said.
“No, I come straight here. Should I have?”
“It’s okay,” Jesse said. “You help Molly and Suit on the crime scene. I’ll go over there.”
“Yeah, okay. Jesse, I’m sorry if I fucked up. I didn’t think she’d sneak away.”
“We’ll play it as it lays, Buddy,” Jesse said. “Go look for clues…and don’t step on any.”
Buddy Hall nodded his head very hard and hustled toward the wide lawn that led up to the now-empty school. Jesse followed, looking at the ground, walking carefully until he got to Molly.
“Moll,” he said. “You run things here. Make sure everything is gone and cleaned up and no trace before those little kids get here at eight a.m.”
“Absolutely,” Molly said.
A state car pulled up behind the other cars and parked, and a smallish man got out with a doctor’s bag.
“Okay,” Jesse said. “The state ME. I want a report as soon as he can get us one.”
“I’ll tell him,” Molly said.
They watched as the ME trudged toward the body.
“Suit’s got a girlfriend out here,” Jesse said. “Doesn’t he?”
Molly nodded.
“And she’s, ah, inappropriate, probably married,” Jesse said.
“Yes.”
“And you discovered him, and he’s made you promise not to tell.”
“Yes. I gave him my word.”
“But you can’t resist busting his balls a little.”
Molly smiled.
“Could you?” she said.
“Probably not,” Jesse said. “One thing, though. If who he’s banging becomes any kind of issue to a case, I need to know.”
“I understand that, Jesse.”
“Okay,” Jesse said. “I’ll trust your judgment.”
“You can,” Molly said.
“I know,” Jesse said.
He walked back to his car and got in and headed back across the causeway toward Mrs. Franklin’s house on Sewall Street.
33.
Now that he had to investigate her murder, Jesse decided to call her by her actual name, Fiona Francisco. In which case he could also think of the daughter as Amber Francisco, and stop messing around with the Franklin-slash-Francisco construct in his head.
He parked in front of her house. There were lights on in the front room. He tried the front door. It was locked. He walked around to the side where a tiny alley squeezed between two buildings. Jesse went down the alley. Behind the house was a tiny brick patio that was at a level lower than the front of the house and was accessed by a door in the basement. The door was open. Jesse looked around the patio. Looming behind it was the back end of another old house. To the left was a small set of stone steps that led up to a driveway at street level. The driveway opened onto a side street that ran perpendicular to Sewall. Jesse looked at it and nodded to himself.
He went in through the open door. He was in a cellar that had been converted, probably in the 1950s from the look of it, into a playroom. Pine-paneled walls, vinyl-tile floors, Celotex tile ceiling. The furnace and electrical panel and hot-water heater were in an alcove. Jesse went up the stairs on the far end and into the living room. It smelled like a tavern. There was a half-full bowl of bright orange cheese puffs on the coffee table in front of the shabby couch. There were four beer cans upright on the coffee table and one on its side. All of them were empty. A pink crocheted coverlet lay half turned back on the couch. Cheese puff detritus speckled the couch and the floor near the couch. The television was on, some sort of infomercial. The kitchen was empty, dirty dishes on the counter. A dirty frying pan on the stove. Jesse opened the refrigerator. Twelve cans of beer, some Velveeta, a loaf of white bread, some peanut butter, and three Diet Cokes. On the counter next to an unwashed coffee cup was a bottle of multivitamins.
That oughta balance everything out, Jesse thought.
He walked through the rest of the small house. The beds were unmade. Dirty laundry lay in piles in both bedrooms. There was a still-sodden towel on the bathroom floor. He went back to the living room and leaned against the front door. To his left was a fireplace that had been cold a long time. Over it was a small mantelpiece, and on the mantel was a school photograph of somebody who probably used to be Amber.
The cellar door had been unlocked. There was no sign of forced entry. It looked as if she had gone down to the cellar and out the back door and up the outside steps to the side street and was gone. Did she walk? Was there a car? How did she end up out on Paradise Neck? More important, how did she end up dead? It seemed an odd coincidence that she was found on the lawn of the Crowne estate. Clearly, she had snuck out. There was no reason to go the way she went except to avoid Buddy Hall in the cruiser out front. Why would she sneak out? If she thought the bad ex-husband was after her, she’d have run to the cop, not away from him…Her daughter…If her daughter called…“Ma, it’s Amber, can’t talk now, sneak out so the cops don’t see you and I’ll meet you on Sea Street, behind the house.”…Maybe love had failed and she was running from her boyfriend.
Jesse walked to the fireplace and looked at Amber’s picture on the mantel. It was in a cheap cardboard holder. The picture was garishly overcolored, as school pictures often are. The girl in it looked blankly sweet, with soft brown hair and a roundish, unformed face. Jesse looked at it for a while. It told him nothing.
Maybe she wasn’t looking for help. Maybe she lured her mother out to be killed…Maybe I been a cop too long…but maybe she did. If she did, who did the killing? Esteban? Why? And why take her to the Crowne estate. Did they kill her there? Kill her elsewhere and dump her there?
Jesse walked once more through the house, hoping it might tell him something. All it said to him was that it was an unpleasant place to live. He went out the front door and closed it behind him and got in his car. ’Course, Horn Street wasn’t a week in Acapulco, either.
He started the car and put it in gear and drove back toward the crime scene. The sky was starting to lighten. It was 4:58 on the dashboard clock. It would be daylight soon. Jesse knew it was too early to speculate. But he also knew it wasn’t often that somebody got killed for no reason, or got killed by a perfect stranger. Now and then it happened. Like Son of Sam in New York, or the pair that Jesse had put away a few years ago. But they weren’t common.
If a few more dumpy beer-drinking women with adolescent daughters get killed, Jesse thought, I’ll revise my position. But right now it’s got something to do with Louis Francisco, and Amber, and maybe Esteban Carty. And maybe something about the Crowne estate.
Or not.
34.
Amber was sitting cross-legged on the daybed, smoking a joint, while Esteban talked on his cell phone. They were alone in the garage with the huge television screen. The TV was on but silent. They both liked to smoke a joint and watch TV without sound.
“It’ll be in the Boston papers, man, you want to go online and see,” Esteban said.
He stood in the doorway with his back to Amber, looking down his alley.
“Yeah, I know you’ll pay. I still got the other package to deliver.”