Molly’s expression turned down. “Do you really think the kid’s dead?”
“If not already, he soon will be. Selling such potent stuff to Heather was a bad mistake. We didn’t even know there was a ring in our area until Heather’s death. The people the kid was working for can’t afford to have him roll over on them to save his own neck. Not if they want to keep their operation going. That’s the other thing.”
“What is?”
“Assign someone on the night shift to collect all the digital surveillance footage from the town’s cameras and see what the private security cameras captured.”
“Will do. But, Jesse, if the kid really is dead, what do you hope to find?”
“The next person up the food chain from Chris Grimm. I think that’s the best we can hope for now. I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong and the kid got away. Maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll turn himself in, but we have to work on the assumption that we’re not going to get much help from Chris Grimm. Drug cases are built one step at a time.”
Molly left. A minute later, Jesse grabbed his new baseball mitt off his desk, stood, and turned to face the window. He stared out at Stiles Island and the sun shimmering on the ocean as he pounded a baseball into the too-stiff pocket of the glove. The last of his old gloves had finally collapsed, the kangaroo leather beyond rescue or repair. Rawlings no longer made the model he’d used throughout his minor-league career. He’d been forced to buy a similar model online from a Japanese company, and it just didn’t fit his hand the way his old gloves did. For the moment, it wasn’t about the glove, but about concentrating on how to move forward with the case.
Thirty-two
Jesse put the glove back on his desk when he heard Joe Walters being hauled into the station. Molly printed him and photographed him, and Gabe brought him to a cell.
“Did you Breathalyze him?” Jesse asked Gabe, when he returned from the jail section of the station.
“Refused, but the doctors at the hospital drew some blood from him just in case. Molly will send it over to the lab.”
“If the gun charges don’t stick, his refusing to be Breathalyzed should stand up. Get him off the streets and away from his wife for a while. Good work. How’d he check out otherwise?”
Gabe laughed. “He puked a few times in the hospital. Not sure what made him more nauseated, the shot to his nose or the one to his—”
Jesse interrupted. “He ask for a lawyer?”
“Said he didn’t have one.”
“Thanks, Gabe. Get back out there.” Jesse turned to Molly. “Call the public defender’s office and get Mr. Walters some representation. Then call Lundquist and ask him to drop by.”
Brian Lundquist had taken the step up into Captain Healy’s old job as the area’s chief homicide investigator for the state police. Although Jesse and Lundquist had known each other for years, Jesse could never quite reconcile Lundquist’s Minnesota farm-boy looks with his skill as an investigator. Always seemed to Jesse that Lundquist would have been a more natural fit as a guy out on a lake somewhere, ice fishing, drinking beer, and eating lutefisk. Then again, Jesse Stone, born in Tucson, wasn’t much of a Yankee, either. It was odd that the two of them should end up knee-deep in murder in eastern Massachusetts.
Lundquist’s hand didn’t quite swallow Jesse’s, but it was pretty big. The Statie plopped himself down into the chair opposite Jesse, but his attention was elsewhere.
“That a new glove?”
“It is.”
Lundquist shook his head. “What’s the world coming to? Jesse Stone bought a new glove.”
“I also have a son I didn’t know about until a few months ago. If that didn’t make the world spin off its axis, my buying a glove isn’t going to do it.”
“Great news about your son, huh?”
Jesse was puzzled. “What?”
“The kid, Cole, didn’t he tell you yet?”
“Tell me what?”
“Oh, no.” Lundquist held his palms up to Jesse like a traffic cop. “I’m not saying another word. But if you didn’t call me about Cole, what am I doing here?”
Jesse thought about pressing him on the thing with Cole but decided to let it go for now.
“We had a teenage girl OD,” Jesse said. “Fentanyl and heroin.”
“Was she a user?”
“She was opioid-addicted, but this was the first time she did it intravenously. Didn’t stand a chance. Mom found her in her bed, cold and unresponsive.”
Lundquist shook his bowed head. “A shame, but more and more frequent. Still, Jesse, what’s it got to do with me? You want me to act as liaison between you and our narcotics team?”
“Nothing like that. I think we’ve tracked down her supplier. A Paradise kid named Christopher Grimm.”
“Arrest him?”
“No, and I don’t think we ever will.”
“How’s that?” Lundquist asked.
“My guess, the kid’s already dead. So I need you to be alert for any John Does that turn up. Molly has all the particulars for you.”
“How do you know the kid was her connection?”
Jesse explained about the stolen goods, the passbook account, and about how the kid showed up at the funeral home and cemetery.
Lundquist agreed. “Yeah, the people he was involved with have probably cut their losses and moved on. Victimless crimes, my ass. Sometimes I wish I could make people understand how crime shakes things up. If people who were thinking about murder ever had to do a family notification, I wonder if it would make them think twice about it. And their own damn families... Jeez, if they could only see how murder can destroy the killer’s family the same way it destroys the victim’s family... If, sometimes I think I’ll choke on that word. You ever think about that stuff, Jesse?”
“Not as much as I used to.”
“That it?” Lundquist asked, standing up.
“It is. Remember to stop and talk to Molly.”
“Of course. A new glove... Will wonders never cease?”
“Get out of here.”
At the door, Lundquist turned. “Listen, Jesse, don’t spoil it for the kid. Let him tell you.”
Jesse nodded.
Thirty-three
When Jesse arrived in Paradise, there weren’t many African American families in town, except for a few who lived in and around the Swap. That was no longer the case, and the new diversity of Paradise was part of what Jesse enjoyed about Boston’s encroachment. Although Paradise was relatively small, there were now developing communities of Indians, Chinese, and Hispanics, along with the Portuguese fishermen and their families who had lived in Paradise for a hundred years. Nor were African Americans consigned now solely to the Swap.
Moss Carpenter was a famous jazz guitarist who had lived on Stiles Island since before Jesse’s arrival in town. Carpenter had always been the one prominent African American who the town fathers pointed to when outsiders complained about Paradise’s lack of diversity. Their tone-deafness used to make Jesse cringe, because to him it always sounded like “Some of my best friends are black.”
It was Moss who had filed the report of the missing Fender jazz bass. He had supplied enough detail in the report so that Jesse was one hundred percent sure the bass they had retrieved from Chris Grimm’s closet was Moss’s stolen guitar. Jesse had brought the guitar with him just the same. The idea wasn’t really to have Moss confirm the guitar was his, but to use it to get closer to the truth about Chris Grimm and the people who employed him.