For his decade-plus in Paradise, Jesse had been able to count on Molly to be Molly. Sure, he loved her, but it was love at arm’s length. Sure, he knew her husband and kids, but he didn’t involve himself in their lives. It was love born of his need for routine, and no one, not even Johnnie Walker, was more reliable, more rock-solid, than Molly. Until now. She had always been there when he needed her. He trusted her. Her judgments. She wasn’t anything like the other women Jesse had been attracted to in appearance or attitude. She wasn’t blond or classically beautiful. She wasn’t needy. She didn’t need or want to be rescued. Suddenly, that had all seemed to change.
It was more than that, too. More than Molly. It was that Jesse had always been good at seeing cases for what they were and what they were not. He had the knack of perspective. Not all cops do. He could almost immediately see how a case would come together, which pieces were missing and which ones were solid. Not with this case. And there was his sense that even though the investigation had only just begun, everyone was holding something back. Molly included. That didn’t bode well for a case where the entire town had a twenty-five-year head start on him.
Angry with himself for his self-doubt, Jesse poured himself another. He raised the glass to Ozzie.
“You were the better shortstop, Oz, but not even you would know what to make of this case.”
It wasn’t all bad. He had finally met the new ME and there was something about her that had gotten his attention. Something more than her sarcasm. Maybe it was that one smile she’d deigned to share with him. He had to admit that he found it hard not to stare at her face.
“What do think, Ozzie? Was I flirting with her?”
Ozzie kept his opinion to himself.
14
They met at the Rusty Scupper in the Swap. The Scupper — a shot and tallboy chaser joint — was as close as Paradise came to a dive bar. It wasn’t the kind of bar where you could order an appletini and not draw stares. The Scupper stank of past accidents, of spilled beers, of overturned ashtrays, and of emptied stomachs. It was also a place that kept its secrets. The two of them sat at a wooden booth covered in generations of carved graffiti: mostly the names of drunk men and the women they loved, longed for, or lamented. There were a lot of four-letter words, too. Even the first two lines of a limerick.
That was as far as the poet had gotten. One of the men at the booth read the lines as he had many times before and laughed as he always did.
“Why you think the guy stopped there?” he asked his booth mate. “I always think about that, whether he just couldn’t think of nothing else to write or if he got too drunk or his arm got tired or something. Maybe he got into a fight or the tip of his knife broke off. What do you think?”
But the other man was lost in his own dark recesses. He fidgeted, spinning his beer bottle like a prayer wheel. Peeling off pieces of the bottle’s wet label, then rolling the wet, sticky paper around on his fingertips and flicking the balls away.
“So what do you think?”
“Huh?” the fidgety man asked.
“About the girl from Japan.”
“I don’t know about no girl from Japan,” he said, scratching at the label with his dirty thumbnail.
“But what do you think?”
“I think we’re fucked.” He patted his jacket pockets. “I need a smoke.”
“Chill, man. We’re okay. There’s nothing to connect us to Zevon.”
“Nothing but that they found his body right next to the girls. Why did he do that, stick Zevon next to the girls?”
“How could he know the building was gonna go? Shit happens, man.”
“But why always to us? I didn’t even want to go to Stiles that night.”
“Yeah, you said that, like, a million times, but you’re full of it. You wanted a piece of her like we all did. It was her friend that screwed everything up. We shouldn’ta let her come.”
“Now who’s full of it? She wouldn’ta gone with us if—”
He stopped mid-sentence when the waitress stopped by the table to ask if they wanted another round.
“Sure,” they both said, just to get rid of her.
“Look, what’s done is done. We messed up. This will blow over, too.”
“It’s never done. And we just killed—”
“Keep it down. Keep it down, man. Take it easy.”
Their second round came, though neither of them had half finished their first beers. The fidgety man stood up, again patting his jacket for cigarettes. When he felt them, he let out a loud sigh. He pulled a bent cigarette out of the semi-crushed pack and rolled it around in his fingers.
“I got to have a smoke,” he said.
“Go ahead, man. Do it already.”
When he was certain his friend was out of the Scupper, he went to the men’s room. He slid the little metal bar into the crude hole in the doorjamb and dug his cell out of his pocket.
“Yeah, it’s me. I think we got a problem.”
When the conversation was over, he went back out to the table and reread the limerick’s first two lines, but this time he didn’t laugh.
15
The following morning Jesse was sitting in his office, waiting for Healy to show so they could finally get the real police work under way, but they had to get the press conference behind them. Jesse had wanted to notify both sets of parents before going public with the autopsy results, but Ginny Connolly’s mother wouldn’t be getting into Logan until that afternoon. Molly was going to meet her flight and then drive her back to Paradise. Maxie Connolly had moved out of state six months after her daughter’s disappearance. Molly told Jesse that Ginny’s father had left before his daughter could walk.
“I don’t even remember Ginny’s dad,” Molly said, “and there were no pictures of him in their house.”
Jesse had also hoped to get an ID on John Doe before he spoke to the media, but that wasn’t going to happen. It seemed John Doe hadn’t been a popular guy. His fingerprints hadn’t gotten any hits from the local, state, or federal databases and his DNA sample was at the back of a long line at the state crime lab. The only tangible thing they had to work with was the tattoo.
As he passed the time, Jesse pounded a baseball into the pocket of his old Rawlings glove. Some men paced. Some prayed the rosary. Jesse pounded the ball. Variations on a theme. He had once been an inevitable phone call away from Dodger Stadium. Funny how inevitability is a bit more elusive than the word implies. Jesse’s dream of Dodger blue came crashing down during a meaningless exhibition game in Pueblo, Colorado. In the course of a few seconds, his future took a permanent detour away from Dodger Stadium. The team doctor said he’d been unlucky. That if only Jesse had landed on any other part of his shoulder, they probably could have fixed him up like new. If only, Jesse thought. Two of the most dangerous words in the English language. Without that powerful arm, Jesse’s career was shot. All the baseball savvy in the world won’t help you throw a runner out at first from deep in the hole. And deep in a hole was where Jesse Stone had found himself.