“I’m confused,” Jesse said, turning to Pettigrew. “Everybody knows about the body.”
Pettigrew shook his head. He put his radio in a vest pocket, moved to his left, and pointed at another metal plate a few feet away from the blue tarp. “That’s not it. Here, Chief, give me a hand. Help me lift this up.”
Jesse and Healy went around to the other side of the plate. Molly helped Pettigrew.
The foreman said, “Ready? Now!”
And with that, they lifted and slid the second metal plate up and back, resting it on the slab next to the other damaged metal plate. Then they looked down into the hole it had covered and saw a frayed, filthy blanket. Jesse knelt down and slowly pulled back the blanket, pieces of it disintegrating in his fingers.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” Healy crossed himself.
Molly dropped to her knees, crossing herself, too. “Oh my God.” She clamped her hand over her mouth.
“You think it’s them, Officer Crane?” Healy asked.
She did not answer. He wasn’t sure she’d even heard him.
“Them who?” Jesse asked, peering down at the two skeletons.
“Mary Kate O’Hara and Ginny Connolly,” Healy said.
Molly pulled the small flashlight off her belt and laid flat on her stomach. She shined it down into the hole. The skeletons were different sizes. One was about five feet in length. The other five-six or — seven. Then Molly gasped. She pushed herself up and ran. She stumbled, fell forward, ripping the knees of her uniform pants. Got up again, limped outside, fell to her knees, and vomited.
When Jesse reached Molly, tears were pouring out of her. He got down beside her, threw his arm around her shoulders.
Healy came and stood over the both of them.
“What is it, Officer Crane?”
“It’s them, Captain. It’s Mary Kate and Ginny.”
“How can you be sure?”
“The ring,” she said. “Look at the ring.”
6
There had been very few times after his rookie year on the LAPD that Jesse Stone was at a loss. This was one of those times. Jesse wasn’t drinking, but Healy was. He was working on his second Jameson, pacing in front of Jesse’s desk.
“How’s Crane holding up?” Healy asked.
“She’ll be fine. I sent her home to get cleaned up. She’ll be back here in a little while. You want to fill me in?”
“I was still in uniform back then, just starting out,” the captain said. “You were probably taking infield practice in your first season in A ball.”
“Long time ago.”
“Feels like yesterday, Jesse. Two sixteen-year-old girls, Mary Kate O’Hara and Virginia Connolly, went missing on the Fourth of July. They were supposed to meet a bunch of friends at Kennedy Park to see the fireworks and hang around for a concert by a local band afterward. Their parents said they left their houses around eight. The friends said that Mary Kate and Ginny were there for the fireworks, but that both of the girls skipped out during the concert. They never made it home. Nobody realized they were missing until about three a.m. If I remember right, the parents didn’t notify the Paradise PD until they had called all of the girls’ friends. So it was maybe five or six before the cops had any idea what was going on. Your department was smaller then. I think it was eight men and the chief. His name was—”
“Frederick W. Tillis,” Jesse said, pointing at the wall to his right. “Someday my picture will be up there staring down at the poor fool who inherits this job.”
“I knew Freddy Tillis a little bit after I got the bump to detective. Nice enough fella, I guess. Not the most competent policeman I ever came across. I think his major qualification for the job was that he came cheap.”
“They hired me because they thought I was a bumbling drunk.”
Healy laughed. “They were half right.”
“The wrong half. But what about the girls?”
“Tillis waited two days before he called us staties in. By then the trail was icy cold, not that there was much of a trail to begin with. The girls seemed to have vanished. There weren’t even many tips. You know, the usual crazies. One said he’d seen them abducted by a spacecraft. There was one credible lead, I think, a drunk guy eating at the Gray Gull. He said he saw a few kids in an overcrowded boat rowing out to Stiles at a time that would fit. His name will be in your files somewhere. It’s something like Sabo or Laszlov, like that. Nothing came of it. The guy was plastered.”
“The ring,” Jesse said. “Molly kept talking about the ring.”
“Mary Kate O’Hara’s ring. Her class ring from Sacred Heart Girls Catholic. The ring company made a mistake in sizing it. It was too large for her ring finger, so she always wore it on the middle finger of her right hand. Both of the skeletons had Sacred Heart rings on, the smaller one on its right middle finger. Be a hell of a coincidence.”
“I don’t believe in coincidence, but let’s wait for the autopsies before we get ahead of ourselves.”
“It’s them, Jesse.” Healy gulped the rest of his drink. Held the empty cup out for another. “Don’t make the same mistake Freddy Tillis did. Go dig the file out and start working it.”
Jesse poured.
“Why is this the first I’m hearing about these girls, Healy? I’ve been chief here for over a decade now. I’ve heard about almost everything else that’s come down the sewer pipe in this town. Why not this?”
“You’re from where? Tucson, right? You played ball in Albuquerque. Worked LAPD for ten years. Paradise is a small town. I been in all sorts of small towns since I came on the job. And if there’s one thing small towns protect, it’s their darkest secrets. It’s shame. They’re ashamed, Jesse. You may be chief, you may live here, but you didn’t grow up here. It’s one thing to be from a place. Something else to be of a place. Talk to Crane about it. She’ll tell you.”
Jesse nodded.
“What do you make of the guy in the blue tarp?” he asked.
Healy laughed. It was a laugh that had no relationship to joy. “You just said you don’t believe in coincidences.”
“Would be a hell of a coincidence for three bodies to end up in the same abandoned building, buried in utility holes ten feet apart.”
Healy shook his head. “So you think there’s a connection?”
“One way or the other.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Healy asked.
“That the bodies being ten feet apart means more to me than the passage of time.”
“We’ll know soon enough.”
“Uh-huh,” Jesse said, finally pouring himself a drink.
7
The files were buried and forgotten, much as their bodies had been. It had taken him nearly a half hour to dig them out of a back storage room, a room Jesse had spent precious little time in since his arrival in Paradise. He didn’t want to think about the other secrets Paradise kept buried there. Now he sat with an array of the girls’ photos laid out on his desktop, the photos dulled by time and carelessness. In spite of their faded images, Jesse could see enough to get a sense of the girls and to glimpse the past.
Mary Kate O’Hara was the smaller of the two girls. Copper-haired and freckle-faced, more cute than pretty, she had fire in her eyes. They looked hazel in the faded photographs. The paperwork said they were green. What did it matter now? Virginia “Ginny” Connolly was the taller of the pair. She was strawberry blond and blue-eyed. In her tenth-grade graduation picture — taken in February of that year — there was still some awkwardness in her features. A nose a bit too big for her face, a mouth full of braces, slumped shoulders to hide her height. But in the photos of her taken in the months leading up to her July fourth disappearance, she’d shed her braces, grown into her face and body. She would have been a beautiful woman, Jesse thought. Both girls had been good if not remarkable students at Sacred Heart. Both had been good athletes, particularly Ginny. Neither had gotten into much trouble, though Mary Kate was a bit of a pistol. She’d been a prankster, according to her school records.