Роберт Паркер - The Bitterest Pill

“I will let you know when we make progress, Mr. Selectman,” Jesse said. When Gray walked away, Jesse said a few other choice things only he could hear.

Molly had gone back into the viewing room, and Jesse saw she was visibly shaken. Two of Molly’s girls were in college, but two were still at home and one of them was a junior like Heather. He wanted to throw his arm over her shoulders but was very careful to never show any form of intimacy with Molly in public. Her job was difficult enough without having to deal with whispers about the two of them. If there was one lesson about small-town life that Jesse had learned early on, it was that rumors spread fast and there was no way to fight back.

The casket lid was raised, and all the ugly autopsy stitchery on her body was covered by her dress. Owing to his past, Jesse had always found those brutal stitches reminded him of the seams on a baseball. Not just then. He had been through this ritual hundreds of times in L.A. and here in Paradise, but this was the first time since Cole had come into his life. Jesse both hated and loved the ways in which Cole had changed him. It bothered him that he was having trouble distancing himself the way he had always been able to previously.

It occurred to him that he might already have been changed if he had seen Diana in her coffin, but her family blamed Jesse for her death and had banned him from attending. They weren’t alone in their beliefs. Jesse blamed himself, too, and there was no way they could punish him any more than he punished himself. His guilt over her murder is what had driven him so deeply down into the bottle of Johnny Walker Black. When he finally hit the bottom he made the choice, with help from Tamara and Molly, to swim back up and climb out forever. Forever was a long way away. Jesse was concerned only with each individual day.

Molly wasn’t the only person shaken by Heather’s death. Obviously, her parents were devastated, and both were up front, both were crying. That wasn’t exactly unexpected, but the death of a teenager sends shock waves through a community. It also reminded everyone of just how fragile and vulnerable they all were. There were lots of tears and stunned faces in the room and very little talking.

Jesse checked his watch. He had to get something to eat and get to a meeting. He tried not to skip too many days without a meeting if he could help it, and Heather’s death had rattled him more than he wanted to admit. That used to be a prescription for a half-bottle of Black Label in the company of Ozzie Smith’s poster. These days it meant a meeting and/or a call to Bill.

“Molly,” he said in a whisper. “I’ve got to get to a meeting. Please give our condolences and tell the Mackeys I’ll be by tomorrow to share what progress I’ve made with them.”

“Not tomorrow, Jesse. Funeral is tomorrow. Besides, you haven’t made any progress.”

“The next day, then. I’m going to ask them questions, but I don’t need them to be any more tense and upset than necessary.”

“Got it. And you don’t want them to prepare answers.”

“Yeah, Molly, that, too.”

Outside, Jesse saw the parking lot was filling up, and many people passed by him on the way into the funeral home. Some stopped to shake his hand. Some nodded. Others waved. Most walked by him, zombielike, girding themselves for what they knew awaited them inside. When he got to his Explorer, he noticed a kid, a teenage boy by the parking-lot entrance, smoking the life out of a cigarette and pacing along the sidewalk under a streetlamp. There was something about the kid, dressed in black jeans, hundred-dollar red Nikes, and a black hoodie, that held Jesse’s attention. He wasn’t sure what it was, maybe the way the kid paced or his fidgety hand movements with the cigarette. He clicked the Explorer doors closed and walked toward the kid. He was on the short side, broad-shouldered, his dark blond hair spilling out of the left side of the hood. He was obviously distracted, lost in his own head, maybe, but whatever the reason, he didn’t seem to notice Jesse’s approach.

Jesse was no more than ten feet away when the kid looked up. Jesse could see in the kid’s expression and in the reddened rims of his very deep blue eyes that he recognized him. The kid hesitated a beat, turned, and ran. Jesse wasn’t sure what to make of that. It wasn’t like a kid had never run away from a cop before, even an innocent kid. Still, there was something about the kid, and Jesse meant to find out what it was. He took off after the kid but lost him after he turned the corner.

After the meeting in the synagogue’s basement in Salem, Jesse debated whether to head straight home or to do what he was about to do. Though he had put in his work at the meeting, the kid in front of the funeral home kept pushing his way into Jesse’s consciousness. Some of Heather’s friends were at the viewing, but he could speak to them tomorrow, after the funeral. The kid with the blue eyes had been crying, but if he was that close to Heather, why not go in like everyone else? During the coffee break at the meeting Jesse realized the kid outside the funeral home was acting guilty. The question was, guilty of what?

One of the things Jesse had learned early on in uniform was to watch the crowd that gathered at a crime scene. Some of them were there out of idle curiosity. Some were simply nosy. Some had no life and fed off the woes of others. But sometimes the guilty party was right there in the crowd, behind the sawhorses or the yellow tape, watching. They were curious, too. But their curiosity was neither idle nor innocent. Some, like arsonists, got off on seeing the results of their handiwork. They enjoyed watching the thing they’d lit up burn down. Others hung around to see what they could see and hear what they could hear about the investigation. It was amazing what you could learn at a crime scene if you knew how to observe one. Still others felt guilty for what they had done. They were the ones you saw in movies, the ones detectives said wanted to be caught. That was how the kid had seemed to Jesse, and that was why Jesse was standing next to the Pembroke Art Gallery and at the door of the adjoining warehouse.

He pressed the buzzer to Maryglenn’s apartment/studio above the warehouse. He knew he could just as well have waited until morning and gone back to the high school, but there was something else on his mind besides the kid. Yesterday at lunch, both Daisy and Maryglenn had seemed odd. And when Jesse had asked about Maryglenn’s past, she changed the subject. Through the big old door Jesse heard Maryglenn coming down the steps.

“Who is it?”

“Jesse Stone.”

The locks clicked and the door pulled back. Jesse was surprised to see Maryglenn out of her usual artist’s black pants and shirt. Instead she was wearing an elaborately patterned Asian robe made of a fabric that hung loosely off parts of her body and tightly to others.

“I’m not used to seeing you out of uniform,” he said, smiling.

There was a brief moment of confusion on her face. Then, when she realized what Jesse meant, she smiled back at him.

“I do indeed own clothing that isn’t black or splattered with paint. Do your boxers have your badge number embroidered into them?”

“How did you know?”

She shook her head at him. “What’s up?”

“I need to talk. Can I come up?”

“This official business or some other kind of business?”

“A little of both, I guess.”

“Come on. Lock the door behind you.”

Jesse had been in Maryglenn’s place before, seen some of her work in progress, but those visits were during the madness surrounding the most violent incidents in Paradise since the assault on Stiles Island. This would be different on many levels. He knew it. She knew it, too. After scaling the stairs, Maryglenn pushed the door open and gestured for Jesse to go on in.