Lie Down with the Devil (16 page)

Wilder had worked at Hastings, Muir, three years, almost four, excellent worker, energetic, a go-getter. Hastings was shocked, aggrieved, angry, as if the murder were an insult to the community, to the smalltown expectation of law and order. The interviewer, a trooper named Thorpe, had led the man down expected pathways: When did you last see the victim? Were you aware of any enemies, any arguments, any disputes?

Mooney read a second interview, a third, with increasing frustration. He didn’t know Thorpe or the other troopers who’d conducted the sessions. He didn’t like the pattern of the questions, the follow-ups, the gaps. No one had mentioned Gianelli, much less accused him.

Julie Farmer.
The name of the hit-and-run vic stood out like it was printed in neon. Age: twenty-one. So she was even younger than the Nausett vic, Danielle Wilder, who had been her best friend. Danielle had been Julie’s mentor, her idol. He read the brief transcript twice. Julie Farmer had voluntarily come to the Nausett station, consented to the taping. Even with her own words on the page, Mooney found he wasn’t getting what he needed. Had she hesitated before answering, spoken freely, kept things back? She didn’t mention Gianelli by name, but she did talk about a
man, an older man, Danielle’s ex-lover, a guy with a reputation as a tough guy…. Maybe the feds had interviewed her again. Maybe she’d remembered the name.

Mooney raised his fingers to the bridge of his nose, adjusted his glasses, massaging the tender area underneath the nose pads. He needed a copy of the federal file, but he didn’t have a single friend left at the bureau who’d be likely to pass it over. He couldn’t risk a formal request. If the feds found out he’d requested the file, their suspicion that he was involved in the leak to Gianelli would harden into certainty.

Dammit, why were the feds even involved? Because Gianelli was organized crime? Mooney tapped his desktop with his pencil point until the lead snapped. The Boston feds were in the doghouse, had been ever since mobster Whitey Bulger had skipped town leaving a legacy of outrage and lawsuits. The revelations kept coming: Senior agents had used Whitey as an informer. In return, they had kept him apprised of government moves against him, including the names of potential witnesses, several of whom had been subsequently murdered. Transfers, trials, and dismissals had followed swiftly.

He could see why the bureau would want to take down Gianelli. Taking down Gianelli would lift their grimy reputation out of the gutter. But how had they made the connection? Where was the evidence linking him to the “red ribbon” crime?

Mooney went back to the photos. Given the lividity, the obvious bruising on the left side, the victim hadn’t been killed in the graveyard. She’d been killed someplace else, then moved, her body repositioned, the red ribbon and black panties left behind to fuel tabloid headlines.

Where had she died? Where was her car? Why had she been dumped in a cemetery? Was it close, convenient, meaningful? Nausett, on the ocean, had plenty of boats, and a mile or so of shoreline. Why not take the body out to sea?

All Mooney had, besides the piles of paper on his desk, were questions. He didn’t even have a copy of the ME’s report. His trooper buddy hadn’t included it in the file and no way could he request it and not get somebody from the bureau demanding to know why.

He eyed the thin red ribbon, looped around the vic’s neck like an untied bow on a Christmas gift. Had the doer loosened it? When and why? Again why?

He pulled the phone closer, tugging the long cord. He would have to go for the ME’s report, take his chances. The ME might have nothing; the feds might have gone with their own lab, but he doubted it. They were quick enough to take advantage of local resources, the state police lab in Sudbury if not the ME’s office in Boston. He might have to make several calls—

The knock on the door was followed so closely by the two officers, he barely had a chance to cover the file, let alone sweep it into a drawer.

“I must have said, ‘Come in.’ ” Mooney had never liked McHenry, the big man. Too much arrogance there, an old-fashioned bull.

McHenry opened his mouth, but McDonough spoke first. “We got something here, thought we ought to tell you.” The smaller man, ill at ease, rocked slowly on the balls of his feet.

“I knew there had to be more to it, a private eye making a dud ID!” McHenry, pleased with himself, jumped into a rundown of the Nausett case: Sam Gianelli was the mobster the dead girl had dated. Not only was the hit-and-run vic a bosom buddy of the
Nausett vic, but Gianelli was cozy with Carlyle. The hit-and-run vic must have been blackmailing Carlyle, threatening to take what she knew about the murder to the cops—

“Motive’s for lawyers.” Mooney kept his voice even, like they were talking about the weather, the remote possibility of snow. “Motive doesn’t put Carlyle behind the wheel.”

McHenry’s smile widened and Mooney thought he’d never seen a less attractive grin.

“Got the vehicle,” the big man said proudly. “Impounding it now, some garage in Allston. So we’ll contact the feds. They’ll want in on this baby.”

“She doesn’t have a car.” Mooney wanted to recall the words the minute they left his tongue, but he didn’t bother to amend them, to turn the self-incriminating statement into, “I heard she didn’t have a car.” Let the Macs think what they wanted to think.

The big man said, “Vehicle’s registered to Gianelli. How do you like them apples? Judy’s gonna work it, and I’m betting she’ll not only make the match with the vic, she’ll put the lady in the driver’s seat.”

Judy Bisset, a criminalist in the CLU, specialized in trace evidence. She was good, but she wasn’t a miracle worker. She couldn’t leave all her other work to concentrate on a single hit and run. It would take time to make the match.

“No reason Carlyle wouldn’t be in the vehicle, if it belongs to Gianelli.” Mooney spoke calmly but his mind was racing. “What does she say about it?”

“Can’t find her. Nobody seems to know where she is.” McHenry made the words into a challenge.

“Well, when you pick her up—”

“We’ve got enough to talk to the feds,” the big
man said stubbornly. “If there’s a link between the cases—”

“That’s okay, McHenry, good work. Get your report on my desk and I’ll take it from here.”

“But we were—”

“I’m already on my way across the street, so I’ll handle things with the bureau. McDonough, why don’t you hang on a minute?”

McHenry lingered a beat too long, then pivoted on his heel. As soon as his footsteps died, Mooney said, “I was looking through the personnel files. You’re up for a department citation on the trash-fire thing. Congratulations.”

“Thank you, sir.” The smaller officer ducked his head and turned to go.

“So how did you get onto the car?” Mooney hoped he had made the question sound like an afterthought.

“We did the hotline thing in the papers. Got it on the news.”

“Guy leave a number?” Mooney wasn’t talking about a phone number. Often, tipsters didn’t want to be identified, but if there was reward money involved, there was a department protocol. The caller would leave a five-digit number instead of a name. If the tip panned out, the tipster could use the number to collect the cash.

“No name, no number,” McDonough said.

“A do-gooder,” Mooney said.

“I guess.”

Outdoors in the bracing chill, Mooney didn’t bother to pretend he was on his way to some mythical confab with the bureau at the JFK Building across the street. He moved like a man on autopilot, backing the Buick out of the lot, racing down busy streets to the Central Artery, the underground maze of the Dig, and headed south.

He drove skillfully, weaving the lanes with a sense of purpose as well as speed. He hadn’t gone to the feds. Instead he had made his choice. This was it. Now was the time to take time. He had it coming, hadn’t taken a vacation in years. He was going to go back to what he was good at: street work.

In Boston, too many local bad guys knew him by sight. More and more, he was the wrong color, the wrong nationality. He spoke the wrong language. He didn’t blend in; he stood out. All that would be different on the Cape.

The crush of traffic temporarily defeated the urge for speed. He accepted bumper-to-bumper traffic on summer Friday afternoons when Bostonians rushed to the Cape, but now, midweek in winter, he wondered what the deal was. Were people slipping off to open summer homes with no hint of spring in the air?
Were they fleeing the city for some unknown reason, following the evacuation routes that had sprung up post-9/11?

As he drove, Mooney tallied his mistakes. He had believed Magda when she’d relayed the news about Gianelli, but he hadn’t pressed for details. Mistake number one. Once he knew more about the case, he had continued to keep quiet, to protect Magda, to protect himself. That was number two. Then he had avoided Carlotta, knowing the feds suspected him of leaking to Gianelli, aware that Agent Dailey was on his tail. Mistake number three.

But the biggest mistake was this: Because he had wanted Gianelli arrested and out of the way, he had never questioned the case. Not his jurisdiction; not his problem, he had told himself. Now, with Carlotta involved, it was.

He considered McHenry’s take on the hit and run. Julie Farmer, the girl who’d been killed by a car in the North End, was Wilder’s friend, and in the Macs’ scenario, she had come to Carlyle not as a client, but as a blackmailer:
I am a witness; I saw what your fiancé did.
To the Macs, the story made sense. To Mooney, it had all the hallmarks of a frame. He doubted the Macs or the feds would see it his way.

Carlotta wasn’t where she ought to be, wasn’t answering her cell phone, wasn’t picking up her home phone. Roz was answering, but she wasn’t talking, and Gloria, who always talked, wasn’t talking either. Mooney couldn’t sit calmly at his desk and watch the chips fall. He needed to move, take action, make waves. The Wilder case was the beginning, the place to start, and this much he knew: The investigation had been bigfooted. The Nausett cops and the state troopers had barely had a chance to sink their hooks
into the case before they had been ordered to give way to the FBI.

A blue Pontiac cut him off. The driver gave him the finger and Mooney smiled. He thought they ought to display the finger on the Massachusetts state seal.

With his own criminalists and evidence techs working full-speed, Mooney thought a week might do the trick. It would take at least a week to study paint chips and glass fragments, make the necessary microscopic lab comparisons, decide whether or not they had the right vehicle. If the Macs went to the bureau, the feds might steamroller the job through their own facilities. Could they do it faster? Would they try? Putting Gianelli away would be a feather in somebody’s cap. Mooney wondered if the cap would belong to the red-faced agent Dailey.

Hingham. Marshfield. Duxbury. Traffic thinned the farther south he drove. The Sagamore Bridge, a notorious summer bottleneck, was easy sailing and once past it, he didn’t need to consult any maps. Mooney’s family, dozens of aunts, uncles, and cousins, used to gather on the Cape when he was a kid, back when it was affordable. They’d pile into the backs of pickup trucks, drive to Dennis or Falmouth or Yarmouthport, watch Cape Cod league baseball games. The price was right: free for all; bring your own beach chairs. If you caught a foul ball, you had to give it back.

Route 6 had been a narrow two-lane road then. Suicide Alley, they had dubbed it. Now he took the third exit off the divided highway, heading south to Nausett. He told himself he’d need to watch it, not come on as the city cop visiting the country cousins, avoid any wiseass remarks about sweeping up dead animals off the roads or babysitting drunken tourists,
as though these cops weren’t real cops, just traffic enforcers, guys with easy, placid jobs.

He had a big-city chip on his shoulder, but at least he knew it. Most of these guys were okay, guys who’d grown up in the places they served, the best kind of cops, with the pulse of the town in their blood, who knew names and families and history going back three, four generations. Sometimes the intimacy backfired: Kids from bad families had it held against them, became the usual suspects rounded up for every petty offense, but mostly it worked out fine.

Jesus, he was nervous. Nervous about a case, playing with his head, going around the investigation instead of plunging into it. He had told himself for years that all his cases were personal, but now this one was, and it felt different.

He thought he knew her, knew Carlotta, but how far would she go? If she had crossed the line with a lover, how far would she go? Women in jail, most of them were there because they’d joined forces with the wrong man.

Gianelli was the wrong man. Moon felt his jaw tighten. He knew Gianelli was the wrong man because he, Mooney, was the right man. But if he was the right man, if he’d always been the right man, why didn’t she see it, too? Why hadn’t he done something to make her see it?

He remembered her in uniform, the first day. Defiant because it was no use pretending to be demure, not with the hair and the height. There early; there late. Reliable, reasonable, always passed over, always given the crap assignments, never complaining. When he’d given her a break, she’d given him suspicion in return.

The timing had never been right.

Signs caught his eye, multisyllabic Indian place names: Attaquin, Ashumet, Santuit. Placards urged him to vote for Proposition 6, to vote against it. A vote against Proposition 6 would
KEEP NAUSETT SAFE.
A vote in favor would
MOVE NAUSETT INTO THE 2IST CENTURY!

Long after she had left the department, when he was alone on stakeout, he’d hear her voice in his head, low and clear, with a husky undertone, a faint hint of smoke. They would engage in imaginary dialogues, alone in the dark, but whenever he picked up the phone, determined to reconnect with the real woman, the ring went unanswered. She was dating some other man. She didn’t want to get involved with a cop. She was so damn stubborn.

When she had been part of his team, he had felt younger, more alive. Maybe it was the feeling rather than the woman he yearned for, the moment relived, youth and promise before they yielded to age and compromise.