Robert B. Parker's Debt to Pay (15 page)

J
esse parked the cruiser by the police barricades and walked along the bent elbow of Trench Alley toward the still-burning fire. All the vehicles that had blocked access to more fire equipment had been driven off the street or, as in the case of his old Explorer, towed to the small police impound lot nearer the station. His Explorer was evidence. The state CSU was already digging bullet fragments and buckshot pellets out of the old Ford. There was no way they could approach the crime scene until Robbie Wilson and the state Department of Environmental Protection declared it safe. That didn't seem like it was going to happen anytime soon.

He'd taken a quick run home to shower and change clothes. He'd called Diana to let her know what was going on.

“Are we still going to Dallas?” she asked.

“Until I have definitive proof that the guy in the car was Peepers, we're going. Even then, we're committed to going.”

“You wouldn't want to disappoint Jenn,” Diana said, a bite of snark in her voice. “We wouldn't want that.”

“Jealous?”

“A little, I guess.”

“When Jenn meets you, you won't be the jealous one.”

“So I'm the trophy girlfriend.”

“As a ballplayer, I won all sorts of trophies,” he said, “but I was never in love with any of them.”

“I love you, Jesse Stone.”

“Me, too. I've got to go.”

He wasn't lying. Robbie Wilson was walking toward him, and the look on the little man's face spelled trouble.

“Where the hell have you been, Chief Stone?” He didn't wait for an answer. “I've been here for hours dealing with this and with the clowns from the state police and the ME's office. I don't have time for this shit. I've got an emergency on my hands here.”

Jesse didn't argue with Wilson. “What's the situation, Robbie?”

“Well, we've got things under control. The fire's still burning, but we've almost got it to a point where we can safely gain access to the shutoff valve for the underground tank. Once we're sure we're not dealing with gas and chemicals anymore, we'll spray down any potential hot spots. Then I'll go in with a guy from the state, assess the damage, and make sure the area is safe. Then, and only then, you can let the CSU team do their thing. Though, I gotta tell you, Chief, between the explosion, the exposure to the heat of the fire, and the fire retardant . . . I don't know what sort of integrity any evidence they gather is going to have.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You sure are an effusive bastard, aren't you, Chief Stone?”

Jesse nodded, but he didn't let Wilson walk away completely empty-handed.

“Chief Wilson,” he said, waiting for Robbie to turn back around, “thanks for pulling me out of harm's way before. I won't forget it.”

The anger in Wilson's face eased. “Just doing my job.”

Jesse waited until the fire chief had walked far enough ahead and then followed, wanting to see the scene for what it was without commentary. It was bad, worse than he had imagined. He could feel the heat from the fire before he even got close to it, but the flames weren't nearly as intense as they had been when he'd left. Robbie Wilson was right, though. The area of the initial crash and explosion was barely recognizable. Jesse looked at where he remembered the overturned Sentra had been. There was nothing there now except foam and char. He tried to imagine the frame of the car beneath the foam, but it was no good. The place was a complete disaster, and he figured he'd be in Dallas by the time the CSU could even access the area. He turned and walked away.

At the edge of Trench Alley, nearing the police barricades, Jesse fished his phone out of his pocket and dialed the number Scott Kahan had given him. He'd rather have called Hunsicker's security man with more definite information, but he didn't have a choice. Before he could dial, the phone vibrated in his hand. When he looked at the screen and saw it was Kahan calling him, Jesse just shook his head.

J
esse Stone.”

Kahan said, “Heard you've had a little excitement in Paradise today.”

“I wouldn't call it excitement. I wouldn't call it little.”

“We've had some here today, too.”

That got Jesse's attention. “How so?”

“A little over a month ago a young woman named Belinda Yankton was snatched out of her luxury building's garage in the same part of town the Hunsickers live in.”

“Vineland Park Village?”

“Exactly.”

Jesse wasn't in the mood for twenty questions. “And this has to do with us how?”

“I'm getting there, Stone. Patience.”

“I don't have much of that left to spread around today.”

Kahan sighed loudly in Jesse's ear. “Okay, but the details are important.”

“I'm listening.”

“This morning the Yankton woman escaped from her captor.
She was found nude and hysterical on a street in West Dallas. Seems she'd been the prisoner of a man this whole time. He kept her naked, tied to a workbench with leather restraints around her wrists and ankles. Kept her pretty drugged up most of the time, but not the whole time. Sound like a familiar MO?”

Jesse could feel heat rising beneath his skin. “Was she sexually assaulted?”

“No. She says her captor claimed he never did that sort of thing.”

“Then why the abduction?”

“You'll love this. The guy said it was because she'd been rude to him. She spilled his Shiner Bock on him at a famous barbecue place here in town. He felt she hadn't been properly apologetic and thought she needed to be taught a lesson in manners.”

The heat beneath Jesse's skin had nearly reached the surface. “Did he hurt her?”

“Not physically, but he tormented her psychologically.”

“Did she get a look at him?”

“I thought you'd never ask,” Kahan said.

“I'm asking now.”

“I think you already know the answer.”

“Peepers.”

“It was him, Stone. No doubt. The Dallas PD have already matched prints he left in the building he was renting to those on file for this particular Mr. Doe. You were right.”

“How do you find all this intel out without tipping off the locals about Jenn?”

“Don't worry, Stone. No one knows we're looking for Peepers or why. I have sources inside all the local PDs. They answer my question, not the other way around. You'd be amazed at what tickets to a Cowboys game can get you.”

“Not really. So he's definitely down there in Dallas?” Jesse asked, wondering who the man in the Sentra could have been.

“Probably.”

That surprised Jesse. “Probably?”

“There was no sign of Peepers when the cops searched the building. It looked as if he'd cleared out a day or two earlier. But he left evidence behind of what he'd been up to.”

“Evidence of what?”

“You won't like it.”

“I'll add it to the list. Evidence of what, Kahan?”

“Metal shavings, gun powder, drill bits.”

“Pipe bombs,” Jesse said. “Seems out of character for him.”

“Maybe so, but there were also rags with gun oil. He's planning something. I think the Yankton woman was a sideshow. Something to keep him occupied while he prepped.”

“But you said he's probably down there, not definitely.”

“The woman says he had been drugging her so much lately that she had lost track of time,” Kahan said. “She can't be sure of the last time she saw him. It might've been yesterday or three days ago. She wasn't completely coherent. All she could say with any clarity was that he wasn't there when she came to this morning.”

Jesse didn't like the sound of it. Something about the woman's escape didn't feel right to him, but he kept his doubts to himself. Instead, he delivered a bombshell of his own. He explained about the shot-out tire, the hand-delivered envelope, and its contents. Then said: “Peepers might be dead.”

Kahan didn't overreact. His voice was calm. “Was he the fatality in the police chase and explosion in Paradise?”

“News travels fast.”

“Bad news even faster,” Kahan said. “Or is this good news?”

“Possibly. General description and MO fit Peepers, but we can't be certain it was him. The car and the deceased were the epicenter of the explosion and the fire's still burning. I'm not sure there'll be enough of him left to do easy DNA analysis with. It'll take a lot of sifting. And there's no chance CSU will have access to the scene until tomorrow, earliest.”

“It'll be a while until you get results even under the best-case scenario. That's unfortunate.”

“I did retrieve a weapon at the scene I believe to be the .22 he's been using. It's being tested as we speak.”

“You
are
still coming,” Kahan said after a long silence.

“Uh-huh.”

“You would have been good at my former profession, Stone. Until you have irrefutable evidence to the contrary, always assume your target is operational.”

Jesse didn't much like that compliment, but as before, he just added it to the ever-growing list.

D
awn had come and gone with Jesse Stone behind his desk. His folded garment bag lay across the top of his packed suitcase by the office door. He picked up the ballistics report on the weapon he'd retrieved at the crime scene for the third time in the last hour, reading through it, looking for something that he knew wasn't there: proof the dead man was Mr. Peepers.

He'd been right about the gun. It was Peepers's .22, all right, and, as he suspected, it had been recently fired, but Jesse felt empty of pride or satisfaction. The bullets matched those found in all the shot-out tires—including the one from two days ago—and the slugs retrieved from the victims in Salem. Peepers's prints were on the handle of the Smith & Wesson. They were on the barrel, the trigger, the trigger guard, the clip, and the ammo. He might as well have had the words
praying mantis
engraved on the side of the barrel or bought space on a highway billboard to announce the weapon was his.

Even in the absence of irrefutable evidence, Jesse supposed he would have felt better about being right if the two other reports on
his desk aligned in a consistent manner. But they just didn't. None of the slugs the state CSU had dug out of his Explorer were a match for Peepers's .22. The bullets that had been shot through Jesse's windshield and sideview mirror had been .45s. The windshield slug had been recovered from, of all places, his spare tire. The irony wasn't lost on him. Unsurprisingly, the rest of what had been recovered from the Explorer were buckshot pellets. A shotgun, a .45, a pipe bomb . . . it didn't fit.

And then there was the preliminary report on the envelope dropped at the front desk. That made less sense than the two ballistics reports. Except for Alisha's fingerprints, there were no other prints on the outside nor the inside of the envelope. Yet Alisha couldn't recall if the man who delivered it was wearing gloves or not. He must have been. The question was why. Why wear gloves to protect against leaving prints on the outside of the envelope when the postcard and photo in the envelope are covered in prints?

There was a simple answer to all of the questions, to all of the seeming contradictions, to all of the inconsistencies. Peepers was fucking with them. Jesse in particular. Unlike the .45, the shotgun, and the pipe bomb, that fit Peepers's M.O. like a second skin. He'd wanted to confuse Jesse, to torture him psychologically.
Here I am. No, I'm not, I'm here. No, over here. No, over there.

Jesse wasn't much of a movie fan. He did like Westerns. Loved them, but Westerns were about as popular as musicals these days. Maybe less so. So it was odd that Jesse should remember a movie he watched when he was a little boy, sick and home from school. It was an old black-and-white movie about the French Revolution. What made it okay was that the Scarlet Pimpernel was kind of like the English Zorro: a foppish dandy by day, hero by night. And as he
looked at the three reports on his desk, Jesse mumbled to himself:
They seek him here, they seek him there. Those Frenchies seek him everywhere. Is he in Heaven, or is he in hell? That damned elusive Pimpernel.
He laughed at himself for remembering that. If he had been asked to recite any other poem, he wasn't sure he could do better than “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

Then, pulling open his side drawer, he stopped laughing. He reached into the drawer, pulled out the bottle of Tullamore Dew, and placed it on the desk. It really was quite beautiful to look at, and it was calling his name sure as the gate agent would if he didn't get a move on. Still, Jesse couldn't stop staring at the rectangular bottle with its rounded shoulders, the amber liquid within singing its siren song. Jesse folded. He poured himself two fingers and drank. He felt that delicious burn in the back of his throat, the slow warmth rising in his belly. He preferred Black Label. This would do. The disappointment in his weakness would come soon enough. Peepers, alive or dead, had won at least a single victory.

In his surrender, another thought crept into Jesse's mind. It was a thought he had either pushed down or kept at bay during these last weeks. It hit him that Jenn was getting married, that the tangled two-step they had done for years was now finally at an end. It hurt. He couldn't believe that it did, but there was no denying it. And regardless of all the hours he and Dix had spent discussing the dysfunction of their marriage and their even more dysfunctional divorce, he felt he had failed. His wrecked shoulder . . . well, that wasn't on him. Circumstance, misfortune, and the baseball gods were responsible for that. His marriage, though, was something else. He knew Jenn was equally responsible. More responsible. He hadn't been the one to cheat. Still, he saw it as his failure somehow. He poured himself another drink.

Five minutes later, he was in the backseat of a Paradise cab on his way to Logan. He didn't bother chatting with the driver. The disappointment was already setting in. That was the folly of alcoholism, he thought, the pleasures of drinking were so short-lived, and the downside lingered at your door forever.