Jesse felt the heat rising under his skin. It was his call whether or not to bring in the staties. Ever since Healy had retired, he was less apt to rush to ask for help from the state police. He liked Lundquist, Healy’s acting replacement, well enough. Healy had given Lundquist his full backing. It was just that Jesse was slow to give his trust. He’d found that trust given slowly was like a smart investment. It paid dividends over a long period and when it went wrong, the damages were minimized.
“Who told you to call in the staties?”
“C’mon, Jesse,” she said. “Do you have any idea of how out of it you were yesterday after Suit and Elena left the reception? I’m surprised you can even stand up. And for goodness’ sakes, we tried calling you for a long time there. What would you have done? I was covering for you in case the mayor got wind of it. This way I could tell her you instructed me to get the state cops right on it.”
He knew she was right, that he owed her his thanks, not his anger, which should have been reserved for himself. Molly had covered for him over the years on the few occasions he had lost control of his drinking. Beyond that, she had made the right call. If the rest of the crime scene looked anything like the hallway, Peter Perkins would be overwhelmed.
“Where’s the body?”
“Upstairs.” Molly pointed with her pen. “The ME is still up there with her.”
“ID?”
“Maude Cain, ninety-one. She’s lived here her whole life.”
Jesse put up his palm. “Wait. Cain... Cain. Cain as in Zachariah Cain?”
“That’s right. Cain as in the man the library is named for. They go back to before Paradise was Paradise.”
Jesse knew some of the local history, but not as much as lifetime residents like Molly. Sometimes, as he had learned when the bodies of Ginny Connolly and Mary Kate O’Hara were found in a collapsed building on Trench Alley, small towns hid their pasts from outsiders. That’s why Molly, besides being the best cop he had, was invaluable.
“Why didn’t the Cains build up on the Bluffs like the Salters and Rutherfords?”
“They gave a lot of their fortune away to do good works. Their money was pretty much gone by the time Maude inherited this place from her mother.”
“I see she was selling the house.”
“She was old. I don’t think she could handle the upkeep anymore.”
“Okay, I’m going up. And, Molly...”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks.”
As he walked to the staircase, he noticed the broken shards of porcelain, a few caked with dried blood, and the general destruction of the house. It didn’t take a seasoned homicide detective to figure out that whoever killed Maude Cain had come looking for something. The question was what had they come looking for? And had it been found?
King got back to the motel room with a sack full of fast-food cheeseburgers, a liter bottle of Coke, a six-pack of Coors, and the local papers. King winced at the pine disinfectant smell and the artificial floral stench of the cheap soap that hit him in the face when he stepped into the room. He kicked the door shut behind him and shook his head at the look of the place. All done up in deep browns and mustard gold, the place hadn’t seen new furnishings since the Carter administration, but they had to wait it out here only another day. Hump, his big body slouched across the ratty quilt, swung his legs off the bed at the sight of his pal. He muted the TV, the black preacher he’d been watching now silently waving his Bible around above his head like a machete.
“Here.”
King flung the bag of burgers on the bed and put the bottle of Coke on top of the fiberboard-and-veneer nightstand. He popped open a Coors and took the papers over to what passed for a desk.
“This is Coke, King,” Hump said.
“Yeah, and so what?”
“I wanted Pepsi. Didn’t they have no Pepsi? Coke is too sweet.”
“Hump, for chrissakes! You know how long it took me to find a fucking payphone. When I got to the store, I grabbed the first cola I found. Deal with it.”
“Okay,” he said, unable to hide his disappointment.
He felt a little better after inhaling two of the four cheeseburgers in the bag.
“King, there’s two burgers left. You want—”
“Knock yourself out. I ate.”
Hump liked that. He could’ve eaten a half-dozen more, but four was good for now. He took a big pull on the Coke and made a face.
“Why they make this stuff so sweet, King? Why do you think?”
“Like I give a shit.”
“They find the old lady yet? What’s the papers say?”
“Nothing.”
“They ain’t found her yet? Maybe it’ll be a few days and we can get far away.”
“Nah, Hump, they’ll find her today, most likely. Even though we left the truck in Salem, the delivery company will just follow the route back to the old lady’s house. Anyways, we aren’t goin’ anyplace. I set a meet for tomorrow.”
“But we didn’t find nothing in the house and we ripped the place all apart. Man, the walls in them old houses is tough to deal with. You can just punch through plasterboard, but those plaster-and-lath walls knocked the crap outta me.”
“The man don’t know we didn’t find anything, right?”
“I guess.”
