Robert B. Parker’s the Hangman’s Sonnet

“From your buddy Jim Flint of the Yarmouth PD. It’s his case file.”

“Thick.”

“Uh-huh. Thorough, too,” Jesse said. “When Lundquist leaves, give him everything you’ve got on Updike. We’ll let the staties put the word out about him. We have to remember we’re trying to close two homicides. The tape is secondary and maybe our way to the killer.”

“Weren’t Bolton and Curnutt responsible for Maude Cain’s death?”

“Probably, but we don’t have Bolton, and that still leaves Curnutt’s homicide to deal with.”

“You think it’s Evan Updike behind the missing tape?”

“Flint liked him for it and he seems the most likely suspect. I think Stan White thinks so, too, though he says different. Until we can do better, Updike’s it. Can you do me a favor, Molly? I need you to make a few calls for me. It’s not strictly police business, but it’ll mean a lot to me.”

“Sure,” she said, making a face. “Tell me what you need.”

Lundquist was holding Jesse’s old baseball mitt in his hands. He didn’t have it on. He was too respectful a person for that. It was more like he was inspecting it, revering it, wondering whether the object itself could reveal anything about the man who owned it.

“Did you play ball?” Jesse asked, walking around his desk, laying the file down.

“A little. All hit. No field. And the curveball was as mysterious to me as the Second Coming.”

Jesse laughed. “If it wasn’t for the curveball, Brian, the major leagues would be much more crowded.”

“Could you hit the curve?”

“Uh-huh.”

“How?”

“Part of it was being blessed with great eyesight. Sometimes I could pick up the rotation on the ball and knew it was a curve. And I was observant. If you watched a pitcher enough, you could see him tipping off his pitches. Sometimes it was how he held his glove when it was a curve. Sometimes his arm angle changed when he threw a curve. But as I moved up in class, pitchers were more polished, many had pitched in the bigs and had corrected their tells. So in Triple-A it was a matter of working the count, getting the pitcher in a spot where you had a pretty good sense of what pitch he would throw in a given situation and where he would throw it. There are a lot of people with the physical gifts to play baseball, but it’s the mental aspects of things that separate the good from the great.”

“Jeez, Jesse, why didn’t you go into coaching?” Lundquist asked, placing the ball back in the glove and the glove back on Jesse’s desk. “You sound like you would’ve made a great manager.”

Jesse shook his head. “Last thing on earth I would have done. It would have been like an author who could no longer get published working in a bookstore. Too frustrating and not enough money in it. No, when my shoulder got wrecked, that was the end of baseball for me forever.”

“Why am I here, Jesse?”

“Because I’m going to need you to back me up when the tape is finally offered up.”

“What do you need?”

“I’m not sure, but I suspect the DA is going to object when the tape is offered to the highest bidder and money is to be exchanged. But I think it’s going to be our only chance to clear the books of the two open homicides.”

“Risky.”

“Very, but the only lead I’ve got is on a guy the Yarmouth PD cleared years ago. Molly will give you all the details when you leave. Everything else is a dead end. The forensics have gotten us nowhere. Hump Bolton has gone to ground. If we balk at the exchange, then Curnutt’s killer will be gone with the wind.”

“Do you really care about who killed a mutt like Curnutt?”

“I care about any open homicide in my town, no matter who the victim was.”

“Fair enough. Okay, Jesse, I’ll back you with the DA. I hope you’re right.”

“Me too.”

75

It wasn’t the Gray Gull. It wasn’t the Lobster Claw. It wasn’t Daisy’s, nor was it any one of thirty other restaurants in the area. Instead, Jesse took Tamara to a chain restaurant out near the highway. It was one of those places with laminated menus, table tents, and annoyingly bubbly servers who told you their names in breathless voices and went on about their all-day two-fers. When she saw the place in the distance, Tamara leaned over and hugged Jesse, hard.

“I love you, Jesse Stone. You are one of a kind.”

Two years earlier this had been the place in which they’d shared their first meal out together. It hadn’t been a date, but it was where they’d first shared dark truths with each other about their pasts and established the trust that bound them together as friends. They hadn’t been back since.

“My treat,” he said, pulling into a yellow-lined parking spot. “You can even have the shrimp-and-steak fajita combo if you’d like.”

“A big spender, my goodness.”

When the hostess saw Jesse’s PPD hat, she winked at him.

“Your table is ready, Chief Stone,” she said, walking them to the booth they’d sat in two years earlier.

Tamara stopped in her tracks about five feet short of the booth when she noticed the bouquet of yellow roses and the bottle of champagne on the table. She punched Jesse’s left biceps.