Robert B. Parker’s the Hangman’s Sonnet

“It clicked a few minutes ago. It has to do with surveillance cameras. I’ll explain it to you later. For now, keep him in sight. You better call Lundquist and clue him in, but keep everyone else in the dark. Call Molly and tell her to have Peter Perkins search Bascom’s apartment. Tell her to assign two units to the Wickham estate. Anyone coming or going from the estate except the mayor or Nita Thompson gets a tail.”

“Got it. Anything else?”

“Nothing else for now.”

Healy asked, “Did you get the tape?”

“It’s destroyed.”

“Damn!”

“Don’t sweat it. I’ll explain it to you later.”

“Okay, Jesse.”

“You know how I said Bascom was a pawn?”

“Yeah.”

“He had company.”

“Like who?”

“Me.”

85

Jesse spent several hours recounting his story to the local and Vermont State Police. Only after Jesse assured them that he would arrest the killer within twenty-four hours did they arrange for him to get a ride back to Paradise. Once he was back at the station, he made calls to Nita Thompson and Stan White, who made a verbal show of feeling betrayed and distraught about the destruction of the tape. After that, Jesse made some other calls, all the pieces falling into place. He wished he could be happy about being right, but there were times, he thought, that wrong was better.

It was too late to worry about that now. At the moment, he stood outside the town house between Lundquist and Healy, waiting to be buzzed in. Healy was exhausted, having spent the entire night sitting on the suspect’s house.

“The money?” Jesse asked.

Healy pointed at the garage door. “In there. The rifle, too. He came home, pulled into the garage, came out, locked the garage door behind him, and he’s been inside ever since.”

Jesse was beat, too. He’d caught a few minutes of shut-eye during the ride to Boston from Paradise with Lundquist. It was the only sleep he’d gotten since the night before. Lundquist was still upset at Jesse for not reporting the shooting incident in the nature preserve and for keeping him out of the loop when he brought Healy into a police matter.

“I had no choice, Brian. I had to use someone who had no official standing, someone I could trust who wasn’t on anybody’s radar screen. Nobody would be looking for Healy in their rearview mirrors.”

Lundquist was unmoved.

“He’ll get over it,” Healy had said to Jesse when Lundquist was taking a call. “He’s new in the job, so he’s touchy. But he’s good.”

At a distance, the town house seemed a lovely brick affair with granite steps, black wrought-iron rails, boot scrapers, and converted gaslights. But up close it was more a reflection of its owner: weary and abused, something that looked better viewed through the lens of the past. The windows needed replacing. The bricks were in desperate need of repointing. Pieces of the fence were rusted and missing like rotted-out teeth in a once-glorious smile.

When the buzzer sounded, Jesse turned to the others and said, “I’m going in alone. It’ll just be easier and I’ll be able to trip him up. If I need you, you’re certainly close enough.”

Healy was uneasy. “This guy tried to kill you twice.”

“If he wanted to kill me, I’d be dead. You saw the shot he made last night.”

Lundquist shrugged. “You want him, he’s yours... for now. He’ll wind up in Vermont eventually.”

Jesse stepped into the vestibule, the front door slamming shut behind him. The inside of Roscoe Niles’s town house was even shabbier than the exterior. The wooden floors were warped and split in several spots, and whatever varnish or wax had once protected them was worn away to a dull memory. The furniture, which ten years earlier might have been called comfortable, was now frayed and scratched, the cushions flat and lifeless. The endless shelves of record albums, CDs, and tapes that had once lined the walls of his den were now as empty as Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboards, and his stereo equipment — tube amp, pre-amp, turntable, reel-to-reel, CD player, speakers — was gone.

There were rectangular ghosts on the walls of the hallways where framed posters and photos had hung, all signed to Roscoe Niles by megastars in the music industry. Jesse had always liked the photo of Roscoe holding David Bowie in his arms, big smiles on both their faces. The empty walls and shelves were eerily reminiscent of Niles’s office at the radio station

As Jesse walked into the kitchen, he questioned himself as he had since last night when it all became clear to him. Should I have seen it sooner? He had never been a man given to second-guessing his decisions. That had changed a few years back after Suit had been shot. But if he was being honest with himself, he had to confess that since Diana’s death, he’d spent a great many drunken hours doing nothing but questioning himself. It’s what had made him vulnerable to manipulation. The only thing he had been sure of since Diana’s murder was that he had been played for a fool by a man he considered a friend.