I Know a Secret

Thirty-three

“I had no idea,” said Holly Devine, her hands calmly folded in her lap as she sat on her living-room sofa. “I knew Daddy was losing weight, but he told me he was just getting over pneumonia. He never said he was dying.” She looked across the coffee table at Jane and Frost. “Maybe he didn’t know either.”

“Your father definitely knew,” said Jane. “When we searched his medicine cabinet, we found prescription pills ordered by an oncologist, Dr. Christine Cuddy. Four months ago, your father was diagnosed with lung cancer. It had already spread to his bones, and when Dr. Isles studied the X-rays, she spotted a metastatic lesion in your father’s spine. Your father must have been in a great deal of pain, because there was a recently prescribed bottle of Vicodin in his bathroom.”

“He told me he’d pulled a muscle. He said the pain was getting better.”

“It wasn’t getting better, Holly. His cancer was already in his liver, and that pain was only going to get worse. He was offered chemotherapy but he refused. He told Dr. Cuddy that he wanted to live as fully as he could, while he could, without feeling sick. Because his daughter needed him.”

It had been only two days since her father’s death, yet Holly appeared composed and dry-eyed as she processed this new information. Outside, a truck rumbled by her apartment building, and the three teacups rattled on the flimsy-looking coffee table. Everything in Holly’s apartment seemed cheaply made, the sort of furniture that usually came packed in a box with step-by-step instructions for assembly. This was a bare-bones apartment, for a career girl still perched on the bottom rungs of the ladder, but Holly was almost certainly on her way up. There was a slyness about her, a canny intelligence in her eyes that Jane was only now recognizing.

“I’m sure he didn’t want me to worry. That’s why he never told me about the cancer,” said Holly. She gave a sad shake of the head. “He’d do anything to make me happy.”

“He even killed for you,” said Jane.

“He did what he thought had to be done. Isn’t that what fathers do? They keep the monsters away.”

“That wasn’t his job, Holly. It was ours.”

“But you couldn’t protect me.”

“Because you didn’t let us. Instead, you practically invited the killers to strike. You ignored our advice and went to a bar. Allowed that woman to send you a drink. Were you trying to get yourself killed, or was it all part of the plan?”

“You weren’t having any luck finding him.”

“So you decided to do it yourself.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What was the plan, Holly?”

“There was no plan. I went for a drink after work, that’s all. I told you, I was supposed to meet a friend.”

“Who never showed up.”

“Do you think I lied about that?”

“I think we haven’t heard the whole story.”

“Which is?”

“That you went to the bar hoping to draw out Stanek and his partner. Instead of letting us find him, you chose to be a vigilante.”

“I chose to fight back.”

“By taking justice into your own hands?”

“Does it really matter how it happens, as long as it does happen?”

Jane stared at her for a moment, suddenly struck by the fact that, on some level, she actually agreed with this woman. She thought of the perps who’d walked free because some cop or attorney made a procedural error, perps that she knew were guilty. She thought of how often she wished there were a shortcut to bringing a killer to justice, a way to kick a monster straight into a prison cell. And she thought of Detective Johnny Tam, who had once resorted to just such a shortcut and delivered his own form of justice. Only Jane knew Tam’s secret, and she would forever protect it.

But Holly’s secrets couldn’t be protected, because Boston PD knew exactly what she and her father had plotted. Holly had to be confronted.

“You drew them out,” said Jane. “Made them reveal themselves.”

“There’s no law against it.”

“There’s a law against murder. You’re an accessory.”

Holly blinked. “Excuse me?”

“The last thing your father did on this earth was to protect his little girl. He was dying of lung cancer, so he had nothing to lose by killing Martin Stanek. And you knew he was going to do it.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Of course you did.”

“How could I?”

“Because you’re the one who told him where to find Stanek. Moments after we arrested Bonnie Sandridge, you called your father’s cell phone. A two-minute phone call, which is how he learned Bonnie’s name and address. He went to her house armed and prepared to kill the man who threatened his daughter.”

Holly took this accusation with surprising calmness. Jane had laid out the evidence that Holly was an accessory to Martin’s murder, yet none of this seemed to fluster her.

Frost said, “Do you care to respond, Ms. Devine?”

“Yes.” Holly sat up straighter. “I did call my father. Of course I called him. I’d just had an encounter with a woman who’d planned to abduct me, and I wanted to tell him I was safe. Any daughter would make that call. I may have mentioned Bonnie’s name on the phone, but I didn’t tell him to kill her. I just told Daddy not to worry, because you had her in custody. I didn’t know that he’d go to her house. I didn’t know he’d bring his gun.” Holly took a deep breath and dropped her head. When she looked up again, her face was streaked with tears. “He gave his life for me. How can you talk about him as if he’s a cold-blooded killer?”

Jane looked at those glistening eyes and trembling lips and she thought: Goddamn it, this gal’s good. While Jane wasn’t buying the act, others might be convinced. They had no recording of the phone conversation between Holly and her father, no proof that Holly actually knew what Earl planned to do. In court, this eerily poised young woman would easily sail through the toughest cross-examination.

“I need to be alone right now,” said Holly. “This has been so hard, losing Daddy. Please, can you just go?”

“Of course,” said Frost, and he stood up to leave. Was he actually buying this performance? Frost had always been a pushover for damsels in distress, especially if those damsels were young and attractive, but surely he could see what was going on here.

Jane held her silence as she and Frost left the apartment and walked out of the building. But as soon as they climbed into her car, she blurted, “What a load of crap. And what a hell of an actress.”

“You think that was acting? She really did seem upset to me,” said Frost.

“You mean those cute little tears she produced on command?”

“Okay.” Frost sighed. “What’s bugging you?”

“There’s something not right about her.”

“Care to be more specific?”

Jane considered what it was about Holly that bothered her. “Two nights ago, when we told her that Earl was dead, do you remember how she reacted to the news?”

“She cried. Like you’d expect a daughter to do.”

“Oh, she cried, all right. Loud, honking sobs. But it felt staged to me, as if she was doing what we expected her to do. And I swear, just now she cried right on cue.”

“What is your problem with her anyway?”

“I don’t know.” Jane started the car. “But I feel like I’ve missed something important. Something about her.”

Back in the homicide unit, Jane scanned all the file folders piled up on her desk, wondering if they contained some detail she’d overlooked, some explanation for why she felt so unsatisfied. Here were the case files she’d already combed through, covering the Boston murders of Cassandra Coyle and Timothy McDougal, the Newport death of Sarah Basterash, and the disappearance of Billy Sullivan in Brookline. Four victims in three different jurisdictions. Their deaths were so dissimilar that the decades-old connection between them could easily have been missed. Cassandra Coyle, her eyeballs scooped out and displayed in her hand like Saint Lucy. Tim McDougal, his chest pierced by arrows, like Saint Sebastian. Sarah Basterash, burned to cinders like Saint Joan. Billy Sullivan, almost certainly buried and moldering in his grave, like Saint Vitalis.

Then there was the child who was still alive, the one who’d been first to accuse the Staneks of abuse twenty years ago: Holly Devine, birthdate November 12. On that day, the church honored Saint Livinus, Apostle of Flanders, who died a martyr after being tortured by pagans. His tongue had been ripped out to stop him from spreading the word of God, but even after his death, according to legend, the amputated tongue of Livinus continued to preach. Did Holly ever lie awake at night, haunted by the bloody fate that was preordained by her birthdate? Did she shudder at the thought of her mouth being forced open, her tongue sliced away with a knife? Jane remembered her own fear when she’d been targeted by the killer called the Surgeon. She remembered startling awake in panic, drenched in sweat, imagining the killer’s scalpel sinking into her flesh.

If Holly had ever felt such terror, she hid it well. Too well.

Jane sighed and rubbed her temples, wondering if she should reread the case files for these four victims.

No, not four victims. She sat up straight. Five.

She shuffled through the stack of folders and found the file for Lizzie DiPalma, the nine-year-old girl who’d vanished twenty years ago. Lizzie’s disappearance was still classified as unsolved, but there’d been little doubt in the minds of investigators that Martin Stanek had abducted and killed her. Two decades later, the girl was still missing.

Frost returned from lunch, saw the files spread out across Jane’s desk, and shook his head. “You’re still going through those?”

“It’s not settling right with me. It feels too neatly tied up, complete with a pretty bow. Our prime suspect conveniently ending up dead.”

“Doesn’t seem like a problem to me.”

“And we never found out what happened to this little girl.” She tapped on the folder. “Lizzie DiPalma.”

“That was twenty years ago. It’s not our case.”

“But it feels like the beginning of everything. As if her disappearance was the first domino to fall, setting off what followed. Lizzie goes missing. Her hat turns up on Martin Stanek’s school bus. Suddenly the accusations start flying. The Staneks are monsters! They’ve been molesting kids for months! Why didn’t any of that come out earlier? Not even a hint of it?”

“Someone had to be the first to speak up.”

“And the very first kid who did speak up was Holly Devine.”

“The girl you keep insisting is strange.”

“Whenever I talk to her, I feel like she’s calculating every word. Like we’re playing a chess game and she’s five moves ahead of me.”

Frost’s phone rang. As he turned to answer it, Jane paged through the Lizzie DiPalma documents, wondering if any progress on the case was possible after so much time had passed. The grounds of the Apple Tree Daycare had been thoroughly searched for the girl’s remains. While microscopic traces of her blood were found on the bus, it was explained by an injury a month earlier, when Lizzie had cut her lip. The most powerful evidence against Martin Stanek was Lizzie’s beaded hat, found on the school bus. The hat she’d been wearing when she vanished.

The killer had to be Martin Stanek.

And now he’s dead. End of story. With a sigh of finality, Jane closed the folder.

“You’re not gonna like this,” said Frost, hanging up the phone.

She turned to him. “What now?”

“You know that glass of wine that Bonnie Sandridge sent to Holly in the pub? The lab says there’s no trace of ketamine.” He shook his head. “We have to release her.”