Robert B. Parker’s Buried Secrets

Twelve

At two-fifty-six a.m., Jesse sat in his Explorer, looking at the Burton house. The pile of trash and debris sat in the front yard, behind the evidence tape.

He thought maybe if he just kept staring at the pile of garbage, something might come to him.

He couldn’t sleep. It happened a lot. So he got up, got dressed, and drove over to the Burton house. He’d sent Gabe home and told him he’d watch until Suit showed up in the morning. Gabe hadn’t argued; he wanted the rest.

Jesse was just glad it wasn’t raining. They needed to move all this evidence inside somewhere, but there hadn’t been any time yet. Lundquist promised they’d begin trucking it all to a state evidence collection facility in the morning, but they’d needed to clear out enough space.

One night couldn’t hurt, he and Jesse had decided.

Two million dollars and change, and Burton had been sleeping on it. Files filled with pictures of dead people. Jesse still had the papers and Polaroids he’d grabbed back at the office, but there could be dozens, even hundreds, more hidden in the warrens of junk and piles of rotting trash.

The state crime scene people hadn’t even finished going through the file boxes piled up around Burton on the couch. But they had found a deposit of margarine from what appeared to be the 1990s in a restaurant-sized case blocking the stairs.

Jesse rubbed his eyes and reached over for his thermos of coffee, wishing there was something stronger in it. The thirst was bad right now. Nothing he couldn’t handle. But bad.

He thought about Daisy and Tate and their little altercation at the police line, then his own disastrous conversation with her in the office.

Jesse knew he had not handled that well. He was sleepless and tired and had been thinking about Burton and the case. He’d been impatient. Had just wanted Daisy out of his office, to be honest.

But he also found it hard to believe Daisy’s dire warnings about Tate. So the kid had been a little overzealous. Every new cop had an adjustment period. He remembered his first days with the LAPD.

Well, he remembered most of them. He’d been drinking pretty hard then.

Jesse figured a little time on foot would give Tate a chance to see that Paradise wasn’t Philadelphia, or even Helton. He could tell when someone wasn’t thrilled about their assignment. Also, Tate wasn’t doing much to hide it. He seemed to withdraw into himself, like a turtle into its shell.

But he was new, Jesse reminded himself. He was used to bigger departments, bigger towns.

Still. It bothered him. Because Daisy was his friend — at least, she was before this morning — and she wasn’t the kind of person to make things up. He’d meant to talk to Peter Perkins about it, but Peter went home directly from the scene, so Jesse didn’t get a chance. They’d catch up tomorrow. Maybe that would shed some more light on the whole thing.

Maybe Tate could apologize and that would be the end of it.

He took a sip of the coffee, but it no longer tasted good. It wasn’t what he wanted.

Goddamn it, he wanted a drink.

Then Jesse looked up. Headlights, coming down the street. He couldn’t quite make out the car behind them — the residential neighborhoods in Paradise had opted for cute little streetlamps on the corners instead of high-intensity lights on overhead poles.

The car braked hard, then swung around in the street.

Jesse could see it better now. A Toyota, relatively new. The rear license plate was missing.

Maybe someone who’d just bought a new car. Maybe a drunk tourist who’d gotten lost on the way back to their hotel.

Maybe not.

Jesse reached for the dash, about to hit the siren, when the car door popped open and Peebles, the witness who’d skedaddled, stepped out quickly. He took two steps away from the car, winding up like a kid trying to chuck a stone across a pond.

Jesse saw what Peebles had in his right hand.

A glass bottle with a burning rag.

Catching a glimpse of Peebles’s face in the flickering light, Jesse saw a mask of fear and sweat and panic.

He hit the siren, hoping to stop Peebles, distract him.

Too late.

The bottle flew through the air.

It hit the front of the house square under the eaves and exploded in a fireball. Molotov cocktail.

The dry old wood and peeling paint caught instantly.