Robert B. Parker’s Buried Secrets

Four

An hour later, Jesse was on the phone with Brian Lundquist, the head of the State Homicide Division. He and his team usually handled the big investigations for small towns like Paradise, but he’d known and worked with Jesse for years now, and if they didn’t have the same relationship that Jesse had with his predecessor, Healy, they still respected each other.

“How much money?” Lundquist asked.

“They haven’t got an exact count yet,” Jesse said. “But they did a rough estimate. If they’re all hundreds, about two million dollars in cash. Some of it was ruined, of course.”

“Jesus,” Lundquist said.

The crime scene techs had gone into the house and, under Dev’s careful direction, managed to slide the body into a bag, which they hauled out and into a waiting ambulance. Then they’d gone back inside and begun the process of bagging the money and excavating the layers and layers of debris.

Dev had promised to call as soon as he’d done the autopsy, but he didn’t think he’d have much to tell Jesse. “Advanced decomposition,” he’d said, just before he left. “Unless I find a bullet inside the skull, I’m probably going to have to go with natural causes.”

“You ever have any dealings with this guy before?” Lundquist asked.

“Nobody did,” Jesse said. “He was a recluse. Neighbors barely saw him.”

Jesse had sent Suit around to canvass the neighborhood. He’d come up with nothing.

“We’ve got a couple complaints about him with code enforcement for not mowing his lawn,” Jesse said. “Other than that, he’s a blank.”

While they talked, Jesse watched the crime scene techs walking in and out of the house, laden with junk.

They laid it out, piece by piece, onto tarps they’d placed on the front lawn.

All of which they had to photograph and tag because of the photos of the dead bodies.

“Any chance the guy was just into true crime? Private investigator? Or maybe he just had a really sick fetish?” Lundquist asked. “Maybe that’s why he had those pictures.”

“That would make things easier, but I doubt it,” Jesse said. “If I had to guess, I’d say he had something to do with every one of them.”

“I really hate it when you get a hunch, Jesse.”

“So do I.”

“But you’re probably right.”

“I usually am.”

“Well, let’s not get crazy here. They find anything that links these pictures to any names? Or open cases?”

Jesse laughed. “Sure. They found a list, right next to a card with the killer’s signed confession and his current address.”

“Too much to hope for.”

“I can’t even tell you what else they’ve found yet. They’re just doing their best to find the floor right now.”

A few of the neighbors watched from their front doors or on their lawns. They weren’t yet moving to the sidewalk or crowding the crime scene tape to get a better look, but it was only a matter of time. Jesse was surprised the media wasn’t here yet, but the local stations were understaffed — budget cuts, he’d heard — and it was a Friday night.

Not that Jesse had a problem with it. He wanted to keep people as far away as possible until he could get a better handle on it.

“You thinking serial killer?”

Jesse considered the question. Serial killers were rare, but he’d run into a couple. They kept trophies. And contrary to all the movies, they were usually sloppy, disorganized, and isolated — just the kind of guy who’d die alone in his house, surrounded by trash.

But Jesse didn’t think that he’d found one. He had a file, taken at random from one of the boxes inside the house, spread out on his dashboard in front of him. It had more Polaroids. These were different people from the first photos he’d discovered, and an entirely different era, judging by the clothes and hairstyles. Maybe the late eighties or early nineties. They were just as dead, though. There was a woman who’d been shot in the chest, lying prone on a kitchen floor, her eyes looking away from the camera, staring blankly at the ceiling. There was a man who’d been strangled — Jesse recognized the bruising around his neck as well as the distinctive bursting of blood vessels in his open eyes. Another guy with the tidy little gunshot wound in his forehead. And four more, all killed by varying methods, including one unidentifiable corpse that had been burned to a crisp on a concrete floor, scorch marks radiating from it in a circle.

The papers inside were old as well, brittle sheets of lined yellow from a legal tablet, covered in faded numbers and barely legible words. He couldn’t make out much, and what he could seemed to be in some kind of code. Dates and locations, if he had to bet. It looked like some kind of recordkeeping system. Something far too impersonal for a serial killer.

And there was the money.

“I don’t know,” Jesse finally said. “If I were going to bet, probably not.”

“Then why the photos of dead bodies?”

“Well, that’s what they pay me to find out.”

“Maybe you could hand this one off, Jesse,” Lundquist said. “It already sounds like a mess, and it’s not going to get any better.”

“No,” Jesse said simply. His town, his responsibility.

“I should have known better than to ask.”

“You really should have.”

There was a sigh over the line. Then Lundquist said, “All right. I’ll send more people.”

“Thanks,” Jesse said.

“You’re lucky it’s getting close to the end of the fiscal year and I need to spend some of my budget or I’ll lose it. We can hire one of those cleanup crews to help out.”

Jesse knew about those crews. Relatives who discovered bodies in a house full of accumulated trash would hire them to sort through the mess, dump everything out, so they could salvage the house.

“Still hard to believe that’s an actual business,” Jesse said. “I mean, how many people are found like this every year?”

“Lot of it going around, I guess,” Lundquist said. “Too many sad and sick and lonely people in this world.”

An evidence tech passed by Jesse with a child’s tricycle over one shoulder. Jesse felt a pang of something he couldn’t name.

And that same need for a drink.

“Well,” he said. “One less of them now.”