Robert B. Parker’s Buried Secrets

Five

“Good morning,” Molly said.

“That is a matter of opinion,” Jesse said.

“Aw, is hims gwumpy?”

Jesse just stared back at her. He was, in fact, more irritable than usual this morning. He chalked it up to not enough coffee and too little sleep. He’d been out late at the Burton house. Suit was there again this morning, with Gabe Weathers. The media had finally shown up, and the pile of junk on the front lawn was growing. They were going to need to haul some of it away soon.

“Can you get Peter Perkins to head over to the Burton place?” he asked Molly as he made himself a fresh cup. Peter had been set on retirement, but with the department’s recruiting and staffing issues, Jesse had convinced him to stay on part-time. “Maybe he can help out.”

“I’ll call him,” Molly said. “Don’t forget, you’re onboarding our new hire today. He’ll be here in a few minutes.”

“ ‘Onboarding’?” Jesse asked. “Where the hell did you hear that?”

“That’s what it’s called when you bring someone new into a team, Jesse,” she said. “Welcome to twenty-first-century management techniques.”

“You’re learning how to manage now?”

“Someone in this place has to.”

Jesse went into his office and looked at the file of paperwork he still needed to sign for his latest addition, Derek Tate, sitting on his desk.

But first he wanted to think about Phil Burton and his haunted house.

He took his glove and a baseball from his desk. For as long as he could remember, smacking the ball into the glove helped him think. He stood and looked out the window, snapping the ball into the glove with an easy, smooth motion of his wrist. It sounded like someone working the heavy bag in a gym.

What they had was called an orgy of evidence. Too many clues and no way to piece them together into a rational narrative. They were all basically blind men trying to describe an elephant from behind.

Every crime was an explosion in someone’s life, tearing things up and leaving debris everywhere. Most people panicked, even if the crime was small, at the violation of it, the way it disrupted everything that was supposed to be normal.

Jesse didn’t. There was always some way to uncover the truth buried underneath the rubble. The size of the mess didn’t matter. Though the pile of junk from the Burton house was enormous. Still, there was always a starting point.

He broke it down in his head. It was how he approached every problem, almost instinctively. It’s why the LAPD had tapped him for its elite Robbery Homicide Division when he was starting out there. He had a talent for it.

The photos of the bodies and the papers were already piling up in a cleared space inside the house. The crime scene techs wanted to get to those first, naturally. So they’d moved out a bunch of old furniture and garbage in what might have been Burton’s dining room years before. Then they began going through the boxes, looking for anything that might help ID the dead people in the pictures.

And there were a lot of them. Lundquist, over the phone, had told Jesse they’d uncovered a hundred more photos of dead people so far. Some were duplicates or multiple angles of the same killing, and some didn’t show the victims’ faces. There had to be photographic evidence of at least sixty different murders, and there was still more, not counting the ones Jesse still had in the folder in his car.

But not one of them had a name attached. Without more information, there was nothing to connect them to any known killings.

Jesse hadn’t expected it to be that easy, to be honest. He’d thanked Lundquist and asked him to keep him informed, and then focused on the part of the puzzle that belonged solely to him: Phil Burton.

Burton had lived in his town for years, but nobody seemed to know him. Even Jesse didn’t know him, and Jesse knew a lot of people. Molly knew everyone, and she’d never seen Burton, either.

A recluse. A hoarder. A man who died alone in the wreckage of a wasted life, surrounded by memories of death. On a stack of cash bigger than most people ever saw. Like some kind of demented version of an ancient king in a burial mound, his corpse piled on top of all his wealth.

Jesse smacked the ball into his glove.

He began to make a mental list. He had to call Dev and Lundquist again. He should reach out to the Feds, see if the serial numbers on the cash matched anything on their lists. He thought of a dozen other small chores that needed doing.

But most of all, Jesse needed to know who Phil Burton was before something in him went wrong and he retreated from the world.

To do that, he needed to find Matthew Peebles. Burton’s only friend, who’d scampered away at the first sign of trouble, but who was concerned enough to alert the police.

Jesse thought about it. Why would a guy in his twenties from New York be friends with an aging hoarder in Paradise? He’d said Burton was a friend of the family, but Jesse didn’t buy that, not after what he’d found in the piles of Burton’s trash. Peebles had to know more than he’d said.

Jesse realized his hand stung, even with the glove. He was putting a lot of power into his wrist. He was angry. He knew himself well enough to know that. It wasn’t just the lack of sleep. Something about this case was bothering him.

What he couldn’t figure out was why.

He shoved it aside. Put the ball and glove back into their spot on the desk. The glove was a custom replica of the one he’d used in the minors, a gift from his son, Cole, who was out in California again. They hadn’t talked for a while. Jesse knew he should call. He put that on the list with everything else.

Jesse looked at his notebook and the driver’s license information he’d taken down about Peebles. No criminal record in Massachusetts, but maybe NYPD had a line on him. He sat down and reached for the phone to get started.

But before he could lift the phone, Ellis Munroe, the district attorney, walked into his office, pausing only to rap his knuckles lightly on the door.

“Got a minute?”

Jesse stared at him. Ellis labored under the belief that he was Jesse’s boss, which he thought gave him the right to enter Jesse’s office uninvited.

Jesse looked past Ellis and called to Molly, in the outer office. “Molly, did I have a meeting with Ellis Munroe this morning?”

“Jesse, come on—” Ellis began.

“I told him not to go in there,” Molly called back. “He went right past me.”

“Sorry, Molly,” Ellis said.

“You apologize to her?” Jesse said.

“Yes, I apologize to Molly. I’ve known her longer than I’ve known you. Our kids went to school together. My son took one of her daughters to a dance once. You, on the other hand, are the chief of police, and I can come into your office whenever I damn well please.”

He leaned in closer and spoke in a lower voice. “Also, do I look stupid enough to pick a fight with Molly Crane? Give me some credit, Stone.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere, Ellis,” Molly said.

“Thank you, Molly. I’ve got it,” Jesse said. He sat back in his chair. “Well? What do you want?”

“I see you’re in your usual mood this morning,” Ellis said. “Okay. Let’s get to it. I want to know where you put the two million dollars in cash you found at a crime scene last night.”

The money. Of course. That much money was going to attract attention. It already had.

“How’d you hear about that?”

“Jesse. Come on. A dead man on top of a couple million dollars? Everyone in town knows about it. And I shouldn’t have had to hear about it from anyone else. Now, where did you put it?”

“It’s still with Dev. He’ll send it over to the state evidence facility when he’s done with it.”

“That money belongs to Paradise,” Ellis said. “We should have it.”

Jesse kept himself from laughing out loud at Ellis. “Really?”

“Money and other valuables gathered in the commission of a crime can be confiscated under both civil and criminal penalties by the responsible jurisdiction,” Ellis said, almost making it sound like he was quoting some court decision. “The Town of Paradise should hold on to that money until we determine the proper ownership, and its proper disposal.”

“We don’t have the facilities to keep it safely,” Jesse said. “You want me to lock it in a jail cell? Besides, it’s a little sticky.”

“It wasn’t your call, Jesse. That should have been up to me. I should have been informed.”

“I just got in, Ellis,” Jesse said. “I would have called you.”

“Yeah,” Ellis said. “Sure you would have. Eventually.”

Jesse shrugged. “Well, you’re here now. You want to know what we know?”

“If you could spare the time in your busy schedule,” Ellis said.

“Don’t be shitty, Ellis,” Molly said from her desk.

“Sorry, Molly,” Ellis said again.

Jesse wondered how he could scare Ellis as much as Molly did. He wasn’t sure it was possible without drawing his gun. Something to consider in the future.

“I don’t have a lot to tell you yet, Ellis,” Jesse said. “It’s why I didn’t call. We’ve got a dead body on top of a lot of money. We’ve got photos of other dead bodies packed among a couple metric tons of garbage. We’re unpacking it as fast as we can.”

“Do you think this dead guy—”

“Phil Burton.”

“—whatever. You think he was a serial killer?”

Jesse inhaled deeply through his nose. He was trying to keep his temper with Ellis. He really was.

“No,” he said.

Ellis waited. Jesse didn’t say anything else.

“That’s it?”

Jesse nodded. That was all he had to say.

“Then what the hell are the pictures of the bodies doing there? Why did he have all that money?”

“Well, those are very good questions, Ellis. We certainly intend to look into that.”

“Don’t patronize me, Jesse. I want answers.”

Jesse had had enough. “Ellis. You want answers? So do I. Will you please get out of here so I can find them?”

Ellis sat for a second longer, scowling. “I want to be kept informed, Stone,” he said.

He tried to glare. Jesse tried to look terrified. Neither of them was very successful.

He got up and left the office.

“Next time, call first,” Molly said, as Ellis exited, doing his best not to slam the door.

“You couldn’t keep him out of my office?” Jesse said to Molly.

“Deputy chief, not your secretary,” Molly said.

Jesse tried to get his thoughts back in order. He had calls to make. A crime to solve. A new hire to onboard, as Molly said.

“Is there anything in that book of management techniques about doing what your boss tells you?” he asked her.

“No, but there is a whole chapter on setting proper boundaries,” she said. “You should read it.”