Robert B. Parker’s Buried Secrets

Fifty

His phone buzzed on his desk. His personal number, not the one he gave out for people looking for the chief of police.

The caller ID said Daisy.

He picked up, already alert. There was no good reason for her to call at this hour.

“Daisy?” he said.

“No,” a man’s voice said.

“Who is this?” Jesse was already on his feet, clipping his holster to his belt, moving toward the door.

“I’m the guy telling you how things are going to be. I’m monitoring your radio. I’ve got people watching your station. You make a call for help, you get on the police band, you do anything but what I tell you, and she dies.”

Jesse stopped. “I’m listening.”

“Good.”

Elliot put his own phone on mute, shutting off his mic and effectively cutting Raney and Tate out of this part of the conversation. He wasn’t so technically inept that he didn’t know how to do that.

“I want you to get the file of the remaining photos and papers from the Burton house. The ones that were not in the fire. The ones you showed on TV. Do you have them?”

“They’re at the state evidence facility.”

Elliott smiled. “Nice try. They’re locked in the small safe behind your desk. You sent the copies to the state evidence facility, but you like to keep the original evidence where you can look at it. That’s strike one, Chief Stone. You played baseball. I sent that one past you just to see if you’d swing. And you did. Now, believe me when I say we know what you’ve got and what you don’t. You can try lying to me again, but I don’t think you want to see what happens to Daisy here when you strike out.”

Shit, Jesse thought. Whoever the guy was, he knew exactly where Jesse kept the Burton file. Which meant he had inside help.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out who that was. It just didn’t do Jesse a lot of good in this particular moment.

“Okay,” Jesse said. “The file is here. What do you want?”

“Come to the café. Leave your gun. Bring the file. Call anyone else, call for help, she dies. Anyone but you shows up, she dies. Take longer than a minute to get here, she dies.”

Jesse finished gearing up and closed his office closet. He put his backup piece, the .38, in his ankle holster and pulled his pant leg over it.

“Put Daisy on,” Jesse demanded, shrugging into his jacket, the phone stuck between his shoulder and his ear.

“She can’t come to the phone right now. But I think she’s got a message for you,” Elliott said.

The next thing Jesse heard was a shot followed immediately by a scream.

“There he goes,” Tate said, as if Raney were blind and couldn’t see the cop burst out of the station and sprint toward the café. Raney had never liked cops, even ex-cops. Being this close to Tate was a chore even when he wasn’t saying stupid shit like that.

Just a little longer, he reminded himself.

Raney watched Stone disappear down the street. He moved pretty fast for an older guy. Must have been scared. Scared was good. It took him a little while to get out of the station, but they heard nothing from the app that monitored the police bands on their phones. No calls for help, not even a click for a coded message.

A little weird that Elliott was so quiet, too, all that time, but that was Elliott. Getting two words out of the guy was a triumph.

Tate, on the other hand, wouldn’t shut up even when he wasn’t talking. Right now, he shifted and creaked in the passenger seat of the car. He sniffed and cracked his gum and blew bubbles, like a kid with ADHD.

Raney really could not wait to kill him. He was reasonably sure the Mob guy in Boston would be fine with another body in the final count when this was all over, no matter how helpful he’d been. He wasn’t as sure about Elliott, but that would come down to what the old guy did when they split the money.

He had no intention of letting his share go without a fight.

But Elliott was right about one thing: First things first. Do the job, then deal with the other problems.

So he waited until the cop had vanished. Then he didn’t say anything to Tate other than “Let’s go.”

They ran wide across the street, circling around the station to the back door, avoiding the cameras on the front and on the streetlight. Even though they were both wearing hoods and masks, they wanted to leave as little evidence behind as possible. Raney had read there were algorithms now that could analyze your walk and match it against a video, identifying you by your gait like it was a fingerprint.

It was getting harder and harder to stay anonymous these days.

But with any luck, he was about to retire.

They couldn’t avoid the camera above the back door of the station. But Raney was quick. He dropped the crowbar he was carrying from his sleeve and leaped up and swung, all in one smooth motion.

The crowbar hit exactly where he’d aimed and knocked the camera cleanly from the wall. He heard it land in the back parking lot.

Tate was already punching numbers into the keypad on the door, his gun in his other hand.

Raney came up behind him, crowbar in his right, nine-millimeter in his left.

Tate opened the door and Raney followed him through.

“We’re in,” he said.

“We’re in,” Elliott heard through the earbuds. He stood over Daisy and waited, eyes darting back and forth between the front door and the café’s owner on the floor.

She sat there, mouth shut, shivering like she was out in the freezing cold.

She’d screamed only once when he’d fired the gun into the floor near her head. That was enough, he thought. He really did not want to shoot her. Despite what everyone sees in the movies, he’d learned long ago that it was easier to kill someone with a bullet than to wound them. You never knew how someone would react to eight grams of lead entering their body; he’d seen people walk it off, and far more drop dead from the shock, or a sudden arterial bleed, or, one time, go into cardiac arrest.

Keeping her alive as a hostage was tricky, but it was better than giving up his only leverage over Stone.

Maybe this was arrogant. Maybe he had too much faith in his own skills. But he was sure he could take Stone and get out of here.

More than anything, Elliott needed that file.

He just had to be ready when the cop came through the door.