Robert B. Parker’s Buried Secrets

Fifty-Six

Healy and Jesse stood outside the townhome on Beacon Hill. Technically, neither one of them had a right to be there. They were invited only as a courtesy. But once the warrants had been drawn up, Lundquist asked if they’d wanted to watch. It was the file Jesse had salvaged from the Burton house — and his testimony about what Elliott said about it — that had enabled the State Police to close a thirty-five-year-old cold case.

Jesse and Healy drank coffee and leaned against a federal sedan. It looked like they were the only ones not on duty. Boston PD, the FBI, and the Staties were all lined up on the steps, wearing their windbreakers and vests, loaded with enough artillery to take a small country. Lundquist was in the lead. He knocked once, then kicked in the door.

“You wish you were going in?” Healy asked.

Jesse stretched, feeling the muscles pull in his back, feeling every one of the last twenty-six hours he’d been awake. He was getting older.

But he was still alive. That was the important thing.

“You know what, I’m willing to let someone else play hero on this one.”

“Eh, you did all the hard work,” Healy said.

Actually, it had been Healy who’d put the last piece of the puzzle together. Jesse had called him and told him how Elliott said the photos implicated Mulvaney personally. That triggered a memory for Healy: a cousin of Mulvaney’s in the Irish Mob who’d been shot. He’d been ahead of Mulvaney in the line of succession, and they’d been fighting over territory and earnings. When he’d been killed, Mulvaney was the obvious suspect. But Mulvaney had an alibi, and there was no other obvious connection.

But with the file and the photo, Healy had been able to get Lundquist to open the case again. The photo matched the crime scene where they’d found Mulvaney’s dead cousin in an alley with a neat gunshot wound in his forehead. And they were able to match a payment in an old, crumbling check register to Phil Burton, which had been meaningless thirty-five years ago.

But it was now proof of conspiracy to commit murder.

Not that they really needed it. Tate and Raney were both singing to the U.S. attorney and the DA and anyone else who would listen.

Mulvaney’s pretty, angry nurse came out of the townhome, although not on her own. She was carried by two big FBI agents, both of whom were bleeding freely from cuts and bruises. She thrashed and cursed and kicked despite being zip-tied at both wrists and ankles. The big agents looked a little embarrassed.

A moment later, Mulvaney’s bodyguard walked out, hands cuffed, head down, practically polite by comparison.

And then Lundquist pushed the old man in his silk pajamas and his expensive wheelchair out through the front door and down the ramp to the sidewalk.

Mulvaney looked sick and gray and lost, his mouth open. He looked as if he was stuck in a nightmare and couldn’t wake up.

Then he glanced across the street and saw Healy and Jesse watching, and his face twisted into a mask of pure hate.

Healy laughed out loud and toasted him with his coffee cup. They lost sight of him as he was placed in a special transport van that could hold his wheelchair.

“What do you know,” Healy said, still beaming. “Sometimes the good guys win one after all.”