Robert B. Parker’s The Devil Wins

7

The files were buried and forgotten, much as their bodies had been. It had taken him nearly a half hour to dig them out of a back storage room, a room Jesse had spent precious little time in since his arrival in Paradise. He didn’t want to think about the other secrets Paradise kept buried there. Now he sat with an array of the girls’ photos laid out on his desktop, the photos dulled by time and carelessness. In spite of their faded images, Jesse could see enough to get a sense of the girls and to glimpse the past.

Mary Kate O’Hara was the smaller of the two girls. Copper-haired and freckle-faced, more cute than pretty, she had fire in her eyes. They looked hazel in the faded photographs. The paperwork said they were green. What did it matter now? Virginia “Ginny” Connolly was the taller of the pair. She was strawberry blond and blue-eyed. In her tenth-grade graduation picture — taken in February of that year — there was still some awkwardness in her features. A nose a bit too big for her face, a mouth full of braces, slumped shoulders to hide her height. But in the photos of her taken in the months leading up to her July fourth disappearance, she’d shed her braces, grown into her face and body. She would have been a beautiful woman, Jesse thought. Both girls had been good if not remarkable students at Sacred Heart. Both had been good athletes, particularly Ginny. Neither had gotten into much trouble, though Mary Kate was a bit of a pistol. She’d been a prankster, according to her school records.

When Jesse took out the other photos from the files, the ones that weren’t just of the two dead girls, he was taken aback. Several of those pictures featured Ginny and Mary Kate with their arms around a third girl. That girl was quite pretty, with dark, wavy hair and an infectious smile. She had a look in her eyes that was quite familiar to Jesse. He had gazed at that expression, at that face, for five or six days a week, for more than ten years. It was a face more familiar to him than Jenn’s, his ex-wife, or Sunny Randall’s, or Diana Evans’s, or any of his other lovers, recent or past. It was Molly’s face.

He put the photos aside and began seriously reading through the files, such as they were. Jesse shook his head at how haphazardly the investigation seemed to have been handled, at least at the start. He knew he shouldn’t judge a small-town PD’s investigation the way he would judge one handled by a big-city police department, but he couldn’t help but compare his LAPD experiences to what had gone down in Paradise when the girls went missing. He recalled how he had been taught to keep extensive and thorough notes, especially during a homicide investigation. Jesse’s murder books were legend. No detail was too small to escape mention, because you just never knew what would lead you to the killer.

That didn’t seem to be the philosophy of the Paradise PD back in the day. Of course, he had to allow that it was never really a murder investigation. In fact, from what he could glean, there didn’t seem to have been a working theory of the case or, more accurately, there seemed to be any number of working theories. From the interview notes, Jesse could infer the questions the cops were asking and could thereby reconstruct what the cops were thinking. Early on, they apparently believed Ginny and Mary Kate went off on an adventure together, possibly hitching down to Boston or to New York City. Then that shifted to a runaway scenario based on the fact that Ginny and her mother had recently been at odds. It was only after the state police came in to help that the girls’ bank records were checked — something a big-city department would have done immediately. And only when no unusual activity turned up, no big withdrawals the week before they vanished, did the working theories take a darker turn.

When the state came into it, they rounded up all the usual suspects: local sex offenders, ex-cons with a history of violence, especially a history of violence toward women. There were a few suspects the state police kept an eye on, but it came to nothing. And it took the better part of a week for a physical search to be mounted. It was a pretty thorough search, too. People had combed over the Bluffs, Stiles Island, the marina, and the rest of town. Unfortunately, there had been a few days of heavy rains in the interim and the feeling was that if there had been any less-than-obvious physical evidence to be found, it had been washed away with the rains.

The most fascinating parts of the reading for Jesse were the interviews with the teenagers of Paradise. It was fascinating on many levels because the kids interviewed back then were people Jesse had known only as adults. Molly and her husband among them. In fact, Molly had been interviewed three times. Bill Marchand and two other selectmen, Robbie Wilson, the mayor, and several of Paradise’s other citizens had been interviewed. Just as fascinating for Jesse was seeing names he didn’t recognize. A good number of the teens back then had stayed and made their lives here, but many had not. He wondered where those kids had gone and why they had gone and what they were up to now. The bottom line was that the interviews, like everything else in the case, led the cops nowhere. No one knew who Ginny and Mary Kate were meeting in the park. No one remembered seeing them.

Jesse had little difficulty believing what he read. He had been through several Fourth of July celebrations in Paradise and it could get pretty chaotic. There were always fireworks and bands in the park, usually Aerosmith, Boston, or the Cars tribute bands. Drugs and underage drinking were never much of a problem in town, but the one exception to that rule was the Fourth celebration. He could only imagine how chaotic it was twenty-five years earlier when the department was even smaller than it is now. When he was done reading through the files, he was drawn back to the old photos, especially the ones of Molly. Then, as he looked up from the photos on his desk, the grown-up version of that girl was standing in front of him.

“Sit down, Molly. You want a drink?”

“More than you know, but I don’t think my stomach can take it,” she said, sitting across from him.

He handed Molly all the pictures from the two files and watched her in silence for the next ten minutes. Watched her as she traveled back in time. For a few moments, Molly looked sixteen again, the years melting off her, the lines on her face fading away. But when she finally looked back up, she was herself again, the lines etched into her face more deeply than they’d been when she had come into Jesse’s office. She tried handing the photos back to Jesse, but he waved her off.

“Make plenty of copies of those. If it turns out that we’ve found Mary Kate and Ginny and that they were, in fact, murdered—”

“It’s them. I’m telling you, it’s them. And what do you mean, if they were murdered?” Molly said, her voice loud enough to be heard in the squad room. “They didn’t bury themselves under that blanket under that metal plate.”

Jesse stayed calm. “If it’s them and they were murdered, we’re going to be working an old double homicide. We’re going to have to re-interview people. Those pictures may help refresh memories, maybe spark new ones.”

“What about the guy in the tarp?”

“No doubt about his being murdered,” Jesse said. “When they got him back to the ME’s and unwrapped him, half his face was blown off. There was an entry wound behind his left ear and one right in back of his head. Until we get an ID, he’s another John Doe.”

“But it’s no accident, us finding his body there next to Mary Kate and Ginny.”

“I doubt it.”

“What do you think it means, Jesse?”

“We follow the evidence around here.”

She wasn’t going to let it go. “But if you had to guess.”

Jesse said, “You already know the answer to that, too.”

“He’s connected to Mary Kate’s and Ginny’s murders.”

“That’s where the smart money would be.”

“You think the guy who murdered the girls murdered—”

Jesse walked around his desk, stood close to Molly, and brushed his hand across her cheek.

“Listen, Molly,” he said, his hand resting on her shoulder. “I can only guess at how hard this is for you. As fine a cop as you are — and you’re the best I’ve got — you need to be an even better, more professional cop than usual. If I could afford to, I wouldn’t let you anywhere near these cases, but I can’t. Even if I could, you wouldn’t stay away.”

“Mary Kate was my best friend, Jesse. Ginny Connolly grew up two houses away from me. Their disappearing the way they did helped make me want to be a cop.”

“Then use that, Molly. Don’t let it cloud your judgment. I’ve always trusted you. Don’t give me a reason to start doubting you now.”

“I’m sorry... about before, I mean, at the building site, losing it like that. It was unprofessional.”

“That badge and uniform don’t make you immune.”

“It made me look weak.”

“It made you look human.”

“What do we do first?” she asked.

“We wait until the identities are confirmed and CODs are established.”

Molly stood up. “Okay. I better make some copies of these photos and get back on patrol.”

“Not so fast,” he said. “Sit another minute.”

She didn’t sit. “What is it?”

“Unless I’m way off, these missing girls were the biggest unsolved mystery in Paradise’s history.”

“I guess that’s right. It’s also probably the only unsolved mystery in Paradise’s history.” She laughed. It was a nervous, staccato laugh.

“Then why is today the first I’m hearing about them?”

Molly looked everywhere but at Jesse. Her face reddened.

“I can’t answer that, Jesse. I don’t know.”

Jesse got the sense there was something Molly wasn’t saying, but he let it go. Pushing her now wouldn’t do either of them any good.