Robert B. Parker’s The Devil Wins

84

Jesse stepped out of the shadows, his .38 coming into the light before him.

“You shouldn’t have emptied the clip,” Jesse said, his voice steady and cool.

“With you there holding your gun on me, yeah, in retrospect, that was pretty dumb. If I left myself some ammo, I might’ve had a fighting chance. But there are a lot of things I wish I could take back.”

“I’m sure that’s true, Bill. We’ll have time to discuss that later. For now, drop your weapon and kick it over to me. Slowly. Any sudden movement at all and I’ll shoot.”

Marchand did as he was told.

Jesse asked, “Do you have any other weapons on you?”

“A knife.” Marchand tilted his head at his left hip.

“Same drill,” Jesse said. “On the floor. Kick it over. I would hate to have to kill you, Bill, but if you force my hand, I won’t think twice about it.”

“I don’t doubt it.” Marchand noticed his voice was brittle.

Jesse asked, “Anything else?”

“There’s a rifle out across the footbridge, but no, nothing else on me.”

“You wouldn’t lie to me, Bill, would you?”

“Never have before.”

Jesse laughed. “Is that your nose I see growing?”

“Never before all this, I mean,” Marchand said, feeling weak, the adrenaline draining out of him.

“Now, do exactly what I tell you to do the way I tell you to do it. Hands on your head. Turn around. Get on your knees as slowly as possible. I’ve had to kill men before and I won’t hesitate to kill you.”

As Jesse was cuffing him, Marchand said, “So you know what it’s like to kill.”

“Kill, not murder.”

“Not so different,” Marchand said.

“There aren’t any two things more different in the world.”

Jesse sat Marchand down in a chair as he called in to the station.

“How did you know it was me, Jesse?”

“I wasn’t one hundred percent sure, not until today. After all the elaborate stuff you went through to cover yourself, it was the little things.”

“Always is.”

“Not always.”

“What was it, then?” Marchand asked.

“Why, Bill, you want to make sure you don’t make the same mistakes next time? There isn’t going to be a next time.”

“Humor me.”

“I knew it was you for sure when you lied about not knowing Shelter Cove. The whole time I was hoping it wasn’t you, but when you lied about that... When I was at Shelter Cove, it looked familiar, but I couldn’t remember why. Then on the ride back to town, it hit me.”

Marchand nodded. “The photo on the wall behind my desk. The one my wife took of me and my kids on the deck of my boat. It’s been there so long, I forgot about it.”

“You can erase your present, but you can’t erase your past.”

“Don’t get cryptic on me, Jesse. It’s not like you.”

“How would you know what I’m like? It’s pretty clear that we didn’t know each other at all.”

“Fair point, but I still want to know what that thing about the past and present means.”

“Once we identified Warren Zebriski, you were finished. Even with killing Dragoa and Millner, even with that tidy little confession, which, planted typewriter or not, I didn’t buy for a second, you were done. Though I’ve got to say it took some nerve for you to risk running down Jameson in broad daylight with Alexio’s truck.”

“What choice did I have?” Marchand shrugged. “Besides, the attempt on Jameson’s life gave me cover. As long as no one got a good look at me, I figured it was worth the risk. I almost got away with it.”

Jesse shook his head. “I spoke to Robbie Wilson and Zebriski’s brother in New York. I looked at the Sacred Heart yearbook. You and Zebriski were friends and you were forever connected to Dragoa and Millner, you were all teammates. I know something about old teammates. Once I was suspicious of you, I did some checking. Found out that your dad was big in commercial real estate around here. Seems that twenty-five years ago he owned the building where the girls were buried. You couldn’t erase any of that.”

Marchand laughed.

“Something funny?”

“The confession,” Marchand said. “It’s almost all there. Most of it happened just like I wrote that it did. Only it was me who had a thing for Ginny, not John, and if we’d only ditched Alexio at the park, we probably would’ve been fine. John was a lowlife, but he wouldn’t have forced himself on Mary Kate like Alexio did. Once Alexio got alcohol in him... You know how it is with him. How many times have you had to arrest him? John was fine, smoking a joint and drinking, staring out at the ocean, but when Ginny and me were getting it on, Alexio lost it. It happened so fast. He just kept stabbing her. It was John that hit Ginny with the rock the first time. I think she was already dead, but I hit her again to make sure. I mean, we couldn’t leave her alive, not after what Alexio did. I didn’t have a choice, Jesse. All we meant to do was to go out to Stiles and celebrate the Fourth, I swear.”

Marchand went silent, slumped in the chair, and hung his head.

Jesse said, “What’s going on with you?”

“Zevon,” Marchand said, as if that explained it.

“Zebriski? What about him? Was he part of what happened on the island?”

“No, no way. Warren was a great guy.” Marchand was offended. “I asked him what he was doing that night, but he said he already had plans that he wasn’t going to change for anything or anybody.”

“I take it that it was you who confessed to him, not Millner,” Jesse said, hearing sirens in the distance.

Marchand nodded. “When Zevon got back from college the next summer, we got really hammered one night and he asked me if the cops had made any progress finding the girls. I blew up at him. I told him that Mary Kate and Ginny Connolly were dead. I told him everything, every fucking detail. I begged him not to go to the cops. I kept saying how it was his fault, that if he had been there to make Mary Kate happy, none of it would have happened the way it did. That they were dead and that all of us spending our lives in jail wasn’t going to bring them back. If only I hadn’t confessed to him, it wouldn’t have come back on me. But I guess it always comes back, right? You always have to pay in the end.”

Jesse didn’t answer, because the truth was that not nearly enough people paid in the end.