Robert B. Parker’s The Devil Wins

9

There was a knock at Jesse’s door. He knew who it was just by the size of the shadow behind the pebbled glass.

“Come on in, Stu,” he said, standing to greet the newspaperman.

Stu Cromwell strode into the office. He was in his sixties, but still an imposing figure. Tall, lean, and fit, he had piercing blue eyes and a mop of white hair. He was a favorite son of Paradise, a local boy who’d made a name for himself on the world stage and come back home to settle down. Unfortunately, the local papers he’d most recently worked for failed as regularly as Hollywood marriages. He’d gotten so fed up with his employers going under that he and his wife had bought out the last failing paper with their own money. Now the Paradise Herald belonged to them.

Jesse waved his arm at the chair across from his desk. “Sit.”

“Thank you, sir,” Cromwell said, shaking Jesse’s hand. “I appreciate the invitation.”

Jesse liked that about Cromwell. He had manners.

“How’s Martha?”

“Not so good. The chemo’s been rough on her and the prognosis isn’t great.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Thanks, Jesse, but I suspect you didn’t call me over here to ask about my wife.”

Jesse shook his head.

“Is it them, Jesse, Mary Kate O’Hara and Ginny Connolly?” Cromwell asked, easing into the chair. As he sat, he flipped open a notepad.

“Officially or off the record?”

Cromwell said, “Let’s start with officially.”

“Until the medical examiner determines their identities, it would be foolish of me to speculate.”

Cromwell laughed. He closed his notepad. “Okay, how about off the record?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe what?”

“Maybe it’s the missing girls.”

“Maybe probably or maybe unlikely?”

“Maybe probably.”

Cromwell rubbed his clean-shaven chin, opened his notepad. “Their remains are skeletal, so why probably?”

“Nice try, Stu.” Jesse clapped his hands together. “If I answered the question in that form, I’d be confirming something that’s not been officially acknowledged.”

“It was worth a shot,” Cromwell said. “But everybody in town knows you found two skeletons in close proximity to the body in the blue tarp. If you’re not going to talk to me about this stuff, why did you call me over here?”

“Did I say I wasn’t going to talk to you?”

Cromwell closed his notepad again. Laughed again. “A little squid pro quo, huh, Jesse? You scratch my octopus and I’ll scratch yours.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Who’s going to scratch whose octopus first?” Cromwell asked.

Jesse never had much use for the press. And his attitude toward the media only got worse after his ex, Jenn, a failed actress, had risen from the weather girl at a Boston TV station to a reporter on a syndicated magazine show. Jenn was smart, but she wasn’t the most savvy person about world affairs and politics. The only subject Jenn was an expert on was herself, but it wasn’t only Jenn’s narrow focus that fueled Jesse’s contempt for the press. He had found her colleagues to be a bunch of self-important boobs. Stu Cromwell was neither self-important nor a boob. And it was Jesse’s sense of things that reporters, especially newspaper reporters, always knew more than they would or could say. They were like cops in that way.

“I wasn’t here when the girls went missing,” Jesse said, “so I’m operating in the dark. I could use someone who knew the landscape back then the way you would have known it.”

“What about your cops? Some of them grew up here and have never left.”

“I’ll talk to them. I have talked to some of them already.”

Cromwell cleared his throat. “You are aware, then, that Molly Crane was close to both girls?”

Jesse nodded.

“I heard she pretty much fell apart this morning.”

“Please, Stu, don’t put that—”

Cromwell raised his palm up. “It has no bearing on the story, Jesse. Don’t worry. It won’t be in the paper tomorrow — not mine, anyway. But I still don’t know what you want from me.”

“Your notes from back then,” Jesse said. “Your files.”

“Sorry, Jesse. That’s a nonstarter. I’ve never shown anyone my notes and files outside of my editors, and not always then. Even if you were willing to show me all the official files, local and state, I wouldn’t make that trade.”

“How about this, then. You act as an unofficial consultant to the department.”

“In what unofficial capacity exactly?” Cromwell drew air quotes around the word unofficial.

“First, I’d like to sit down with you and talk about how Paradise was back around the time the girls went missing. After I start doing my investigation, I’d like to be able to run things by you. I’ll need a way to test what I’m being told against what the reality of Paradise was. I am not going to know the players like you know them or knew them.”

Cromwell was curious. “And for this I get what?”

“Exclusives.”

“You do realize that you’re going to get swamped by the media once this gets out there. You’ll have more satellite trucks here than ever before. You sure you want to go promising exclusives to a small-town paper?”

Jesse nodded.

“Okay, then,” Cromwell said. “Exclusives like...?”

“Sacred Heart Girls Catholic class rings were found among the remains.”

“Did one of them have the ring on the middle finger of its right hand?”

Jesse said, “Possibly.”

Stu Cromwell stood up and stuck his right hand out to Jesse. “Aren’t you going to shake the hand of your new unofficial consultant?”

Jesse shook Stu’s hand.

“About the ring...” Cromwell said.

“Middle finger of the right hand.”

Cromwell smiled.

“Until I say different, Stu, quote me only as an unnamed police source. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

Cromwell stood, thanked Jesse, and left.