56

By midafternoon, Jesse had been through two meetings and was on the outskirts of Boston. The first hadn’t been exactly what he anticipated it would be. He’d strode into the mayor’s office at seven sharp, expecting that the only people in attendance would be the mayor, Nita Thompson, and himself. He’d already called Lundquist and filled him in. Jesse was surprised and more than a little pissed off to see that Stan White, Bella Lawton, and Roger Bascom were there as well.

Someone had once told Jesse that there was no such thing as a secret if more than one person knew it. People always had someone in their lives they felt they could trust with anything. Problem was, that person also had one person in his or her life he or she trusted with anything. By the time people got done trusting all those other people, whatever had begun as one person’s secret was being broadcast over the Internet in thirty-five languages. The same was true of police operations: The fewer people involved, the better the chances of success. The way Jesse saw it, they already had a steep hill to climb and the slope had just gotten more severe.

Jesse didn’t show his anger to anyone but Nita Thompson, who shrugged and shook her head as if to say, It wasn’t my idea. He waved her over to a corner of the office while the rest of them looked at the morning papers.

“Are you kidding me? Why in the hell are they here?”

Nita raised her palms in surrender. “Don’t look at me, but didn’t you say Stan White might be helpful if your theory about the tape is right?”

“I said he might be useful. Useful and helpful, two different things. I was going to approach him with a hypothetical about the value of the tape. But forget him for now. There’s a publicist with him. She’s the last thing we need. And Bascom? He’s a square badge who’s got nothing to do with a police matter.”

“They’re uninvited guests courtesy of Stan White.”

“Of course they are. This big birthday he’s throwing Jester is going over like a lead balloon. Bella confessed to me they’re having trouble getting C-list celebrities to come. Once this gets out, they’ll be turning people away.”

Nita tilted her head, confused. “Bella, is it? You two on a first-name basis? When did you glean this bit of intelligence?”

The other day when she was sunbathing nude and I got to see that she was even more of a knockout with her clothes off.

He ignored the question. “What about the governor and the senator? Do we have more time?”

“We’ve bought ourselves an extra day, maybe two, but that’s it,” she said. “Remember, politicians are beholden to the media these days as much as if not more than the media is beholden to politicians. No one is going to the mat for a small-town mayor, especially with elections coming up next year. At least Selko kept his word. Today’s story focuses only on the details of Curnutt’s murder: the homemade silencer, the caliber of the weapon, like that.”

Jesse was still pissed about Bella Lawton and Bascom’s presence, but there was nothing he could do about it now.

“Chief, Nita, please join us,” Mayor Walker said, calling them over to her desk.

After a quick round of handshakes and hot air from the mayor, she turned the floor over to Jesse. Stan White wasn’t the kind of man interested in Robert’s Rules of Order.

“Do you think this guy,” White said before Jesse opened his mouth, “this Hangman character, really has the tape?”

Jesse answered White’s question with one of his own. “If he does, how much would it be worth?”

“Millions,” he said, parroting Roscoe Niles’s answer to the same question. “Five, maybe six million. Maybe more. Who knows? It’s one of the last few great mysteries of Baby Boomer rock, along with whether or not the Beatles intentionally fueled the Paul-is-dead rumor and what really happened to Bobby Fuller. The difference is that this one really might get solved.”

Both Nita Thompson and Bella Lawton looked at Stan White as if he had just sprouted a second head.

“Bobby Fuller?” Bella said, almost unaware the words had actually come out of her mouth. “Who’s Bobby Fuller?”

The mayor sang. “I fought the law and the law won...”

“I thought that was a Green Day song,” Nita said.

Stan White threw his hands up. “Please! The song was written by Sonny Curtis, who was in the Crickets, but the Bobby Fuller Four made it a hit in the mid-sixties.”

“Thanks for the lesson in rock history, Stan,” Jesse said. “But here’s the deal. You have a few days at most to prepare for the media blitz that’s bound to come if this guy can prove he really does have the tape. The tape isn’t my concern. My job is to bring this guy in to see if he was the person who hired Curnutt and Bolton to break into Maude Cain’s house, and to find out if he was the person who murdered Curnutt.”

Nita was still unconvinced. “Aren’t we getting ahead of ourselves? With all due respect, what if Jesse is wrong about this? We’re operating on the basis of a big if here.”

But the others in the room acted as if they hadn’t heard her or as if they had fully bought into Jesse’s theory.

“No,” Stan White said, a hint of desperation in his voice. “Jesse’s right. He’s got to be.”

The mayor asked. “If you are right, wouldn’t it be safe to assume that the man with the tape and the man you should be focusing on is Humphrey Bolton?”

“Assumptions are never safe, Your Honor. Especially not in police work.”

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