The Bitterest Pill

Twenty

After his meeting, Jesse stopped by Gabe Weathers’s stakeout across the street from Chris Grimm’s house.

“Anything?”

“Nothing,” Gabe said. “No sign of the kid.”

“Parents?”

“Home.” Gabe picked up a pad on the seat next to him. “Mother got home at six-fifteen. The father got in about twenty minutes later. That’s his truck in the driveway.”

“Good work. Head back to the station, pick up your cruiser, and go back on patrol. Let Perkins know what’s going on.”

“You taking over here?”

“I’m going to talk to the parents. I think the kid’s in the wind.”

“Why’d he split, do you think?”

“Same reason everybody runs. He has something to hide.”

“Like what?”

“I’ll know more after I talk to the parents.” Jesse slapped the doorsill on one of Paradise’s two unmarked cars. It was an old Honda Accord the Staties had seized in the process of breaking up a criminal enterprise and sold to the Paradise PD for a pittance. “Get a move on.”

Jesse waited for Gabe to leave and turn the corner before approaching the Grimms’ house. The darkness covered up the multitude of sins the exterior displayed in the daylight. It was like many of the houses in town: a simple two-story with a detached one-car garage, a small front lawn surrounded by a low picket fence, and a small backyard. When he had stopped by earlier, Jesse noticed the clapboards were five years past needing a new coat of paint, the roof was sagging like the seat of an old chair, the windows rattled in a light breeze, and the garage was already partially collapsed. The lawn was more weeds than grass and more dirt than either. The letters WE were worn out on the front mat, the C, too, so that it read L OME. He got the sense that the original sentiment on the mat was now an afterthought, if even that. There wasn’t much welcoming about the place. He rang the bell twice but didn’t hear it buzz on the inside of the house, so he knocked long and loud.

A blowsy woman with messy black-and-gray hair answered the door. Dressed in a cut-sleeve sweatshirt and yoga pants, she was forty-five going on sixty. She had fading yellow bruises on her arms. Her face was lined and gaunt. A lit cigarette dangled from the corner of her yellow-stained lips. Her deep blue eyes gave her identity away, as they were the same shade and shape as her son’s. And those eyes got big at the sight of Jesse’s PPD hat, uniform shirt, and jacket. Then, almost unnoticeably, they became sneering and suspicious.

“What’d Chris do now?” she asked, voice full of resignation.

But before Jesse could respond, an unseen man called out from inside the house. “Who’s that? Is it your little fucking angel?”

She turned into the house. “It’s the cops.” When she faced Jesse again, her expression had changed. There was real fear in it. She said, “Well?”

“I’m Chief Jesse Stone.” He gave her a smile in hopes of keeping things calm. “I just want to talk with Chris, Mrs. Grimm.”

“Mrs. Walters. Grimm was my first husband’s name, the lousy prick. Chris kept the name just to spite me and his stepfather.”

“Is Chris in?”

She shook her head, but it wasn’t a protective gesture. Jesse already got the sense she wasn’t the maternal type who would lie for her kid or throw herself in front on an oncoming car to save his life. “Haven’t seen him. What’s this about?”

“You’ve heard about Heather Mackey’s death?”

“She was a little hottie. Too bad, Chris had a thing for her. But what’s this got to do with him?”

Jesse lied. “Probably nothing. I’m just talking to kids who knew her or were friends of hers.”

The mother wasn’t buying it. “Well, he ain’t here.”

There were the sounds of heavy footsteps coming from behind her, and when they did that fearful expression returned. Jesse looked over her shoulder to see a fireplug of a man coming their way. He was in a dirty blue work shirt that had been pulled out of darker blue work pants. He had on blackened work boots, the laces untied. The laces slapped the floor as he walked. He had thick arms, a thick neck, and a nasty face. The main feature of which was a bent nose covered in gin blossoms. As he got close, Jesse could smell sweat and alcohol coming off him in waves. Jesse wasn’t exactly disgusted by the smell of alcohol since he stopped drinking, but he was now very sensitive to its odor coming off other people.

He said, “This the cop?”

She rolled her eyes at him. “No, it’s one of those male strippers dressed as a cop, come to give me a birthday greeting from my girlfriends.”

He snickered an ugly snicker. “Well, shit, it ain’t your birthday and you don’t have any friends, so he must be a real cop.”

Jesse introduced himself again. That got another ugly snicker out of the stepfather of the year.

“The kid ain’t here. Didn’t she tell you that already?”

“She did.”

“Then what are you still doing here? You,” he said to his wife, grabbing her by the arms where those fading bruises were and shoving her behind him, “go finish doing what you was doing. I’ll handle this.”

She didn’t protest, about-facing and heading down the hall without acknowledging Jesse.

The husband leaned against the open front door. “Listen, Chief, she lets the kid get away with murder. Yeah, she’s way too lenient with him and maybe should’ve smacked him around a little more when he was younger, but I’m sure he never did anything serious. He’s weak and too much of a pussy.”

Jesse was getting angry with him, so pulled a card out and handed it to him. “Please give that to Chris when he gets home and let him know I just want to talk with him about Heather.”

“Yeah, whatever,” the stepfather said, waving a dismissive hand. He made to shut the door.

Jesse stopped him, holding his hand against the door. “Do it, because otherwise I’ll be back, and I’d hate to interrupt your drinking every night. Do we understand each other?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cops are all the same.”

He slammed the door shut. As Jesse walked back to his Explorer, he realized that his chasing Chris through the cemetery probably wasn’t the only reason the kid wasn’t anxious to come home.