The Bitterest Pill

Thirty-one

After the arrest, Jesse had Gabe Weathers take Joe Walters to the hospital to get his nose reset and have him checked out. The last thing Jesse wanted was to give a belligerent abuser like Walters a way to game the system and hand him a get-out-of-jail-free card. So it was all by the book.

“Stay with him, Gabe. He doesn’t leave your sight until we book him and put him in a cell.”

Jesse drove back to the station and asked Molly to come into his office. She sat opposite him. Jesse explained what had gone on at the Walterses’ house and what they’d found in the kid’s room.

“So you think Chris Grimm was Heather’s connection?” Molly asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“But you didn’t find any drugs in the kid’s room.”

“None, but that just means the kid wasn’t stupid.”

“He was stupid enough to keep stolen property in his room.”

Jesse smiled a sad smile.

“What’s that smile about, Jesse?”

“I’m smiling because I heard your voice in my head, Molly.”

“And what did my voice say?”

“It said that Chris Grimm wasn’t stupid, he was just being a kid.”

“A kid selling drugs.”

“I didn’t say I thought he was a saint or that he was even a good kid. My guess, he pawned a lot of the stuff he got in trade for the drugs and held on to the stuff he thought was cool, like the stolen bass and the Rolex. We have to remember, this is a kid with a kid’s sense of the world. A pro wouldn’t have kept any of it, would have unloaded it immediately for ten, twenty cents on the dollar if necessary. One thing I can say, there did seem to be something between Heather Mackey and him.”

“Yeah,” Molly said. “The kind between a user and a dealer.”

“It was more than that. Why else would the kid show up outside the funeral home and at the cemetery?”

“Fear. Guilt.”

“Maybe. Doesn’t matter now.”

“I guess we’ll find out when we get him.”

Jesse shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

Molly was confused. “He’s a seventeen-year-old kid scared out of his mind. Where’s he going to run? We’ll get him or the Staties will.”

“My guess, the kid’s already dead. He was working for someone else.”

“Who?”

“You tell me, Molly. But he wasn’t a criminal mastermind. He must have been recruited for the job. He was the school-level connection. There’s always layers of insulation between the real supplier and the users.”

Molly didn’t love hearing that. It reminded her how easily her own daughters might have come in contact with Chris Grimm or someone like him.

Jesse said, “First thing we have to do is go through the stuff we collected at the kid’s house. When Peter gets back and logs in the evidence, I want you to carefully go through it and call all the phone numbers on every slip of paper and every business card. Most will be dead ends, but maybe not all. I need you to individually catalog every piece of jewelry we found so we can put it up on the PPD website. And I need you to pull the reports on the theft of the Fender guitar and a Rolex.”

Molly’s expression turned down. “Do you really think the kid’s dead?”

“If not already, he soon will be. Selling such potent stuff to Heather was a bad mistake. We didn’t even know there was a ring in our area until Heather’s death. The people the kid was working for can’t afford to have him roll over on them to save his own neck. Not if they want to keep their operation going. That’s the other thing.”

“What is?”

“Assign someone on the night shift to collect all the digital surveillance footage from the town’s cameras and see what the private security cameras captured.”

“Will do. But, Jesse, if the kid really is dead, what do you hope to find?”

“The next person up the food chain from Chris Grimm. I think that’s the best we can hope for now. I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong and the kid got away. Maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll turn himself in, but we have to work on the assumption that we’re not going to get much help from Chris Grimm. Drug cases are built one step at a time.”

Molly left. A minute later, Jesse grabbed his new baseball mitt off his desk, stood, and turned to face the window. He stared out at Stiles Island and the sun shimmering on the ocean as he pounded a baseball into the too-stiff pocket of the glove. The last of his old gloves had finally collapsed, the kangaroo leather beyond rescue or repair. Rawlings no longer made the model he’d used throughout his minor-league career. He’d been forced to buy a similar model online from a Japanese company, and it just didn’t fit his hand the way his old gloves did. For the moment, it wasn’t about the glove, but about concentrating on how to move forward with the case.