The Neighbor

CHAPTER TWO

Sergeant Detective D.D. Warren loved a good all-you-can-eat buffet. It was never about the pasta-filler food to be sure, and just plain bad strategy if there was a carving roast to be had. No, over the years she had developed a finely honed strategy: stage one, the salad bar. Not that she was a huge fan of iceberg lettuce, but as a thirty-something single workaholic, she never bothered with perishables in her own fridge. So yeah, first pass generally involved some veggies, or God knows, given her eating habits, she’d probably develop scurvy.

Stage two: thinly sliced meat. Turkey was okay. Honey-baked ham, a step up. Rare roast beef, the gold medal standard. She liked it cherry red in the middle and bleeding profusely. If her meat didn’t jump a little when she poked it with her fork, someone in the kitchen had committed a crime against beef.

Though of course she would still eat it. At an all-you-can-eat buffet, one couldn’t have very high standards.

So a little salad, then on to some thinly sliced rare roast beef. Now the unthinking schmuck inevitably dished up potatoes to accompany her meat. Never! Better to chase it with cracker-crusted broiled haddock, maybe three or four clams casino, and of course chilled shrimp. Then one had to consider the sautéed vegetables, or perhaps some of that green bean casserole with the crunchy fried onions on top. Now, that was a meal.

Dessert, of course, was a very important part of the buffet process. Cheesecake fell into the same category as potatoes and pasta-a rookie mistake, don’t do it! Better to start with puddings or fruit crisps. And, as the saying went, there was always room for Jell-O. Or for that matter, chocolate mousse. And crème brûlée. Topped with raspberries, dynamite.

Yeah, she could go with some crème brûlée.

Which made it kind of sad that it was only seven in the morning, and the closest thing to food she had in her North End loft was a bag of flour.

D.D. rolled over in bed, felt her stomach rumble, and tried to pretend that was the only part of her that was hungry.

Outside the bank of windows, the morning looked gray. Another cold and frosty morning in March. Normally she’d be up and heading for HQ by now, but yesterday, she’d wrapped up an intensive two-month investigation into a drive-by shooting that had taken out an up-and-coming drug dealer, as well as a mother walking her two young children. The shooting had occurred a mere three blocks from Boston PD’s Roxbury headquarters, adding yet more insult to injury.

The press had gone nuts. The locals had staged daily pickets, demanding safer streets.

And the superintendent had promptly formed a massive task-force, headed, of course, by D.D., because somehow, a pretty blonde white chick wouldn’t get nearly the same flack as yet another stuffed suit.

D.D. hadn’t minded. Hell, she lived for this. Flashing cameras, hysterical citizens, red-faced politicians. Bring it on. She took the public flogging, then retreated behind closed doors to whip her team into a proper investigative frenzy. Some asshole thought he could massacre an entire family on her watch? No fucking way.

They’d made a list of likely suspects and started to squeeze. And sure enough, six weeks later, they busted down the doors of a condemned warehouse near the waterfront, and dragged their man from the dark recesses into the harsh sunlight, cameras rolling.

She and her team would get to be heroes for twenty-four hours or so, then the next idiot would come along and the whole pattern would repeat. The way of the world. Shit, wipe, flush. Shit again.

She sighed, tossed from side to side, ran her hand across her five-hundred-thread-count sheets, and sighed again. She should get out of bed. Shower. Invest some quality time in doing laundry and cleaning the disaster that currently passed as her living space.

She thought of the buffet again. And sex. Really hot, pounding, punishing sex. She wanted her hands palming a rock-hard ass. She wanted arms like steel bands around her hips. She wanted whisker burn between her thighs while her fingernails ripped these same cool white sheets to shreds.

Goddammit. She threw back the covers and stalked out of the bedroom, wearing only a T-shirt, panties, and a fine sheen of sexual frustration.

She’d clean her condo. Go for a run. Eat a dozen doughnuts.

She made it to the kitchen, yanked the canister of espresso beans out of the freezer, found the grinder, and got to work.

She was thirty-eight for God’s sake. A dedicated investigator and hard-core workaholic. Feeling a little bit lonely, no hunky husband or two-point-two rugrats running around? Too late to change the rules now.

She poured the fresh-ground coffee into the tiny gold filter, and flipped the switch. The Italian machine roared to life, the scent of fresh espresso filling the air and calming her a little. She fetched the milk and prepared to foam.

She’d purchased the North End loft three months ago. Way too nice for a cop, but that was the joy of the imploding Boston condo market. The developers built them, the market didn’t come. So working stiffs like D.D. suddenly got a chance at the good life. She liked the place. Open, airy, minimalist. When she was home, it was enough to make her think she should be home more. Not that she was, but she thought about it.

She finished preparing her latte, and padded over to the bank of windows overlooking the busy side street. Still restless, still wired. She liked her view from here. Busy street, filled with busy people, scurrying below. Lots of little lives with little urgencies, none of whom could see her, worry about her, want anything from her. See, she was off duty, and still, life went on. Not a bad lesson for a woman like her.

She blew back a small batch of foam, took several sips, and felt some of her tension unknot a little more.

She never should’ve gone to the wedding. That’s what this was about. A woman her age should boycott all weddings and baby showers.

Damn that Bobby Dodge. He’d actually choked up when saying his vows. And Annabelle had cried, looking impossibly lovely in her strapless white gown. Then, the dog, Bella, walking down the aisle with two gold bands fastened to her collar with a giant bow.

How the hell were you not supposed to get a little emotional about something like that? Especially when the music started and everyone was dancing to Etta James’s “At Last” except you, of course, because you’d been working so damn much you never got around to finding a date?

D.D. sipped more latte, gazed down at busy little lives, and scowled.

Bobby Dodge had gotten married. That’s what this was about. He’d gone and found someone better than her, and now he was married and she was…

Goddammit, she needed to get laid.

She’d just gotten her running shoes laced up when her cell phone rang. She checked the number, frowned, placed the phone to her ear.

“Sergeant Warren,” she announced crisply.

“Morning, Sergeant. Detective Brian Miller, District C-6. Sorry to bother you.”

D.D. shrugged, waited. Then when the detective didn’t immediately continue, “How can I help you this morning, Detective Miller?”

“Well, I got a situation…” Again, Miller’s voice trailed off, and again, D.D. waited.

District C-6 was the BPD field division that covered the South Boston area. As a sergeant with the homicide unit, D.D. didn’t work with the C-6 detectives very often. South Boston wasn’t really known for its murders. Larceny, burglary, robbery, yes. Homicide, not so much.

“Dispatch took a call at five A.M.,” Miller finally spoke up. “A husband, reporting that he’d come home and discovered his wife was missing.”

D.D. arched a brow, sat back in the chair. “He came home at five A.M.?”

“He reported her missing at five A.M. Husband’s name is Jason Jones. Ring any bells?”

“Should it?”

“He’s a reporter for the Boston Daily. Covers the South Boston beat, writes some larger city features. Apparently, he works most nights, covering city council meetings, board meetings, whatever. Wednesday it’s the water precinct, then he got a call to cover a residential fire. Anyhow, he wrapped up around two A.M., and returned home, where his four-year-old daughter was sleeping in her room but his wife was MIA.”

“Okay.”

“First responders did the standard drill,” Miller continued. “Checked ’round the house. Car’s on the street, woman’s purse and keys on the kitchen counter. No sign of forced entry, but in the upstairs bedroom a bedside lamp is broken and a blue-and-green quilt is missing.”

“Okay.”

“Given the circumstances, a mom leaving a kid alone, etc., etc., the first responders called their supervisor, who contacted my boss in the district office. Needless to say, we’ve spent the past few hours combing the neighborhood, checking with local businesses, tracking down friends and families, etc., etc. To make a long story short, I haven’t a clue.”

“Got a body?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Blood spatter? Footprints, collateral damage?”

“Just a busted-up lamp.”

“First responders check the whole house? Attic, basement, crawl space?”

“We’re trying.”

“Trying?”

“Husband… he’s not refusing, but he’s not exactly cooperating.”

“Ah crap.” And suddenly D.D. got it. Why a district detective was calling a homicide sergeant about a missing female. And why the homicide sergeant wouldn’t be going for her run. “Mrs. Jones-she’s young, white, and beautiful, isn’t she?”

“Twenty-three-year-old blond schoolteacher. Has the kind of smile that lights up a TV screen.”

“Please tell me you haven’t talked about this over the radio.”

“Why do you think I called you on your cell phone?”

“What’s the address? Give me ten minutes, Detective Miller. I’ll be right there.”

D.D. left her running shoes in the family room, her running shorts in the hall, and her running shirt in the bedroom. Jeans, white button-down top, a killer pair of boots, and she was ready to go. Clipped her pager to her waist, hung her creds around her neck, slipped her cell phone into her back pocket.

Last pause for her favorite caramel-colored leather jacket, hanging on a hook by the door.

Then Sergeant Warren hit the road, on the job and loving it.

South Boston had a long and colorful history, even by Boston standards. With the bustling financial district on one side, and the bright blue ocean on the other, it functioned as a quaint harbor town with all the perks of big-city living. The area was originally settled by the lower end of the socioeconomic scale. Struggling immigrants, mostly Irish, cramming thirty people to a room in vermin-ridden tenement housing, where a slop bucket served as latrine and a straw pile became a flea-infested mattress. Life was hard, with disease, pests, and poverty being everyone’s closest neighbor.

Fast-forward a hundred and fifty years, and “Southie” was less of a place and more of an attitude. It gave birth to Whitey Bulger, one of Boston’s most notorious crime lords, who spent the seventies turning the local housing projects into his personal playground, addicting one half of the population while employing the other half. And still, the area soldiered on, neighbor looking after neighbor, each generation of tough, wiseass kids producing the next generation of tough, wiseass kids. Outsiders didn’t get it, and by Southie standards, that was just fine.

Unfortunately, all attitudes sooner or later got adjusted. One year, a major harbor event brought droves of city dwellers into the area. They arrived expecting squalid neighborhoods and decrepit streets. They discovered waterfront views, an abundance of green parks, and outstanding Catholic schools. Here was a neighborhood, ten minutes from downtown Boston, where your toughest choice on a Saturday morning was whether to go right and head to the park, or go left and hang out on the beach.

Needless to say, the yuppies found real estate agents, and the next thing you knew, old housing projects became million-dollar waterfront condos, and fourth-generation triple-deckers were sold to developers for five times the money anyone thought they’d ever bring.

The community became both more and less. Different economics and ethnicities. Same great parks and tree-lined streets. Added some coffee bars. Kept the Irish pubs. More upwardly mobile professionals. Still a lot of families and kids. Good place to live, if you’d bought in before the prices went nuts.

D.D. followed her GPS navigator to the address provided by Detective Miller. She found herself close to the water at a quaint little brown-and-cream painted bungalow with a postage-stamp lawn and a nude maple tree. She had two thoughts at once: Someone had built a bungalow in Boston? And two, Detective Miller was good. He was five and a half hours into a call out, and thus far, no ribbons of crime-scene tape, no parking lot of police cruisers, and better yet, no long lines of media vans. House appeared quiet, street appeared quiet. The proverbial calm before the storm.

D.D. drove around the block three times before finally parking several streets down. If Miller had managed this long without advertising, she wasn’t gonna give the game away.

Walking back, hands fisted in her front pockets, shoulders hunched for warmth, she discovered Miller standing in the front yard, waiting for her. He was smaller than she expected, with thinning brown hair and a 1970s mustache. He looked like the kind of cop who would make an excellent undercover officer-so nondescript no one would notice him, let alone realize he was eavesdropping on important conversations. He also had the pale complexion of a man who spent most of his time under fluorescent lights. Desk jockey, D.D. thought, and immediately reserved judgment.

Miller crossed the lawn and fell in step beside her. He kept walking, so she did, too. Sometimes, policing involved a bit of acting. Today, apparently, they were playing the role of a couple out for a morning stroll. Miller’s rumpled brown suit was a bit formal for the part, but D.D., in her slim-fitted jeans and leather jacket, looked dynamite.

“Sandra Jones works over at the middle school,” Miller started out, speaking low and rushed as they ate up the first block, heading toward the water. “Teaches sixth grade social studies. We’ve got two uniforms over there now, but no one has heard from her since she left the school yesterday at three-thirty. We’ve canvassed the local businesses, taverns, convenience stores; nothing. Dinner dishes are in the sink. A stack of graded papers next to her purse on the kitchen counter. According to the husband, Sandra didn’t usually start work until after putting their daughter to bed at eight P.M. So we’re working on the assumption that she was at home with her daughter until sometime after eight-thirty, nine P.M. Cell phone shows no activity after six; we’re pulling the records for the landline now.”

“What about family? Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins?” D.D. asked. The sun had finally burned through the gray cloud cover, but the temperature remained raw, with the wind blowing off the water and slicing viciously through her leather coat.

“No local family. Just an estranged father in Georgia. The husband refused to specify, just said it was old news and had nothing to do with this.”

“How nice of the husband to do our thinking for us. You call the father?”

“Would if I had a name.”

“The husband won’t give you the name?” D.D. was incredulous.

Miller shook his head, jamming his hands in his pants pockets while his breath came out in faint clouds of steam. “Oh, wait till you meet this guy. Ever watch that show? The medical drama?”

“ER?”

“No, the one with more sex.”

“Grey’s Anatomy?”

“Yeah, that’s the one. What’s the name of that doctor? McDuff, McDevon…?”

“McDreamy?”

“That’s the one. Mr. Jones could be his twin. That rumpled thing going on with the hair, the five o’clock shadow… Hell, minute this story breaks, this guy is gonna get more fan mail than Scott Peterson. I say we have about twenty more hours, and then either we find Sandy Jones or we’re totally, completely screwed.”

D.D. sighed heavily. They hit the waterfront, made a right, and kept moving. “Men are stupid,” she muttered impatiently. “I mean, for heaven’s sake. It’s like once a week now some good-looking, got-everything-going-for-him guy tries to solve his marital difficulties by killing off his wife and claiming she disappeared. And every week the media descends-”

“We got a pool going. Five to one odds on Nancy Grace. Four to one on Greta Van Susteren.”

D.D. shot him a look. “And every week,” she continued, “the police assemble a taskforce, volunteers comb the woods, the Coast Guard sweeps the harbor, and you know what?”

Miller appeared hopeful.

“The wife’s body is found, and the husband ends up serving twenty to life in maximum security. Wouldn’t you think that by now at least one of these guys would settle for an old-fashioned divorce?”

Miller didn’t have anything to say.

D.D. sighed, ran a hand through her hair, sighed again. “All right, gut reaction. Do you think the wife’s dead?”

“Yep.” Miller said it matter-of-factly. When she waited, he offered up, “Broken lamp, missing quilt. I’d say someone wrapped up the body and carted it off. Quilt would contain the blood, which accounts for the lack of physical evidence.”

“All right. You think the husband did it?”

Miller pulled out a folded yellow sheet of legal pad paper from inside his brown sports jacket, and handed it to her. “You’ll like this. While the husband has been, shall we say, reluctant, to answer our questions, he did provide his own timeline for the evening, including the names and phone numbers of people who could corroborate his whereabouts.”

“He provided a list of alibis?” D.D. unfolded the sheet, noting the first name listed, Larry Wade, Fire Marshall, then James McConnagal, Massachusetts State Police, then three more names, this time from the BPD. She kept reading, her eyes growing wider, then her hands starting to shake with barely suppressed rage. “Who the hell is this guy again?”

“Reporter, Boston Daily. House burned last night. He claims he was there, covering that story, along with half of Boston’s finest.”

“No shit. You call any of these guys yet?”

“Nah, I already know what I’m gonna get.”

“They saw him, but they didn’t see him,” D.D. filled in. “It’s a fire, everyone’s working. Maybe he asked each one of them for a quote, so they noticed him at that moment, then when he slips away…”

“Yep. As alibis go, this guy scores straight out of the gate. He’s got half a dozen of our own people to say where he was last night, even if some of the time he wasn’t there at all. Meaning,” Miller wagged his finger at her, “don’t let Mr. Jones’s good looks fool you. McDreamy is also McSmarty. That’s so unfair.”

D.D. handed the paper back. “He lawyer up?” They hit the corner, and by mutual consent turned around and headed back. They were walking into the wind now, the force of the breeze flattening their coats against their chests while carrying the sting of the water into their faces.

“Not yet. He just won’t answer our questions.”

“Did you invite him down to the station house?”

“He asked to see our arrest warrant.”

D.D. arched a brow, registering that bit of news. McDreamy was McSmarty. At least, he knew more about his constitutional rights than the average bear. Interesting. She tucked her chin down, turning her face away from the wind. “No sign of forced entry?”

“No, and get this, both the front and back doors are made of steel.”

“Really?”

“Yep. With key in and key out bolt locks. Oh, and we found wooden dowels jammed into most of the window frames.”

“No shit. What’d the husband say?”

“One of those questions he declined to answer.”

“Is there a home security system? Maybe a camera?”

“No and no. Not even a nanny cam. I asked.”

They were approaching the house now, the adorable fifties bungalow that apparently was reinforced tighter than Fort Knox.

“Key in and key out locks,” D.D. murmured. “No cameras. Makes me wonder if the setup is about keeping someone out, or keeping someone in.”

“Think the wife was abused?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time. You said there was a kid?”

“Four-year-old girl. Clarissa Jane Jones. They call her Ree.”

“Talk to her yet?”

Miller hesitated. “Kid’s spent the morning curled up on her father’s lap, looking pretty traumatized. Given that I don’t see any hope of this guy letting us speak to her alone, I haven’t pushed. Figured I’d approach them both when we had a little more ammunition.”

D.D. nodded. Interviewing kids was messy business. Some detectives had a knack for it, some didn’t. She was guessing, based on Miller’s reluctance, that he didn’t feel too good about it. Which would be why D.D. made the big bucks.

“Is the husband confined?” she asked. They climbed the bungalow’s front steps, approaching a bright green welcome mat, where the blue scripted word was surrounded by a sea of bright green and yellow flowers. It looked to D.D. like the kind of welcome mat a little girl and her mother might pick out.

“Father and daughter are sitting in the family room. I left an officer in charge. Best I can do at the moment.”

“At the moment,” she agreed, pausing in front of the doormat. “You’ve searched the home?”

“Ninety percent of it.”

“Cars?”

“Yep.”

“Outbuildings?”

“Yep.”

“Checked with local establishments, neighbors, friends, relatives, and coworkers?”

“Efforts are ongoing.”

“All without sign of Sandra Jones.”

Miller glanced at his watch. “Approximately six hours from the husband’s first call, there remains no sign of twenty-three-year-old white female Sandra Jones.”

“But you do have a potential crime scene in the master bedroom, a potential witness in Sandra’s four-year-old daughter, and a potential suspect in Sandra’s journalist husband. That about sums it up?”

“That about sums it up.” Miller gestured to the front door, revealing his first hint of impatience. “How do you wanna play it: house, husband, or kid?”

D.D. put a hand on the doorknob. She had an immediate gut reaction, but paused to think it through. These first few hours, when you had a call out, but not yet a crime, were always a critical time in an investigation. They had suspicions, but not yet probable cause; a person of interest, but not yet a prime suspect. From a legal perspective, they had just enough rope to hang themselves.

D.D. sighed, realized she wasn’t going home any time soon, and made her choice.