The Price of Malice Page 6

  “Fine with me,” Joe agreed. “What about Wayne?”

  “Totally different story. A lot of people knew him, even though he didn’t live on the street. I’m building a who’s-who list. A bunch of them swear he went after kids, but nobody’s seen anything.”

  “Hold it, hold it,” Joe requested. “There were that many kids he abused on Manor Court?”

  “No, no,” Sam reassured him. “Sorry—that kind of ran together. A few of those we canvassed said he was a snapper, but I couldn’t get a single kid’s name from any of them. It was all, ‘So-and-so told me he’d done what’s-his-name.’ Super vague right now.”

  “A snapper?” Les asked.

  Willy held up his wrist. “Comes from them using rubber bands—when they get the urge to fuck a kid, they’re supposed to snap a rubber band they wear around their wrist. Pain equals lust, so lust goes away. That’s the theory. Typical shrink crap. A bullet would make the lust go away quicker—cheaper, too.”

  “Thank you for that,” Spinney said, shaking his head but smiling. “Short and concise, as usual.”

  “I found a box of rubber bands in his apartment,” Joe told them.

  “Bet they weren’t used much,” Willy commented.

  Joe had to admit he was right—there’d been no rubber band on the body and the box had been full. “I’ll talk to his shrink tomorrow,” he said. “A word to the wise, though, before we go too far down this path. Right now, this snapper stuff is purely anecdotal, unless you know something, Willy, that you’re keeping in your pocket.”

  Willy raised his eyebrows innocently. “Not me. I just heard the guy was dirty—like Sam did—again and again.”

  “Meaning,” Joe resumed, “that he probably is. But he doesn’t have a record, which means we don’t have proof.”

  “You worried about a stiff’s reputation?” Willy challenged, his face darkening again.

  “What I’m worried about,” Joe explained, “is getting blinded by this. Somebody killed him—maybe because he went after kids; maybe for some completely different reason. I don’t want to lose this case because we got too focused, too fast.”

  He looked over at Spinney. “You dug into Castine’s records. Anything you didn’t mention earlier?”

  Lester pulled out a couple of notes. “Wayne Castine, aged thirty-two, born Hardwick, Vermont, of Shirley Evans, since deceased, and an unknown father. Evans married when Wayne was five, and a few years later, Wayne cropped up as a person-of-interest in a child abuse case filed against the stepfather. I called a friend at child services and was told that Wayne was the victim. This conversation was off the record, of course, but it told me what you might expect—mom dragged a growing bunch of kids around the state, never making ends meet, and fell in with one loser after another. The abuse was repeated with another of mom’s boyfriends a few years later.”

  Lester, the father of two, sighed and concluded, “You get the idea—he was done for from the start.”

  “But no criminal record of his own?” Joe asked incredulously.

  “No adult record,” Les corrected him. “I made another call to Parole and Probation and got the skinny there. Usual bad-boy stuff—underage drinking, criminal mischief, assault, B-and-E. He messed up a lot. He spent time in juvenile detention, was finally taken away from mom and passed around to a few foster homes. But it looks like he learned not to get caught after he reached maturity, ’cause that’s where the legal trail runs out of gas.”

  “Except for the person-of-interest computer entries you mentioned,” Joe added. “I hate to say it, but that’s where you’re going to have to spend some time, talking to those POIs, just to see what might pop up.”

  Spinney looked slightly glum. “I know.”

  “At least you can start from the present and work backward,” Joe added cheerfully. “Take the most recent entry; chances are that whatever got him killed stemmed from some fresh-out-of-the-oven insult.”

  He paused to rub his eyes. “God—it’s getting late. Why don’t we wrap this up . . .”

  Sam had raised her hand, like a schoolgirl. “Anything specific you want me to do tomorrow?”

  “Wayne’s coworkers,” he told her succinctly. “Also, a Bratt PD cop—a new guy named Gary Nelson—interviewed two of Castine’s neighbors, one of whom saw Castine with a young girl he claimed was his niece. Reinterview that witness and see if you can’t get a fix on the girl. Also, there was one neighbor Nelson missed—could be the one who knows something.”

  Sam didn’t look up from the notes she was taking. “Got it.”

  Joe stood up. “All right. That’s it. Keep in touch. Reconvene here tomorrow at sixteen hundred, but send up a flare if you find anything hot before then.”

  Everyone gathered their belongings—except Willy, of course, who merely sauntered out the door. Joe moved to his desk, pretending to settle in for some late-night paperwork, and waved good night to the last person to leave.

  But he wasn’t interested in paperwork. What was on his mind had been plaguing him all day—and building for the past few weeks.

  With a New Englander’s ingrained respect for personal privacy, he hadn’t intruded on Lyn’s request to be left alone. He had broken the news to her of the lobster boat’s discovery during a hike up Mt. Wantastiquet, across the river from downtown Brattleboro. The view had been spectacular, the weather perfect, her welcome of him earlier encouraging. He’d recognized the burden he had to share, guessed at the magnitude of its effect, but had hoped it might be tolerably borne, at least after the initial shock.

  But it hadn’t been. It had crippled her, and then the two of them. He had tried to keep her company, quietly, supportively. She’d become almost mute, distracted, as if lost in an immense and all-consuming calculation. He had sensed himself changing in her eyes from someone she could just stand to a downright nuisance, before she’d finally affirmed the fact by asking him to keep his distance. She needed “space,” she’d told him, and he’d rarely hated a word more. At first, his distress had been all about her, enhanced by the guilt that he’d been the bearer of her bad news. With time, in her absence, missing her, his emotions had turned more selfish.

  He didn’t doubt that this latest case had ratcheted up his desire to see her. Major investigations took time, cut into sleep, and destroyed all previously scheduled events, especially leisure ones. Weekends vanished, nine-to-five had no meaning. But it was also when the job became intoxicating, driving the brain into high gear, allowing adrenaline to replace sleep—and making him crave both a good sounding board, and some company in bed.

  He envied Sam and Willy most now, and Lester with his wife, Susan. They all had someone with whom to share the odd thought that comes unexpectedly, over dinner or while taking a shower, the one that sometimes blows a case wide open. More importantly—even with Sam and Willy, who worked together days—such sharing could counterbalance the tension of the investigation with the need to fill a grocery list, or take out the trash, or make love and welcome oblivion.

  Whatever his motivation or its timing, Joe missed her. Lyn had reignited a love of companionship he hadn’t experienced in a long while. Things with Gail had hardened over time, often becoming couched in discourse and debate, disguising that their minds had gradually been asked to handle what had faded from their hearts.

  The time Joe had spent with Lyn reminded him of how natural and uncomplicated a relationship could be.

  And right now, he was longing for that enough to break his promise to her and act upon it.

  Lyn’s bar on Elliot Street, like a reminder of the trouble between them, was named “Silva’s,” which she’d told him once was more in honor of her father than a reflection of her own last name. It was better than a going concern—it had been the proverbial right place at the right time. Opened just recently, it was jammed nightly with appreciative patrons, drawn by the music, the crowd, and, of course, the need to be seen where it counted, for some reason.

  Lyn had been a book
keeper for years, as well as a bartender. She and Joe had met in Gloucester, where he’d been on a case. The attraction had been mutual, if initially chaste. Indeed, by the time she found a bar up for sale in Brattleboro, he’d placed her in a backlog of very pleasant but distant memories. Her reappearance in his life had been surprising and extraordinarily welcome. Right place, right time.

  He climbed the concrete steps to the bar’s carved wooden door, and left the swelter of the darkened street for the air-conditioned bedlam of a night spot in full swing.

  Joe was no lover of bars. He barely drank, found no pleasure in drunks, disliked loud music, and hated crowds. Still, he had a regular seat here, when Lyn was on duty, which she was several times a week, both to support her staff and to keep an eye on the business. Many a night, Joe would park himself on the last bar stool against the wall and nurse a succession of Cokes as he watched her ply her trade, impressed by her natural ease with people—all the more so since he knew her to be an introvert at heart, happiest alone or in his company. Until recently.

  “Joe,” came a woman’s voice. “You want the usual?”

  He looked over the tops of the heads lined up at the bar and saw a young woman’s face glimpsing out from between them—the night’s barkeep, Holly.

  “Not tonight, thanks—was hoping to catch Lyn.”

  Holly’s brow furrowed. “You been away?” She gestured to the far end of the bar, where they could have some semblance of privacy. He squeezed in between his usual perch, now occupied, and the wall.

  “Kind of,” he told her. “Why do you ask?”

  She was leaning far over the bar, with her ear almost pressed against his mouth. She now straightened enough to face him and shout, just inches away, “She left for home, about three, four days ago. Family emergency.”

  “She all right?”

  “Yeah, yeah. She’s fine. It’s her mom, I think. Her brother, Steve, called. Is she all right, by the way?”

  He was able to hear about every other word. “All right?”

  “Yeah,” Holly spoke louder. “She’s been really weird lately. I mean, before the phone call from home.”

  “A different piece of bad news,” Joe explained vaguely.

  Holly knew better than to ask. “Well. I hope it gets better. We miss her. Give her our love when you see her. You going there now?”

  He considered the idea. He hadn’t thought of it—merely rued his bad luck when he’d heard she’d left town. But for a man with his needs, and who often went sleepless for days, a night of travel to and from Gloucester sounded feasible and possibly restorative. To hell with her “space,” he suddenly thought.

  “Yeah,” he yelled. “I think I am.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  On the map, Cape Ann, of which Gloucester is the dominant town, forms the top of a capital letter “C” that cradles Boston Harbor in its embrace, with the bottom arm being the Hull/Cohasset area. As a result, where it isn’t a working-class fishing port, Gloucester is a Boston playground, hemmed in by Martha Stewart mansions and country clubs. During the summer, during the day, and certainly during weekends, it is a recreational madhouse, filled with Type-A urban-ites charging through their supposed time off like a bunch of drunks at a liquor store sale. Not fun to watch, and even worse to experience, especially in heavy, SUV-clogged traffic.

  Fortunately, Joe had none of that to concern him. He drove through the middle of the night with his windows down, his air conditioner off, and his radio barely murmuring—virtually the only car visible on the entire 150-mile trip. As he crossed the Annisquam River onto the cape itself, swung around the Grant traffic circle, and headed south on Washington Street, he could fully appreciate the salt-tinged quiet of the maritime breeze that had enwrapped this quintessential fishing village for over 350 years. Approaching the center of the town—incongruously decorated by a statue of Joan of Arc—he felt the hyped-up, modern tensions of Boston’s extended commercial crush yield to something more permanent and stubborn. Perhaps Joan wasn’t so misplaced after all, he thought. She, too, persevered against reason and all odds, just as the fishing fleet in this town had defied both financial and ecological dread.

  Of course, he only hoped that Gloucester would end up better off than Joan.

  Like many of its ilk, the town has two faces—a glossy one for tourists, offering lobster meals, boutiques, ocean tours, and overpriced latté; and the time-tested working-class reality, with its docks, factories, bars, and a cluster of churches offering whatever solace the bars lacked. In a town from which, over its history, some ten thousand people had died at sea, any kindness, from any quarter, was worth consideration.

  Joe turned east, leaving the photogenic Gloucester for its grittier back bay, crested a small hill, and drove into a scene of boats, docks, and processing plants, garishly isolated from the black of night by a scattering of sodium lights, hung on high.

  Working from strained memory, he left the primary street and entered a cobweb of narrow lanes—Webster, Friend, Elwell, and more, all riding a hilly terrain like boats on a rolling sea—in search of the address he knew Lyn’s brother shared with their mother, Maria.

  Eventually, no longer sure where he was, he suddenly recognized the building—small and tired—and pulled over to the curb. In both directions, he was boxed in by rows of similar homes, mostly painted white, crowded together as if warding off wind and cold. It seemed they knew, like the generations they’d sheltered, that despite the balmy weather, bad times were just over the horizon.

  Joe craned his neck to see the house’s dark facade, recognizing Lyn’s car parked before it, and pulled his cell phone from his belt.

  A sleepy, quizzical voice answered after the sixth ring. “Hello?”

  “Lyn? It’s Joe. I’m sorry I woke you up.”

  A long pause was followed by, “It’s okay. What’s wrong?”

  “I’m all right. I know this sounds crazy, but I wanted to hear your voice again.”

  He could hear her shifting, no doubt rearranging a pillow behind her head. “Jesus, Joe.”

  “I know, I know. Stupid . . .”

  “No, not stupid,” she interrupted. “I’m glad you did.”

  “Really?”

  Another silence, followed by, “I’ve been a little jammed up, not sure what to do. I thought I had to figure that out alone.”

  “And now?”

  She sighed. “I don’t know. It’s still pretty confusing.”

  He nodded in the darkness, sharing the feeling. “How’s your mom doing?”

  “You know about that?”

  “I dropped by the bar. They told me Steve had called, and that you’d gone home.”

  “Yeah. She’s doing better. She just had a meltdown when I told her about the boat being found, and Steve couldn’t handle it on his own. He’s a little beaten up, too. With his history, I figured I better head down.”

  After his father and brother had been declared lost at sea, Steve had caved in, first indulging in drugs, and then dealing them. He’d just recently emerged from prison, barely in time to help his quasi-catatonic mother in her last years. It was no wonder they’d both been shaken by Joe’s discovery.

  “I don’t know how you’ll take this, Lyn,” Joe admitted, “but I followed you down.”

  He could almost see her astonishment. “You what?”

  “I drove to Gloucester. I’m parked outside your house right now.”

  No response.

  “There’s no obligation to it, Lyn,” he said quickly. “I can leave just as easily. I yielded to impulse.”

  “It’s okay. It’s okay,” she said, to his relief. “I’m sorry. I had to get my head around it. I’m still half asleep. Let me come down.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  She laughed, albeit less with delight than at the stupidity of the comment. “Of course I do. Hang on.”

  It didn’t take two minutes for her to appear, dressed in jeans and a light sweatshirt, and dart across the street t
o slide into his passenger seat. They hugged awkwardly across the center console, making him regret that he hadn’t waited for her on the sidewalk.

  “You really are crazy, you know that?” she told him, settling back in the corner and shaking her head. “This is pure high school.”

  “I know,” he conceded. “It was just getting under my skin. I feel so guilty about all this.”

  “That you stumbled across the Maria?” she asked. “How’s that work?”

  He gazed out the windshield, appreciative of the way even stationary cars allowed for conversation without eye contact. “I was worried I was being held to blame a little.”

  She didn’t answer directly, but joined him for a few seconds, studying the dark street ahead. “Maybe you were.”

  “What do I do about that?” he asked slowly.

  “Maybe you just did it.”

  He wasn’t sure what to say.

  She crossed her arms and tucked her chin in slightly. Now it was her turn to avoid eye contact. “Look,” she said, “I know this has been weird. You probably had no idea you were hooking up with such a psycho.”

  “That’s not what I’m seeing.”

  “Because you only see what I show you.”

  He couldn’t say much to that.

  “Joe,” she said in a stronger voice, shifting in her seat and looking straight at him. “When you first told me you’d found the Maria, I didn’t give you a chance to explain. I mean, you told me it was way up north and in some bad guy’s boathouse, but then I shut you down. Can you give me all of it now? I promise I won’t get weird again.”

  Joe nodded, happy to talk about something concrete. “It was your brother, Steve, funnily enough. He was telling us how your dad would take the whole family up the coast of Maine, pretending to be on vacation but actually picking up tips on the lobster trade.”

  “I remember that,” she said.

  “Well, he mentioned how, when you were in Jonesport, you and your mother went off shopping or something, while he, José, and your dad went to the docks to talk shop with a boat captain.”