“Alan Garner works for Gino Fish. Gino Fish is the guy whose phone number Billie Bishop left when she departed the shelter.”
Simpson was sweating. His face was red. Jesse could see him thinking.
“And two other girls left his phone number at the same shelter,” he said.
Jesse nodded. Suit wasn’t stupid, but his mind had to move slowly over the surface of information before he possessed it. Jesse gave him time.
After a time Simpson said, “Well, that would be a really big coincidence.”
“Really big,” Jesse said.
“So why not go in and confront him with it?”
“And he says, I don’t know anything about it, and what do we say?”
Suitcase drank some more coffee.
“I think it works,” he said.
“Drinking hot stuff?”
“Yeah.”
“Your mother tell you to run cold water over the inside of your wrist to cool your blood?”
Simpson was surprised.
“Yeah.”
Jesse smiled.
“We could try to find those other girls,” Simpson said. “See what they could tell us.”
“One’s named Mary,” Jesse said. “The other one is Jane. Or so they told Sister.”
“No last names?”
“Nope.”
“You know where they came from, we could check Missing Persons…”
“I don’t know where they came from. I doubt that the names are real.”
“But they left a real phone number.”
“Kids need to hang on to something,” Jesse said.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“However fucked up,” Jesse said, “kids don’t want to just disappear.”
“They need to feel connected?”
“To something,” Jesse said.
Simpson took another sip of coffee. The sweat ran down his face in front of each ear.
“Careful,” Jesse said. “You don’t want to get a chill.”
“I don’t know what we’re looking for here,” Simpson said.
“Me, either,” Jesse said.
“So how we going to know when we see it?”
Jesse smiled.
“It’s a chief of police thing,” Jesse said.
Chapter Forty-two
Today they were in Simpson’s Dodge pickup, parked farther down Tremont Street, watching Development Associates of Boston in the rearview mirror. Jesse went to use the washroom at the Boston Ballet building, showing his badge in the lobby to forestall discussion.
“First rule of stakeout,” Jesse said when he came back. “Locate near a place you can take a leak.”
“We going to follow somebody if they leave? Gino, or the receptionist guy?”
“Nope.”
“So why are we here?”
“See what happens.”
“Why don’t we follow them?”
“I don’t want to spook them,” Jesse said.
“You think they’d spot us?”
“People like Gino need to be pretty alert,” Jesse said. “If somebody’s alert, it’s pretty hard to tail them alone.”
