“My guess?” Jesse said. “Do some coke. Do some booze.
Get laid. Giggle some.”
Molly stared at him.
“God.”
Jesse shrugged.
“That’s how they’ve coped until now,” he said.
“Jesse, these are twenty-year-old kids. They’re five years older than my daughter.”
“And they are depraved, stupid, careless, amoral people,”
Jesse said.
“They are victims.”
“That may be,” Jesse said. “But sympathizing with them is not my business. My business is catching the person who killed their sister.”
“So why did you have to dig up all this awfulness?” Molly said.
“It was there,” Jesse said. “I needed to know about it.”
Molly held out her glass.
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R O B E R T B . P A R K E R
“One more,” she said. “Then I’ll go home and take a bath.”
Molly wasn’t a drinker. She was starting to slur her words.
Jesse poured her another drink. She took a sip and looked at him over the glass. Her eyes had a sort of softness about them, the way Jenn’s got if she drank too much.
“You are so nice,” Molly said. “So often. And then . . . you are such a cynical, hard bastard.”
“Nice guys finish last,” Jesse said.
“Somebody said that.”
“Leo Durocher.”
“You know you don’t believe it.”
“Hell,” Jesse said. “I’ve proved it.”
Molly didn’t say anything else. She sat quietly and finished her third drink. Jesse sipped his Coke.
When Molly’s drink was gone, Jesse said, “Come on, hon, I’ll drive you home.”
“I can drive myself,” she said.
“No,” Jesse said. “You can’t.”
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53
R ita Fiore’s office offered a long view of the South Shore.
“Ms. Fiore will be right with you,” the
secretary said and left.
Jesse looked at the South Shore for a short while until Rita came in wearing a red suit and sat behind her desk.
“Wow,” she said, “a coat and tie.”
“Trying to fit in,” Jesse said. “You talk to your private eye?”
“I did,” Rita said.
She took a notebook from her middle drawer and opened it and thumbed through some pages.
“He gave me what he had.”
R O B E R T B . P A R K E R
“Didn’t I run into him once?” Jesse said. “Working on something in Paradise?”
“I think so,” Rita said.
“Him and a terrifying black guy.”
“Terrifying is one description,” Rita said. “Toothsome would be another.”
Jesse smiled.
“What did he tell you?” he said.
Rita looked at her notes.
“They wanted to know if he could find a person and track his movements,” Rita paused and studied her notes a moment.
“I hate my handwriting,” she said. “And he said, ‘You want someone followed?’ and they said mostly they wanted to know where someone had been in the last few months. And he said that was possible, who did they
