“I’m not being girl reporter now. I’m being ex-wife who still loves you.”
Jesse felt the tension he always felt with Jenn: trying to control himself, trying to keep what he felt stored carefully away so it wouldn’t spill out all over the place. He flexed his shoulders a little.
“It’s pretty hard,” Jesse said, “to believe in much. You can’t prevent crime. You couldn’t even solve most crimes if the bad guys would simply keep their mouths shut. About all you can aim at is to make your corner peaceful.”
“But you keep at it,” Jenn said.
“Gotta keep at something,” Jesse said.
“You see too much of human emotion, up too close,” Jenn said. “Don’t you? People lie—to you, to themselves. Few people can be counted on. Most people do what they need to do, not what they ought.”
“You know that, too,” Jesse said.
“I work in television, Jesse.”
“Oh,” Jesse said. “Yeah.”
They were quiet.
Outside Jesse’s window a couple of firemen were washing their cars in the broad driveway of the fire station. Jesse could hear the phone ring dimly at the front desk, and Molly’s voice.
“So what do we hang on to?’ Jenn said.
“Each other?” Jesse said.
“I guess,” Jenn said.
“And we’re having a hell of a time doing that,” Jesse said.
11.
The east side of Marshport butted up against the west side of Paradise. Marshport was an elderly mill town with no mills. There was an enclave of Ukrainians in the southwest end of town. The rest of the city was mostly Hispanic. There had been a couple of feeble efforts to reinvigorate parts of the city, but the efforts had simply replaced the old slums with newer ones.
Jesse parked in front of a building that used to house a grammar school and now served as office space for the few enterprises in Marshport that needed offices. He had driven his own car. He was not in uniform. He was wearing jeans and a white shirt, with a blue blazer over his gun.
The door to Nina Pinero’s office had OUTREACH stenciled on it in black. Jesse went in. The office was a former classroom, on the second floor, in back, with a view of a playground where a couple of kids shot desultory baskets on a blacktop court at a hoop with a chain net. The playground was littered with bottles and newspapers and fast-food wrappers and scraps of indeterminate stuff.
The blackboard was still there, and the bulletin board, which was covered with memos tacked up with colored map pins. There were a couple of file cabinets against the near wall, and Nina Pinero’s desk looked like a holdover from the classroom days. There were three telephones on it.
“Nina Pinero?” Jesse said.
“I’m Nina,” she said.
There was no one else in the room.
“I’m Jesse Stone,” Jesse said. “I called earlier.”
“Mr. Stone,” Nina said. She nodded at a straight chair next to the desk. “Have
