Truth Be Told (Jane Ryland) (28 page)

“Thorley’s parole was like that, controversial. I knew there was something. I tried to look it up in the online newspaper archives, but they don’t go back that far. The head of the parole board was replaced after he sprung Thorley. There was a new governor, so that might have had something to do with it. But after Thorley, with the new parole board chairman, paroles pretty much stopped. You can find the details, I’m sure.”

“So you think—” Jake turned on to Huntington, could see the lofty high-rise glass of the Prudential Tower ahead, and the flashing weather lights on the stubby old Hancock building next to it.
Flashing blue, changes due.

“I don’t think anything,” Frasca said. “I just said the name Thorley rang a bell. That’s the bell.”

“Thanks, Nate.” So there was something. Or nothing. But at least an idea worth a follow-up. If Thorley’s parole was controversial, maybe someone knew something about him that was suspicious—like maybe he really was a bad guy.

Why hadn’t Richard Arsenault, Thorley’s parole officer, mentioned that?

*   *   *

“You burned it?” Peter tried to grasp the finality of it. He’d been hoping—a slim hope, but nonetheless a hope—that something about the note would exonerate Thorley. It was someone else’s handwriting, maybe, or revealed a fingerprint, or a mark, or was written on a unique kind of stationery. So many possibilities, so many opportunities for reasonable doubt. But now … none.

Peter couldn’t even prove the note even existed.

He tamped down his disappointment, tried to hide his anger. This was denial. And fear. Maybe panic. People weren’t lawyers, and didn’t always make the right decisions. Not that lawyers always did.

“I understand. You probably wanted the whole thing to go away,” Peter said.

“Well, I thought maybe—” Doreen Rinker’s fingers smoothed the plastic tabletop, as if she were trying to wipe away her mistake. “Thought maybe the note would get him
more
in trouble.”

“I see,” Peter said. The wrong decision for the right reason. So often a signpost on the road to a guilty verdict.

“Okay, then. Moving on.” No reason to make her miserable over it. More miserable than she already was. He would assume there really had been a note, since after all, that’s what started the whole thing. “Tell me again, exactly what did it say? Try to picture it, Ms. Rinker. Sometimes that helps.”

Doreen leaned against the spindly ladder back of the kitchen chair, tilted her head toward the ceiling, closed her eyes. The skin of her neck was mottled and sun-spotted: “Cape Cod skin,” they called it, unfortunate by-product of a life on the beach.

He saw her chest rise and fall as she took a breath, let it out. “White paper, like from a copier,” she said. “‘Doreen,’ it said. And then…”

Peter waited, silent.

“It said: ‘I’m sorry.’ It said: ‘I’m doing it for the family. Lilac Sunday was my fault, and I need to take responsibility.’” Doreen opened her eyes, blinked as if she’d just awakened from a nap, crossed her arms in front of her, and scratched her upper arms with those stubby fingernails. “And then it said ‘I’m sorry’ again.”

“Was it signed?”

“No.” Doreen drew out the word, remembering. He could see her picturing the note, her eyes moving up and right, retrieving the memory. “Well, no and yes. It was signed ‘G.’ But that’s what the family called him, ‘G.’” She smiled, almost. “He hated the name Gordon.”

“So it was signed, in effect. Because no one else would have known about G, correct? And it was in his handwriting? Would you recognize it?”

He was grasping at straws here, he knew. Thorley himself had accepted authorship of the note. But no harm in pursuing every angle. Even if the angle was now ashes.

“Well.” Doreen blinked, then pressed her fingertips over her eyes. “I never considered—well, I don’t know. I guess I don’t know his handwriting.”

“Did anyone else know where that key was?” More straw grasping. Thorley had admitted writing the damn note, as clear and incriminating a confession as he’d ever seen. A jury would buy into “guilty” without a second thought. But this case would never get to a jury, Peter realized. Thorley insisted he was guilty.

Peter didn’t have to prove his client innocent, of course. Likely he actually
was
the Lilac Sunday killer. But it was his job, his responsibility, his constitutional obligation, to make the Commonwealth prove his client guilty. If they couldn’t, Thorley should be set free, even if he didn’t want to be.

But seemed Doreen Rinker was a dead end.

Peter should head back to Boston, get the latest on the Moulten Road crime scene, see if the cops could produce any real evidence linking that to Thorley. And he needed to check on Sandoval. Poor guy. Now in custody, overnight at best, and maybe longer. He might call MaryLou Sandoval, just to touch base.

Doreen hadn’t answered him.

“Doreen? Did anyone else know where the key was?”

“Not that I know of.” Doreen tilted her head, the creases in her forehead deepening into furrows. “You think someone else might have—”

Peter shook his head. “Not really,” he admitted. “But I need to explore all—hang on. My phone.”

His phone buzzed in his jacket pocket, vibrating against his thigh. He took it out, looked at the caller ID. Jane.

“Go ahead and take it,” Doreen said. She gestured toward the hallway. “I’ll just run to the little girls’ room.”

“This is Peter Hardesty.” Peter watched Doreen walk away, her flip-flops flapping against the hardwood floor.

“Are you kidding me?” the voice on the other end said.

Jane. An unhappy Jane, from the sound of it. He almost smiled, listening to her indignation. He’d be angry, too, if he was—

“Jane? Jane?” He tried to interrupt, no point having her go on about it. “I’m sorry, really, I am, I called you though, and you never called me back.”

She didn’t stop.

“… and now, according to some police source who just called one of our reporters, Elliot Sandoval has been arrested! You didn’t even leave a specific message that—”

“I didn’t,” he admitted, interrupting. “It was kind of a crazy time.”

“Crazy?” Jane’s voice went up an octave. “Crazy? Critical, I’d call it. And what’s more, that was a specific event you’d promised to share with me, exclusively, if
we
promised not to run a story. Remember that? I lived up to my side of the—”

“Yeah, I know.” Peter had to interrupt again. “But what could I do? You didn’t answer the phone, and my primary concern was with my client, who at the moment was about to be arrested for murder.”

“Duh,” Jane said. “My point exactly.”

“But all is not lost.” Peter tried to advance the conversation, distract her from her sarcasm. She was so intent on this, she probably wasn’t even listening. Peter could picture her face, her frown, a pencil behind her ear, her hair coming out of that ponytail. It was—charming, how devoted she was. He was glad they were on the same side in this one. Even though she wasn’t acting like that now. “The arraignment is slated for ten
A.M.
tomorrow, so how about if we go from there?”

Silence.

“The detectives would never have let you in, anyway.” Peter kept trying. Somehow, it was important that she not be angry with him, that she trusted him. He’d made a battlefield decision, under pressure, and his client had to come first. Deal or not. And of course, Jane could renege on her end of it, too. She and that imperious editor could decide to make the Sandovals’ life miserable while they awaited the disposition of his case.

“Jane?”

Silence. He heard a toilet flushing somewhere down the hall. He didn’t have long for this conversation to stay private. “Jane? Are you still there?”

*   *   *

Jane leaned back in her office chair, phone in hand, stretching out as far as she could, balancing with practiced precariousness on the two back legs. She’d figured on writing the bank piece, then heading home for an early dinner and falling asleep in front of
Masterpiece.
But then, a colleague had e-mailed her the scoop from the cops. She’d read it fifteen or sixteen times, incredulous, before it actually sank into her brain.

Of all the ridiculous and double-dealing …
She’d sat in Marcotte’s office with Hardesty, and against her better judgment agreed to keep things under wraps in order to get the exclusive. So much for
that
brilliant idea. She was surprised Victoria Marcotte hadn’t swooped in on her broom to cackle over Jane’s defeat. Although Marcotte herself agreed to the collaboration.

Jane was just—she clunked her chair wheels back onto the floor. A peon.

“Yes, I’m still here. I’m trying to keep my language appropriate.” Jane sighed, puffing out a breath of defeat. It was one local story, not Watergate. “Can you bring me up to date, then? If you tell me what happened, who said what, all that, I suppose we can go from there.”

She jammed the phone between her shoulder and cheek, clicked open a blank Word file on her computer. The e-mail had warned the Sandoval arrest was on the down-low, cops weren’t making it public, so the paper couldn’t run it anyway. Did Jake know? Had he made the arrest? She hadn’t heard from him, either.
Jake.
What was up with him? Jane poised her fingers over her keyboard. “Peter? I can take the info right now.”

She heard sounds on Peter’s end of the call, someone talking. “Peter? Are you there?”

“Yes, sorry, Jane,” he said. “I’m at a consultation actually, and I can’t—”

Silence. Had they lost the connection? She could feel Peter thinking, though, in the empty space on the other end. And certainly there was a clattering, like dishes. A consultation? Maybe in a restaurant? Or maybe she just thought so because she was hungry. She hadn’t eaten since—she couldn’t remember.

“Peter?” she said again. It was pushing five
P.M.
, and she was on her last reserves of adrenaline. There was still the bank story to write, accompanied by Colin Ackerman’s canned video bites. He’d actually offered her another ball-point pen—“For being such a good customer,” he’d said. She declined. The paper’s rules said you could accept gifts if they weren’t valued over twenty-five dollars, but Jane went by her own rules. An honest reporter never takes anything free.

“Yeah,” Peter said. “Like I was saying, I can’t now. But how about tonight? Over dinner?”

Jane took the phone away from her ear, looked at it as if she could see him through the little holes in the receiver. She put it back to her ear, realizing she was smiling.

“Dinner?”

“Low-key,” he said. “I’m tired after last night, and I’m sure you are, too. But we’ve got to eat. We’ll go early, Legal’s or someplace, and I’ll give you the whole story.”

Jane took a long shot. “You didn’t happen to take photos of the arrest, did you?”

She heard his quiet laugh. “No photos, Jane. Do you ever stop? But I do have some interesting info about the case. I’m out on the Cape, though, so how about seven thirty? Grilled shrimp, white wine, and the scoop.”

Jane assessed her jeans, she was wearing good ones at least, her black T-shirt, and linen jacket, acceptably wrinkled. Black flats. She could go into the ladies’, fluff her hair, wash her face, be presentable. Not that it mattered, she reminded herself. It was a work dinner, not a date. Better to be on good terms with this guy than be angry. Nothing was ever gained from holding a grudge.

“We’ll split the bill,” she said. “You’re very persuasive.”

“Just ask my juries,” Peter said.

42

“Richard Arsenault, with A-U-L-T,” Jake said into the phone. Slowing down, he scanned Marlborough Street for an available parking place near 243, as if such a thing would be possible at six in the evening in the heart of Back Bay. If Mother was out at some event, he could use her deeded parking place in the narrow alley behind the building. Otherwise, he’d be tempted to use his police department leverage to park in the no-standing zone. It was official business, after all.

“Arsenault’s who I talked to, Nate,” he continued. “He never said a word about a controversial parole. Do you know him?”

Jake spotted a space—
miracle
—near enough to the front of 243, and edged in between a high-end Bimmer and a Volvo convertible. Ignored the resident-parking-only sign. He was a resident, technically. Just not right now.

“Arsenault?” Frasca paused, his staticky silence continuing as Jake shifted into park. “Ah, no. That name is not familiar. Thorley’s parole officer was—wait. Hang on.”

Jake checked his face in the rearview. He needed a shave, his jacket had seen better days, and he hadn’t been home since yesterday. Mother would make some sort of comment, he was sure. He’d finally decided her attitude came from affection, not criticism. He was still her little boy, weapon-toting badge-carrying police detective or not.

“Smith,” Frasca said. “Gary Lee Smith. That’s the name on these records I have. That’s who he was assigned to, back four, five years ago. When he was first paroled.”

“But now he has Arsenault? What happened to Gary Lee Smith? And why?”

“Why? You’re asking me
, Detective
?” Frasca’s laugh came through the speaker, accompanied by the rush of a motorcycle outside Jake’s window and some rat-sized dogs, tangled in their leashes, yapping around the frazzled-looking teenager walking them.

“Good point,” Jake said. The machinations of the parole department were legendary. Jake would have to investigate whether the PO reassignment was anything but by-the-book. Those guys were legal system nomads, like correction guards and court officers, always shopping for a better gig or cush assignment. At a certain age, though, they were all about the pension. Unless they got caught in some scam or scheme or misguided palace intrigue, in which case they were out on their ass. “Thanks, Nate. Keep me posted.”

“I already have,” Frasca said. “Now it’s your turn.
Adiós.
”

My turn to what?
Jake thought, as he stashed the phone, clicked the remote lock on his cruiser, avoided dog shit on the sidewalk, and headed for 243.