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  Death In Paradise

  ( Jesse Stone - 3 )

  Robert B Parker

  Death in Paradise

  By

  Robert B. Parker

  “[PARKER] HAS ANOTHER WINNER IN JESSE STONE.”

  —USA Today

  Praise for Death in Paradise

  “Stone is a deceptively complex character, one whose problems are both interesting and completely believable… another strong effort in what is already an impressive series.”

  —Library Journal

  “Beautifully wrought… [an] immensely satisfying tale. Rarely if ever has Parker’s fiction conveyed with solemn intensity the challenge of living a good life in a world of sin. The book’s ultimate pleasure lies in the words, suffused with a tough compassion won only through years of living, presented in prose whose impeccability speaks of decades of careful writing.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred)

  “What’s so cool about Death in Paradise is watching Jesse Stone’s relentless pursuit of the bad guy.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “Hard-hitting… and brutally frank… Parker reinvents, revises, and reincarnates the hardball, tough-guy, deadpan mysteries of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Death in Paradise is a tough, clear-eyed, sardonic look at life and the raw deals it can dish out.”

  —The Providence Sunday Journal

  “If you love Parker, you’ll love this book. Jesse Stone is clearly in the Parker style.”

  —Calgary Herald

  “James Ellroy-style dialogue… Like Jesse Stone’s beer, Parker’s novels can be quaffed with relish.”

  —Ottawa Citizen

  “[Parker’s] gift for creating engaging characters and involving the reader in their fate makes this… well worth your attention.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  Trouble in Paradise

  “This book is so good, there’re not enough R’s in terrific.”

  —The Kansas City Star

  “Tough and tight… [Robert Parker] once again shows how to do it well, and with style.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Tough-guy dialogue… sharp social commentary… psychological penetration. Fresh… Interesting… Robert B. Parker is loaded for bear this time.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Parker has injected Trouble in Paradise with yet another blast of the page-turning energy he’s famous for.”

  —The New York Post

  “You’ve got to like Stone… Harks back to Spenser and, before him, Sam Spade.”

  —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Parker’s plot is built like a smooth-running Ducati engine. It is paced beautifully… Tight storytelling.”

  —The Newark Star-Ledger

  “Parker’s new series continues explosively… Parker does an excellent job of building tension and weaving several subplots into an explosive finale.”

  —The Cleveland Plain Dealer

  Night Passage

  “Jesse Stone is a complex and consistently interesting new protagonist.”

  —Newsday

  “Not for nothing is Parker regarded as the reigning champion of the American tough-guy detective novel, heavyweight division. Over a twenty-five-year career, the man has rarely composed a bad sentence or an inert paragraph. His thirtieth novel, which features brand-new protagonist Jesse Stone… proves no exception.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Stunning.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “Vintage Parker.”

  —The Denver Post

  “A winner.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “A genuine page-turner.”

  —Hartford Courant

  “A fast-paced, character-driven tale that practically reads itself.”

  —The Raleigh News & Observer

  “[Parker’s] writing—tough, witty, lean, with a touch of the poet—has never been better.”

  —Lexington Herald-Leader

  THE SPENSER NOVELS

  Potshot

  Hugger Mugger

  Hush Money

  Sudden Mischief

  Small Vices

  Chance

  Thin Air

  Walking Shadow

  Paper Doll

  Double Deuce

  Pastime

  Stardust

  Playmates

  Crimson Joy

  Pale Kings and Princes

  Taming a Sea-Horse

  A Catskill Eagle

  Valediction

  The Widening Gyre

  Ceremony

  A Savage Place

  Early Autumn

  Looking for Rachel Wallace

  The Judas Goat

  Promised Land

  Mortal Stakes

  God Save the Child

  The Godwulf Manuscript

  THE JESSE STONE NOVELS

  Death in Paradise

  Trouble in Paradise

  Night Passage

  THE SUNNY RANDALL NOVELS

  Perish Twice

  Family Honor

  ALSO BY ROBERT B. PARKER

  Gunman’s Rhapsody

  All Our Yesterdays

  Perchance to Dream

  Poodle Springs (with Raymond Chandler)

  Love and Glory

  Wilderness

  Three Weeks in the Spring (with Joan Parker)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  DEATH IN PARADISE

  A Berkley Book published by arrangement with the authorp>

  PRINTING HISTORY

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons hardcover edition October 2001p>

  Berkley mass-market edition November 2002p>

  Copyright (c) 2001 by Robert B. Parker.

  Cover art by Jacob Ristan/RBMM.

  Cover design by Judy Murello.

  All rights reserved.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  Visit our website at www.penguinputnam.com

  ISBN: 0-425-18706-3

  BERKLEY(r)

  Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY and the “B” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  10 987654321

  FOR DAVE AND DAN

  who kept their mother going

  and brought their father home.

  DEATH IN

  PARADISE

  Chapter One

  One out. A left-handed hitter with an inside-out swing. The ball would slice away from him toward third. Jesse took a step to his right. The next pitch was inside and chest high and the batter yanked it down the first baseline, over the bag and into the right-field corner, had there been a corner, and lumbered into second base without a throw.

  “I saw you move into the hole,” the batter said to Jesse.

  “Foiled again, Paulie.”

  They played three nights a week under the lights on the west side of town beside a lake, wearing team tee shirts and hats. One umpire. No stealing. No spikes allowed. Officially it was the Paradise Men’s Softball League, but Jesse often thought of it as the Boys of Evening. The next batter was right-handed and Jesse knew he pulled ever
ything. He stayed in the hole. On a two-one count the right-handed hitter rammed the ball a step to Jesse’s left. One step. Left foot first, right foot turned, glove on the ground. Soft hands. Don’t grab at it. Let it come to you. It was all muscle memory. Exact movements, rehearsed since childhood, and deeply visceral, somatically choreographed by the movement of the ball. With the ball hit in front of him, Paulie tried to go to third. In a continuous sequence of motion, Jesse swiped him with his glove as he went by, then threw the runner out at first.

  “Never try to advance on a ball hit in front of you,” Paulie said as they walked off the field.

  “I’ve heard that,” Jesse said.

  His shoulder hurt, as it always did when he threw. And he knew, as he always knew, that the throw was not a big-league throw. Before he got hurt, the ball used to hum when he threw it, used to make a little snarly hiss as it went across the infield.

  After the game they drank beer in the parking lot. Jesse was careful with the beer. Hanging around in the late twilight after a ball game drinking club soda just didn’t work. But booze was too easy for Jesse. It went down too gently, made him feel too integrated. Jesse felt that it wasn’t seemly for the police chief to get publicly hammered. So he had learned in the last few years to approach it very carefully.

  The talk was of double plays, and games played long ago, and plays at the plate, and sex. Talk of sex and baseball was the best of all possible talk. Jesse sipped a little of the beer. Beer from an ice-filled cooler was the best way for beer to be. From the edge of the lake a voice said, “Jesse, get over here.”

  The voice was scared. Carrying a can of Lite beer, Jesse walked to the lakeside. Two men were squatting on their heels at the edge of the water. In front of them, floating facedown, was something that used to be a girl.

  Chapter Two

  The rest of the Paradise cops didn’t like looking at the body. Jesse had pulled it out, and it lay now on the ground illuminated by the headlights of the Paradise Police cruisers.

  “She been in the water a long time?” Suitcase Simpson asked Jesse.

  “Yeah,” Jesse said. “She’s only wearing one shoe.”

  Simpson didn’t look. He didn’t care about how many shoes she had.

  “You seen a lot of floaters?”

  “When I worked in L.A., there was a lot of ocean-front,” Jesse said. He was squatting on his heels beside the corpse, studying it. He reached over and turned the head a little and studied it some more.

  Simpson was trying to look at the body obliquely, so it would only be an impression. He was a big kid, with red cheeks and some baby fat still left. But he wanted to be a cop. He wanted to be like Jesse. And he was trying to force himself to look, the way Jesse did, at the water-ridden thing on the ground.

  Behind them, Peter Perkins had strung crime-scene tape, and behind it the Boys of Evening stood silently, looking at the scene, but not the body. There was no talk. As they stood, the town ambulance pulled into the parking lot with its lights flashing, but no siren.

  Through his open window the driver shouted to Jesse.

  “Whaddya need?”

  “Body bag.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  The two EMTs got out of the ambulance without shutting off the flashing lights. They got the litter from the back and lay a body bag on it and wheeled it over. Neither of them liked looking at the corpse.

  “Drowned?”

  “I don’t think so,” Jesse said.

  He moved her sodden hair and pointed with a pencil. “Bullet went in here, I think,” Jesse said.

  “A bullet?”

  “Yep, went out the other side. No need to look. Let’s roll her in the bag.”

  Still trying to look without seeing, Simpson said, “You thinking she was murdered, Jesse?”

  “I’m thinking she was shot in the head behind her right ear and the bullet exited high on the left side of her head and blew a pretty sizable piece of her skull off when it did.”

  “Maybe she shot herself,” Simpson said.

  “And jumped into the lake after,” Jesse said.

  “So you’re saying she was murdered and her body dumped?”

  “It’s a working theory,” Jesse said.

  Chapter Three

  Jesse sat in his office with his feet on the desk and talked with the State Police Homicide boss, a captain named Healy.

  “The homicide commander personally?” Jesse said.

  Healy smiled.

  “I told you,” he said, “I live in the neighborhood.”

  “You got the pathology report?”

  Healy tossed a big manila envelope on Jesse’s desk.

  “One shot, behind the right ear, close range. Entrance wound suggests a .38. Slug exited high on the other side, tore out some of her skull. They think they got powder traces. They can’t find any on her hands. But the body’s deteriorated to the point where they aren’t certain. The millimeters and tissue analysis and all, it’s in there.”

  “Water in her lungs?”

  “No,” Healy said. “She was dead when she went in the water.”

  “Could she have shot herself?” Jesse said. “I mean, was it physically possible given the path of the slug?”

  “Yeah, she could have. And the amount of time she was in there could have destroyed the traces on her hands.”

  “Drag marks on her?”

  Healy shook his head.

  “Body’s too far gone.”

  “So she could have waded out into the lake someplace and shot herself and floated around until we found her. It’s a big lake.”

  “Gun?” Healy said.

  “We got a couple guys from the fire department down there in wet suits,” Jesse said. “Water’s dirty. Hard to see.”

  “Even if you find the gun in there,” Healy said, “why did she want to do it that way?”

  “Didn’t want anyone to know?”

  “Suicides always want people to know,” Healy said. “That’s part of what it’s about.”

  “True.”

  “You find the gun it’ll be because the perp threw it in there after her. You know who she is?”

  “No. Could they get any prints?”

  Healy shook his head.

  “Dental?”

  “ME charted her teeth,” Healy said.

  “So all we have to do is locate a dental chart that matches.”

  “In which case you’ll know who she is anyway.”

  “Missing persons?”

  “You know how many kids run away every week?” Healy said.

  “Any from Paradise?”

  “None reported,” Healy said.

  “She could have run away from anywhere and ended up here,” Jesse said.

  “She could.”

  “You matching the dental charts against the runaways?”

  “Sure,” Healy said. “I got a guy on it.”

  “One?”

  “You know how things work,” Healy said.

  “Slowly,” Jesse said.

  “See,” Healy said. “I knew you’d know.”

  “How old was she?”

  “Maybe fourteen.”

  They were both quiet. The victim’s age hung in the room like smoke.

  “We’ll get on it,” Healy said after a while. “You come up with anything, let us know.”

  “Or vice versa,” Jesse said.

  Chapter Four

  Anthony DeAngelo came into Jesse’s office leading a male Dalmatian on an improvised leash. The dog was panting, and restless on the leash.

  “Got a date?” Jesse said.

  “It’s a him,” DeAngelo said.

  “So?”

  “I found him up on the pike running around, you know, like they do when they’re lost?”

  “Near the donut shop?”

  DeAngelo grinned. “Yeah, how’d you know?”

  “I’m an experienced law officer,” Jesse said. “Molly got any lost dogs?”

&n
bsp; “I checked when I came in the station. She says she got two. One’s a poodle. One’s a Lab.”

  Jesse nodded.

  “No tags?”

  “No collar,” DeAngelo said.

  “How’d you get him in the car?” Jesse said.

  “Donut.”

  “Of course,” Jesse said. “Where’d you get the nice leash?”

  “Lady at the donut shop gave me some twine.”

  “You call the dog officer?” Jesse said.

  “Valenti? He’s working. Don’t usually get home till six.”

  “Part-time help,” Jesse said. “Inexpensive and worth it.”

  He looked at the dog. Still panting, the dog looked disoriented. He was wagging his tail aimlessly. His ears were flat and his body was a little hunched.

  “Okay,” Jesse said, “put him in one of the cells.”

  “Ain’t it illegal in this town to domicile dogs and humans in the same space?” DeAngelo said.

  “Of course it is,” Jesse said. He looked at DeAngelo without speaking.

  “Okay,” DeAngelo said. “You care which cell?”

  “Your choice,” Jesse said. “And give him some water.”

  DeAngelo nodded and led the dog away. Jesse went to the office door and stuck his head out and yelled for Molly Crane.

  “Call around to some vets,” he said. “Describe the dog, see if they know anything about this one.”

  “What kind of dog is it?” Molly said.

  “Dalmatian. They’re not all that common.”

  “Male or female?”

  “Male,” Jesse said. “For crissake, you’re a cop. You’re supposed to be observant.”

  “I’m an Irish Catholic girl,” Molly said. “I don’t look at penises.”

  “Not even human?”

  From the cell block in the back, they could hear the dog begin to howl.

  “Especially not human.”

  “Always in the dark,” Jesse said.

  Molly grinned at him. “Always. With my eyes tight shut, thinking of Saint Patrick.”

  “It’s good to be aware of your heritage,” Jesse said. “Tell Suit I want to talk to him.”

  The dog’s howling was now steady.

  Molly smiled at him. “Dog’s lonely,” she said.

  “Ain’t we all,” Jesse said.

  “Not the way I hear it,” Molly said and went out.

  Jesse watched her as she went. She was small and in shape. The blue uniform fit her well. The service pistol looked too large. He knew she was sensual: the way her eyes were. The way she stood. The way she walked. He knew. And she knew he knew.