Night Passage (A Jesse Stone Novel)

off the barstool.
    “Sure,” she said.
    There were two big speakers at opposite corners of the small dance floor and when they got onto the floor they could hear the music. It was slow. Pressed against him, she felt the tension building in her. She could feel the thick slabs of his muscles. Muscles where she didn’t know people had muscles. They danced two numbers, his huge hand low on her back, pressing her steadily in against him.
    “You’re free until tomorrow afternoon,” he said as the second record stopped playing, and the DJ began his chatter while he cued a new record.
    “As a bird,” she said.
    “You wanna go someplace?” he said.
    “And do what?” she said, looking upward at him as seductively as she knew how. She had practiced that in the mirror at home.
    “We could get naked,” he said.
    She giggled and thought about seeing that body without clothes on. It was a little frightening and a little enticing and she was interested in a way she didn’t understand but which was not merely sexual. She giggled again.
    “Yes,” she said. “Let’s go someplace and get naked.”

42
     
    Anthony DeAngelo had never seen a murdered person before. He’d seen a couple of people killed in car accidents, and he’d even done mouth-to-mouth on a guy who was having a heart attack and died while DeAngelo was working on him. But the naked woman in the junior high school parking lot was his first murder victim. There were bruises on her face, and her head was turned at an awkward angle. Someone had written slut in what looked like lipstick across her stomach. DeAngelo tried to look at her calmly as he called in on his radio. He didn’t want the kids being herded past the scene by teachers to think he was frightened by it. But he was. This wasn’t accidental death. This stiffening corpse lying naked in the dull mist, on the damp asphalt in the early morning, had died violently during the night at the hands of a terrible person. He didn’t know exactly what he should do, standing there talking into his radio. He wanted to cover the poor woman but he didn’t think he ought to disturb the crime scene. Rain wasn’t heavy. Probably didn’t bother her anyway. He wished Jesse would hurry up and get there. In the school the kids were crowded at the windows despite the best efforts of the teachers. The school bus driver who had spotted the body first was standing beside DeAngelo’s cruiser. She looked for people to talk to, to tell about what she had seen and how she was the first to see it, and oh God, the poor woman! But DeAngelo was still on the radio and the junior high school staff was fruitlessly busy trying to protect the kids from seeing the corpse. He felt better when Jesse pulled up in the unmarked black Ford with the buggy whip antenna on the back bumper swaying in decreasing arcs as the car stopped and Jesse got out.
    “Anthony,” Jesse said.
    He walked over and looked down at the body.
    “ ‘Slut,’ ” he said.
    “Yeah. Like the car. Like the cat,” DeAngelo said.
    Jesse nodded, still looking at her.
    “Clothes?” he said.
    DeAngelo shook his head. “I haven’t seen any.”
    The town ambulance pulled into the parking lot and behind it Peter Perkins in his own car, a Mazda pickup. Two young Paradise firemen who doubled as EMTs got out and walked almost gingerly toward the crime scene. Peter Perkins got out of his truck. He was in jeans and a tee shirt with his gun strapped on and his badge on his belt. A thirty-five-millimeter camera hung around his neck. He went to the bed of his pickup and got his evidence kit. One of the EMTs knelt beside the body and felt for a pulse.
    After a moment he said, “She’s dead, Jesse.”
    “Un huh.”
    “What do you want us to do, Jesse?”
    The EMT was not quite twenty-five. His name was Duke Vincent. Jesse played softball with him in the Paradise town league. Like DeAngelo, Vincent had seen death. But never murder. Vincent’s voice was calm but soft, and Jesse knew he was feeling shaky. Jesse remembered the first time he’d seen it. It was a lot worse than this, a shotgun, close up, he remembered.
    “You think her neck’s broken, Dukie?” Jesse said.
    Vincent looked at the corpse again. Jesse knew he didn’t like it.
    “I guess so,” Vincent said.
    “Yeah, me too,” Jesse said. “Probably what killed her. You and Steve stand by with the ambulance for a while. We’ll have the county M.E. look at her, and there’ll be some state