Night Passage (A Jesse Stone Novel)

that you allowed us to be cheated out of,” Hasty said.
    At Berkeley Street he turned the car onto Storrow Drive and they headed back to Paradise in utter silence.

69
     
    Jesse stood alone in Lou Burke’s small garden apartment. What struck him most was the anonymity of it. No pictures of family. No books. No old baseball gloves with the infield dust ground into the seams. Jesse walked slowly through the three small rooms. No newspapers stacked up. No magazines. A television set with a twenty-six-inch screen glowered at the living/dining area off the kitchenette. A small desk near the entry. Some bills due the end of the month. Two canisters of coffee on the kitchen counter, a Mr. Coffee machine. Some milk and some orange juice in the refrigerator. A couple of pairs of slacks in the closet, a blue suit, a starched fatigue outfit with Freedom’s Horsemen markings. Clean police uniform shirts in the bureau drawer. An alarm clock on the bedside table. No fishing equipment. No hunting gear. No cameras. No binoculars. No rugs on the floor. No curtains on the windows. The shades were all drawn to precisely the middle of the lower window. The bed was tightly made. There was no dust. No plants. No bowling trophies. The floors were polished. In the front hall closet was an upright vacuum cleaner.
    Not much of a life, Lou.
    Jesse stood in the middle of the living room and listened to the silence. He turned slowly. There was nothing he was forgetting. Nothing he’d overlooked. He wondered if his apartment would look like this to a stranger, empty and lifeless and temporary. He was glad Jenn’s picture was on his bureau. He looked once more around the small empty space. There was nothing more to see. So Jesse went out the front door and locked it behind him.
    Back at the station Jesse stopped to talk with Molly.
    “We got a typewriter around here anywhere?” Jesse said.
    “Nope. Got rid of them five years ago when we got the computers.”
    “Don’t have one left over in the cellar or the storage closet in the squad room, or anyplace?”
    “No. Tom made a deal with a used-typewriter guy, from Lynn. When we went computer the typewriter guy came in, took all three typewriters. You want me to see if I can get you one?”
    Jesse shook his head.
    “No, just curious. Lou Burke have any family?”
    “None that I know, Jesse. Parents died a while back. Far as I know he never married.”
    “Brothers? Sisters?”
    “Not that he ever talked about. Pretty much the department and the town was what he had.”
    Jesse didn’t miss the cutting edge in the remark. The department was Lou Burke’s life, and Jesse had taken it from him.
    “There was no typewriter in his apartment,” Jesse said.
    “I’m sure there wasn’t,” Molly said. “Lou was a wonderful cop but he hated to write anything. I used to do half his reports for him.”
    “So where did he type out his suicide note?” Jesse said.
    Molly looked up at Jesse and started to speak and stopped and frowned.
    “There’s no typewriter at his house,” she said.
    “That’s correct,” Jesse said.
    “The note wasn’t printed out of a computer.”
    “No,” Jesse said.
    “Maybe he went to somebody’s house that had a typewriter,” Molly said.
    Jesse picked up a pad of blue-lined yellow paper from Molly’s desk. There were fifty pads just like it in the office supply cabinet in the squad room.
    “Wouldn’t it have been easier to have handwritten the note?” Jesse said.
    “That is odd,” Molly said. “Though suicidal people are, you know”—Molly tossed her hands—“crazy.”
    Jesse put the notepad back down on Molly’s desk. He didn’t say anything.
    “Unless he didn’t write the note,” Molly said. “And whoever did it just assumed that there’d be typewriters in the station. But even if there were, we’d find out pretty quick that they weren’t used for the note.”
    “Which means whoever wrote it was stupid,” Jesse said.
    “That’s not all it means,” Molly said.
    “No,” Jesse said, “it’s not.”
    He walked back toward his office. Molly watched him as he went.
    “Jesus,” she said softly.

70
     
    Jesse parked his car in the curving cobblestone driveway of the Episcopal church rectory. It was a big brick building with a green center entrance door and green shutters. It was a bright morning, and the grass of the rectory lawn was wet with the early morning frost that had melted in the sun. A woman wearing an apron over a