Rough Weather: A Spenser Novel

wrote
DEATHS: Minister, Maurice Lessard, four Tashtego patrol guys, the shooter I threw off the cliff.
Others? The guy off the cliff could not be planned for. I crossed him out. The security guys almost certainly just drew the wrong duty at the wrong time. Hard to imagine that this whole elaborate charade was a cover to kill one or more of them. I knew nothing about the minister. If there were others, Healy would let me know. Healy was meticulous. He would run down everybody. And he would share it with me. We went back a long way, and while we weren’t exactly friends, we weren’t exactly notfriends. More than that, Healy was not a protocol guy. If anyone could help him, he’d take the help.
    I stood again and looked down at Berkeley Street. It was lunchtime, and lots of people, many of them well-dressed young women, were on the street, going to lunch. I examined them closely, but none looked suspicious.
    I sat down again. I poured some more coffee. I drank some and stared out the window some more. Then I picked up my pen and crossed out everybody on my yellow pad but Heidi and Adelaide, Peter Van Meer, and Maurice Lessard.
    “Solid gumshoe technique,” I said to Pearl. “Narrow the investigation.”
    Pearl didn’t even open an eye. She usually paid very little attention to discussions that did not involve food or a walk. She paid very little attention to this one.

 
    Healy came into my office without
knocking, carrying a briefcase, and sat down in one of the client chairs that I had arranged hopefully in front of my desk. He opened the briefcase, took out a blue manila folder, and tossed it onto my desk.
    “Background,” Healy said. “The results of our extensive research.”
    “Folder looks kind of thin,” I said.
    “I knew you’d be grateful,” Healy said.
    I slid the folder toward myself and left it closed on the desktop.
    “Can’t wait to read it,” I said. “Is there a ransom request yet?”
    “Not to my knowledge.”
    “You think they’d tell you?” I said.
    “I think so.”
    “Even if they were warned not to?” I said.
    “Most people are so shook by the whole thing they want to turn it over to us regardless.”
    I nodded.
    “Unless they can hire some guy like you,” Healy said.
    “There is no guy like me,” I said. “Except me.”
    “And you don’t know anything about a ransom.”
    “No,” I said.
    “And you’d tell me if you did,” Healy said.
    “Maybe,” I said.
    “Ah,” Healy said. “The spirit of cooperation.”
    “What else you got?” I said.
    “The final body count,” Healy said, “not counting the guy you say went off the cliff, we haven’t found him yet, is six.”
    I counted on my fingers.
    “The minister,” I said, “the groom, four security guys.”
    “Shot?”
    “Yep,” Healy said. “Single shot to the head, all of them.”
    “Same gun?” I said.
    “Probably,” Healy said. “We can’t find a couple of the slugs, and some of the ones we did find are so mangled from ricocheting around inside the vic that the lab can’t do anything with them. The ones we can use all came from the same nine-millimeter weapon.”
    “Rugar had a Glock,” I said.
    Healy nodded.
    “Six people,” Healy said.
    “In an afternoon,” I said.
    Healy nodded.
    “You find out where the chopper landed?” I said.
    “No.”
    “Hard to land one where nobody notices,” I said.
    “Easy if you do it where choppers come and go all day,” Healy said.
    “Good point,” I said.
    “Minister was head of some big-time Episcopal church in NYC,” Healy said. “The groom is from a very wealthy family in Philadelphia. Pharmaceuticals. Father is very active in Republican politics. He was an ambassador somewhere, and then he was secretary of something for a while.”
    “Which is his reward for being active,” I said.
    “I wonder what the punishment would be,” Healy said.
    “I know,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to do it, either. What did the kid do?”
    “Vice president of one of the companies,” Healy said.
    “How old was he?”
    “ Twenty-three,” Healy said. “Worked his way up.”
    “If you’re going to practice nepotism,” I said, “you may as well keep it in the family. Where’d he go to school?”
    “Penn,” Healy said.
    “How’d he meet Adelaide?”
    “Mutual friend,” Healy said. “It’s in the folder.”
    “How about the Tashtego patrol guys?” I said.
    “Usual. Two of them were cops in Westport, one had been in the Marines, one