Dan Maguire was feeling pissed off. He always got like that when he dealt with Parker. She had this way of getting under his skin like a damn deer tick. But before long, he would be uprooting that tick once and for all. He would perform a Parker-ectomy.
“Parker-ectomy,” he muttered, pleased with his own wit.
“What’s that, Chief?”
That was Bradley Walsh, riding shotgun. Maguire had almost forgotten the kid was there.
“Nothing.”
Maguire steered the cruiser onto Main Street, heading for Jay’s Deli, where an alarm was ringing on backup power. Rain tap-danced on the windshield. The wipers beat in long, steady strokes.
He threw Walsh a glance. “What were you saying to Parker back there?”
“I just asked if she was being more careful. She rolled through a stop sign yesterday. I gave her a warning.”
“You didn’t ticket her? God damn it, I told you to put heat on that bitch.”
“Sorry, Chief. I figured with the storm and all, we had bigger fish to fry.”
Maguire shook his head. It had been a mistake to hire Walsh. The kid didn’t understand how things worked in this town. He wasn’t local; he’d grown up in New Hampshire, for Christ’s sake.
It was different for Maguire. He’d been raised around here and had served under Brighton Cove’s previous chief, a good man but too easygoing. Maguire’s dad, now deceased, had been a cop in Algonquin. Dan Maguire had risen higher in the ranks than his old man, but he still felt he had something to prove. And Parker was his ticket to proving it.
Bigger fish, hell. For him, there were no bigger fish. He hadn’t been kidding when he compared himself to Captain Ahab. And Bonnie Parker was his white whale.
And yeah, maybe he was a little obsessed. He could admit it. He’d had a bug up his butt about Parker for years, and even more so since August. He knew Parker was involved in that mess—the shooting at the pavilion, the craziness in the Coach House, and whatever had gone down at the airport. But there was no proof. The damn girl had covered her tracks too well.
But not about everything.
Through relentless digging into the PI’s past, Maguire had tentatively identified her parents as Tom and Rebecca Parker, both murdered in a motel room in central Pennsylvania in 1998. The motel clerk had reported that they’d had a girl with them, a girl of about fifteen or sixteen, the right age for Bonnie. A girl who’d never been found.
The Pennsylvania state police had worked the case. Evidence at the scene had identified the killer, a certain Lucas Hatch, though indications were that more than one perpetrator had been involved. Hatch couldn’t be found, and probably the authorities hadn’t looked too hard. The two victims had been drifters, the wife a high school dropout who’d gotten pregnant at sixteen, the husband a small-time crook with a lifelong history of making trouble. No great loss. And the girl? Well, nobody could say what had become of her.
Six months later, Lucas Hatch turned up dead in Buckington, Ohio, along with two other losers who might have been the guys from the motel. The Ohio authorities got nowhere. But something caught Maguire’s eye when he went through the old police reports. Two days before the killings, Hector Samuelson, owner of a Buckington gun shop, spotted a teenage girl shoplifting a box of ammunition. He chased her down in the parking lot outside, at which point the girl turned, calmly finished loading an antique .38, and aimed it at his face. Prudently, Samuelson backed off. In his statement to police he described the girl as approximately sixteen, blond, blue-eyed, and “fierce.”
Maguire obtained a copy of Bonnie’s PI photo, on file with the state, and had a computer guy age-regress her to sixteen. He put it in a six-pack with five mugshots of teenage female offenders, all blond and blue-eyed. He flew to Ohio and showed Samuelson the photo array. It was a long shot—the encounter had taken place twelve years earlier, and the witness was in his sixties now. But it paid off. Samuelson unhesitatingly selected the photo of Parker. No doubt, he said, none at all.
The best part was that one of Hatch’s pals had been shot with a .38. The other two had been shot with 9mm rounds, but that could be explained easily enough. Little Bonnie had killed the first guy with her antique gun and then lifted the victim’s own piece before going after the remaining pair. The police hadn’t connected the shoplifting with the murders, because who would suspect a teenage girl of being the triggerman in a bloodbath?
Maguire would. He knew Parker. She was a bad seed. Hatch and his gang had made a mistake not finishing her off in the motel. Somehow she’d tracked them down and taken them out.
He was certain of it. Dead certain. But Samuelson’s word on the basis of a computer-altered photo and a twelve-year-old memory wasn’t enough.
Maguire’s next move would be to persuade Ohio law enforcement to depose Samuelson. Armed with an affidavit, he hoped to get a court order to exhume one of Parker’s parents. He would do a DNA test on the remains, and another one on Parker herself. If she could be confirmed as Tom and Rebecca’s daughter, and as the armed shoplifter who stole ammo in Buckington just two days before the killings, then he could put some serious pressure on her.
All he needed was an opening, and he could make her crack.
He slant-parked at the curb outside the deli, beaming his headlights at the shop, where the alarm was still clanging frantically. Right away he could see there was no break-in. One of the plywood panels nailed up over the storefront windows had blown free, and a loose awning had punched through the glass. Even so, he’d better check it out.
He left the car and tramped through puddles, the rookie at his side. While the alarm screamed in monotone, Maguire angled his big steel flashlight through the opening in the window and let the beam explore the interior of the deli. The cash register appeared untouched, and there was no sign of intrusion.
“Call Jay,” he told Walsh, yelling to be heard over the alarm. “Tell him to get down here and board it up again before something worse happens.”
“Right, Chief.”
They were back in the squad car, returning to the checkpoint via a roundabout route, when Walsh spoke up. “So Parker and Desmond Harris—they’re an item?”
The question came out of nowhere, asked with phony casualness. For the first time it occurred to Maguire that Walsh might have the hots for the PI. The idea wasn’t so far-fetched. Parker was comely enough in a chain-smoking tough-gal kind of way. To a rookie like Walsh, barely old enough to shave the peach fuzz off his cheeks, she might exude an aura of glamorous mystery.
“That’s how I figure it,” Maguire said, watching the kid’s reaction. “Weird, huh? She’s got a thing for a fucking paraplegic. Maybe they do it in his wheelchair.”
Walsh nodded in a distracted way.
Maguire stared straight ahead. “Look, kid. I don’t want you getting close to that girl. She’s bad news.”
“I know that, sir.” The words came out a little too fast.
“I’m not shitting you. The stuff I found out about her—it’s serious. She’s a bona fide sociopath. Violent and crazy, deeply messed up. And she will be going away for a long, long time.”
“Okay.”
“Keep your distance, is what I’m saying. For your own good.”
“Yes, sir, Chief. I understand.”
Maguire grunted, unconvinced.
The kid would bear watching. Everyone had to be part of the team.