MY CELL PHONE finally rang at a few minutes after two.
The screen read UNKNOWN CALLER.
I hoped it was Lisa, using another burner phone, calling to tell me she was safe and on her way back.
“She dead,” Tony Marcus said.
I felt as if all the air had come out of me, all at once.
“Lisa,” I said.
“Fuck yeah Lisa,” he said.
I did not tell him that she had come to my house. Or that she had told me she was going to meet him. I wasn’t sure why. But for the moment I was more interested in what he knew. The questions I wanted to ask him about what she’d told me—about him—could wait.
“Where?”
“One to the forehead,” he said.
“No,” I said. “Where did it happen?”
“Does it matter?” he said, and then gave me an address in The Fens, saying it was near Fenway Park. So she had been telling the truth about where she was going. Tony said it was one of the apartments Lisa had convinced him to rent for their high-roller customers who didn’t want to go to one of the houses, the kind Olivia Hewitt had described to me when I’d visited her house.
“She must’ve kept a key,” Tony said.
“Did you have something to do with this, Tony?” I said.
“Killing her?” he said. “I fucking loved her.”
There was no strut or swagger in his voice now, none of his street-corner brio. Nor the thug in him. The man who had run women his whole life was only talking about one now.
I was out of bed now, walking across the room to where I’d left my jeans draped over a chair.
“Who found her?” I said.
“I found her,” he said. “Who the fuck you think found her?”
“Do the police know?”
“You know,” he said. “I know.”
“Are you with the body?” I said.
“Hell no,” he said. “She called me, told me we needed to talk. Said something about wanting to settle things, whatever the fuck that meant. Told me to meet her over at The Fens, she’d be there ’round one o’clock. I get there and walk in and find her dead on the floor.”
I had my phone between my shoulder and cheek and was getting into my jeans.
“Where are you now?” I said.
“Back home,” he said.
“Who else knew you were going to see her?”
There was a pause at his end.
“Couple of my boys,” he said.
“You told no one else?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry, Tony,” I said. “I really am.”
There was another pause at Tony’s end before he said, “So am I.”
I tapped the speaker key briefly so I could pull a turtleneck over my head. Rosie stared at me from her end of the bed as if knowing this wasn’t the time of night for me to be getting dressed. I should have known Tony would leave her, that he couldn’t be anywhere near a crime scene, certainly not with a dead girlfriend the cops already knew he’d hired me to locate. Lee Farrell had already questioned him in connection with the death of Callie Harden.
“I’m going over there,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because I am,” I said, and asked if I needed a key. He said he’d left the door unlocked.
Before he ended the call he said, “Remember what I told you about clients and privileges? You remember that before you tell anybody about this call I just made to you.”
There was one last pause and then he said, “If I did it, I wouldn’t’ve fucking called you,” before he ended the call.
There had been nothing for me to say in my defense. He was right. I was having some week. I’d gone to see Callie and a few hours later somebody had shot her dead. I had finally gotten with Lisa and now somebody had shot her dead. As soon as I ended the call with Tony I should have called Olivia Hewitt and Laura and Kourtney with a K and tell them to watch their backs.
I knew I could call in Lisa’s death anonymously. Or I could call Lee Farrell and wake him up and tell him that Lisa Morneau had been murdered and where he could find her.
But then he’d want to know how I knew all that.
I wanted to go to The Fens first. I didn’t know what I could do there or what I might find, but somehow I wanted to do better for Lisa Morneau in death than I had in life. I wanted to see her. To somehow see this through. I felt I owed her that.
I wanted to be the one who found her killer, and nailed his ass.
I DROVE OVER to Peterborough and parked around the corner from the address Tony had given me. The door was unlocked, as he’d said it would be. She was in the living room, next to a coffee table, on the floor, on her back. One shot to the head, like Tony had said. A stain of blood that had spread out like a halo. Her running shoes were splayed. Her eyes were closed. I wondered if Tony had closed them. She was still wearing her vest. I stared down at her. She was another who had tried to get out of the life and now had no life at all.
I knelt down next to her now and felt the pockets of the vest. Nothing.
I had brought crime scene gloves with me that I kept around the house for special occasions. I put on the gloves and carefully reached under her and felt something in one of the back pockets of her jeans. I turned her just slightly and pulled out the small, thin ZTE phone. Maybe Tony hadn’t thought to search her. Or simply didn’t care, just wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible.
I placed the phone into the back pocket of my jeans, then reached into the side pocket of my vest and pulled out my phone and called Lee Farrell and told him where I was, and commenced lying my ass off about how I’d gotten there, and why, holding things back from him the way I just had with Tony Marcus.