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“We’ll know more after the fire investigator’s report.”
“Has to be arson, doesn’t it?”
“Why do you say that?”
Mitch gazed at him guilelessly. “Well, things like that don’t just happen. The restaurant just goes up. How? A gas leak? Or a burner on the stove left on near something flammable? Grease fire? Doesn’t sound like it from what I’ve heard.”
“What have you heard? Who called you?”
“Scott. He was freaking, man. Glenn and I were friends, but Scott was his best friend. They were kind of mad at each other, but it was like they were brothers.”
“Scott thinks it’s arson?”
“I don’t know for sure. He just said Glenn was inside and it shouldn’t have happened. He said she cursed us.”
“Jessie?”
“Yeah, Jessie.” His face flushed as if he heard the idiocy of his statement. “Who else?”
“What happened all those years ago, Mitch?” Mac asked quietly. He felt his pulse rush a bit, wondering if this was the moment someone finally opened up to him.
Mitch’s eyes watered as the tears he’d been fighting got the better of him and spilled down his cheeks. “Not a damn thing,” he said wearily. “That’s the problem, man. Nothing happened to her. She just left, but now she’s back even more than she was in high school. Sending notes. Burning down the restaurant. Killing Glenn. If she isn’t alive, then she’s making it happen from the grave. I don’t know how, but she’s behind all of this. She is. Back then some people thought she was weird, y’know. Like she had ESP or somethin’. I thought it was all just crap, but now…who the hell knows?” He reached a hand toward an upper, nonexistent shirt pocket, then dropped it. “I need a smoke,” he said and headed toward the office where he grabbed a pack of cigarettes from a jacket hung on a peg. He shook one out, then pushed through a back door to the rear of the building. Mac followed. The greyhound, long snout grizzled with age, didn’t move.
“What notes?” Mac asked quietly as Mitch cupped his hand over the lighted end of the cigarette and sucked hard on the other. Both of his hands were shaking, and as if noticing Mac’s stare, he clenched one and pulled out the cigarette from his mouth with the other, moving it to hide his tremor.
“‘What are little boys made of? Frogs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails.’” He puffed harder on the cigarette, as if the carcinogenic smoke were giving life, not taking it. Mitch made a half-choked sound. “She used to say it, now she’s writing it down.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s the same damned nursery rhyme she used to taunt us with. She’d say it and she had a way of making it sound dirty. Sexy. And now she’s goddamned sending them to us!”
“You got a nursery rhyme note?” Mac asked carefully.
“That fuckin’ nursery rhyme. The one she used to sing. Yes. I got it. From her.” He was nodding rapidly and took another drag.
“From Jessie.”
“That’s what I said, man.” He was coming visibly undone.
“It came in the mail? Had a return address?”
“Fuck, yeah…I mean, it came in the mail. No return address.” Abruptly he went back inside and yanked a card from another pocket of the same jacket that had held his cigarettes. He handed it to Mac and took a step back, staring at it as if it were poisonous. “You take it. Maybe it’ll help you find her, but when you do, make sure she stays the hell away from me!”
Chapter Sixteen
The offices of Salchow, Wendt, and Delacroix were in Portland’s Pearl District in the Grassle Building, a gray granite and glass monolith that knifed upward thirty stories. Today, a black and gray sky hovered outside and Christopher Delacroix III gazed at it with a grim expression as he dropped the receiver to his office phone into its cradle.
Detective Samuel “Mac” McNally had called. He’d wanted to know if The Third had received a nursery rhyme note in the mail.
Now The Third opened a desk drawer and pulled out the blue envelope. Initially, he’d been more perplexed than alarmed. It was childish. The work of some amateur who was trying to goad them. He’d talked to Jarrett and learned he’d received one, too, so he’d assumed the rest of the guys had gotten one.
But he’d kind of hoped the notes would escape McNally’s notice. They would just add fuel to the Jessie fire, and he was getting really sick and tired of even thinking about her. She’d been a high school tease, for crying out loud. None of them had gotten lucky with her. Jarrett sure as hell hadn’t and neither of those losers, Mitch and Glenn, ever got close.
He closed his eyes, feeling a jolt of regret. The fire and discovery of a body at Blue Note was all over the news. It was clear that the body was Glenn’s, though that piece of information hadn’t been officially released as yet. Glenn. Dull, unhappy Glenn. He and Jarrett had used both Glenn and Mitch as their personal whipping boys over the years. He knew it. Usually didn’t care all that much. But today…
“Damn you, Jezebel,” The Third said quietly to the boiling dark gray clouds beyond his windows.
His intercom beeped gently, a soft tone that befitted the moneyed appearance of his office. “Yes,” he said, depressing the switch.
