“You want another one?” asked Mickey.
“Sure.”
Mickey turned to the bar. He didn’t even have to order. Hector just nodded and went for the bottle.
“So, what do you want to know about him?” said Tyrrell.
“I want to know what you know.”
And Tyrrell began to talk. He spoke first of Parker’s father, who had killed two young people in a car and then taken his own life. He could offer no insights into the killings beyond suggesting there was something wrong with the father that had passed itself on to the son: a faulty gene, perhaps; a predilection toward violence.
The hamburgers arrived, along with Tyrrell’s second drink. Tyrrell ate, but Mickey did not. He was too busy taking notes, or that would be his excuse if he were asked.
“We think the first man he killed was named Johnny Friday,” said Tyrrell. “He was a pimp, beaten to death in the washroom of a bus station. He was no loss to the world, but that’s not the point.”
“Why do you suspect Parker?”
“Because he was there. Cameras picked him up entering and leaving the station during the killing window.”
“Were there cameras on the bath J A on the broom door?”
“There were cameras everywhere, but he didn’t appear on them. We just got him entering and leaving the station.”
Mickey was puzzled. “How could that be?”
For the first time, Tyrrell looked uncertain. “I don’t know. The cameras weren’t fixed then, except for the ones on the doors. It was a cost-cutting measure. They moved from side to side. I guess he timed them, then moved in conjunction with them.”
“Difficult to do, though.”
“Difficult. Not impossible. Still, it was odd.”
“Was he interviewed?”
“We had a witness who placed him at the scene: washroom attendant. Guy was Korean. Couldn’t speak more than about three words of English, but he picked out Parker’s image from the door cameras. Well, he picked out Parker’s image as one of five possibles from a series of images. Trouble was, we all looked alike to him. Of those five people, four were as different from one another as I am from you. Anyway, Parker was hauled in, and agreed to be questioned. He didn’t even lawyer up. He admitted to being at the bus station, but nothing more than that. Said it was in connection with some runaway he’d been asked to find. It checked out. He was working a teen case at the time.”
“And that’s as far as it went?”
“There wasn’t enough to charge him on, and no appetite for it anyway. Here was an ex-cop who had lost his wife and child only months before. He may not have been loved by his fellow officers, but cops support their own in times of trouble. It would have been a more unpopular case to prosecute than charging Goldilocks with burglary. And like I said, Johnny Friday was no Eagle Scout. A lot of people out there felt that someone had done humanity a service by taking him off the team permanently.”
“Why wasn’t Parker popular?”
“Dunno. He wasn’t meant to be a cop. He never fit in. There was always something odd about him.”
“So why did he join?”
“Some misplaced loyalty to his old man’s memory, I suppose. Maybe he thought he could make up for those kids’ deaths by being a better cop than his father was. You ask me, it’s about the only admirable thing he ever did.”
Mickey let that slide. Already, he was startled by the depths of Tyrrell’s bitterness toward Parker. He couldn’t figure out what Parker might have done to deserve it, short of burning Tyrrell’s house down and then screwing his wife in the ashes.
“You said that Johnny Friday was the first killing in which Parker was suspected of involvement. There were others?”
“I’d guess so.”
“You’d guess?”
Tyrrell signaled for a third whiskey. He was slowing down some, but he was also getting tetchy.
“Look, most are a matter of record: here, in Louisiana, in Maine, in Virginia, in South Carolina. He’s like the Grim Reaper, or cancer. If those are the ones that we know about, J A know abo don’t you think there are others that we don’t know about? You think he called the cops every time he or one of his buddies punched someone’s clock?”
“His buddies? You mean the men known as Angel and Louis?”
“Shadows,” said Tyrrell softly. “Shadows with teeth.”
“What can you tell me about them?”
“Rumors, mostly. Angel, he did time for theft. From what I can tell, Parker might have used him as a source, and in return he offered him protection.”
“So it started out as a professional relationship?”
“You could say that. The other one, Louis, he’s harder to pin down. No arrests, no history: he’s a wraith. There was some stuff last year. An auto shop he was reputed to have a silent interest in got targeted. A guy, one of the shooters, ended up in the hospital, then died a week later of his injuries. After that—”
Hector appeared at his elbow and replaced an empty glass with a full one. Tyrrell paused to take a mouthful.
“Well, this is where it gets strange. One of Louis’s friends, business partners, whatever, he died too. They said that he had a heart attack, but I heard different. One of the mortuary attendants said that they had to fill in a bullet hole in his throat.”
“Who did it? Louis?”
“Nah, he doesn’t hurt those close to him. He’s not that kind of killer. The whispers were that this was a revenge raid gone wrong.”
“That’s what he was doing up in Massena,” said Mickey, more to himself than to Tyrrell, who didn’t seem to notice anyway.
“They’re like him: they’re being looked after,” said Tyrrell.
“Looked after?”
“A man doesn’t get to do what Parker has done, to kill with impunity, unless someone is watching his back.”
“The ones on record were justifiable homicides, I heard.”
“Justifiable! You don’t find it strange that none of them ever even made it to the steps of a court, that every investigation into his actions exonerated him or just petered out?”
“You’re talking about a conspiracy.”
“I’m talking about protection. I’m talking about people with a vested interest in keeping Parker on the streets.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Could be because they approve of what he’s done.”
“But he’s lost his PI’s license. He can’t own a firearm.”
“He can’t legally carry a firearm in the state of Maine. You can be damned sure he has guns squirreled away somewhere.”
“What I’m saying is, if there was a conspiracy to protect him, then something has changed.”
height="0%" width="5%"“Not enough to land him behind bars, where he belongs.” Tyrrell rapped an index finger on the table to emphasize his point.