Prayers for Rain (29 page)

I spent the week sitting on Scott Pearse—following him to work every morning, following him home every night. Angie covered his days while I slept, so I’d leave him when he picked up his truck at a garage on A Street, be watching again when he left the General Mail Facility along the Fort Point Channel after his final mail collection of the day. His routine, that week anyway, was maddeningly innocuous.

In the morning, he’d leave A Street, his truck fully loaded with large parcels. These he’d deliver to the green boxes throughout Back Bay, where they’d be picked up by the mail carriers on foot and brought to people’s doorsteps. After a midafternoon lunch, according to Angie, he’d head out again, this time with an empty truck, that he’d gradually fill with the contents of the blue mailboxes. Once that was done, he’d drop the mail at the sorting facility and clock out.

He’d have a single-malt scotch every night with his fellow postmen at the Celtic Arms on Otis Street. He always left after one drink, no matter how many men tried to pull him back down to his seat, always dropped ten bucks on the table to cover the Laphroaig and the tip.

Then he’d walk down Summer Street and follow Atlantic north until he reached Congress, where he’d turn right. Five minutes later, he’d be up in his Sleeper
Street loft, and he’d stay there until lights-out at eleven-thirty.

I had to work at it to begin thinking of him as Scott and not Wesley. The name Wesley had fit him—patrician and haughty and cold. Scott seemed too bland and middle class. Wesley was the name of the guy you knew in college who was captain of the golf team and didn’t like blacks at his parties. Scott was the guy who wore tank tops and loud baggy shorts, organized pickup games, and puked in the back of your car.

But after some time spent watching him in which he acted far more like a Scott than a Wesley—watching TV alone, reading in a slim leather recliner under a gooseneck lamp in the center of his loft, pulling Fit-N-Easy meals from his freezer and nuking them in his microwave, eating them at the bar that curled around the edge of his kitchen—I eventually came around to the idea of Scott. Scott the Sinister. Scott the Asshole. Scott the Marked Man.

The first night I followed him, I found a fire escape with roof access behind the building across the street from his. His loft was four stories off the ground and two below my rooftop perch, and Scott Pearse hadn’t bothered with curtains over his floor-to-ceiling dormers except in the bedroom and bathroom. So I had an unobstructed, well-lit view of his spacious living room, kitchen, and dining area, the framed black-and-white photographs that hung from his walls. They were chilly photos of stripped trees and frozen rivers that snaked under mills, a massive garbage dump in the foreground with the Eiffel Tower miles off in the backround, Venice in December, Prague on a black night awash in rain.

As I moved my binoculars from one to the next, I became certain that Scott Pearse, himself, had taken them. They were all exquisitely composed, all had a detached, clinical beauty, and all were as cold as death.

In all the nights I watched him, he never did anything
out of the ordinary, and that in itself began to seem bizarre. Maybe in his bedroom, he made the calls to Diane Bourne or other confederates, picked his next victim, or planned for the next stage of his assault on Vanessa Moore or someone else I cared about. Maybe he had someone chained to the bedpost in there. Maybe after I thought he’d gone to bed, he sat up reading private psychiatric files and stolen mail. Maybe. But not while I was watching.

Angie reported the same thing regarding his days. Pearse never dawdled long enough in his truck to have the opportunity to look through any of the mail he picked up during the second half of his shift.

“He’s strictly by-the-numbers,” Angie reported.

Fortunately, we weren’t, and in the only joyful irony of that week, Angie obtained Pearse’s phone number by breaking into
his
mailbox on Sleeper Street and peeking at his phone bill.

But otherwise, nothing. His façade began to seem impenetrable.

Access to the loft was out of the question. There was no way to bug the place. Each night when he entered, Scott Pearse disengaged an alarm inside the front door. Video cameras were positioned in the upper corners of the loft and triggered, I suspected, by motion detectors. Even if we could get past all that, Scott Pearse, I was pretty sure, had defenses I couldn’t see, backup plans to his backup plans.

I was beginning to wonder, as I sat up on the roof every night and fought off sleep while I watched him do nothing upon nothing, if maybe he was on to us. Knew we’d discovered who he was. It seemed unlikely, but still, all it would have taken was a casual anecdote from the postman I’d run into on the street.
Hey, Scott, some guy thought you were his old college roommate, but I set him straight
.

One night, Scott Pearse walked to his window. He sipped some scotch. He stared down at the street. He raised his head and looked directly at me. But it wasn’t me
he was looking at. In a room bathed in track lighting, with the dark night outside his window forming a slate wall before him, all he’d be able to see would be his own reflection.

He must have been fascinated with it, though, because he stared in my direction for a long time. Then he raised his glass, as if in a toast. And smiled.

We moved Vanessa at night, took her out via the service elevator and along a maintenance corridor, out through a back door into the alley behind her building, and drove her away in Bubba’s van. Vanessa, unlike most women if they’d just climbed into a van and found Bubba in back with them, didn’t blink several times or gasp or move as far away as possible. She sat on the bench that ran from behind the driver’s seat to the rear doors and lit a cigarette.

“Ruprecht Rogowski,” she said. “Right?”

Bubba stifled a yawn with his fist. “No one calls me Ruprecht.”

She held up a hand as Angie pulled the van out of the alley. “My mistake. It’s Bubba, then?”

Bubba nodded.

“What’s your stake in all this, Bubba?”

“Guy killed a dog. I like dogs.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Let me ask you—you got a problem spending time with a mental defective who’s got what they call ‘antisocial tendencies’?”

She smiled. “You are aware what it is I do for a living?”

“Sure,” Bubba said. “You got my buddy Nelson Ferrare off.”

“How is Mr. Ferrare?”

“Same old,” Bubba said.

Nelson, as they spoke, was in fact taking my place on the rooftop across from Scott Pearse’s place. He’d just returned from Atlantic City, where he’d fallen in love with a cocktail waitress who’d loved him back until he ran out of money. Now he was back in town, willing to do any
thing for a little cash and a chance to go back to his cocktail waitress and run out of money again.

“Does he still fall in love with every woman he sees?” Vanessa asked.

“Pretty much.” Bubba rubbed his chin. “So we’re clear, sister, here’s the deal: I’m going to stick to you like crabs.”

“Like crabs,” Vanessa said. “How appealing.”

“You’ll sleep at my place,” Bubba said, “eat with me, drink with me, and I’ll be with you in court. Till the mailman goes down, you’re never out of my sight. Get used to it.”

“Can’t wait,” Vanessa said, then shifted on the bench. “Patrick?”

I turned fully in the captain’s chair, looked over at her. “Yeah?”

“You’ve decided not to guard my body?”

“We have a past relationship. That means I’m compromised emotionally. Makes me the worst choice for the job.”

She looked at the back of Angie’s head as Angie turned onto Storrow Drive. “Compromised,” she said. “Sure.”

“Scott Pearse,” Devin said the next night at Nash’s Pub on Dorchester Avenue, “was born in the Philippines to military parents stationed in Subic Bay. Grew up all over the globe.” He opened his notebook, leafed through it until he found the correct page. “West Germany, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Cuba, Alaska, Georgia, and finally, Kansas.”

“Kansas?” Angie said. “Not Missouri.”

“Kansas,” Devin repeated.

Devin’s partner, Oscar Lee, said, “Surrender, Dorothy. Surrender.”

Angie narrowed her eyes at him, shook her head.

Oscar shrugged, picked his dead cigar out of the ashtray and relit it.

“Father was a colonel,” Devin said. “Colonel Ryan
Pearse of Army Intelligence, designation classified.” He looked at Oscar. “But we got friends.”

Oscar looked at me and jerked his cigar back at his partner. “Notice White Boy always says ‘we’ when he talks about me and my sources?”

“It’s a race thing,” Devin assured us.

Oscar tapped some ash off his cigar. “Colonel Pearse was Psych Ops.”

“Which?” Angie said.

“Psychological Operations,” Oscar said. “Kind of guy gets paid to think up new ways to torture the enemy, spread disinformation, generally fuck with your head.”

“Was Scott his only son?”

“You betcha,” Devin said. “Mother divorced the father when the son was eight, moved to some shitty subsidized housing in Lawrence. Restraining orders against the father follow. She drags his ass into court a few times, and here’s where it gets fun. She claims the father is using psych ops against
her
, fucking with her mind, trying to make everyone think she was crazy. But she’s got no proof. Father gets the restraining orders dropped eventually, gains bimonthly visitation rights with the kid, and one day the kid comes home when he’s, like, eleven to find Mommy sitting on the living room couch with her wrists cut open.”

“Suicide,” Angie said.

“Yup,” Oscar said. “Kid goes to live with the father on base, joins Special Forces when he turns eighteen, gets an HD after—”

“A what?”

“An honorable discharge,” Oscar said, “after serving in Panama during that five-minute conflict over there in late ’89. And this made me curious.”

“Why?”

“Well,” Oscar said, “these Special Forces guys, they’re career soldiers. They don’t just do a couple of years and muster out like regular grunts. They’re after Langley or the Pentagon. Plus, Pearse should have come back from
Panama in the catbird seat: He had honest-to-God battle time now. He should have been
it
, you know?”

“But?” Angie said.

“But he wasn’t,” Oscar said. “So I called another of
my
buddies”—he shot a look at Devin—“and he did some digging and essentially your boy, Pearse, got shitcanned.”

“For what?”

“Lieutenant Pearse’s unit, under his immediate command, hit the wrong target. He was almost court-martialed because he gave the orders. In the end, he knew some brass with pull because he and his unit escaped with the military equivalent of a severance package. They walked with HD’s, but no Pentagon, no Langley for those boys.”

“What target?” Angie said.

“They were supposed to hit a building allegedly housing members of Noriega’s secret police. Instead they went two doors down.”

“And?”

“Wasted a whorehouse at six in the morning. Sprayed everyone inside. Two johns, both Panamanian, and five prostitutes. Your boy then allegedly walked through the room and bayonetted all the female corpses before they torched the place. That’s just rumor, mind you, but that’s what my source remembers hearing.”

“And the army,” Angie said, “never prosecuted.”

Oscar looked at her like she was drunk. “It was Panama. Remember? Killed nine times as many civilians as military personnel? All to capture a drug dealer with former ties to the CIA during the administration of a president who used to
run
the CIA. This shit was fishy enough without calling attention to your mistakes. The rule of combat’s simple—if there are photographs or members of the press in attendance? You broke it, you buy it. But if not, and you cap the wrong guy or guys or village?” He shrugged. “Shit happens. Set the torches and march double-time.”

“Five women,” Angie said.

“Oh, he didn’t kill ’em all,” Oscar said. “The whole squad went in there and unloaded. Nine guys firing ten rounds a second.”

“No, he didn’t kill them all,” Angie said. “He just made sure they were all dead.”

“With a bayonet,” I said.

“Yeah, well,” Devin said, and lit a cigarette, “if there were only nice people in the world, we’d lose our jobs. Anyway, Scott Pearse musters out, comes back to the States, lives with his dad, who’s retired, a couple years, and then his dad dies of a heart attack and a few months later, Scott wins the lottery.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, he won the Kansas State Lottery.”

“Bullshit.”

He shook his head, held up a hand. “On my mother. I swear. Good news was he picked the winning six numbers, and the jackpot was for a million-two. Bad news was, eight other people picked the same numbers. So he collects his payout, which is like eighty-eight grand after the IRS gets through, and he buys a black ’68 Shelby GT-500 from a classic car dealer, and then shows up in Boston, summer of ’92, and takes the postal exam. And from there on in, far as we know, he’s been a model citizen.”

Oscar looked at his empty mug and empty shot glass, said to Devin, “We staying for another?”

Devin nodded vigorously. “They’re buying.”

“Oh, yeah!” Oscar waved at the bartender, circled his finger over the table to indicate another round.

The bartender nodded happily. Of course he was happy. When the tab was on me, Oscar and Devin drank only top shelf. And they threw it back like water. And ordered more. And more.

By the time I got the tab, I wondered who’d gotten the better of the deal. And whether the bill would max out my Visa. And why I couldn’t just have normal friends who drank tea.

“You want to know how the United States Postal Service deals with several pieces of mail that don’t reach their destination?” Vanessa Moore asked us.

“Pray tell,” Angie said.

We were on the second floor of Bubba’s warehouse, which serves as his living quarters. The front third of the floor is mined with explosives because…well, because Bubba’s fucking nuts, but he’d somehow managed to deactivate them for the length of Vanessa’s stay.