Текст книги "Mr. Mercedes"

Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

Hodges is thinking hard. Three computer techs in the Cyber Patrol: Frobisher, Hartsfield, and Linklatter, the skinny blond woman. He’s almost positive it will turn out to be Frobisher or Hartsfield, and whichever one it is won’t be prepared to see kermitfrog 19 walking through the door. Even if Mr Mercedes doesn’t run, he won’t be able to hide the initial shock of recognition.

‘I’m going in. You two are staying here.’

‘Going in with no backup?’ Jerome asks. ‘Gee, Bill, I don’t think that’s very sma—’

‘I’ll be all right, I’ve got the element of surprise going for me, but if I’m not back out in ten minutes, call nine-one-one. Got it?’

‘Yes.’

Hodges points at Holly. ‘You stay close to Jerome. No more lone-wolf investigations.’ I should talk, he thinks.

She nods humbly, and Hodges walks away before they can engage him in further discussion. As he approaches the doors of Discount Electronix, he unbuttons his sportcoat. The weight of his father’s gun against his ribcage is comforting.

7

As they watch Hodges enter the electronics store, a question occurs to Jerome. ‘Holly, how did you get here? Taxi?’

She shakes her head and points into the parking lot. There, parked three rows back from Jerome’s Wrangler, is a gray Mercedes sedan. ‘It was in the garage.’ She notes Jerome’s slack-jawed amazement and immediately becomes defensive. ‘I can drive, you know. I have a valid driver’s license. I’ve never had an accident, and I have Safe Driver’s Insurance. From Allstate. Do you know that the man who does the Allstate ads on TV used to be the president on 24?’

‘That’s the car …’

She frowns, puzzled. ‘What’s the big deal, Jerome? It was in the garage and the keys were in a basket in the front hall. So what’s the big fat deal?’

The dents are gone, he notes. The headlights and windshield have been replaced. It looks as good as new. You’d never know it was used to kill people.

‘Jerome? Do you think Olivia would mind?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘Probably not.’ He is imagining that grille covered with blood. Pieces of shredded cloth dangling from it.

‘It wouldn’t start at first, the battery was dead, but she had one of those portable jump-stations, and I knew how to use it because my father had one. Jerome, if Mr Hodges doesn’t make an arrest, could we walk down to the frogurt place?’

He barely hears her. He’s still staring at the Mercedes. They returned it to her, he thinks. Well, of course they did. It was her property, after all. She even got the damage repaired. But he’d be willing to bet she never drove it again. If there were spooks – real ones – they’d be in there. Probably screaming.

‘Jerome? Earth to Jerome.’

‘Huh?’

‘If everything turns out okay, let’s get frogurt. I was sitting in the sun and waiting for you guys and I’m awfully hot. I’ll treat. I’d really like ice cream, but …’

He doesn’t hear the rest. He’s thinking Ice cream.

The click in his head is so loud he actually winces, and all at once he knows why one of the Cyber Patrol faces on Hodges’s computer looked familiar to him. The strength goes out of his legs and he leans against one of the walkway support posts to keep from falling.

‘Oh my God,’ he says.

‘What’s wrong?’ She shakes his arm, chewing her lips frantically. ‘What’s wrong? Are you sick, Jerome?’

But at first he can only say it again: ‘Oh my God.’

8

Hodges thinks that the Birch Hill Mall Discount Electronix looks like an enterprise with about three months to live. Many of the shelves are empty, and the stock that’s left has a disconsolate, neglected look. Almost all of the browsers are in the Home Entertainment department, where fluorescent pink signs proclaim WOW! DVD BLOWOUT! ALL DISCS 50% OFF! EVEN BLU-RAY! Although there are ten checkout lines, only three are open, staffed by women in blue dusters with the yellow DE logo on them. Two of these women are looking out the window; the third is reading Twilight. A couple of other employees are wandering the aisles, doing a lot of nothing much.

Hodges doesn’t want any of them, but he sees two of the three he does want. Anthony Frobisher, he of the John Lennon specs, is talking to a customer who has a shopping basket full of discounted DVDs in one hand and a clutch of coupons in the other. Frobisher’s tie suggests that he might be the store manager as well as a Cyber Patrolman. The narrow-faced girl with the dirty-blond hair is at the back of the store, seated at a computer. There’s a cigarette parked behind one ear.

Hodges strolls up the center aisle of the DVD BLOWOUT. Frobisher looks at him and raises a finger to say Be with you soon. Hodges smiles and gives him a little I’m okay wave. Frobisher returns to the customer with the coupons. No recognition there. Hodges walks on to the back of the store.

The dirty blond looks up at him, then back at the screen of the computer she’s using. No recognition from her, either. She’s not wearing a Discount Electronix shirt; hers says WHEN I WANT MY OPINION, I’LL GIVE IT TO YOU. He sees she’s playing an updated version of Pitfall!, a cruder version of which fascinated his daughter Alison a quarter of a century before. Everything that goes around comes around, Hodges thinks. A Zen concept for sure.

‘Unless you’ve got a computer question, talk to Tones,’ she says. ‘I only do crunchers.’

‘Tones would be Anthony Frobisher?’

‘Yeah. Mr Spiffy in the tie.’

‘You’d be Freddi Linklatter. Of the Cyber Patrol.’

‘Yeah.’ She pauses Pitfall Harry in mid-jump over a coiled snake in order to give him a closer inspection. What she sees is Hodges’s police ID, with his thumb strategically placed to hide its year of expiration.

‘Oooh,’ she says, and holds out her hands with the twig-thin wrists together. ‘I’m a bad, bad girl and handcuffs are what I deserve. Whip me, beat me, make me write bad checks.’

Hodges gives a brief smile and tucks his ID away. ‘Isn’t Brady Hartsfield the third member of your happy band? I don’t see him.’

‘Out with the flu. He says. Want my best guess?’

‘Hit me.’

‘I think maybe he finally had to put dear old Mom in rehab. He says she drinks and he has to take care of her most of the time. Which is probably why he’s never had a gee-eff. You know what that is, right?’

‘I’m pretty sure, yeah.’

She examines him with bright and mordant interest. ‘Is Brady in trouble? I wouldn’t be surprised. He’s a little on the, you know, peekee-yoolier side.’

‘I just need to speak to him.’

Anthony Frobisher – Tones – joins them. ‘May I help you, sir?’

‘It’s five-oh,’ Freddi says. She gives Frobisher a wide smile that exposes small teeth badly in need of cleaning. ‘He found out about the meth lab in the back.’

‘Can it, Freddi.’

She makes an extravagant lip-zipping gesture, finishing with the twist of an invisible key, but doesn’t go back to her game.

In Hodges’s pocket, his cell phone rings. He silences it with his thumb.

‘I’m Detective Bill Hodges, Mr Frobisher. I have a few questions for Brady Hartsfield.’

‘He’s out with the flu. What did he do?’

‘Tones is a poet and don’t know it,’ Freddi Linklatter observes. ‘Although his feet show it, because they’re Longfel—’

‘Shut up, Freddi. For the last time.’

‘Can I have his address, please?’

‘Of course. I’ll get it for you.’

‘Can I un-shut for a minute?’ Freddi asks.

Hodges nods. She punches a key on her computer. Pitfall Harry is replaced by a spreadsheet headed STORE PERSONNEL.

‘Presto,’ she says. ‘Forty-nine Elm Street. That’s on the—’

‘North Side, yeah,’ Hodges says. ‘Thank you both. You’ve been very helpful.’

As he leaves, Freddi Linklatter calls after him, ‘It’s something with his mom, betcha anything. He’s freaky about her.’

9

Hodges has no more than stepped out into the bright sunshine when Jerome almost tackles him. Holly lurks just behind. She’s stopped biting her lips and gone to her fingernails, which look badly abused. ‘I called you,’ Jerome says. ‘Why didn’t you pick up?’

‘I was asking questions. What’s got you all white-eyed?’

‘Is Hartsfield in there?’

Hodges is too surprised to reply.

‘Oh, it’s him,’ Jerome says. ‘Got to be. You were right about him watching you, and I know how. It’s like that Hawthorne story about the purloined letter. Hide in plain sight.’

Holly stops munching her fingernails long enough to say, ‘Poe wrote that story. Don’t they teach you kids anything?’

Hodges says, ‘Slow down, Jerome.’

Jerome takes a deep breath. ‘He’s got two jobs, Bill. Two. He must only work here until mid-afternoon or something. After that he works for Loeb’s.’

‘Loeb’s? Is that the—’

‘Yeah, the ice cream company. He drives the Mr Tastey truck. The one with the bells. I’ve bought stuff from him, my sister has, too. All the kids do. He’s on our side of town a lot. Brady Hartsfield is the ice cream man!’

Hodges realizes he’s heard those cheerful, tinkling bells more than a lot lately. In the spring of his depression, crashed out in his La-Z-Boy, watching afternoon TV (and sometimes playing with the gun now riding against his ribs), it seems he heard them every day. Heard them and ignored them, because only kids pay actual attention to the ice cream man. Except some deeper part of his mind didn’t completely ignore them. It was the deep part that kept coming back to Bowfinger, and his satiric comment about Mrs Melbourne.

She thinks they walk among us, Mr Bowfinger said, but it hadn’t been space aliens Mrs Melbourne had been concerned about on the day Hodges had done his canvass; it had been black SUVs, and chiropractors, and the people on Hanover Street who played loud music late at night.

Also, the Mr Tastey man.

That one looks suspicious, she had said.

This spring it seems like he’s always around, she had said.

A terrible question surfaces in his mind, like one of the snakes always lying in wait for Pitfall Harry: if he had paid attention to Mrs Melbourne instead of dismissing her as a harmless crank (the way he and Pete dismissed Olivia Trelawney), would Janey still be alive? He doesn’t think so, but he’s never going to know for sure, and he has an idea that the question will haunt a great many sleepless nights in the weeks and months to come.

Maybe the years.

He looks out at the parking lot … and there he sees a ghost. A gray one.

He turns back to Jerome and Holly, now standing side by side, and doesn’t even have to ask.

‘Yeah,’ Jerome says. ‘Holly drove it here.’

‘The registration and the sticker decal on the license plate are both a tiny bit expired,’ Holly says. ‘Please don’t be mad at me, okay? I had to come. I wanted to help, but I knew if I just called you, you’d say no.’

‘I’m not mad,’ Hodges says. In fact, he doesn’t know what he is. He feels like he’s entered a dreamworld where all the clocks run backward.

‘What do we do now?’ Jerome asks. ‘Call the cops?’

But Hodges is still not ready to let go. The young man in the picture may have a cauldron of crazy boiling away behind his bland face, but Hodges has met his share of psychopaths and knows that when they’re taken by surprise, most collapse like puffballs. They’re only dangerous to the unarmed and unsuspecting, like the broke folks waiting to apply for jobs on that April morning in 2009.

‘Let’s you and I take a ride to Mr Hartsfield’s place of residence,’ Hodges says. ‘And let’s go in that.’ He points to the gray Mercedes.

‘But … if he sees us pull up, won’t he recognize it?’

Hodges smiles a sharklike smile Jerome Robinson has never seen before. ‘I certainly hope so.’ He holds out his hand. ‘May I have the key, Holly?’

Her abused lips tighten. ‘Yes, but I’m going.’

‘No way,’ Hodges says. ‘Too dangerous.’

‘If it’s too dangerous for me, it’s too dangerous for you.’ She won’t look directly at him and her eyes keep skipping past his face, but her voice is firm. ‘You can make me stay, but if you do, I’ll call the police and give them Brady Hartsfield’s address just as soon as you’re gone.’

‘You don’t have it,’ Hodges says. This sounds feeble even to him.

Holly doesn’t reply, which is a form of courtesy. She won’t even need to go inside Discount Electronix and ask the dirty blond; now that they have the name, she can probably suss out the Hartsfield address from her devilish iPad.

Fuck.

‘All right, you can come. But I drive, and when we get there, you and Jerome are going to stay in the car. Do you have a problem with that?’

‘No, Mr Hodges.’

This time her eyes go to his face and stay there for three whole seconds. It might be a step forward. With Holly, he thinks, who knows.

10

Because of drastic budget cuts that kicked in the previous year, most city patrol cars are solo rides. This isn’t the case in Lowtown. In Lowtown every shop holds a deuce, the ideal deuce containing at least one person of color, because in Lowtown the minorities are the majority. At just past noon on June third, Officers Laverty and Rosario are cruising Lowbriar Avenue about half a mile beyond the overpass where Bill Hodges once stopped a couple of trolls from robbing a shorty. Laverty is white. Rosario is Latina. Because their shop is CPC 54, they are known in the department as Toody and Muldoon, after the cops in an ancient sitcom called Car 54, Where Are You? Amarilis Rosario sometimes amuses her fellow blue knights at roll call by saying, ‘Ooh, ooh, Toody, I got an idea!’ It sounds extremely cute in her Dominican accent, and always gets a laugh.

On patrol, however, she’s Ms Taking Care of Business. They both are. In Lowtown you have to be.

‘The cornerboys remind me of the Blue Angels in this air show I saw once,’ she says now.

‘Yeah?’

‘They see us coming, they peel off like they’re in formation. Look, there goes another one.’

As they approach the intersection of Lowbriar and Strike, a kid in a Cleveland Cavaliers warm-up jacket (oversized and totally superfluous on this day) suddenly decamps from the corner where he’s been jiving around and heads down Strike at a trot. He looks about thirteen.

‘Maybe he just remembered it’s a schoolday,’ Laverty says.

Rosario laughs. ‘As if, esse.’

Now they are approaching the corner of Lowbriar and Martin Luther King Avenue. MLK is the ghetto’s other large thoroughfare, and this time half a dozen cornerboys decide they have business elsewhere.

‘That’s formation flying, all right,’ Laverty says. He laughs, although it’s not really funny. ‘Listen, where do you want to eat?’

‘Let’s see if that wagon’s on Randolph,’ she says. ‘I’m in a taco state of mind.’

‘Señor Taco it is,’ he says, ‘but lay off the beans, okay? We’ve got another four hours in this … huh. Check it, Rosie. That’s weird.’

Up ahead, a man is coming out of a storefront with a long flower box. It’s weird because the storefront isn’t a florist’s; it’s King Virtue Pawn & Loan. It’s also weird because the man looks Caucasian and they are now in the blackest part of Lowtown. He’s approaching a dirty white Econoline van that’s standing on a yellow curb: a twenty-dollar fine. Laverty and Rosario are hungry, though, they’ve got their faces fixed for tacos with that nice hot picante sauce Señor Taco keeps on the counter, and they might have let it go. Probably would have.

But.

With David Berkowitz, it was a parking ticket. With Ted Bundy, it was a busted taillight. Today a florist’s box with badly folded flaps is all it takes to change the world. As the guy fumbles for the keys to his old van (not even Emperor Ming of Mongo would leave his vehicle unlocked in Lowtown), the box tilts downward. The end comes open and something slides partway out.

The guy catchs it and shoves it back in before it can fall into the street, but Jason Laverty spent two tours in Iraq and he knows an RPG launcher when he sees it. He flips on the blues and hooks in behind the guy, who looks around with a startled expression.

‘Sidearm!’ he snaps at his partner. ‘Get it out!’

They fly out the doors, double-fisted Glocks pointing at the sky.

‘Drop the box, sir!’ Laverty shouts. ‘Drop the box and put your hands on the van! Lean forward. Do it now!’

For a moment the guy – he’s about forty, olive-skinned, round-shouldered – hugs the florist’s box tighter against his chest, like a baby. But when Rosie Rosario lowers her gun and points it at his chest, he drops the box. It splits wide open and reveals what Laverty tentatively identifies as a Russian-made Hashim antitank grenade launcher.

‘Holy shit!’ Rosario says, and then: ‘Toody, Toody, I got an id—’

‘Officers, lower your weapons.’

Laverty keeps his focus on Grenade Launcher Guy, but Rosario turns and sees a gray-haired Cauc in a blue jacket. He’s wearing an earpiece and has his own Glock. Before she can ask him anything, the street is full of men in blue jackets, all running for King Virtue Pawn & Loan. One is carrying a Stinger battering ram, the kind cops call a baby doorbuster. She sees ATF on the backs of the jackets, and all at once she has that unmistakable I-stepped-in-shit feeling.

‘Officers, lower your weapons. Agent James Kosinsky, ATF.’

Laverty says, ‘Maybe you’d like one of us to cuff him first? Just asking.’

ATF agents are piling into the pawnshop like Christmas shoppers into Walmart on Black Friday. A crowd is gathering across the street, as yet too stunned by the size of the strike force to start casting aspersions. Or stones, for that matter.

Kosinsky sighs. ‘You may as well,’ he says. ‘The horse has left the barn.’

‘We didn’t know you had anything going,’ Laverty says. Meanwhile, Grenade Launcher Guy already has his hands off the van and behind him with the wrists pressed together. It’s pretty clear this isn’t his first rodeo. ‘He was unlocking his van and I saw that poking out of the end of the box. What was I supposed to do?’

‘What you did, of course.’ From inside the pawnshop there comes the sound of breaking glass, shouts, and then the boom of the doorbuster being put to work. ‘Tell you what, now that you’re here, why don’t you throw Mr Cavelli there in the back of your car and come on inside. See what we’ve got.’

While Laverty and Rosario are escorting their prisoner to the cruiser, Kosinsky notes the number.

‘So,’ he says. ‘Which one of you is Toody and which one is Muldoon?’

11

As the ATF strike force, led by Agent Kosinsky, begins its inventory of the cavernous storage area behind King Virtue Pawn & Loan’s humble façade, a gray Mercedes sedan is pulling to the curb in front of 49 Elm Street. Hodges is behind the wheel. Today Holly is riding shotgun – because, she claims (with at least some logic), the car is more hers than theirs.

‘Someone is home,’ she points out. ‘There’s a very badly maintained Honda Civic in the driveway.’

Hodges notes the shuffling approach of an old man from the house directly across the street. ‘I will now speak with Mr Concerned Citizen. You two will keep your mouths shut.’

He rolls down his window. ‘Help you, sir?’

‘I thought maybe I could help you,’ the old guy says. His bright eyes are busy inventorying Hodges and his passengers. Also the car, which doesn’t surprise Hodges. It’s a mighty fine car. ‘If you’re looking for Brady, you’re out of luck. That in the driveway is Missus Hartsfield’s car. Haven’t seen it move in weeks. Not sure it even runs anymore. Maybe Missus Hartsfield went off with him, because I haven’t seen her today. Usually I do, when she toddles out to get her post.’ He points to the mailbox beside the door of 49. ‘She likes the catalogs. Most women do.’ He extends a knuckly hand. ‘Hank Beeson.’

Hodges shakes it briefly, then flashes his ID, careful to keep his thumb over the expiration date. ‘Good to meet you, Mr Beeson. I’m Detective Bill Hodges. Can you tell me what kind of car Mr Hartsfield drives? Make and model?’

‘It’s a brown Subaru. Can’t help you with the model or the year. All those rice-burners look the same to me.’

‘Uh-huh. Have to ask you to go back to your house now, sir. We may come by to ask you a few questions later.’

‘Did Brady do something wrong?’

‘Just a routine call,’ Hodges says. ‘Go on back to your house, please.’

Instead of doing that, Beeson bends lower for a look at Jerome. ‘Aren’t you kinda young to be on the cops?’

‘I’m a trainee,’ Jerome says. ‘Better do as Detective Hodges says, sir.’

‘I’m goin, I’m goin.’ But he gives the trio another stem-to-stern once-over first. ‘Since when do city cops drive around in Mercedes-Benzes?’

Hodges has no answer for that, but Holly does. ‘It’s a RICO car. RICO stands for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations. We take their stuff. We can use it any way we want because we’re the police.’

‘Well, yeah. Sure. Stands to reason.’ Beeson looks partly satisfied and partly mystified. But he goes back to his house, where he soon appears to them again, this time looking out a front window.

‘RICO is the feds,’ Hodges says mildly.

Holly tips her head fractionally toward their observer, and there’s a faint smile on her hard-used lips. ‘Do you think he knows that?’ When neither of them answers, she becomes businesslike. ‘What do we do now?’

‘If Hartsfield’s in there, I’m going to make a citizen’s arrest. If he’s not but his mother is, I’m going to interview her. You two are going to stay in the car.’

‘I don’t know if that’s a good idea,’ Jerome says, but by the expression on his face – Hodges can see it in the rearview mirror – he knows this objection will be overruled.

‘It’s the only one I have,’ Hodges says.

He gets out of the car. Before he can close the door, Holly leans toward him and says: ‘There’s no one home.’ He doesn’t say anything, but she nods as if he had. ‘Can’t you feel it?’

Actually, he can.

12

Hodges walks up the driveway, noting the drawn drapes in the big front window. He looks briefly in the Honda and sees nothing worth noting. He tries the passenger door. It opens. The air inside is hot and stale, with a faintly boozy smell. He shuts the door, climbs the porch steps, and rings the doorbell. He hears it cling-clong inside the house. Nobody comes. He tries it again, then knocks. Nobody comes. He hammers with the side of his fist, very aware that Mr Beeson from across the street is taking all this in. Nobody comes.

He strolls to the garage and peers through one of the windows in the overhead door. A few tools, a mini-fridge, not much else.

He takes out his cell phone and calls Jerome. This block of Elm Street is very still, and he can hear – faintly – the AC/DC ringtone as the call goes through. He sees Jerome answer.

‘Have Holly jump on her iPad and check the city tax records for the owner’s name at 49 Elm. Can she do that?’

He hears Jerome asking Holly.

‘She says she’ll see what she can do.’

‘Good. I’m going around back. Stay on the line. I’ll check in with you at roughly thirty-second intervals. If more than a minute goes by without hearing from me, call nine-one-one.’

‘You positive you want to do this, Bill?’

‘Yes. Be sure Holly knows that getting the name isn’t a big deal. I don’t want her getting squirrelly.’

‘She’s chill,’ Jerome says. ‘Already tapping away. Just make sure you stay in touch.’

‘Count on it.’

He walks between the garage and the house. The backyard is small but neatly kept. There’s a circular bed of flowers in the middle. Hodges wonders who planted them, Mom or Sonny Boy. He mounts three wooden steps to the back stoop. There’s an aluminum screen door with another door inside. The screen door is unlocked. The house door isn’t.

‘Jerome? Checking in. All quiet.’

He peers through the glass and sees a kitchen. It’s squared away. There are a few plates and glasses in the drainer by the sink. A neatly folded dishwiper hangs over the oven handle. There are two placemats on the table. No placemat for Poppa Bear, which fits the profile he has fleshed out on his yellow legal pad. He knocks, then hammers. Nobody comes.

‘Jerome? Checking in. All quiet.’

He puts his phone down on the back stoop and takes out the flat leather case, glad he thought of it. Inside are his father’s lock-picks – three silver rods with hooks of varying sizes at the ends. He selects the medium pick. A good choice; it slides in easily. He fiddles around, turning the pick first one way, then the other, feeling for the mechanism. He’s just about to pause and check in with Jerome again when the pick catches. He twists, quick and hard, just as his father taught him, and there’s a click as the locking button pops up on the kitchen side of the door. Meanwhile, his phone is squawking his name. He picks it up.

‘Jerome? All quiet.’

‘You had me worried,’ Jerome says. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Breaking and entering.’

13

Hodges steps into the Hartsfield kitchen. The smell hits him at once. It’s faint, but it’s there. Holding his cell phone in his left hand and his father’s .38 in the right, Hodges follows his nose first into the living room – empty, although the TV remote and scattering of catalogs on the coffee table makes him think that the couch is Mrs Hartsfield’s downstairs nest – and then up the stairs. The smell gets stronger as he goes. It’s not a stench yet, but it’s headed in that direction.

There’s a short upstairs hall with one door on the right and two on the left. He clears the righthand room first. It’s guest quarters where no guests have stayed for a long time. It’s as sterile as an operating theater.

He checks in with Jerome again before opening the first door on the left. This is where the smell is coming from. He takes a deep breath and enters fast, crouching until he’s assured himself there’s no one behind the door. He opens the closet – this door is the kind that folds on a center hinge – and shoves back the clothes. No one.

‘Jerome? Checking in.’

‘Is anyone there?’

Well … sort of. The coverlet of the double bed has been pulled up over an unmistakable shape.

‘Wait one.’

He looks under the bed and sees nothing but a pair of slippers, a pair of pink sneakers, a single white ankle sock, and a few dust kitties. He pulls the coverlet back and there’s Brady Hartsfield’s mother. Her skin is waxy-pale, with a faint green undertint. Her mouth hangs ajar. Her eyes, dusty and glazed, have settled in their sockets. He lifts an arm, flexes it slightly, lets it drop. Rigor has come and gone.

‘Listen, Jerome. I’ve found Mrs Hartsfield. She’s dead.’

‘Oh my God.’ Jerome’s usually adult voice cracks on the last word. ‘What are you—’

‘Wait one.’

‘You already said that.’

Hodges puts his phone on the night table and draws the coverlet down to Mrs Hartsfield’s feet. She’s wearing blue silk pajamas. The shirt is stained with what appears to be vomit and some blood, but there’s no visible bullet hole or stab wound. Her face is swollen, yet there are no ligature marks or bruises on her neck. The swelling is just the slow death-march of decomposition. He pulls up her pajama top enough so he can see her belly. Like her face, it’s slightly swollen, but he’s betting that’s gas. He leans close to her mouth, looks inside, and sees what he expected: clotted goop on her tongue and in the gutters between her gums and her cheeks. He’s guessing she got drunk, sicked up her last meal, and went out like a rock star. The blood could be from her throat. Or an aggravated stomach ulcer.

He picks up the phone and says, ‘He might have poisoned her, but it’s more likely she did it to herself.’

‘Booze?’

‘Probably. Without a post-mortem, there’s no way to tell.’

‘What do you want us to do?’

‘Sit tight.’

‘We still don’t call the police?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Holly wants to talk to you.’

There’s a moment of dead air, then she’s on the line, and clear as a bell. She sounds calm. Calmer than Jerome, actually.

‘Her name is Deborah Hartsfield. The kind of Deborah that ends in an H.’

‘Good job. Give the phone back to Jerome.’

A second later Jerome says, ‘I hope you know what you’re doing.’

I don’t, he thinks as he checks the bathroom. I’ve lost my mind and the only way to get it back is to let go of this. You know that.

But he thinks of Janey giving him his new hat – his snappy private eye fedora – and knows he can’t. Won’t.

The bathroom is clean … or almost. There’s some hair in the sink. Hodges sees it but doesn’t take note of it. He’s thinking of the crucial difference between accidental death and murder. Murder would be bad, because killing close family members is all too often how a serious nutcase starts his final run. If it was an accident or suicide, there might still be time. Brady could be hunkered down somewhere, trying to decide what to do next.

Which is too close to what I’m doing, Hodges thinks.

The last upstairs room is Brady’s. The bed is unmade. The desk is piled helter-skelter with books, most of them science fiction. There’s a Terminator poster on the wall, with Schwarzenegger wearing dark glasses and toting a futuristic elephant gun.

I’ll be back, Hodges thinks, looking at it.

‘Jerome? Checking in.’

‘The guy from across the street is still scoping us. Holly thinks we should come inside.’

‘Not yet.’

‘When?’

‘When I’m sure this place is clear.’

Brady has his own bathroom. It’s as neat as a GI’s footlocker on inspection day. Hodges gives it a cursory glance, then goes back downstairs. There’s a small alcove off the living room, with just enough space for a small desk. On it is a laptop. A purse hangs by its strap from the back of the chair. On the wall is a large framed photograph of the woman upstairs and a teenage version of Brady Hartsfield. They’re standing on a beach somewhere with their arms around each other and their cheeks pressed together. They’re wearing identical million-dollar smiles. It’s more girlfriend–boyfriend than mother–son.

Hodges looks with fascination upon Mr Mercedes in his salad days. There’s nothing in his face that suggests homicidal tendencies, but of course there almost never is. The resemblance between the two of them is faint, mostly in the shape of the noses and the color of the hair. She was a pretty woman, really just short of beautiful, but Hodges is willing to guess that Brady’s father didn’t have similar good looks. The boy in the photo seems … ordinary. A kid you’d pass on the street without a second glance.

That’s probably the way he likes it, Hodges thinks. The Invisible Man.

He goes back into the kitchen and this time sees a door beside the stove. He opens it and looks at steep stairs descending into darkness. Aware that he makes a perfect silhouette for anyone who might be down there, Hodges moves to one side while he feels for the light switch. He finds it and steps into the doorway again with the gun leveled. He sees a worktable. Beyond it, a waist-high shelf runs the length of the room. On it is a line of computers. It makes him think of Mission Control at Cape Canaveral.