Текст книги "Mr. Mercedes"

Автор книги: Stephen Edwin King

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‘Yes. My other gig starts at three.’

Frobisher wrinkles the overlarge schnozzola in the middle of his face to show what he thinks of Brady’s other job. ‘Did I hear you say something about returning to school?’

Brady doesn’t reply to this, because anything he says might be the wrong thing. Anthony ‘Tones’ Frobisher must not know that Brady hates him. Fucking loathes him. Brady hates everybody, including his drunk mother, but it’s like that old country song says: no one has to know right now.

‘You’re twenty-eight, Brady. Old enough so you no longer have to rely on shitty pool coverage to insure your automobile – which is good – but a little too old to be training for a career in electrical engineering. Or computer programming, for that matter.’

‘Don’t be a turd,’ Freddi says. ‘Don’t be a Tones Turd.’

‘If telling the truth makes a man a turd, then a turd I shall be.’

‘Yeah,’ Freddi says. ‘You’ll go down in history. Tones the Truth-Telling Turd. Kids will learn about you in school.’

‘I don’t mind a little truth,’ Brady says quietly.

‘Good. You can don’t-mind all the time you’re cataloguing and stickering DVDs. Starting now.’

Brady nods good-naturedly, stands up, and dusts the seat of his pants. The Discount Electronix fifty-percent-off sale starts the following week; management in New Jersey has mandated that DE must be out of the digital-versatile-disc business by January of 2011. That once profitable line of merchandise has been strangled by Netflix and Redbox. Soon there will be nothing in the store but home computers (made in China and the Philippines) and flat-screen TVs, which in this deep recession few can afford to buy.

‘You,’ Frobisher says, turning to Freddi, ‘have an out-call.’ He hands her a pink work invoice. ‘Old lady with a screen freeze. That’s what she says it is, anyway.’

‘Yes, mon capitan. I live to serve.’ She stands up, salutes, and takes the call-sheet he holds out.

‘Tuck your shirt in. Put on your cap so your customer doesn’t have to be disgusted by that weird haircut. Don’t drive too fast. Get another ticket and life as you know it on the Cyber Patrol is over. Also, pick up your fucking cigarette butts before you go.’

He disappears inside before she can return his serve.

‘DVD stickers for you, an old lady with a CPU probably full of graham cracker crumbs for me,’ Freddi says, jumping down and putting her hat on. She gives the bill a gangsta twist and starts across to the VWs without even glancing at her cigarette butts. She does pause long enough to look back at Brady, hands on her nonexistent boy hips. ‘This is not the life I pictured for myself when I was in the fifth grade.’

‘Me, either,’ Brady says quietly.

He watches her putt away, on a mission to rescue an old lady who’s probably going crazy because she can’t download her favorite mock-apple pie recipe. This time Brady wonders what Freddi would say if he told her what life was like for him when he was a kid. That was when he killed his brother. And his mother covered it up.

Why would she not?

After all, it had sort of been her idea.

12

As Brady is slapping yellow 50% OFF stickers on old Quentin Tarantino movies and Freddi is helping out elderly Mrs Vera Willkins on the West Side (it’s her keyboard that’s full of crumbs, it turns out), Bill Hodges is turning off Lowbriar, the four-lane street that bisects the city and gives Lowtown its name, and in to the parking lot beside DeMasio’s Italian Ristorante. He doesn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to know Pete got here first. Hodges parks next to a plain gray Chevrolet sedan with blackwall tires that just about scream city police and gets out of his old Toyota, a car that just about screams old retired fella. He touches the hood of the Chevrolet. Warm. Pete has not beaten him by much.

He pauses for a moment, enjoying this almost-noon morning with its bright sunshine and sharp shadows, looking at the overpass a block down. It’s been gang-tagged up the old wazoo, and although it’s empty now (noon is breakfast time for the younger denizens of Lowtown), he knows that if he walked under there, he would smell the sour reek of cheap wine and whiskey. His feet would grate on the shards of broken bottles. In the gutters, more bottles. The little brown kind.

No longer his problem. Besides, the darkness beneath the overpass is empty, and Pete is waiting for him. Hodges goes in and is pleased when Elaine at the hostess stand smiles and greets him by name, although he hasn’t been here for months. Maybe even a year. Of course Pete is in one of the booths, already raising a hand to him, and Pete might have refreshed her memory, as the lawyers say.

He raises his own hand in return, and by the time he gets to the booth, Pete is standing beside it, arms raised to envelop him in a bearhug. They thump each other on the back the requisite number of times and Pete tells him he’s looking good.

‘You know the three Ages of Man, don’t you?’ Hodges asks.

Pete shakes his head, grinning.

‘Youth, middle age, and you look fuckin terrific.’

Pete roars with laughter and asks if Hodges knows what the blonde said when she opened the box of Cheerios. Hodges says he does not. Pete makes big amazed eyes and says, ‘Oh! Look at the cute little doughnut seeds!’

Hodges gives his own obligatory roar of laughter (although he does not think this a particularly witty example of Genus Blond), and with the amenities thus disposed of, they sit down. A waiter comes over – no waitresses in DeMasio’s, only elderly men who wear spotless aprons tied up high on their narrow chicken chests – and Pete orders a pitcher of beer. Bud Lite, not Ivory Special. When it comes, Pete raises his glass.

‘Here’s to you, Billy, and life after work.’

‘Thanks.’

They click and drink. Pete asks about Allie and Hodges asks about Pete’s son and daughter. Their wives, both of the ex variety, are touched upon (as if to prove to each other – and themselves – that they are not afraid to talk about them) and then banished from the conversation. Food is ordered. By the time it comes, they have finished with Hodges’s two grandchildren and have analyzed the chances of the Cleveland Indians, which happens to be the closest major league team. Pete has ravioli, Hodges spaghetti with garlic and oil, what he has always ordered here.

Halfway through these calorie bombs, Pete takes a folded piece of paper from his breast pocket and places it, with some ceremony, beside his plate.

‘What’s that?’ Hodges asks.

‘Proof that my detective skills are as keenly honed as ever. I don’t see you since that horror show at Raintree Inn – my hangover lasted three days, by the way – and I talk to you, what, twice? Three times? Then, bang, you ask me to lunch. Am I surprised? No. Do I smell an ulterior motive? Yes. So let’s see if I’m right.’

Hodges gives a shrug. ‘I’m like the curious cat. You know what they say – satisfaction brought him back.’

Pete Huntley is grinning broadly, and when Hodges reaches for the folded slip of paper, Pete puts a hand over it. ‘No-no-no-no. You have to say it. Don’t be coy, Kermit.’

Hodges sighs and ticks four items off on his fingers. When he’s done, Pete pushes the folded piece of paper across the table. Hodges opens it and reads:

Davis

Park Rapist

Pawnshops

Mercedes Killer

Hodges pretends to be discomfited. ‘You got me, Sheriff. Don’t say a thing if you don’t want to.’

Pete grows serious. ‘Jesus, if you weren’t interested in the cases that were hanging fire when you hung up your jock, I’d be disappointed. I’ve been … a little worried about you.’

‘I don’t want to horn in or anything.’ Hodges is a trifle aghast at how smoothly this enormous whopper comes out.

‘Your nose is growing, Pinocchio.’

‘No, seriously. All I want is an update.’

‘Happy to oblige. Let’s start with Donald Davis. You know the script. He fucked up every business he tried his hand at, most recently Davis Classic Cars. Guy’s so deep in debt he should change his name to Captain Nemo. Two or three pretty kitties on the side.’

‘It was three when I called it a day,’ Hodges says, going back to work on his pasta. It’s not Donald Davis he’s here about, or the City Park rapist, or the guy who’s been knocking over pawnshops and liquor stores for the last four years; they are just camouflage. But he can’t help being interested.

‘Wife gets tired of the debt and the kitties. She’s prepping the divorce papers when she disappears. Oldest story in the world. He reports her missing and declares bankruptcy on the same day. Does TV interviews and squirts a bucket of alligator tears. We know he killed her, but with no body …’ He shrugs. ‘You were in on the meetings with Diana the Dope.’ He’s talking about the city’s district attorney.

‘Still can’t persuade her to charge him?’

‘No corpus delicious, no charge. The cops in Modesto knew Scott Peterson was guilty as sin and still didn’t charge him until they recovered the bodies of his wife and kid. You know that.’

Hodges does. He and Pete discussed Scott and Laci Peterson a lot during their investigation of Sheila Davis’s disappearance.

‘But guess what? Blood’s turned up in their summer cabin by the lake.’ Pete pauses for effect, then drops the other shoe. ‘It’s hers.’

Hodges leans forward, his food temporarily forgotten. ‘When was this?’

‘Last month.’

‘And you didn’t tell me?’

‘I’m telling you now. Because you’re asking now. The search out there is ongoing. The Victor County cops are in charge.’

‘Did anyone see him in the area prior to Sheila’s disappearance?’

‘Oh yeah. Two kids. Davis claimed he was mushroom hunting. Fucking Euell Gibbons, you know? When they find the body – if they find it – ole Donnie Davis can quit waiting for the seven years to be up so he can petition to have her declared dead and collect the insurance.’ Pete smiles widely. ‘Think of the time he’ll save.’

‘What about the Park Rapist?’

‘It’s really just a matter of time. We know he’s white, we know he’s in his teens or twenties, and we know he just can’t get enough of that well-maintained matronly pussy.’

‘You’re putting out decoys, right? Because he likes the warm weather.’

‘We are, and we’ll get him.’

‘It would be nice if you got him before he rapes another fifty-something on her way home from work.’

‘We’re doing our best.’ Pete looks slightly annoyed, and when their waiter appears to ask if everything’s all right, Pete waves the guy away.

‘I know,’ Hodges says. Soothingly. ‘Pawnshop guy?’

Pete breaks into a broad grin. ‘Young Aaron Jefferson.’

‘Huh?’

‘That’s his actual name, although when he played football for City High, he called himself YA. You know, like YA Tittle. Although his girlfriend – also the mother of his three-year-old – tells us he calls the guy YA Titties. When I asked her if he was joking or serious, she said she didn’t have any idea.’

Here is another story Hodges knows, another so old it could have come from the Bible … and there’s probably a version of it in there someplace. ‘Let me guess. He racks up a dozen jobs—’

‘It’s fourteen now. Waving that sawed-off around like Omar on The Wire.’

‘—and keeps getting away with it because he has the luck of the devil. Then he cheats on baby mama. She gets pissed and rats him out.’

Pete points a finger-gun at his old partner. ‘Hole in one. And the next time Young Aaron walks into a pawnshop or a check-cashing emporium with his bellygun, we’ll know ahead of time, and it’s angel, angel, down we go.’

‘Why wait?’

‘DA again,’ Pete says. ‘You bring Diana the Dope a steak, she says cook it for me, and if it isn’t medium-rare, I’ll send it back.’

‘But you’ve got him.’

‘I’ll bet you a new set of whitewalls that YA Titties is in County by the Fourth of July and in State by Christmas. Davis and the Park Rapist may take a little longer, but we’ll get them. You want dessert?’

‘No. Yes.’ To the waiter he says, ‘You still have that rum cake? The dark chocolate one?’

The waiter looks insulted. ‘Yes, sir. Always.’

‘I’ll have a piece of that. And coffee. Pete?’

‘I’ll settle for the last of the beer.’ So saying, he pours it out of the pitcher. ‘You sure about that cake, Billy? You look like you’ve put on a few pounds since I saw you last.’

It’s true. Hodges eats heartily in retirement, but only for the last couple of days has food tasted good to him. ‘I’m thinking about Weight Watchers.’

Pete nods. ‘Yeah? I’m thinking about the priesthood.’

‘Fuck you. What about the Mercedes Killer?’

‘We’re still canvassing the Trelawney neighborhood – in fact, that’s where Isabelle is right now – but I’d be shocked if she or anyone else comes up with a live lead. Izzy’s not knocking on any doors that haven’t been knocked on half a dozen times before. The guy stole Trelawney’s luxury sled, drove out of the fog, did his thing, drove back into the fog, dumped it, and … nothing. Never mind Monsewer YA Titties, it’s the Mercedes guy who really had the luck of the devil. If he’d tried that stunt even an hour later, there would have been cops there. For crowd control.’

‘I know.’

‘Do you think he knew, Billy?’

Hodges tilts a hand back and forth to indicate it’s hard to say. Maybe, if he and Mr Mercedes should strike up a conversation on that Blue Umbrella website, he’ll ask.

‘The murdering prick could have lost control when he started hitting people and crashed, but he didn’t. German engineering, best in the world, that’s what Isabelle says. Someone could have jumped on the hood and blocked his vision, but no one did. One of the posts holding up the DO NOT CROSS tape could have bounced under the car and gotten hung up there, but that didn’t happen, either. And someone could have seen him when he parked behind that warehouse and got out with his mask off, but no one did.’

‘It was five-twenty in the morning,’ Hodges points out, ‘and even at noon that area would have been almost as deserted.’

‘Because of the recession,’ Pete Huntley says moodily. ‘Yeah, yeah. Probably half the people who used to work in those warehouses were at City Center, waiting for the frigging job fair to start. Have some irony, it’s good for your blood.’

‘So you’ve got nothing.’

‘Dead in the water.’

Hodges’s cake comes. It smells good and tastes better.

When the waiter’s gone, Pete leans across the table. ‘My nightmare is that he’ll do it again. That another fog will come rolling in off the lake and he’ll do it again.’

He says he won’t, Hodges thinks, conveying another forkload of the delicious cake into his mouth. He says he has absolutely no urge. He says once was enough.

‘That or something else,’ Hodges says.

‘I got into a big fight with my daughter back in March,’ Pete says. ‘Monster fight. I didn’t see her once in April. She skipped all her weekends.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Uh-huh. She wanted to go see a cheerleading competition. Bring the Funk, I think it was called. Practically every school in the state was in it. You remember how crazy Candy always was about cheerleaders?’

‘Yeah,’ Hodges says. He doesn’t.

‘Had a little pleated skirt when she was four or six or something, we couldn’t get her out of it. Two of the moms said they’d take the girls. And I told Candy no. You know why?’

Sure he does.

‘Because the competition was at City Center, that’s why. In my mind’s eye I could see about a thousand tweenyboppers and their moms milling around outside, waiting for the doors to open, dusk instead of dawn, but you know the fog comes in off the lake then, too. I could see that cocksucker running at them in another stolen Mercedes – or maybe a fucking Hummer this time – and the kids and the mommies just standing there, staring like deer in the headlights. So I said no. You should have heard her scream at me, Billy, but I still said no. She wouldn’t talk to me for a month, and she still wouldn’t be talking to me if Maureen hadn’t taken her. I told Mo absolutely no way, don’t you dare, and she said, That’s why I divorced you, Pete, because I got tired of listening to no way and don’t you dare. And of course nothing happened.’

He drinks the rest of the beer, then leans forward again.

‘I hope there are plenty of people with me when we catch him. If I nail him alone, I’m apt to kill him just for putting me on the outs with my daughter.’

‘Then why hope for plenty of people?’

Pete considers this, then smiles a slow smile. ‘You have a point there.’

‘Do you ever wonder about Mrs Trelawney?’ Hodges asks the question casually, but he has been thinking about Olivia Trelawney a lot since the anonymous letter dropped through the mail slot. Even before then. On several occasions during the gray time since his retirement, he has actually dreamed about her. That long face – the face of a woeful horse. The kind of face that says nobody understands and the whole world is against me. All that money and still unable to count the blessings of her life, beginning with freedom from the paycheck. It had been years since Mrs T. had had to balance her accounts or monitor her answering machine for calls from bill collectors, but she could only count the curses, totting up a long account of bad haircuts and rude service people. Mrs Olivia Trelawney with her shapeless boatneck dresses, said boats always listed either to starboard or to port. The watery eyes that always seemed on the verge of tears. No one had liked her, and that included Detective First Grade Kermit William Hodges. No one had been surprised when she killed herself, including that selfsame Detective Hodges. The deaths of eight people – not to mention the injuries of many more – was a lot to carry on your conscience.

‘Wonder about her how?’ Pete asks.

‘If she was telling the truth after all. About the key.’

Pete raises his eyebrows. ‘She thought she was telling it. You know that as well as I do. She talked herself into it so completely she could have passed a lie-detector test.’

It’s true, and Olivia Trelawney hadn’t been a surprise to either of them. God knows they had seen others like her. Career criminals acted guilty even when they hadn’t committed the crime or crimes they had been hauled in to discuss, because they knew damned well they were guilty of something. Solid citizens just couldn’t believe it, and when one of them wound up being questioned prior to charging, Hodges knows, it was hardly ever because a gun was involved. No, it was usually a car. I thought it was a dog I ran over, they’d say, and no matter what they might have seen in the rearview mirror after the awful double thump, they’d believe it.

Just a dog.

‘I wonder, though,’ Hodges says. Hoping he seems thoughtful rather than pushy.

‘Come on, Bill. You saw what I saw, and any time you need a refresher course, you can come down to the station and look at the photos.’

‘I suppose.’

The opening bars of ‘Night on Bald Mountain’ sound from the pocket of Pete’s Men’s Wearhouse sportcoat. He digs out his phone, looks at it, and says, ‘I gotta take this.’

Hodges makes a be-my-guest gesture.

‘Hello?’ Pete listens. His eyes grow wide, and he stands up so fast his chair almost falls over. ‘What?’

Other diners stop eating and look around. Hodges watches with interest.

‘Yeah … yeah! I’ll be right there. What? Yeah, yeah, okay. Don’t wait, just go.’

He snaps the phone closed and sits down again. All his lights are suddenly on, and in that moment Hodges envies him bitterly.

‘I should eat with you more often, Billy. You’re my lucky charm, always were. We talk about it, and it happens.’

‘What?’ Thinking, It’s Mr Mercedes. The thought that follows is both ridiculous and forlorn: He was supposed to be mine.

‘That was Izzy. She just got a call from a State Police colonel out in Victory County. A game warden spotted some bones in an old gravel pit about an hour ago. The pit’s less than two miles from Donnie Davis’s summer place on the lake, and guess what? The bones appear to be wearing the remains of a dress.’

He raises his hand over the table. Hodges high-fives it.

Pete returns the phone to its sagging pocket and brings out his wallet. Hodges shakes his head, not even kidding himself about what he feels: relief. Enormous relief. ‘No, this is my treat. You’re meeting Isabelle out there, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Then roll.’

‘Okay. Thanks for lunch.’

‘One other thing – hear anything about Turnpike Joe?’

‘That’s State,’ Pete says. ‘And the Feebles now. They’re welcome to it. What I hear is they’ve got nothing. Just waiting for him to do it again and hoping to get lucky.’ He glances at his watch.

‘Go, go.’

Pete starts out, stops, returns to the table, and puts a big kiss on Hodges’s forehead. ‘Great to see you, sweetheart.’

‘Get lost,’ Hodges tells him. ‘People will say we’re in love.’

Pete scrams with a big grin on his face, and Hodges thinks of what they sometimes used to call themselves: the Hounds of Heaven.

He wonders how sharp his own nose is these days.

13

The waiter returns to ask if there will be anything else. Hodges starts to say no, then orders another cup of coffee. He just wants to sit here awhile, savoring double happiness: it wasn’t Mr Mercedes and it was Donnie Davis, the sanctimonious cocksucker who killed his wife and then had his lawyer set up a reward fund for information leading to her whereabouts. Because, oh Jesus, he loved her so much and all he wanted was for her to come home so they could start over.

He also wants to think about Olivia Trelawney, and Olivia Trelawney’s stolen Mercedes. That it was stolen no one doubts. But in spite of all her protests to the contrary, no one doubts that she enabled the thief.

Hodges remembers a case that Isabelle Jaynes, then freshly arrived from San Diego, told them about after they brought her up to speed on Mrs Trelawney’s inadvertent part in the City Center Massacre. In Isabelle’s story it was a gun. She said she and her partner had been called to a home where a nine-year-old boy had shot and killed his four-year-old sister. They had been playing with an automatic pistol their father had left on his bureau.

‘The father wasn’t charged, but he’ll carry that for the rest of his life,’ she said. ‘This will turn out to be the same kind of thing, wait and see.’

That was a month before the Trelawney woman swallowed the pills, maybe less, and nobody on the Mercedes Killer case had given much of a shit. To them – and him – Mrs T. had just been a self-pitying rich lady who refused to accept her part in what had happened.

The Mercedes SL was downtown when it was stolen, but Mrs Trelawney, a widow who lost her wealthy husband to a heart attack, lived in Sugar Heights, a suburb as rich as its name where lots of gated drives led up to fourteen– and twenty-room McMansions. Hodges grew up in Atlanta, and whenever he drives through Sugar Heights he thinks of a ritzy Atlanta neighborhood called Buckhead.

Mrs T.’s elderly mother, Elizabeth Wharton, lived in an apartment – a very nice one, with rooms as big as a political candidate’s promises – in an upscale condo cluster on Lake Avenue. The crib had space enough for a live-in housekeeper, and a private nurse came three days a week. Mrs Wharton had advanced scoliosis, and it was her OxyContin that her daughter had filched from the apartment’s medicine cabinet when she decided to step out.

Suicide proves guilt. He remembers Lieutenant Morrissey saying that, but Hodges himself has always had his doubts, and lately those doubts have been stronger than ever. What he knows now is that guilt isn’t the only reason people commit suicide.

Sometimes you can just get bored with afternoon TV.

14

Two motor patrol cops found the Mercedes an hour after the killings. It was behind one of the warehouses that cluttered the lakeshore.

The huge paved yard was filled with rusty container boxes that stood around like Easter Island monoliths. The gray Mercedes was parked carelessly askew between two of them. By the time Hodges and Huntley arrived, five police cars were parked in the yard, two drawn up nose-to-nose behind the car’s back bumper, as if the cops expected the big gray sedan to start up by itself, like that old Plymouth in the horror movie, and make a run for it. The fog had thickened into a light rain. The patrol car roofracks lit the droplets in conflicting pulses of blue light.

Hodges and Huntley approached the cluster of motor patrolmen. Pete Huntley spoke with the two who had discovered the car while Hodges did a walk-around. The front end of the SL500 was only slightly crumpled – that famous German engineering – but the hood and the windshield were spattered with gore. A shirtsleeve, now stiffening with blood, was snagged in the grille. This would later be traced to August Odenkirk, one of the victims. There was something else, too. Something that gleamed even in that morning’s pale light. Hodges dropped to one knee for a closer look. He was still in that position when Huntley joined him.

‘What the hell is that?’ Pete asked.

‘I think a wedding ring,’ Hodges said.

So it proved. The plain gold band belonged to Francine Reis, thirty-nine, of Squirrel Ridge Road, and was eventually returned to her family. She had to be buried with it on the third finger of her right hand, because the first three fingers of the left had been torn off. The ME guessed this was because she raised it in an instinctive warding-off gesture as the Mercedes came down on her. Two of those fingers were found at the scene of the crime shortly before noon on April tenth. The index finger was never found. Hodges thought that a seagull – one of the big boys that patrolled the lakeshore – might have seized it and carried it away. He preferred that idea to the grisly alternative: that an unhurt City Center survivor had taken it as a souvenir.

Hodges stood up and motioned one of the motor patrolmen over. ‘We’ve got to get a tarp over this before the rain washes away any—’

‘Already on its way,’ the cop said, and cocked a thumb at Pete. ‘First thing he told us.’

‘Well aren’t you special,’ Hodges said in a not-too-bad Church Lady voice, but his partner’s answering smile was as pale as the day. Pete was looking at the blunt, blood-spattered snout of the Mercedes, and at the ring caught in the chrome.

Another cop came over, notebook in hand, open to a page already curling with moisture. His name-tag ID’d him as F. SHAMMINGTON. ‘Car’s registered to a Mrs Olivia Ann Trelawney, 729 Lilac Drive. That’s Sugar Heights.’

‘Where most good Mercedeses go to sleep when their long day’s work is done,’ Hodges said. ‘Find out if she’s at home, Officer Shammington. If she’s not, see if you can track her down. Can you do that?’

‘Yes, sir, absolutely.’

‘Just routine, right? A stolen-car inquiry.’

‘You got it.’

Hodges turned to Pete. ‘Front of the cabin. Notice anything?’

‘No airbag deployment. He disabled them. Speaks to premeditation.’

‘Also speaks to him knowing how to do it. What do you make of the mask?’

Pete peered through the droplets of rain on the driver’s side window, not touching the glass. Lying on the leather driver’s seat was a rubber mask, the kind you pulled over your head. Tufts of orange Bozo-ish hair stuck up above the temples like horns. The nose was a red rubber bulb. Without a head to stretch it, the red-lipped smile had become a sneer.

‘Creepy as hell. You ever see that TV movie about the clown in the sewer?’

Hodges shook his head. Later – only weeks before his retirement – he bought a DVD copy of the film, and Pete was right. The mask-face was very close to the face of Pennywise, the clown in the movie.

The two of them walked around the car again, this time noting blood on the tires and rocker panels. A lot of it was going to wash off before the tarp and the techs arrived; it was still forty minutes shy of seven A.M.

‘Officers!’ Hodges called, and when they gathered: ‘Who’s got a cell phone with a camera?’

They all did. Hodges directed them into a circle around what he was already thinking of as the deathcar – one word, deathcar, just like that – and they began snapping pictures.

Officer Shammington was standing a little apart, talking on his cell phone. Pete beckoned him over. ‘Do you have an age on the Trelawney woman?’

Shammington consulted his notebook. ‘DOB on her driver’s license is February third, 1957. Which makes her … uh …’

‘Fifty-two,’ Hodges said. He and Pete Huntley had been working together for a dozen years, and by now a lot of things didn’t have to be spoken aloud. Olivia Trelawney was the right sex and age for the Park Rapist, but totally wrong for the role of spree killer. They knew there had been cases of people losing control of their vehicles and accidentally driving into groups of people – only five years ago, in this very city, a man in his eighties, borderline senile, had plowed his Buick Electra into a sidewalk café, killing one and injuring half a dozen others – but Olivia Trelawney didn’t fit that profile, either. Too young.

Plus, there was the mask.

But …

But.

15

The bill comes on a silver tray. Hodges lays his plastic on top of it and sips his coffee while he waits for it to come back. He’s comfortably full, and in the middle of the day that condition usually leaves him ready for a two-hour nap. Not this afternoon. This afternoon he has never felt more awake.

The but had been so apparent that neither of them had to say it out loud – not to the motor patrolmen (more arriving all the time, although the goddam tarp never got there until quarter past seven) and not to each other. The doors of the SL500 were locked and the ignition slot was empty. There was no sign of tampering that either detective could see, and later that day the head mechanic from the city’s Mercedes dealership confirmed that.

‘How hard would it be for someone to slim-jim a window?’ Hodges had asked the mechanic. ‘Pop the lock that way?’

‘All but impossible,’ the mechanic had said. ‘These Mercs are built. If someone did manage to do it, it would leave signs.’ He had tilted his cap back on his head. ‘What happened is plain and simple, Officers. She left the key in the ignition and ignored the reminder chime when she got out. Her mind was probably on something else. The thief saw the key and took the car. I mean, he must have had the key. How else could he lock the car when he left it?’