Mr. Mercedes

1

Brady Hartsfield cruises the tangle of West Side streets until seven-thirty, when dusk starts to drain the blue from the late spring sky. His first wave of customers, between three and six P.M., consists of after-school kids wearing backpacks and waving crumpled dollar bills. Most don’t even look at him. They’re too busy blabbing to their buddies or talking into the cell phones they see not as accessories but as necessities every bit as vital as food and air. A few of them say thank you, but most don’t bother. Brady doesn’t mind. He doesn’t want to be looked at and he doesn’t want to be remembered. To these brats he’s just the sugar-pusher in the white uniform, and that’s the way he likes it.

From six to seven is dead time, while the little animals go in for their dinners. Maybe a few—the ones who say thank you—even talk to their parents. Most probably go right on poking the buttons of their phones while Mommy and Daddy yak to each other about their jobs or watch the evening news so they can find out all about the big world out there, where movers and shakers are actually doing shit.

During his last half hour, business picks up again. This time it’s the parents as well as the kids who approach the jingling Mr. Tastey truck, buying ice cream treats they’ll eat with their asses (mostly fat ones) snugged down in backyard lawnchairs. He almost pities them. They are people of little vision, as stupid as ants crawling around their hill. A mass killer is serving them ice cream, and they have no idea.

From time to time, Brady has wondered how hard it would be to poison a truckload of treats: the vanilla, the chocolate, the Berry Good, the Flavor of the Day, the Tastey Frosteys, the Brownie Delites, even the Freeze-Stix and Whistle Pops. He has gone so far as to research this on the Internet. He has done what Anthony “Tones” Frobisher, his boss at Discount Electronix, would probably call a “feasibility study,” and concluded that, while it would be possible, it would also be stupid. It’s not that he’s averse to taking a risk; he got away with the Mercedes Massacre when the odds of being caught were better than those of getting away clean. But he doesn’t want to be caught now. He’s got work to do. His work this late spring and early summer is the fat ex-cop, K. William Hodges.

He might cruise his West Side route with a truckload of poisoned ice cream after the ex-cop gets tired of playing with the gun he keeps beside his living room chair and actually uses it. But not until. The fat ex-cop bugs Brady Hartsfield. Bugs him bad. Hodges retired with full honors, they even threw him a party, and how was that right when he had failed to catch the most notorious criminal this city had ever seen?

2

On his last circuit of the day, he cruises by the house on Teaberry Lane where Jerome Robinson, Hodges’s hired boy, lives with his mother, father, and kid sister. Jerome Robinson also bugs Brady. Robinson is good-looking, he works for the ex-cop, and he goes out every weekend with different girls. All of the girls are pretty. Some are even white. That’s wrong. It’s against nature.

“Hey!” Robinson cries. “Mr. Ice Cream Man! Wait up!”

He sprints lightly across his lawn with his dog, a big Irish setter, running at his heels. Behind them comes the kid sister, who is about nine.

“Get me a chocolate, Jerry!” she cries. “Pleeeease?”

He even has a white kid’s name. Jerome. Jerry. It’s offensive. Why can’t he be Traymore? Or Devon? Or Leroy? Why can’t he be fucking Kunta Kinte?

Jerome’s feet are sockless in his moccasins, his ankles still green from cutting the ex-cop’s lawn. He’s got a big smile on his undeniably handsome face, and when he flashes it at his weekend dates, Brady just bets those girls drop their pants and hold out their arms. Come on in, Jerry.

Brady himself has never been with a girl.

“How you doin, man?” Jerome asks.

Brady, who has left the wheel and now stands at the service window, grins. “I’m fine. It’s almost quitting time, and that always makes me fine.”

“You have any chocolate left? The Little Mermaid there wants some.”

Brady gives him a thumbs-up, still grinning. It’s pretty much the same grin he was wearing under the clown mask when he tore into the crowd of sad-sack job-seekers at City Center with the accelerator pedal pushed to the mat. “It’s a big ten-four on the chocolate, my friend.”

The little sister arrives, eyes sparkling, braids bouncing. “Don’t you call me Little Mermaid, Jere, I hate that!”

She’s nine or so, and also has a ridiculously white name: Barbara. Brady finds the idea of a black child named Barbara so surreal it’s not even offensive. The only one in the family with a nigger name is the dog, standing on his hind legs with his paws planted on the side of the truck and his tail wagging.

“Down, Odell!” Jerome says, and the dog sits, panting and looking cheerful.

“What about you?” Brady asks Jerome. “Something for you?”

“A vanilla soft-serve, please.”

Vanilla’s what you’d like to be, Brady thinks, and gets them their orders.

He likes to keep an eye on Jerome, he likes to know about Jerome, because these days Jerome seems to be the only person who spends any time with the Det-Ret, and in the last two months Brady has observed them together enough to see that Hodges treats the kid as a friend as well as a part-time employee. Brady has never had friends himself, friends are dangerous, but he knows what they are: sops to the ego. Emotional safety nets. When you’re feeling bad, who do you turn to? Your friends, of course, and your friends say stuff like aw gee and cheer up and we’re with you and let’s go out for a drink. Jerome is only seventeen, not yet old enough to go out with Hodges for a drink (unless it’s soda), but he can always say cheer up and I’m with you. So he bears watching.

Mrs. Trelawney didn’t have any friends. No husband, either. Just her old sick mommy. Which made her easy meat, especially after the cops started working her over. Why, they had done half of Brady’s work for him. The rest he did for himself, pretty much right under the scrawny bitch’s nose.

“Here you go,” Brady says, handing Jerome ice cream treats he wishes were spiked with arsenic. Or maybe warfarin. Load them up with that and they’d bleed out from their eyes and ears and mouths. Not to mention their assholes. He imagines all the kids on the West Side dropping their packs and their precious cell phones while the blood poured from every orifice. What a disaster movie that would make!

Jerome gives him a ten, and along with his change, Brady hands back a dog biscuit. “For Odell,” he says.

“Thanks, mister!” Barbara says, and licks her chocolate cone. “This is good!”

“Enjoy it, honey.”

He drives the Mr. Tastey truck, and he frequently drives a Cyber Patrol VW on out-calls, but his real job this summer is Detective K. William Hodges (Ret.). And making sure Detective Hodges (Ret.) uses that gun.

Brady heads back toward Loeb’s Ice Cream Factory to turn in his truck and change into his street clothes. He keeps to the speed limit the whole way.

Always safe, never sorry.

3

After leaving DeMasio’s—with a side-trip to deal with the bullies hassling the little kid beneath the turnpike extension overpass—Hodges simply drives, piloting his Toyota through the city streets without any destination in mind. Or so he thinks until he realizes he is on Lilac Drive in the posh lakeside suburb of Sugar Heights. There he pulls over and parks across the street from a gated drive with a plaque reading 729 on one of the fieldstone posts.

The late Olivia Trelawney’s house stands at the top of an asphalt drive almost as wide as the street it fronts. On the gate is a FOR SALE sign inviting Qualified Buyers to call MICHAEL ZAFRON REALTY & FINE HOMES. Hodges thinks that sign is apt to be there awhile, given the housing market in this Year of Our Lord, 2010. But somebody is keeping the grass cut, and given the size of the lawn, the somebody must be using a mower a lot bigger than Hodges’s Lawn-Boy.

Who’s paying for the upkeep? Got to be Mrs. T.’s estate. She had certainly been rolling in dough. He seems to recall that the probated figure was in the neighborhood of seven million dollars. For the first time since his retirement, when he turned the unsolved case of the City Center Massacre over to Pete Huntley and Isabelle Jaynes, Hodges wonders if Mrs. T.’s mother is still alive. He remembers the scoliosis that bent the poor old lady almost double, and left her in terrible pain… but scoliosis isn’t necessarily fatal. Also, hadn’t Olivia Trelawney had a sister living somewhere out west?

He fishes for the sister’s name but can’t come up with it. What he does remember is that Pete took to calling Mrs. Trelawney Mrs. Twitchy, because she couldn’t stop adjusting her clothes, and brushing at tightly bunned hair that needed no brushing, and fiddling with the gold band of her Patek Philippe watch, turning it around and around on her bony wrist. Hodges disliked her; Pete had almost come to loathe her. Which made saddling her with some of the blame for the City Center atrocity rather satisfying. She had enabled the guy, after all; how could there be any doubt? She had been given two keys when she bought the Mercedes, but had been able to produce only one.

Then, shortly before Thanksgiving, the suicide.

Hodges remembers clearly what Pete said when they got the news: “If she meets those dead people on the other side—especially the Cray girl and her baby—she’s going to have some serious questions to answer.” For Pete it had been the final confirmation: somewhere in her mind, Mrs. T. had known all along that she had left her key in the ignition of the car she called her Gray Lady.

Hodges had believed it, too. The question is, does he still? Or has the poison-pen letter he got yesterday from the self-confessed Mercedes Killer changed his mind?

Maybe not, but that letter raises questions. Suppose Mr. Mercedes had written a similar missive to Mrs. Trelawney? Mrs. Trelawney with all those tics and insecurities just below a thin crust of defiance? Wasn’t it possible? Mr. Mercedes certainly would have known about the anger and contempt with which the public had showered her in the wake of the killings; all he had to do was read the Letters to the Editor page of the local paper.

Is it possible—

But here his thoughts break off, because a car has pulled up behind him, so close it’s almost touching his Toyota’s bumper. There are no jackpot lights on the roof, but it’s a late-model Crown Vic, powder blue. The man getting out from behind the wheel is burly and crewcut, his sportcoat no doubt covering a gun in a shoulder holster. If this were a city detective, Hodges knows, the gun would be a Glock .40, just like the one in his safe at home. But he’s not a city detective. Hodges still knows them all.

He rolls down his window.

“Afternoon, sir,” Crewcut says. “May I ask what you’re doing here? Because you’ve been parked quite awhile.”

Hodges glances at his watch and sees this is true. It’s almost four-thirty. Given the rush-hour traffic downtown, he’ll be lucky to get home in time to watch Scott Pelley on CBS Evening News. He used to watch NBC until he decided Brian Williams was a good-natured goof who’s too fond of YouTube videos. Not the sort of newscaster he wants when it seems like the whole world is falling apa—

“Sir? Sincerely hoping for an answer here.” Crewcut bends down. The side of his sportcoat gapes open. Not a Glock but a Ruger. Sort of a cowboy gun, in Hodges’s opinion.

“And I,” Hodges says, “am sincerely hoping you have the authority to ask.”

His interlocutor’s brow creases. “Beg pardon?”

“I think you’re private security,” Hodges says patiently, “but I want to see some ID. Then, you know what? I want to see your carry-concealed permit for the cannon you’ve got inside your coat. And it better be in your wallet and not in the glove compartment of your car, or you’re in violation of section nineteen of the city firearms code, which, briefly stated, is this: ‘If you carry concealed, you must also carry your permit to carry concealed.’ So let’s see your paperwork.”

Crewcut’s frown deepens. “Are you a cop?”

“Retired,” Hodges says, “but that doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten either my rights or your responsibilities. Let me see your ID and your carry permit, please. You don’t have to hand them over—”

“You’re damn right I don’t.”

“—but I want to see them. Then we can discuss my presence here on Lilac Drive.”

Crewcut thinks it over, but only for a few seconds. Then he takes out his wallet and flips it open. In this city—as in most, Hodges thinks—security personnel treat retired cops as they would those on active duty, because retired cops have plenty of friends who are on active duty, and who can make life difficult if given a reason to do so. The guy turns out to be Radney Peeples, and his company card identifies him as an employee of Vigilant Guard Service. He also shows Hodges a permit to carry concealed, which is good until June of 2012.

“Radney, not Rodney,” Hodges says. “Like Radney Foster, the country singer.”

Foster’s face breaks into a grin. “That’s right.”

“Mr. Peeples, my name is Bill Hodges, I ended my tour as a Detective First Class, and my last big case was the Mercedes Killer. I’m guessing that’ll give you a pretty good idea of what I’m doing here.”

“Mrs. Trelawney,” Foster says, and steps back respectfully as Hodges opens his car door, gets out, and stretches. “Little trip down Memory Lane, Detective?”

“I’m just a mister these days.” Hodges offers his hand. Peeples shakes it. “Otherwise, you’re correct. I retired from the cops at about the same time Mrs. Trelawney retired from life in general.”

“That was sad,” Peeples said. “Do you know that kids egged her gate? Not just at Halloween, either. Three or four times. We caught one bunch, the others…” He shook his head. “Plus toilet paper.”

“Yeah, they love that,” Hodges says.

“And one night someone tagged the lefthand gatepost. We got it taken care of before she saw it, and I’m glad. You know what it said?”

Hodges shakes his head.

Peeples lowers his voice. “KILLER CUNT is what it said, in big drippy capital letters. Which was absolutely not fair. She goofed up, that’s all. Is there any of us who haven’t at one time or another?”

“Not me, that’s for sure,” Hodges says.

“Right. Bible says let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”

That’ll be the day, Hodges thinks, and asks (with honest curiosity), “Did you like her?”

Peeples’s eyes shift up and to the left, an involuntary movement Hodges has seen in a great many interrogation rooms over the years. It means Peeples is either going to duck the question or outright lie.

It turns out to be a duck.

“Well,” he says, “she treated us right at Christmas. She sometimes mixed up the names, but she knew who we all were, and we each got forty dollars and a bottle of whiskey. Good whiskey. Do you think we got that from her husband?” He snorts. “Ten bucks tucked inside a Hallmark card was what we got when that skinflint was still in the saddle.”

“Who exactly does Vigilant work for?”

“It’s called the Sugar Heights Association. You know, one of those neighborhood things. They fight over the zoning regulations when they don’t like em and make sure everyone in the neighborhood keeps to a certain… uh, standard, I guess you’d say. There are lots of rules. Like you can put up white lights at Christmas but not colored ones. And they can’t blink.”

Hodges rolls his eyes. Peeples grins. They have gone from potential antagonists to colleagues—almost, anyway—and why? Because Hodges happened to recognize the guy’s slightly off-center first name. You could call that luck, but there’s always something that will get you on the same side as the person you want to question, something, and part of Hodges’s success on the cops came from being able to recognize it, at least in most cases. It’s a talent Pete Huntley never had, and Hodges is delighted to find his remains in good working order.

“I think she had a sister,” he says. “Mrs. Trelawney, I mean. Never met her, though, and can’t remember the name.”

“Janelle Patterson,” Peeples says promptly.

“You have met her, I take it.”

“Yes indeed. She’s good people. Bears a resemblance to Mrs. Trelawney, but younger and better-looking.” His hands describe an hourglass shape in the air. “More filled out. Do you happen to know if there’s been any progress on the Mercedes thing, Mr. Hodges?”

This isn’t a question Hodges would ordinarily answer, but if you want to get information, you have to give information. And what he has is safe enough, because it isn’t information at all. He uses the phrase Pete Huntley used at lunch a few hours ago. “Dead in the water.”

Peeples nods as if this is no more than he expected. “Crime of impulse. No ties to any of the vics, no motive, just a goddam thrill-killing. Best chance of getting him is if he tries to do it again, don’t you think?”

Mr. Mercedes says he won’t, Hodges thinks, but this is information he absolutely doesn’t want to give out, so he agrees. Collegial agreement is always good.

“Mrs. T. left a big estate,” Hodges says, “and I’m not just talking about the house. I wonder if the sister inherited.”

“Oh yeah,” Peeples says. He pauses, then says something Hodges himself will say to someone else in the not too distant future. “Can I trust your discretion?”

“Yes.” When asked such a question, the simple answer is best. No qualifiers.

“The Patterson woman was living in Los Angeles when her sister… you know. The pills.”

Hodges nods.

“Married, but no children. Not a happy marriage. When she found out she had inherited megabucks and a Sugar Heights estate, she divorced the husband like a shot and came east.” Peeples jerks a thumb at the gate, the wide drive, and the big house. “Lived there for a couple of months while the will was going through probate. Got close with Mrs. Wilcox, down at 640. Mrs. Wilcox likes to talk, and sees me as a friend.”

This might mean anything from coffee-buddies to afternoon sex.

“Miz Patterson took over visiting the mother, who lived in a condo building downtown. You know about the mother?”

“Elizabeth Wharton,” Hodges says. “Wonder if she’s still alive.”

“I’m pretty sure she is.”

“Because she had terrible scoliosis.” Hodges takes a little hunched-over walk to demonstrate. If you want to get, you have to give.

“Is that so? Too bad. Anyway, Helen—Mrs. Wilcox—says that Miz Patterson visited as regular as clockwork, just like Mrs. Trelawney did. Until a month ago, that is. Then things must have got worse, because I believe the old lady’s now in a nursing home in Warsaw County. Miz Patterson moved into the condo herself. And that’s where she is now. I still see her every now and then, though. Last time was a week ago, when the real estate guy showed the house.”

Hodges decides he’s gotten everything he can reasonably expect from Radney Peeples. “Thanks for the update. I’m going to roll. Sorry we kind of got off on the wrong foot.”

“Not at all,” Peeples says, giving Hodges’s offered hand two brisk pumps. “You handled it like a pro. Just remember, I never said anything. Janelle Patterson may be living downtown, but she’s still part of the Association, and that makes her a client.”

“You never said a word,” Hodges says, getting back into his car. He hopes that Helen Wilcox’s husband won’t catch his wife and this beefcake in the sack together, if that is indeed going on; it would probably be the end of Vigilant Guard Service’s arrangement with the residents of Sugar Heights. Peeples himself would immediately be terminated for cause. About that there is no doubt at all.

Probably she just trots out to his car with fresh-baked cookies, Hodges thinks as he drives away. You’ve been watching too much Nazi couples therapy on afternoon TV.

Not that Radney Peeples’s love-life matters to him. What matters to Hodges as he heads back to his much humbler home on the West Side is that Janelle Patterson inherited her sister’s estate, Janelle Patterson is living right here in town (at least for the time being), and Janelle Patterson must have done something with the late Olivia Trelawney’s possessions. That would include her personal papers, and her personal papers might contain a letter—possibly more than one—from the freako who has reached out to Hodges. If such correspondence exists, he would like to see it.

Of course this is police business and K. William Hodges is no longer a policeman. By pursuing it he is skating well beyond the bounds of what is legal and he knows it—for one thing, he is withholding evidence—but he has no intention of stopping just yet. The cocky arrogance of the freako’s letter has pissed him off. But, he admits, it’s pissed him off in a good way. It’s given him a sense of purpose, and after the last few months, that seems like a pretty terrific thing.

If I do happen to make a little progress, I’ll turn the whole thing over to Pete.

He’s not looking in the rearview mirror as this thought crosses his mind, but if he had been, he would have seen his eyes flick momentarily up and to the left.

4

Hodges parks his Toyota in the sheltering overhang to the left of his house that serves as his garage, and pauses to admire his freshly cut lawn before going to the door. There he finds a note sticking out of the mail slot. His first thought is Mr. Mercedes, but such a thing would be bold even for that guy.

It’s from Jerome. His neat printing contrasts wildly with the bullshit jive of the message.

Hodges shakes his head wearily but can’t help smiling. His hired kid gets straight As in advanced math, he can replace fallen gutters, he fixes Hodges’s email when it goes blooey (as it frequently does, mostly due to his own mismanagement), he can do basic plumbing, he can speak French pretty well, and if you ask what he’s reading, he’s apt to bore you for half an hour with the blood symbolism of D. H. Lawrence. He doesn’t want to be white, but being a gifted black male in an upper-middle-class family has presented him with what he calls “identity challenges.” He says this in a joking way, but Hodges does not believe he’s joking. Not really.

Jerome’s college professor dad and CPA mom—both humor-challenged, in Hodges’s opinion—would no doubt be aghast at this communication. They might even feel their son in need of psychological counseling. But they won’t find out from Hodges.

“Jerome, Jerome, Jerome,” he says, letting himself in. Jerome and his chos fo hos. Jerome who can’t decide, at least not yet, on which Ivy League college he wants to attend; that any of the big boys will accept him is a foregone conclusion. He’s the only person in the neighborhood whom Hodges thinks of as a friend, and really, the only one he needs. Hodges believes friendship is overrated, and in this way, if in no other, he is like Brady Hartsfield.

He has made it in time for most of the evening news, but decides against it. There is only so much Gulf oil-spill and Tea Party politics he can take. He turns on his computer instead, launches Firefox, and plugs Under Debbie’s Blue Umbrella into the search field. There are only six results, a very small catch in the vast fishy sea of the Internet, and only one that matches the phrase exactly. Hodges clicks on it and a picture appears.

Under a sky filled with threatening clouds is a country hillside. Animated rain—a simple repeating loop, he judges—is pouring down in silvery streams. But the two people seated beneath a large blue umbrella, a young man and a young woman, are safe and dry. They are not kissing, but their heads are close together. They appear to be in deep conversation.

Below the picture, there’s a brief description of the Blue Umbrella’s raison d’être.

Below this is a button marked GET STARTED NOW! Hodges mouses his cursor onto it, then hesitates. About six months ago, Jerome had to delete his email address and give him a new one, because everyone in Hodges’s address book had gotten a message saying he was stranded in New York, someone had stolen his wallet with all his credit cards inside, and he needed money to get home. Would the email recipient please send fifty dollars—more if he or she could afford it—to a Mail Boxes Etc. in Tribeca. “I’ll pay you back as soon as I get this mess straightened out,” the message concluded.

Hodges was deeply embarrassed because the begging request had gone out to his ex, his brother in Toledo, and better than four dozen cops he’d worked with over the years. Also his daughter. He had expected his phone—both landline and cell—to ring like crazy for the next forty-eight hours or so, but very few people called, and only Alison seemed actually concerned. This didn’t surprise him. Allie, a Gloomy Gus by nature, has been expecting her father to lose his shit ever since he turned fifty-five.

Hodges had called on Jerome for help, and Jerome explained he had been a victim of phishing.

“Mostly the people who phish your address just want to sell Viagra or knockoff jewelry, but I’ve seen this kind before, too. It happened to my Environmental Studies teacher, and he ended up paying people back almost a thousand bucks. Of course, that was in the old days, before people wised up—”

“Old days meaning exactly when, Jerome?”

Jerome had shrugged. “Two, three years ago. It’s a new world out there, Mr. Hodges. Just be grateful the phisherman didn’t hit you with a virus that ate all your files and apps.”

“I wouldn’t lose much,” Hodges had said. “Mostly I just surf the Web. Although I would miss the computer solitaire. It plays ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’ when I win.”

Jerome had given him his patented I’m-too-polite-to-call-you-dumb look. “What about your tax returns? I helped you do em online last year. You want someone to see what you paid Uncle Sugar? Besides me, I mean?”

Hodges admitted he didn’t.

In that strange (and somehow endearing) pedagogical voice the intelligent young always seem to employ when endeavoring to educate the clueless old, Jerome said, “Your computer isn’t just a new kind of TV set. Get that out of your mind. Every time you turn it on, you’re opening a window into your life. If someone wants to look, that is.”

All this goes through his head as he looks at the blue umbrella and the endlessly falling rain. Other stuff goes through it, too, stuff from his cop-mind, which had been asleep but is now wide awake.

Maybe Mr. Mercedes wants to talk. On the other hand, maybe what he really wants is to look through that window Jerome was talking about.

Instead of clicking on GET STARTED NOW!, Hodges exits the site, grabs his phone, and punches one of the few numbers he has on speed-dial. Jerome’s mother answers, and after some brief and pleasant chitchat, she hands off to young Mr. Chos Fo Hos himself.

Speaking in the most horrible Ebonics dialect he can manage, Hodges says: “Yo, my homie, you keepin dem bitches in line? Dey earnin? You representin?”

“Oh, hi, Mr. Hodges. Yes, everything’s fine.”

“You don’t likes me talkin dis way on yo honkah, brah?”

“Uh…”

Jerome is honestly flummoxed, and Hodges takes pity on him. “The lawn looks terrific.”

“Oh. Good. Thanks. Can I do anything else for you?”

“Maybe so. I was wondering if you could come by after school tomorrow. It’s a computer thing.”

“Sure. What’s the problem this time?”

“I’d rather not discuss it on the phone,” Hodges says, “but you might find it interesting. Four o’clock okay?”

“That works.”

“Good. Do me a favor and leave Tyrone Feelgood Deelite at home.”

“Okay, Mr. Hodges, will do.”

“When are you going to lighten up and call me Bill? Mr. Hodges makes me feel like your American History teacher.”

“Maybe when I’m out of high school,” Jerome says, very seriously.

“Just as long as you know you can make the jump any time you want.”

Jerome laughs. The kid has got a great, full laugh. Hearing it always cheers Hodges up.

He sits at the computer desk in his little cubbyhole of an office, drumming his fingers, thinking. It occurs to him that he hardly ever uses this room during the evening. If he wakes at two A.M. and can’t get back to sleep, yes. He’ll come in and play solitaire for an hour or so before returning to bed. But he’s usually in his La-Z-Boy between seven and midnight, watching old movies on AMC or TCM and stuffing his face with fats and sugars.

He grabs his phone again, dials Directory Assistance, and asks the robot on the other end if it has a number for Janelle Patterson. He’s not hopeful; now that she is the Seven Million Dollar Woman, and newly divorced in the bargain, Mrs. Trelawney’s sister has probably got an unlisted number.

But the robot coughs it up. Hodges is so surprised he has to fumble for a pencil and then punch 2 for a repeat. He drums his fingers some more, thinking how he wants to approach her. It will probably come to nothing, but it would be his next step if he were still on the cops. Since he’s not, it will take a little extra finesse.

He is amused to discover how eagerly he welcomes this challenge.

5

Brady calls ahead to Sammy’s Pizza on his way home and picks up a small pepperoni and mushroom pie. If he thought his mother would eat a couple of slices, he would have gotten a bigger one, but he knows better.

Maybe if it was pepperoni and Popov, he thinks. If they sold that, I’d have to skip the medium and go straight to a large.

There are tract houses on the city’s North Side. They were built between Korea and Vietnam, which means they all look the same and they’re all turning to shit. Most still have plastic toys on the crabgrassy lawns, although it’s now full dark. Chaz Hartsfield is at 49 Elm Street, where there are no elms and probably never were. It’s just that all the streets in this area of the city—known, reasonably enough, as Northfield—are named for trees.

Brady parks behind Ma’s rustbucket Honda, which needs a new exhaust system, new points, and new plugs. Not to mention an inspection sticker.

Let her take care of it, Brady thinks, but she won’t. He will. He’ll have to. The way he takes care of everything.

The way I took care of Frankie, he thinks. Back when the basement was just the basement instead of my control center.

Brady and Deborah Ann Hartsfield don’t talk about Frankie.

The door is locked. At least he’s taught her that much, although God knows it hasn’t been easy. She’s the kind of person who thinks okay solves all of life’s problems. Tell her Put the half-and-half back in the fridge after you use it, she says okay. Then you come home and there it sits on the counter, going sour. You say Please do a wash so I can have a clean uni for the ice cream truck tomorrow, she says okay. But when you poke your head into the laundry room, everything’s still there in the basket.

The cackle of the TV greets him. Something about an immunity challenge, so it’s Survivor. He has tried to tell her it’s all fake, a set-up. She says yes, okay, she knows, but she still never misses it.

“I’m home, Ma!”

“Hi, honey!” Only a moderate slur, which is good for this hour of the evening. If I was her liver, Brady thinks, I’d jump out of her mouth some night while she’s snoring and run the fuck away.

He nonetheless feels that little flicker of anticipation as he goes into the living room, the flicker he hates. She’s sitting on the couch in the white silk robe he got her for Christmas, and he can see more white where it splits apart high up on her thighs. Her underwear. He refuses to think the word panties in connection with his mother, it’s too sexy, but it’s down there in his mind, just the same: a snake hiding in poison sumac. Also, he can see the small round shadows of her nipples. It’s not right that such things should turn him on—she’s pushing fifty, she’s starting to flab out around the middle, she’s his mother, for God’s sake—but…

But.

“I brought pizza,” he says, holding up the box and thinking, I already ate.

“I already ate,” she says. Probably she did. A few lettuce leaves and a teensy tub of yogurt. It’s how she keeps what’s left of her figure.

“It’s your favorite,” he says, thinking, You enjoy it, honey.

“You enjoy it, sweetie,” she says. She lifts her glass and takes a ladylike sip. Gulping comes later, after he’s gone to bed and she thinks he’s asleep. “Get yourself a Coke and come sit beside me.” She pats the couch. Her robe opens a little more. White robe, white panties.

Underwear, he reminds himself. Underwear, that’s all, she’s my mother, she’s Ma, and when it’s your ma it’s just underwear.

She sees him looking and smiles. She does not adjust the robe. “The survivors are on Fiji this year.” She frowns. “I think it’s Fiji. One of those islands, anyway. Come and watch with me.”

“Nah, I guess I’ll go downstairs and work for awhile.”

“What project is this, honey?”

“A new kind of router.” She wouldn’t know a router from a grouter, so that’s safe enough.

“One of these days you’ll invent something that will make us rich,” she says. “I know you will. Then, goodbye electronics store. And goodbye to that ice cream truck.” She looks at him with wide eyes that are only a little watery from the vodka. He doesn’t know how much she puts down in the course of an ordinary day, and counting empty bottles doesn’t work because she ditches them somewhere, but he knows her capacity is staggering.

“Thanks,” he says. Feeling flattered in spite of himself. Feeling other stuff, too. Very much in spite of himself.

“Come give your Ma a kiss, honeyboy.”

He approaches the couch, careful not to look down the front of the gaping robe and trying to ignore that crawling sensation just below his belt buckle. She turns her face to one side, but when he bends to kiss her cheek, she turns back and presses her damp half-open mouth to his. He tastes booze and smells the perfume she always dabs behind her ears. She dabs it other places, as well.

She places a palm on the nape of his neck and ruffles his hair with the tips of her fingers, sending a shiver all the way down to the small of his back. She touches his upper lip with the tip of her tongue, just a flick, there and gone, then pulls back and gives him the wide-eyed starlet stare.

“My honeyboy,” she breathes, like the heroine of some romantic chick-flick—the kind where the men wave swords and the women wear low-cut dresses with their cakes pushed up into shimmery globes.

He pulls away hastily. She smiles at him, then looks back at the TV, where good-looking young people in bathing suits are running along a beach. He opens the pizza box with hands that are shaking slightly, takes out a slice, and drops it in her salad bowl.

“Eat that,” he says. “It’ll sop up the booze. Some of it.”

“Don’t be mean to Mommy,” she says, but with no rancor and certainly no hurt. She pulls her robe closed, doing it absently, already lost in the world of the survivors again, intent on discovering who will be voted off the island this week. “And don’t forget about my car, Brady. It needs a sticker.”

“It needs a lot more than that,” he says, and goes into the kitchen. He grabs a Coke from the fridge, then opens the door to the basement. He stands there in the dark for a moment, then speaks a single word: “Control.” Below him, the fluorescents (he installed them himself, just as he remodeled the basement himself) flash on.

At the foot of the stairs, he thinks of Frankie. He almost always does when he stands in the place where Frankie died. The only time he didn’t think of Frankie was when he was preparing to make his run at City Center. During those weeks everything else left his mind, and what a relief that was.

Brady, Frankie said. His last word on Planet Earth. Gurgles and gasps didn’t count.

He puts his pizza and his soda on the worktable in the middle of the room, then goes into the closet-sized bathroom and drops trou. He won’t be able to eat, won’t be able to work on his new project (which is certainly not a router), he won’t be able to think, until he takes care of some urgent business.

In his letter to the fat ex-cop, he stated he was so sexually excited when he crashed into the job-seekers at City Center that he was wearing a condom. He further stated that he masturbates while reliving the event. If that were true, it would give a whole new meaning to the term autoerotic, but it isn’t. He lied a lot in that letter, each lie calculated to wind Hodges up a little more, and his bogus sex-fantasies weren’t the greatest of them.

He actually doesn’t have much interest in girls, and girls sense it. It’s probably why he gets along so well with Freddi Linklatter, his cyber-dyke colleague at Discount Electronix. For all Brady knows, she might think he’s gay. But he’s not gay, either. He’s largely a mystery to himself—an occluded front—but one thing he knows for sure: he’s not asexual, or not completely. He and his mother share a gothic rainbow of a secret, a thing not to be thought of unless it is absolutely necessary. When it does become necessary, it must be dealt with and put away again.

Ma, I see your panties, he thinks, and takes care of his business as fast as he can. There’s Vaseline in the medicine cabinet, but he doesn’t use it. He wants it to burn.

6

Back in his roomy basement workspace, Brady speaks another word. This one is chaos.

On the far side of the control room is a long shelf about three feet above the floor. Ranged along it are seven laptop computers with their darkened screens flipped up. There’s also a chair on casters, so he can roll rapidly from one to another. When Brady speaks the magic word, all seven come to life. The number 20 appears on each screen, then 19, then 18. If he allows this countdown to reach zero, a suicide program will kick in, scrubbing his hard discs clean and overwriting them with gibberish.

“Darkness,” he says, and the big countdown numbers disappear, replaced by desktop images that show scenes from The Wild Bunch, his favorite movie.

He tried apocalypse and Armageddon, much better start-up words in his opinion, full of ringing finality, but the word-recognition program has problems with them, and the last thing he wants is having to replace all his files because of a stupid glitch. Two-syllable words are safer. Not that there’s much on six of the seven computers. Number Three is the only one with what the fat ex-cop would call “incriminating information,” but he likes to look at that awesome array of computing power, all lit up as it is now. It makes the basement room feel like a real command center.

Brady considers himself a creator as well as a destroyer, but knows that so far he hasn’t managed to create anything that will exactly set the world on fire, and he’s haunted by the possibility that he never will. That he has, at best, a second-rate creative mind.

Take the Rolla, for instance. That had come to him in a flash of inspiration one night when he’d been vacuuming the living room (like using the washing machine, such a chore is usually beneath his mother). He had sketched a device that looked like a footstool on bearings, with a motor and a short hose attachment on the underside. With the addition of a simple computer program, Brady reckoned the device could be designed to move around a room, vacuuming as it went. If it hit an obstacle—a chair, say, or a wall—it would turn on its own and start off in a new direction.

He had actually begun building a prototype when he saw a version of his Rolla trundling busily around the window display of an upscale appliance store downtown. The name was even similar; it was called a Roomba. Someone had beaten him to it, and that someone was probably making millions. It wasn’t fair, but what is? Life is a crap carnival with shit prizes.

He has blue-boxed the TVs in the house, which means Brady and his ma are getting not just basic cable but all the premium channels (including a few exotic add-ins like Al Jazeera) for free, and there’s not a damn thing Time Warner, Comcast, or XFINITY can do about it. He has hacked the DVD player so it will run not just American discs but those from every region of the world. It’s easy—three or four quick steps with the remote, plus a six-digit recognition code. Great in theory, but does it get used? Not at 49 Elm Street, it doesn’t. Ma won’t watch anything that isn’t spoon-fed to her by the four major networks, and Brady himself is mostly working one of his two jobs or down here in the control room, where he does his actual work.

The blue boxes are great, but they’re also illegal. For all he knows, the DVD hacks are illegal, too. Not to mention his Redbox and Netflix hacks. All his best ideas are illegal. Take Thing One and Thing Two.

Thing One had been on the passenger seat of Mrs. Trelawney’s Mercedes when he left City Center on that foggy morning the previous April, with blood dripping from the bent grille and stippling the windshield. The idea came to him during the murky period three years ago, after he had decided to kill a whole bunch of people—what he then thought of as his terrorist run—but before he had decided just how, when, or where to do it. He had been full of ideas then, jittery, not sleeping much. In those days he always felt as though he had just swallowed a whole Thermos of black coffee laced with amphetamines.

Thing One was a modified TV remote with a microchip for a brain and a battery pack to boost its range… although the range was still pretty short. If you pointed it at a traffic light twenty or thirty yards away, you could change red to yellow with one tap, red to blinking yellow with two taps, and red to green with three.

Brady was delighted with it, and had used it several times (always while sitting parked in his old Subaru; the ice cream truck was far too conspicuous) at busy intersections. After several near misses, he had finally caused an actual accident. Just a fender-bender, but it had been fun to watch the two men arguing about whose fault it had been. For awhile it had looked like they might actually come to blows.

Thing Two came shortly afterward, but it was Thing One that settled Brady on his target, because it radically upped the chances of a successful getaway. The distance between City Center and the abandoned warehouse he had picked as a dumping spot for Mrs. Trelawney’s gray Mercedes was exactly 1.9 miles. There were eight traffic lights along the route he planned to take, and with his splendid gadget, he wouldn’t have to worry about any of them. But on that morning—Jesus Christ, wouldn’t you know it?—every one of those lights had been green. Brady understood the early hour had something to do with it, but it was still infuriating.

If I hadn’t had it, he thinks as he goes to the closet at the far end of the basement, at least four of those lights would have been red. That’s the way my life works.

Thing Two was the only one of his gadgets that turned out to be an actual moneymaker. Not big money, but as everyone knew, money isn’t everything. Besides, without Thing Two there would have been no Mercedes. And with no Mercedes, no City Center Massacre.

Good old Thing Two.

A big Yale padlock hangs from the hasp of the closet door. Brady opens it with a key on his ring. The lights inside—more new fluorescents—are already on. The closet is small and made even smaller by the plain board shelves. On one of them are nine shoeboxes. Inside each box is a pound of homemade plastic explosive. Brady has tested some of this stuff at an abandoned gravel pit far out in the country, and it works just fine.

If I was over there in Afghanistan, he thinks, dressed in a head-rag and one of those funky bathrobes, I could have quite a career blowing up troop carriers.

On another shelf, in another shoebox, are five cell phones. They’re the disposable kind the Lowtown drug dealers call burners. The phones, available at fine drugstores and convenience stores everywhere, are Brady’s project for tonight. They have to be modified so that a single number will ring all of them, creating the proper spark needed to detonate the boom-clay in the shoeboxes at the same time. He hasn’t actually decided to use the plastic, but part of him wants to. Yes indeed. He told the fat ex-cop he has no urge to replicate his masterpiece, but that was another lie. A lot depends on the fat ex-cop himself. If he does what Brady wants—as Mrs. Trelawney did what Brady wanted—he’s sure the urge will go away, at least for awhile.

If not… well…

He grabs the box of phones, starts out of the closet, then pauses and looks back. On one of the other shelves is a quilted woodman’s vest from L.L.Bean. If Brady were really going out in the woods, a Medium would suit him fine—he’s slim—but this one is an XL. On the breast is a smile decal, the one wearing dark glasses and showing its teeth. The vest holds four more one-pound blocks of plastic explosive, two in the outside pockets, two in the slash pockets on the inside. The body of the vest bulges, because it’s filled with ball bearings (just like the ones in Hodges’s Happy Slapper). Brady slashed the lining to pour them in. It even crossed his mind to ask Ma to sew the slashes up, and that gave him a good laugh as he sealed them shut with duct tape.

My very own suicide vest, he thinks affectionately.

He won’t use it… probably won’t use it… but this idea also has a certain attraction. It would put an end to everything. No more Discount Electronix, no more Cyber Patrol calls to dig peanut butter or saltine crumbs out of some elderly idiot’s CPU, no more ice cream truck. Also no more crawling snakes in the back of his mind. Or under his belt buckle.

He imagines doing it at a rock concert; he knows Springsteen is going to play Lakefront Arena this June. Or how about the Fourth of July parade down Lake Street, the city’s main drag? Or maybe on opening day of the Summer Sidewalk Art Festival and Street Fair, which happens every year on the first Saturday in August. That would be good, except wouldn’t he look funny, wearing a quilted vest on a hot August afternoon?

True, but such things can always be worked out by the creative mind, he thinks, spreading the disposable phones on his worktable and beginning to remove the SIM cards. Besides, the suicide vest is just a whatdoyoucallit, doomsday scenario. It will probably never be used. Nice to have it handy, though.

Before going upstairs, he sits down at his Number Three, goes online, and checks the Blue Umbrella. Nothing from the fat ex-cop.

Yet.

7

When Hodges uses the intercom outside Mrs. Wharton’s Lake Avenue condo at ten the next morning, he’s wearing a suit for only the second or third time since he retired. It feels good to be in a suit again, even though it’s tight at the waist and under the arms. A man in a suit feels like a working man.

A woman’s voice comes from the speaker. “Yes?”

“It’s Bill Hodges, ma’am. We spoke last night?”

“So we did, and you’re right on time. It’s 19-C, Detective Hodges.”

He starts to tell her that he’s no longer a detective, but the door is buzzing and so he doesn’t bother. Besides, he told her he was retired when they talked on the phone.

Janelle Patterson is waiting for him at the door, just as her sister was on the day of the City Center Massacre, when Hodges and Pete Huntley came to interview her the first time. The resemblance between the two women is enough to give Hodges a powerful sense of déjà vu. But as he makes his way down the short hall from the elevator to the apartment doorway (trying to walk rather than lumber), he sees that the differences outweigh the similarities. Patterson has the same light blue eyes and high cheekbones, but where Olivia Trelawney’s mouth was tight and pinched, the lips often white with a combination of strain and irritation, Janelle Patterson’s seem, even in repose, ready to smile. Or to bestow a kiss. Her lips are shiny with wet-look gloss; they look good enough to eat. And no boatneck tops for this lady. She’s wearing a snug turtleneck that cradles a pair of perfectly round breasts. They are not big, those breasts, but as Hodges’s dear old father used to say, more than a handful is wasted. Is he looking at the work of good foundation garments or a post-divorce enhancement? Enhancement seems more likely to Hodges. Thanks to her sister, she can afford all the bodywork she wants.

She extends her hand and gives him a good no-nonsense shake. “Thank you for coming.” As if it had been at her request.

“Glad you could see me,” he says, following her in.

That same kick-ass view of the lake smacks him in the face. He remembers it well, although they had only the one interview with Mrs. T. here; all the others were either at the big house in Sugar Heights or at the station. She had gone into hysterics during one of those station visits, he remembers. Everybody is blaming me, she said. The suicide had come not much later, only a matter of weeks.

“Would you like coffee, Detective? It’s Jamaican. Very tasty, I think.”

Hodges makes it a habit not to drink coffee in the middle of the morning, because doing so usually gives him savage acid reflux in spite of his Zantac. But he agrees.

He sits in one of the sling chairs by the wide living room window while he waits for her to come back from the kitchen. The day is warm and clear; on the lake, sailboats are zipping and curving like skaters. When she returns he stands up to take the silver tray she’s carrying, but Janelle smiles, shakes her head no, and sets it on the low coffee table with a graceful dip of her knees. Almost a curtsey.

Hodges has considered every possible twist and turn their conversation might take, but his forethought turns out to be irrelevant. It is as if, after carefully planning a seduction, the object of his desire has met him at the door in a shortie nightgown and fuck-me shoes.

“I want to find out who drove my sister to suicide,” she says as she pours their coffee into stout china mugs, “but I didn’t know how I should proceed. Your call was like a message from God. After our conversation, I think you’re the man for the job.”

Hodges is too dumbfounded to speak.

She offers him a mug. “If you want cream, you’ll have to pour it yourself. When it comes to additives, I take no responsibility.”

“Black is fine.”

She smiles. Her teeth are either perfect or perfectly capped. “A man after my own heart.”

He sips, mostly to buy time, but the coffee is delicious. He clears his throat and says, “As I told you when we talked last night, Mrs. Patterson, I’m no longer a police detective. On November twentieth of last year, I became just another private citizen. We need to have that up front.”

She regards him over the rim of her cup. Hodges wonders if the moist gloss on her lips leaves an imprint, or if lipstick technology has rendered that sort of thing obsolete. It’s a crazy thing to be wondering, but she’s a pretty lady. Also, he doesn’t get out much these days.

“As far as I’m concerned,” Janelle Patterson says, “there are only two words that matter in what you just said. One is private and the other is detective. I want to know who meddled with her, who toyed with her until she killed herself, and nobody in the police department cares. They’d like to catch the man who used her car to kill those people, oh yes, but about my sister—may I be vulgar?—they don’t give a shit.”

Hodges may be retired, but he still has his loyalties. “That isn’t necessarily true.”

“I understand why you’d say that, Detective—”

“Mister, please. Just Mr. Hodges. Or Bill, if you like.”

“Bill, then. And it is true. There’s a connection between those murders and my sister’s suicide, because the man who used the car is also the man who wrote the letter. And those other things. Those Blue Umbrella things.”

Easy, Hodges cautions himself. Don’t blow it.

“What letter are we talking about, Mrs. Patterson?”

“Janey. If you’re Bill, I’m Janey. Wait here. I’ll show you.”

She gets up and leaves the room. Hodges’s heart is beating hard—much harder than when he took on the trolls beneath the underpass—but he still appreciates that the view of Janey Patterson going away is as good as the one from the front.

Easy, boy, he tells himself again, and sips more coffee. Philip Marlowe you ain’t. His mug is already half empty, and no acid. Not a trace of it. Miracle coffee, he thinks.

She comes back holding two pieces of paper by the corners and with an expression of distaste. “I found it when I was going through the papers in Ollie’s desk. Her lawyer, Mr. Schron, was with me—she named him the executor of her will, so he had to be—but he was in the kitchen, getting himself a glass of water. He never saw this. I hid it.” She says it matter-of-factly, with no shame or defiance. “I knew what it was right away. Because of that. The guy left one on the steering wheel of her car. I guess you could call it his calling-card.”

She taps the sunglasses-wearing smile-face partway down the first page of the letter. Hodges has already noted it. He has also noted the letter’s font, which he has identified from his own word processing program as American Typewriter.

“When did you find it?”

She thinks back, calculating the passage of time. “I came for the funeral, which was near the end of November. I discovered that I was Ollie’s sole beneficiary when the will was read. That would have been the first week of December. I asked Mr. Schron if we could put off the inventory of Ollie’s assets and possessions until January, because I had some business to take care of back in L.A. He agreed.” She looks at Hodges, a level stare from blue eyes with a bright sparkle in them. “The business I had to take care of was divorcing my husband, who was—may I be vulgar again?—a philandering, coke-snorting asshole.”

Hodges has no desire to go down this sidetrack. “You returned to Sugar Heights in January?”

“Yes.”

“And found the letter then?”

“Yes.”

“Have the police seen it?” He knows the answer, January was over four months ago, but the question has to be asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I already told you! Because I don’t trust them!” That bright sparkle in her eyes overspills as she begins to cry.

8

She asks if he will excuse her. Hodges tells her of course. She disappears, presumably to get control of herself and repair her face. Hodges picks up the letter and reads it, taking small sips of coffee as he does so. The coffee really is delicious. Now, if he just had a cookie or two to go with it…

Here was Mr. Smiley-Face.

Janey Patterson has returned and is once again sitting opposite him, drinking her coffee, but for the moment Hodges barely notices her. He’s thinking back to the four or five interviews he and Pete conducted with Mrs. T. He’s remembering how she was always straightening the boatneck tops. Or tugging down her skirt. Or touching the corners of her pinched mouth, as if to remove a crumb of lipstick. Or winding a curl of hair around her finger and tugging at it. That too.

He goes back to the letter.

Following this zinger, there’s another of those sunglasses-wearing smile-faces, as if to say Just kidding.

The fuck you didn’t, Hodges thinks.

Hodges puts the letter down on the coffee table and says, “Holy shit.”

Janey Patterson nods. “That was pretty much my reaction.”

“He invited her to get in touch with him—”

Janey gives him an incredulous look. “Invited her? Try blackmailed her. ‘Do it or I’ll kill myself.’”

“According to you, she took him up on it. Have you seen any of their communications? Were there maybe printouts along with this letter?”

She shakes her head. “Ollie told my mother that she’d been chatting with what she called ‘a very disturbed man’ and trying to get him to seek help because he’d done a terrible thing. My mother was alarmed. She assumed Ollie was talking with the very disturbed man face-to-face, like in the park or a coffee shop or something. You have to remember she’s in her late eighties now. She knows about computers, but she’s vague on their practical uses. Ollie explained about chat-rooms—or tried to—but I’m not sure how much Mom actually understood. What she remembers is that Ollie said she talked to the very disturbed man underneath a blue umbrella.”

“Did your mother connect the man to the stolen Mercedes and the killings at City Center?”

“She never said anything that would make me believe so. Her short-term memory’s gotten very foggy. If you ask her about the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor, she can tell you exactly when she heard the news on the radio, and probably who the newscaster was. Ask her what she had for breakfast, or even where she is…” Janey shrugged. “She might be able to tell you, she might not.”

“And where is she, exactly?”

“A place called Sunny Acres, about thirty miles from here.” She laughs, a rueful sound with no joy in it. “Whenever I hear the name, I think of those old melodramas you see on Turner Classic Movies, where the heroine is declared insane and socked away in some awful drafty madhouse.”

She turns to look out at the lake. Her face has taken on an expression Hodges finds interesting: a bit pensive and a bit defensive. The more he looks at her, the more he likes her looks. The fine lines around her eyes suggest that she’s a woman who likes to laugh.

“I know who I’d be in one of those old movies,” she says, still looking out at the boats playing on the water. “The conniving sister who inherits the care of an elderly parent along with a pile of money. The cruel sister who keeps the money but ships the Aged P off to a creepy mansion where the old people get Alpo for dinner and are left to lie in their own urine all night. But Sunny’s not like that. It’s actually very nice. Not cheap, either. And Mom asked to go.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she says, mocking him with a little wrinkle of her nose. “Do you happen to remember her nurse? Mrs. Greene. Althea Greene.”

Hodges catches himself reaching into his jacket to consult a case notebook that’s no longer there. But after a moment’s thought he recalls the nurse without it. A tall and stately woman in white who seemed to glide rather than walk. With a mass of marcelled gray hair that made her look a bit like Elsa Lanchester in The Bride of Frankenstein. He and Pete had asked if she’d noticed Mrs. Trelawney’s Mercedes parked at the curb when she left on that Thursday night. She had replied she was quite sure she had, which to the team of Hodges and Huntley meant she wasn’t sure at all.

“Yeah, I remember her.”

“She announced her retirement almost as soon as I moved back from Los Angeles. She said that at sixty-four she no longer felt able to deal competently with a patient suffering from such serious disabilities, and she stuck to her guns even after I offered to bring in a nurse’s aide—two, if she wanted. I think she was appalled by the publicity that resulted from the City Center Massacre, but if it had been only that, she might have stayed.”

“Your sister’s suicide was the final straw?”

“I’m pretty sure it was. I won’t say Althea and Ollie were bosom buddies or anything, but they got on, and they saw eye to eye about Mom’s care. Now Sunny’s the best thing for her, and Mom’s relieved to be there. On her good days, at least. So am I. For one thing, they manage her pain better.”

“If I were to go out and talk to her…”

“She might remember a few things, or she might not.” She turns from the lake to look at him directly. “Will you take the job? I checked private detective rates online, and I’m prepared to do considerably better. Five thousand dollars a week, plus expenses. An eight-week minimum.”

Forty thousand for eight weeks’ work, Hodges marvels. Maybe he could be Philip Marlowe after all. He imagines himself in a ratty two-room office that gives on the third-floor hallway of a cheap office building. Hiring a va-voom receptionist with a name like Lola or Velma. A tough-talking blonde, of course. He’d wear a trenchcoat and a brown fedora on rainy days, the hat pulled down to one eyebrow.

Ridiculous. And not what attracts him. The attraction is not being in his La-Z-Boy, watching the lady judge and stuffing his face with snacks. He also likes being in his suit. But there’s more. He left the PD with strings dangling. Pete has ID’d the pawnshop armed robber, and it looks like he and Isabelle Jaynes may soon be arresting Donald Davis, the mope who killed his wife and then went on TV, flashing his handsome smile. Good for Pete and Izzy, but neither Davis or the pawnshop shotgunner is the Big Casino.

Also, he thinks, Mr. Mercedes should have left me alone. And Mrs. T. He should have left her alone, too.

“Bill?” Janey’s snapping her fingers like a stage hypnotist bringing a subject out of a trance. “Are you there, Bill?”

He returns his attention to her, a woman in her mid-forties who’s not afraid to sit in bright sunlight. “If I say yes, you’ll be hiring me as a security consultant.”

She looks amused. “Like the men who work for Vigilant Guard Service out in the Heights?”

“No, not like them. They’re bonded, for one thing. I’m not.” I never had to be, he thinks. “I’d just be private security, like the kind of guys who work the downtown nightclubs. That’s nothing you’d be able to claim as a deduction on your income tax, I’m afraid.”

Amusement broadens into a smile, and she does the nose-wrinkling thing again. A fairly entrancing sight, in Hodges’s opinion. “Don’t care. In case you didn’t know, I’m rolling in dough.”

“What I’m trying for is full disclosure, Janey. I have no private detective’s license, which won’t stop me from asking questions, but how well I can operate without either a badge or a PI ticket remains to be seen. It’s like asking a blind man to stroll around town without his guide dog.”

“Surely there’s a Police Department old boys’ network?”

“There is, but if I tried to use it, I’d be putting both the old boys and myself in a bad position.” That he has already done this by pumping Pete for information is a thing he won’t share with her on such short acquaintance.

He lifts the letter Janey has showed him.

“For one thing, I’m guilty of withholding evidence if I agree to keep this between us.” That he’s already withholding a similar letter is another thing she doesn’t need to know. “Technically, at least. And withholding is a felony offense.”

She looks dismayed. “Oh my God, I never thought of that.”

“On the other hand, I doubt if there’s much Forensics could do with it. A letter dropped into a mailbox on Marlborough Street or Lowbriar Avenue is just about the most anonymous thing in the world. Once upon a time—I remember it well—you could match up the typing in a letter to the machine that wrote it. If you could find the machine, that is. It was as good as a fingerprint.”

“But this wasn’t typed.”

“Nope. Laser printer. Which means no hanging As or crooked Ts. So I wouldn’t be withholding much.”

Of course withholding is still withholding.

“I’m going to take the job, Janey, but five thousand a week is ridiculous. I’ll take a check for two, if you want to write one. And bill you for expenses.”

“That doesn’t seem like anywhere near enough.”

“If I get someplace, we can talk about a bonus.” But he doesn’t think he’ll take one, even if he does manage to run Mr. Mercedes to ground. Not when he came here already determined to investigate the bastard, and to sweet-talk her into helping him.

“All right. Agreed. And thank you.”

“Welcome. Now tell me about your relationship with Olivia. All I know is it was good enough for you to call her Ollie, and I could use more.”

“That will take some time. Would you like another cup of coffee? And a cookie or two to go with it? I have lemon snaps.”

Hodges says yes to both.

9

“Ollie.”

Janey says this, then falls silent long enough for Hodges to sip some of his new cup of coffee and eat a cookie. Then she turns to the window and the sailboats again, crosses her legs, and speaks without looking at him.

“Have you ever loved someone without liking them?”

Hodges thinks of Corinne, and the stormy eighteen months that preceded the final split. “Yes.”

“Then you’ll understand. Ollie was my big sister, eight years older than I was. I loved her, but when she went off to college, I was the happiest girl in America. And when she dropped out three months later and came running back home, I felt like a tired girl who has to pick up a big sack of bricks again after being allowed to put it down for awhile. She wasn’t mean to me, never called me names or pulled my pigtails or teased when I walked home from junior high holding hands with Marky Sullivan, but when she was in the house, we were always at Condition Yellow. Do you know what I mean?”

Hodges isn’t completely sure, but nods anyway.

“Food made her sick to her stomach. She got rashes when she was stressed out about anything—job interviews were the worst, although she finally did get a secretarial job. She had good skills and she was very pretty. Did you know that?”

Hodges makes a noncommittal noise. If he were to reply honestly, he might have said, I can believe it because I see it in you.

“One time she agreed to take me to a concert. It was U2, and I was mad to see them. Ollie liked them, too, but the night of the show she started vomiting. It was so bad that my parents ended up taking her to the ER and I had to stay home watching TV instead of pogoing and screaming for Bono. Ollie swore it was food poisoning, but we all ate the same meal, and no one else got sick. Stress is what it was. Pure stress. And you talk about hypochondria? With my sister, every headache was a brain tumor and every pimple was skin cancer. Once she got pinkeye and spent a week convinced she was going blind. Her periods were horroramas. She took to her bed until they were over.”

“And still kept her job?”

Janey’s reply is as dry as Death Valley. “Ollie’s periods always used to last exactly forty-eight hours and they always came on the weekends. It was amazing.”

“Oh.” Hodges can think of nothing else to say.

Janey spins the letter around a few times on the coffee table with the tip of her finger, then raises those light blue eyes to Hodges. “He uses a phrase in here—something about having nervous tics. Did you notice that?”

“Yes.” Hodges has noticed a great many things about this letter, mostly how it is in many ways a negative image of the one he received.

“My sister had her share, too. You may have noticed some of them.”

Hodges pulls his tie first one way, then the other.

Janey grins. “Yes, that’s one of them. There were many others. Patting light switches to make sure they were off. Unplugging the toaster after breakfast. She always said bread-and-butter before she went out somewhere, because supposedly if you did that, you’d remember anything you’d forgotten. I remember one day she had to drive me to school because I missed the bus. Mom and Dad had already gone to work. We got halfway there, then she became convinced the oven was on. We had to turn around and go back and check it. Nothing else would do. It was off, of course. I didn’t make it to school until second period, and got hit with my first and only detention. I was furious. I was often furious with her, but I loved her, too. Mom, Dad, we all did. Like it was hardwired. But man, was she ever a sack of bricks.”

“Too nervous to go out, but she not only married, she married money.”

“Actually, she married a prematurely balding clerk in the investment company where she worked. Kent Trelawney. A nerd—I use the word affectionately, Kent was absolutely okay—with a love of video games. He started to invest in some of the companies that made them, and those investments paid off. My mother said he had the magic touch and my father said he was dumb lucky, but it was neither of those things. He knew the field, that’s all, and what he didn’t know he made it his business to learn. When they got married near the end of the seventies, they were only wealthy. Then Kent discovered Microsoft.”

She throws her head back and belts out a hearty laugh, startling him.

“Sorry,” she says. “Just thinking about the pure American irony of it. I was pretty, also well adjusted and gregarious. If I’d ever been in a beauty contest—which I call meat-shows for men, if you want to know, and probably you don’t—I would have won Miss Congeniality in a walk. Lots of girlfriends, lots of boyfriends, lots of phone calls, and lots of dates. I was in charge of freshman orientation during my senior year at Catholic High School, and did a great job, if I do say so myself. Soothed a lot of nerves. My sister was just as pretty, but she was the neurotic one. The obsessive-compulsive one. If she’d ever been in a beauty contest, she would have thrown up all over her bathing suit.”

Janey laughs some more. Another tear trickles down her cheek as she does. She wipes it away with the heel of her hand.

“So here’s the irony. Miss Congeniality got stuck with the coke-snorting dingbat and Miss Nervy caught the good guy, the money-making, never-cheat husband. Do you get it?”

“Yeah,” Hodges says. “I do.”

“Olivia Wharton and Kent Trelawney. A courtship with about as much chance of success as a six-months preemie. Kent kept asking her out and she kept saying no. Finally she agreed to have dinner with him—just to make him stop bothering her, she said—and when they got to the restaurant, she froze. Couldn’t get out of the car. Shaking like a leaf. Some guys would have given up right there, but not Kent. He took her to McDonald’s and got Value Meals at the drive-through window. They ate in the parking lot. I guess they did that a lot. She’d go to the movies with him, but always had to sit on the aisle. She said sitting on the inside made her short of breath.”

“A lady with all the bells and whistles.”

“My mother and father tried for years to get her to see a shrink. Where they failed, Kent succeeded. The shrink put her on pills, and she got better. She had one of her patented anxiety attacks on her wedding day—I was the one who held her veil while she vomited in the church bathroom—but she got through it.” Janey smiles wistfully and adds, “She was a beautiful bride.”

Hodges sits silently, fascinated by this glimpse of Olivia Trelawney before she became Our Lady of Boatneck Tops.

“After she married, we drifted apart. As sisters sometimes do. We saw each other half a dozen times a year until our father died, even less after that.”

“Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the Fourth of July?”

“Pretty much. I could see some of her old shit coming back, and after Kent died—it was a heart attack—all of it came back. She lost a ton of weight. She went back to the awful clothes she wore in high school and when she was working in the office. Some of this I saw when I came back to visit her and Mom, some when we talked on Skype.”

He nods his understanding. “I’ve got a friend who keeps trying to hook me up with that.”

She regards him with a smile. “You’re old school, aren’t you? I mean really.” Her smile fades. “The last time I saw Ollie was May of last year, not long after the City Center thing.” Janey hesitates, then gives it its proper name. “The massacre. She was in terrible shape. She said the cops were hounding her. Was that true?”

“No, but she thought we were. It’s true we questioned her repeatedly, because she continued to insist she took her key and locked the Mercedes. That was a problem for us, because the car wasn’t broken into and it wasn’t hotwired. What we finally decided…” Hodges stops, thinking of the fat family psychologist who comes on every weekday at four. The one who specializes in breaking through the wall of denial.

“You finally decided what?”

“That she couldn’t bear to face the truth. Does that sound like the sister you grew up with?”

“Yes.” Janey points to the letter. “Do you suppose she finally told the truth to this guy? On Debbie’s Blue Umbrella? Do you think that’s why she took Mom’s pills?”

“There’s no way to be sure.” But Hodges thinks it’s likely.

“She quit her antidepressants.” Janey is looking out at the lake again. “She denied it when I asked her, but I knew. She never liked them, said they made her feel woolly-headed. She took them for Kent, and once Kent was dead she took them for our mother, but after City Center…” She shakes her head, takes a deep breath. “Have I told you enough about her mental state, Bill? Because there’s plenty more if you want it.”

“I think I get the picture.”

She shakes her head in dull wonder. “It’s as if the guy knew her.”

Hodges doesn’t say what seems obvious to him, mostly because he has his own letter for comparison: he did. Somehow he did.

“You said she was obsessive-compulsive. To the point where she turned around and went back to check if the oven was on.”

“Yes.”

“Does it seem likely to you that a woman like that would have forgotten her key in the ignition?”

Janey doesn’t answer for a long time. Then she says, “Actually, no.”

It doesn’t to Hodges, either. There’s a first time for everything, of course, but… did he and Pete ever discuss that aspect of the matter? He’s not sure, but thinks maybe they did. Only they hadn’t known the depths of Mrs. T.’s mental problems, had they?

He asks, “Ever try going on this Blue Umbrella site yourself? Using the username he gave her?”

She stares at him, gobsmacked. “It never even crossed my mind, and if it had, I would have been too scared of what I might find. I guess that’s why you’re the detective and I’m the client. Will you try that?”

“I don’t know what I’ll try. I need to think about it, and I need to consult a guy who knows more about computers than I do.”

“Make sure you note down his fee,” she says.

Hodges says he will, thinking that at least Jerome Robinson will get some good out of this, no matter how the cards fall. And why shouldn’t he? Eight people died at City Center and three more were permanently crippled, but Jerome still has to go to college. Hodges remembers an old saying: even on the darkest day, the sun shines on some dog’s ass.

“What’s next?”

Hodges takes the letter and stands up. “Next, I take this to the nearest UCopy. Then I return the original to you.”

“No need of that. I’ll scan it into the computer and print you one. Hand it over.”

“Really? You can do that?”

Her eyes are still red from crying, but the glance she gives him is nonetheless merry. “It’s a good thing you have a computer expert on call,” she says. “I’ll be right back. In the meantime, have another cookie.”

Hodges has three.

10

When she returns with his copy of the letter, he folds it into his inner jacket pocket. “The original should go into a safe, if there’s one here.”

“There’s one at the Sugar Heights house—will that do?”

It probably would, but Hodges doesn’t care for the idea. Too many prospective buyers tromping in and out. Which is probably stupid, but there it is.

“Do you have a safe-deposit box?”

“No, but I could rent one. I use Bank of America, just two blocks over.”

“I’d like that better,” Hodges says, going to the door.

“Thank you for doing this,” she says, and holds out both of her hands. As if he has asked her to dance. “You don’t know what a relief it is.”

He takes the offered hands, squeezes them lightly, then lets go, although he would have been happy to hold them longer.

“Two other things. First, your mother. How often do you visit her?”

“Every other day or so. Sometimes I take her food from the Iranian restaurant she and Ollie liked—the Sunny Acres kitchen staff is happy to warm it up—and sometimes I bring her a DVD or two. She likes the oldies, like with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. I always bring her something, and she’s always happy to see me. On her good days she does see me. On her bad ones, she’s apt to call me Olivia. Or Charlotte. That’s my aunt. I also have an uncle.”

“The next time she has a good day, you ought to call me so I can go see her.”

“All right. I’ll go with you. What’s the other thing?”

“This lawyer you mentioned. Schron. Did he strike you as competent?”

“Sharpest knife in the drawer, that was my impression.”

“If I do find something out, maybe even put a name on the guy, we’re going to need someone like that. We’ll go see him, we’ll turn over the letters—”

“Letters? I only found the one.”

Hodges thinks Ah, shit, then regroups. “The letter and the copy, I mean.”

“Oh, right.”

“If I find the guy, it’s the job of the police to arrest him and charge him. Schron’s job is to make sure we don’t get arrested for going off the reservation and investigating on our own.”

“That would be criminal law, isn’t it? I’m not sure he does that kind.”

“Probably not, but if he’s good, he’ll know somebody who does. Someone who’s just as good as he is. Are we agreed on that? We have to be. I’m willing to poke around, but if this turns into police business, we let the police take over.”

“I’m fine with that,” Janey says. Then she stands on tiptoe, puts her hands on the shoulders of his too-tight coat, and plants a kiss on his cheek. “I think you’re a good guy, Bill. And the right guy for this.”

He feels that kiss all the way down in the elevator. A lovely little warm spot. He’s glad he took pains about shaving before leaving the house.

11

The silver rain falls without end, but the young couple—lovers? friends?—are safe and dry under the blue umbrella that belongs to someone, likely a fictional someone, named Debbie. This time Hodges notices that it’s the boy who appears to be speaking, and the girl’s eyes are slightly widened, as if in surprise. Maybe he’s just proposed to her?

Jerome pops this romantic thought like a balloon. “Looks like a porn site, doesn’t it?”

“Now what would a young pre–Ivy Leaguer like yourself know about porn sites?”

They are seated side by side in Hodges’s study, looking at the Blue Umbrella start-up page. Odell, Jerome’s Irish setter, is lying on his back behind them, rear legs splayed, tongue hanging from one side of his mouth, staring at the ceiling with a look of good-humored contemplation. Jerome brought him on a leash, but only because that’s the law inside the city limits. Odell knows enough to stay out of the street and is about as harmless to passersby as a dog can be.

“I know what you know and what everybody with a computer knows,” Jerome says. In his khaki slacks and button-down Ivy League shirt, his hair a close-cropped cap of curls, he looks to Hodges like a young Barack Obama, only taller. Jerome is six-five. And around him is the faint, pleasantly nostalgic aroma of Old Spice aftershave. “Porn sites are thicker than flies on roadkill. You surf the Net, you can’t help bumping into them. And the ones with the innocent-sounding names are the ones most apt to be loaded.”

“Loaded how?”

“With the kinds of images that can get you arrested.”

“Kiddie porn, you mean.”

“Or torture porn. Ninety-nine percent of the whips-and-chains stuff is faked. The other one percent…” Jerome shrugs.

“And you know this how?”

Jerome gives him a look—straight, frank, and open. Not an act, just the way he is, and what Hodges likes most about the kid. His mother and father are the same way. Even his little sis.

“Mr. Hodges, everybody knows. If they’re under thirty, that is.”

“Back in the day, people used to say don’t trust anyone over thirty.”

Jerome smiles. “I trust em, but when it comes to computers, an awful lot of em are clueless. They beat up their machines, then expect em to work. They open bareback email attachments. They go to websites like this, and all at once their computer goes HAL 9000 and starts downloading pictures of teenage escorts or terrorist videos that show people getting their heads chopped off.”

It was on the tip of Hodge’s tongue to ask who Hal 9000 is—it sounds like a gangbanger tag to him—but the thing about terrorist videos diverts him. “That actually happens?”

“It’s been known to. And then…” Jerome makes a fist and raps his knuckles against the top of his head. “Knock-knock-knock, Homeland Security at your door.” He unrolls his fist so he can point a finger at the couple under the blue umbrella. “On the other hand, this might be just what it claims to be, a chat site where shy people can be electronic pen-pals. You know, a lonelyhearts deal. Lots of people out there lookin for love, dude. Let’s see.”

He reaches for the mouse but Hodges grabs his wrist. Jerome looks at him inquiringly.

“Don’t see on my computer,” Hodges says. “See on yours.”

“If you’d asked me to bring my laptop—”

“Do it tonight, that’ll be fine. And if you happen to unleash a virus that swallows your cruncher whole, I’ll stand you the price of a new one.”

Jerome shoots him a look of condescending amusement. “Mr. Hodges, I’ve got the best virus detection and prevention program money can buy, and the second best backing it up. Any bug trying to creep into my machines gets swatted pronto.”

“It might not be there to eat,” Hodges says. He’s thinking about Mrs. T.’s sister saying, It’s as if the guy knew her. “It might be there to watch.”

Jerome doesn’t look worried; he looks excited. “How did you get onto this site, Mr. Hodges? Are you coming out of retirement? Are you, like, on the case?”

Hodges has never missed Pete Huntley so bitterly as he does at that moment: a tennis partner to volley with, only with theories and suppositions instead of fuzzy green balls. He has no doubt Jerome could fulfill that function, he has a good mind and a demonstrated talent for making all the right deductive leaps… but he’s also a year from voting age, four from being able to buy a legal drink, and this could be dangerous.

“Just peek into the site for me,” Hodges says. “But before you do, hunt around on the Net. See what you can find out about it. What I want to know most of all is—”

“If it has an actual history,” Jerome cuts in, once more demonstrating that admirable deductive ability. “A whatdoyoucallit, backstory. You want to make sure it’s not a straw man set up for you alone.”

“You know,” Hodges says, “you should quit doing chores for me and get a job with one of those computer-doctor companies. You could probably make a lot more dough. Which reminds me, you need to give me a price for this job.”

Jerome is offended, but not by the offer of a fee. “Those companies are for geeks with bad social skills.” He reaches behind him and scratches Odell’s dark red fur. Odell thumps his tail appreciatively, although he would probably prefer a steak sandwich. “In fact there’s one bunch that drives around in VW Beetles. You can’t get much geekier than that. Discount Electronix… you know them?”

“Sure,” Hodges says, thinking of the advertising circular he got along with his poison-pen letter.

“They must have liked the idea, because they have the same deal, only they call it the Cyber Patrol, and their VWs are green instead of black. Plus there are mucho independents. Look online, you can find two hundred right here in the city. I thinks I stick to chos, Massa Hodges.”

Jerome clicks away from Under Debbie’s Blue Umbrella and back to Hodges’s screensaver, which happens to be a picture of Allie, back when she was five and still thought her old man was God.

“But since you’re worried, I’ll take precautions. I’ve got an old iMac in my closet with nothing on it but Atari Arcade and a few other moldy oldies. I’ll use that one to check out the site.”

“Good idea.”

“Anything else I can do for you today?”

Hodges starts to say no, but Mrs. T.’s stolen Mercedes is still bugging him. There is something very wrong there. He felt it then and feels it more strongly now—so strongly he almost sees it. But almost never won a kewpie doll at the county fair. The wrongness is a ball he wants to hit, and have someone hit back to him.

“You could listen to a story,” he says. In his mind he’s already making up a piece of fiction that will touch on all the salient points. Who knows, maybe Jerome’s fresh eye will spot something he himself has missed. Unlikely, but not impossible. “Would you be willing to do that?”

“Sure.”

“Then clip Odell on his leash. We’ll walk down to Big Licks. I’ve got my face fixed for a strawberry cone.”

“Maybe we’ll see the Mr. Tastey truck before we get there,” Jerome says. “That guy’s been in the neighborhood all week, and he’s got some awesome goodies.”

“So much the better,” Hodges says, getting up. “Let’s go.”

12

They walk down the hill to the little shopping center at the intersection of Harper Road and Hanover Street with Odell padding between them on the slack leash. They can see the buildings of downtown two miles distant, City Center and the Midwest Culture and Arts Complex dominating the cluster of skyscrapers. The MAC is not one of I. M. Pei’s finer creations, in Hodges’s opinion. Not that his opinion has ever been solicited on the matter.

“So what’s the story, morning glory?” Jerome asks.

“Well,” Hodges says, “let’s say there’s this guy with a long-term lady friend who lives downtown. He himself lives in Parsonville.” This is a municipality just beyond Sugar Heights, not as lux but far from shabby.

“Some of my friends call Parsonville Whiteyville,” Jerome says. “I heard my father say it once, and my mother told him to shut up with the racist talk.”

“Uh-huh.” Jerome’s friends, the black ones, probably call Sugar Heights Whiteyville, too, which makes Hodges think he’s doing okay so far.

Odell has stopped to check out Mrs. Melbourne’s flowers. Jerome pulls him away before he can leave a doggy memo there.

“So anyway,” Hodges resumes, “the long-term lady friend has a condo apartment in the Branson Park area—Wieland Avenue, Branson Street, Lake Avenue, that part of town.”

“Also nice.”

“Yeah. He goes to see her three or four times a week. One or two nights a week he takes her to dinner or a movie and stays over. When he does that, he parks his car—a nice one, a Beemer—on the street, because it’s a good area, well policed, plenty of those high-intensity arc-sodiums. Also, the parking’s free from seven P.M. to eight A.M.”

“I had a Beemer, I’d put it in one of the garages down there and never mind the free parking,” Jerome says, and tugs the leash again. “Stop it, Odell, nice dogs don’t eat out of the gutter.”

Odell looks over his shoulder and rolls an eye as if to say You don’t know what nice dogs do.

“Well, rich people have some funny ideas about economy,” Hodges says, thinking of Mrs. T.’s explanation for doing the same thing.

“If you say so.” They have almost reached the shopping center. On the way down the hill they’ve heard the jingling tune of the ice cream truck, once quite close, but it fades again as the Mr. Tastey guy heads for the housing developments north of Harper Road.

“So one Thursday night this guy goes to visit his lady as usual. He parks as usual—all kinds of empty spaces down there once the business day is over—and locks up his car as usual. He and his lady take a walk to a nearby restaurant, have a nice meal, then walk back. His car’s right there, he sees it before they go in. He spends the night with his lady, and when he leaves the building in the morning—”

“His Beemer’s gone bye-bye.” They are now standing outside the ice cream shop. There’s a bicycle rack nearby. Jerome fastens Odell’s leash to it. The dog lies down and puts his muzzle on one paw.

“No,” Hodges says, “it’s there.” He is thinking that this is a damned good variation on what actually happened. He almost believes it himself. “But it’s facing the other way, because it’s parked on the other side of the street.”

Jerome raises his eyebrows.

“Yeah, I know. Weird, right? So the guy goes across to it. Car looks okay, it’s locked up tight just the way he left it, it’s just in a new place. So the first thing he does is check for his key, and yep, it’s still in his pocket. So what the hell happened, Jerome?”

“I don’t know, Mr. H. It’s like a Sherlock Holmes story, isn’t it? A real three-pipe problem.” There’s a little smile on Jerome’s face that Hodges can’t quite parse and isn’t sure he likes. It’s a knowing smile.

Hodges digs his wallet out of his Levi’s (the suit was good, but it’s a relief to be back in jeans and an Indians pullover again). He selects a five and hands it to Jerome. “Go get our ice cream cones. I’ll dog-sit Odell.”

“You don’t need to do that, he’s fine.”

“I’m sure he is, but standing in line will give you time to consider my little problem. Think of yourself as Sherlock, maybe that’ll help.”

“Okay.” Tyrone Feelgood Delight pops out. “Only you is Sherlock! I is Doctah Watson!”

13

There’s a pocket park on the far side of Hanover. They cross at the WALK light, grab a bench, and watch a bunch of shaggy-haired middle-school boys dare life and limb in the sunken concrete skateboarding area. Odell divides his time between watching the boys and the ice cream cones.

“You ever try that?” Hodges asks, nodding at the daredevils.

“No, suh!” Jerome gives him a wide-eyed stare. “I is black. I spends mah spare time shootin hoops and runnin on de cinder track at de high school. Us black fellas is mighty fast, as de whole worl’ knows.”

“Thought I told you to leave Tyrone at home.” Hodges uses his finger to swop some ice cream off his cone and extends the dripping finger to Odell, who cleans it with alacrity.

“Sometimes dat boy jus’ show up!” Jerome declares. Then Tyrone is gone, just like that. “There’s no guy and no lady friend and no Beemer. You’re talking about the Mercedes Killer.”

So much for fiction. “Say I am.”

“Are you investigating that on your own, Mr. Hodges?”

Hodges thinks this over, very carefully, then repeats himself. “Say I am.”

“Does the Debbie’s Blue Umbrella site have something to do with it?”

“Say it does.”

A boy falls off his skateboard and stands up with road rash on both knees. One of his friends buzzes over, jeering. Road Rash Boy slides a hand across one oozing knee, flings a spray of red droplets at Jeering Boy, then rolls away, shouting “AIDS! AIDS!” Jeering Boy rolls after him, only now he’s Laughing Boy.

“Barbarians,” Jerome mutters. He bends to scratch Odell behind the ears, then straightens up. “If you want to talk about it—”

Embarrassed, Hodges says, “I don’t think at this point—”

“I understand,” Jerome says. “But I did think about your problem while I was in line, and I’ve got a question.”

“Yes?”

“Your make-believe Beemer guy, where was his spare key?”

Hodges sits very still, thinking how very quick this kid is. Then he sees a line of pink ice cream trickling down the side of his waffle cone and licks it off.

“Let’s say he claims he never had one.”

“Like the woman who owned the Mercedes did.”

“Yes. Exactly like that.”

“Remember me telling you how my mom got pissed at my dad for calling Parsonville Whiteyville?”

“Yeah.”

“Want to hear about a time when my dad got pissed at my mom? The only time I ever heard him say, That’s just like a woman?”

“If it bears on my little problem, shoot.”

“Mom’s got a Chevy Malibu. Candy-apple red. You’ve seen it in the driveway.”

“Sure.”

“He bought it new three years ago and gave it to her for her birthday, provoking massive squeals of delight.”

Yes, Hodges thinks, Tyrone Feelgood has definitely taken a hike.

“She drives it for a year. No problems. Then it’s time to re-register. Dad said he’d do it for her on his way home from work. He goes out to get the paperwork, then comes back in from the driveway holding up a key. He’s not mad, but he’s irritated. He tells her that if she leaves her spare key in the car, someone could find it and drive her car away. She asks where it was. He says in a plastic Ziploc bag along with her registration, her insurance card, and the owner’s manual, which she had never opened. Still had the paper band around it that says thanks for buying your new car at Lake Chevrolet.”

Another drip is trickling down Hodges’s ice cream. This time he doesn’t notice it even when it reaches his hand and pools there. “In the…”

“Glove compartment, yes. My dad said it was careless, and my mom said…” Jerome leans forward, his brown eyes fixed on Hodges’s gray ones. “She said she didn’t even know it was there. That’s when he said it was just like a woman. Which didn’t make her happy.”

“Bet it didn’t.” In Hodges’s brain, all sorts of gears are engaging.

“Dad says, Honey, all you have to do is forget once and leave your car unlocked. Some crack addict comes along, sees the buttons up, and decides to toss it in case there’s anything worth stealing. He checks the glove compartment for money, sees the key in the plastic bag, and away he goes to find out who wants to buy a low-mileage Malibu for cash.”

“What did your mother say to that?”

Jerome grins. “First thing, she turned it around. No one does that any better than my moms. She says, You bought the car and you brought it home. You should have told me. I’m eating my breakfast while they’re having this little discussion and thought of saying, If you’d ever checked the owner’s manual, Mom, maybe just to see what all those cute little lights on the dashboard signify, but I kept my mouth shut. My mom and dad don’t get into it often, but when they do, a wise person steers clear. Even the Barbster knows that, and she’s only nine.”

It occurs to Hodges that when he and Corinne were married, this is something Alison also knew.

“The other thing she said was that she never forgets to lock her car. Which, so far as I know, is true. Anyway, that key is now hanging on one of the hooks in our kitchen. Safe, sound, and ready to go if the primary ever gets lost.”

Hodges sits looking at the skateboarders but not seeing them. He’s thinking that Jerome’s mom had a point when she said her husband should have either presented her with the spare key or at least told her about it. You don’t just assume people will do an inventory and find things by themselves. But Olivia Trelawney’s case was different. She bought her own car, and should have known.

Only the salesman had probably overloaded her with info about her expensive new purchase; they had a way of doing that. When to change the oil, how to use the cruise control, how to use the GPS, don’t forget to put your spare key in a safe place, here’s how you plug in your cell phone, here’s the number to call roadside assistance if you need it, click the headlight switch all the way to the left to engage the twilight function.

Hodges could remember buying his first new car and letting the guy’s post-sales tutorial wash over him—uh-huh, yep, right, gotcha—just anxious to get his new purchase out on the road, to dig the rattle-free ride and inhale that incomparable new-car smell, which to the buyer is the aroma of money well spent. But Mrs. T. was obsessive-compulsive. He could believe she’d overlooked the spare key and left it in the glove compartment, but if she had taken her primary key that Thursday night, wouldn’t she also have locked the car doors? She said she did, had maintained that to the very end, and really, think about it—

“Mr. Hodges?”

“With the new smart keys, it’s a simple three-step process, isn’t it?” he says. “Step one, turn off the engine. Step two, remove the key from the ignition. If your mind’s on something else and you forget step two, there’s a chime to remind you. Step three, close the door and push the button stamped with the padlock icon. Why would you forget that, with the key right there in your hand? Theft-Proofing for Dummies.”

“True-dat, Mr. H., but some dummies forget, anyway.”

Hodges is too lost in thought for reticence. “She was no dummy. Nervous and twitchy but not stupid. If she took her key, I almost have to believe she locked her car. And the car wasn’t broken into. So even if she did leave the spare in her glove compartment, how did the guy get to it?”

“So it’s a locked-car mystery instead of a locked room. Dis be a fo’-pipe problem!”

Hodges doesn’t reply. He’s going over it and over it. That the spare might have been in the glove compartment now seems obvious, but did either he or Pete ever raise the possibility? He’s pretty sure they didn’t. Because they thought like men? Or because they were pissed at Mrs. T.’s carelessness and wanted to blame her? And she was to blame, wasn’t she?

Not if she really did lock her car, he thinks.

“Mr. Hodges, what does that Blue Umbrella website have to do with the Mercedes Killer?”

Hodges comes back out of his own head. He’s been in deep, and it’s a pretty long trudge. “I don’t want to talk about that just now, Jerome.”

“But maybe I can help!”

Has he ever seen Jerome this excited? Maybe once, when the debate team he captained his sophomore year won the citywide championship.

“Find out about that website and you will be helping,” Hodges says.

“You don’t want to tell me because I’m a kid. That’s it, isn’t it?”

It is part of the reason, but Hodges has no intention of saying so. And as it happens, there’s something else.

“It’s more complicated than that. I’m not a cop anymore, and investigating the City Center thing skates right up to the edge of what’s legal. If I find anything out and don’t tell my old partner, who’s now the lead on the Mercedes Killer case, I’ll be over the edge. You have a bright future ahead of you, including just about any college or university you decide to favor with your presence. What would I say to your mother and father if you got dragged into an investigation of my actions, maybe as an accomplice?”

Jerome sits quietly, digesting this. Then he gives the end of his cone to Odell, who accepts it eagerly. “I get it.”

“Do you?”

“Yeah.”

Jerome stands up and Hodges does the same. “Still friends?”

“Sure. But if you think I can help you, promise me that you’ll ask. You know what they say, two heads are better than one.”

“That’s a deal.”

They start back up the hill. At first Odell walks between them as before, then starts to pull ahead because Hodges is slowing down. He’s also losing his breath. “I’ve got to drop some weight,” he tells Jerome. “You know what? I tore the seat out of a perfectly good pair of pants the other day.”

“You could probably stand to lose ten,” Jerome says diplomatically.

“Double that and you’d be a lot closer.”

“Want to stop and rest a minute?”

“No.” Hodges sounds childish even to himself. He means it about the weight, though; when he gets back to the house, every damn snack in the cupboards and the fridge is going into the trash. Then he thinks, Make it the garbage disposal. Too easy to weaken and fish stuff out of the trash.

“Jerome, it would be best if you kept my little investigation to yourself. Can I trust your discretion?”

Jerome replies without hesitation. “Absolutely. Mum’s the word.”

“Good.”

A block ahead, the Mr. Tastey truck jingles its way across Harper Road and heads down Vinson Lane. Jerome tips a wave. Hodges can’t see if the ice cream man waves back.

“Now we see him,” Hodges said.

Jerome turns, gives him a grin. “Ice cream man’s like a cop.”

“Huh?”

“Never around when you need him.”

14

Brady rolls along, obeying the speed limit (twenty miles per here on Vinson Lane), hardly hearing the jingle and clang of “Buffalo Gals” from the speakers above him. He’s wearing a sweater beneath his white Mr. Tastey jacket, because the load behind him is cold.

Like my mind, he thinks. Only ice cream is just cold. My mind is also analytical. It’s a machine. A Mac loaded with gigs to the googolplex.

He turns it to what he has just seen, the fat ex-cop walking up Harper Road Hill with Jerome Robinson and the Irish setter with the nigger name. Jerome gave him a wave and Brady gave it right back, because that’s the way you blend in. Like listening to Freddi Linklatter’s endless rants about how tough it was to be a gay woman in a straight world.

Kermit William “I wish I was young” Hodges and Jerome “I wish I was white” Robinson. What was the Odd Couple talking about? That’s something Brady Hartsfield would like to know. Maybe he’ll find out if the cop takes the bait and strikes up a conversation on Debbie’s Blue Umbrella. It certainly worked with the rich bitch; once she started talking, nothing could stop her.

The Det-Ret and his darkie houseboy.

Also Odell. Don’t forget Odell. Jerome and his little sister love that dog. It would really break them up if something happened to it. Probably nothing will, but maybe he’ll research some more poisons on the Net when he gets home tonight.

Such thoughts are always flitting through Brady’s mind; they are the bats in his belfry. This morning at DE, as he was inventorying another load of cheap-ass DVDs (why more are coming in at the same time they’re trying to dump stock is a mystery that will never be solved), it occurred to him that he could use his suicide vest to assassinate the president, Mr. Barack “I wish I was white” Obama. Go out in a blaze of glory. Barack comes to this state often, because it’s important to his re-election strategy. And when he comes to the state, he comes to this city. Has a rally. Talks about hope. Talks about change. Rah-rah-rah, blah-blah-blah. Brady was figuring out how to avoid metal detectors and random checks when Tones Frobisher buzzed him and told him he had a service call. By the time he was on the road in one of the green Cyber Patrol VWs, he was thinking about something else. Brad Pitt, to be exact. Fucking matinee idol.

Sometimes, though, his ideas stick.

A chubby little boy comes running down the sidewalk, waving money. Brady pulls over.

“I want chawww-klit!” the little boy brays. “And I want it with springles!”

You got it, you fatass little creep, Brady thinks, and smiles his widest, most charming smile. Fuck up your cholesterol all you want, I give you until forty, and who knows, maybe you’ll survive the first heart attack. That won’t stop you, though, nope. Not when the world is full of beer and Whoppers and chocolate ice cream.

“You got it, little buddy. One chocolate with sprinkles coming right up. How was school? Get any As?”

15

That night the TV never goes on at 63 Harper Road, not even for the Evening News. Nor does the computer. Hodges hauls out his trusty legal pad instead. Janelle Patterson called him old school. So he is, and he doesn’t apologize for it. This is the way he has always worked, the way he’s most comfortable.

Sitting in beautiful no-TV silence, he reads over the letter Mr. Mercedes sent him. Then he reads the one Mrs. T. got. Back and forth he goes for an hour or more, examining the letters line by line. Because Mrs. T.’s letter is a copy, he feels free to jot in the margins and circle certain words.

He finishes this part of his procedure by reading the letters aloud. He uses different voices, because Mr. Mercedes has adopted two different personae. The letter Hodges received is gloating and arrogant. Ha-ha, you broken-down old fool, it says. You have nothing to live for and you know it, so why don’t you just kill yourself? The tone of Olivia Trelawney’s letter is cringing and melancholy, full of remorse and tales of childhood abuse, but here also is the idea of suicide, this time couched in terms of sympathy: I understand. I totally get it, because I feel the same.

At last he puts the letters in a folder with MERCEDES KILLER printed on the tab. There’s nothing else in it, which means it’s mighty thin, but if he’s still any good at his job, it will thicken with page after page of his own notes.

He sits for fifteen minutes, hands folded on his too-large middle like a meditating Buddha. Then he draws the pad to him and begins writing.

I think I was right about most of the stylistic red herrings. In Mrs. T.’s letter he doesn’t use exclamation points, capitalized phrases, or many one-sentence paragraphs (the ones at the end are for dramatic effect). I was wrong about the quotation marks, he likes those. Also fond of underlining things. He may not be young after all, I could have been wrong about that…

But he thinks of Jerome, who has already forgotten more about computers and the Internet than Hodges himself will ever learn. And of Janey Patterson, who knew how to make a copy of her sister’s letter by scanning, and who uses Skype. Janey Patterson, who’s got to be almost twenty years younger than he is.

He picks up his pen again.

… but I don’t think I am. Probably not a teenager (altho can’t rule it out) but let’s say in the range 20–35. He’s smart. Good vocabulary, able to turn a phrase.

He goes through the letters yet again and jots down some of those turned phrases: scurrying little mouse of a kid, strawberry jam in a sleeping bag, most people are sheep and sheep don’t eat meat.

Nothing that would make people forget Philip Roth, but Hodges thinks such lines show a degree of talent. He finds one more and prints it below the others: What have they done for you except hound you and cause you sleepless nights?

He taps the tip of his pen above this, creating a constellation of tiny dark blue dots. He thinks most people would write give you sleepless nights or bring you sleepless nights, but those weren’t good enough for Mr. Mercedes, because he is a gardener planting seeds of doubt and paranoia. They are out to get you, Mrs. T., and they have a point, don’t they? Because you did leave your key. The cops say so; I say so too, and I was there. How can we both be wrong?

He writes these ideas down, boxes them, then turns to a fresh sheet.

Best point of identification is still PERK for PERP, he uses it in both letters, but also note HYPHENS in the Trelawney letter. Bee-hive instead of beehive. Week-days instead of weekdays. If I am able to ID this guy and get a writing sample, I can nail him.

Such stylistic fingerprints wouldn’t be enough to convince a jury, but Hodges himself? Absolutely.

He sits back again, head tilted, eyes fixed on nothing. He isn’t aware of time passing; for Hodges, time, which has hung so heavy since his retirement, has been canceled. Then he lurches forward, office chair squalling an unheard protest, and writes in large capital letters: HAS MR. MERCEDES BEEN WATCHING?

Hodges feels all but positive he has been. That it’s his MO.

He followed Mrs. Trelawney’s vilification in the newspapers, he watched her two or three appearances on the TV news (curt and unflattering, those appearances drove her already low approval ratings into the basement). He may have done drive-bys on her house as well. Hodges should talk to Radney Peeples again and find out if Peeples or any other Vigilant employees noted certain cars cruising Mrs. Trelawney’s Sugar Heights neighborhood in the weeks before she caught the bus. And someone sprayed KILLER CUNT on one of her gateposts. How long before her suicide was that? Maybe Mr. Mercedes did it himself. And of course, he could have gotten to know her better, lots better, if she took him up on his invitation to meet under the Blue Umbrella.

Then there’s me, he thinks, and looks at the way his own letter ends: I wouldn’t want you to start thinking about your gun followed by But you are thinking of it, aren’t you? Is Mr. Mercedes talking about his theoretical service weapon, or has he seen the .38 Hodges sometimes plays with? No way of telling, but…

But I think he has. He knows where I live, you can look right into my living room from the street, and I think he’s seen it.

The idea that he’s been watched fills Hodges with excitement rather than dread or embarrassment. If he could match some vehicle the Vigilant people have noticed with a vehicle spending an inordinate amount of time on Harper Road—

That’s when the telephone rings.

16

“Hi, Mr. H.”

“S’up, Jerome?”

“I’m under the Umbrella.”

Hodges puts his legal pad aside. The first four pages are now full of disjointed notes, the next three with a close-written case summary, just like in the old days. He rocks back in his chair.

“It didn’t eat your computer, I take it?”

“Nope. No worms, no viruses. And I’ve already got four offers to talk with new friends. One’s from Abilene, Texas. She says her name is Bernice, but I can call her Berni. With an i. She sounds cute as hell, and I won’t say I’m not tempted, but she’s probably a cross-dressing shoe salesman from Boston who lives with his mother. The Internet, dude—it’s a wonderbox.”

Hodges grins.

“First the background, which I partly got from poking around that selfsame Internet and mostly from a couple of Computer Science geeks at the university. You ready?”

Hodges grabs his legal pad again and turns to a fresh page. “Hit me.” Which is exactly what he used to say to Pete Huntley when Pete came in with fresh information on a case.

“Okay, but first… do you know what the most precious Internet commodity is?”

“Nope.” And, thinking of Janey Patterson: “I’m old school.”

Jerome laughs. “That you are, Mr. Hodges. It’s part of your charm.”

Dryly: “Thank you, Jerome.”

“The most precious commodity is privacy, and that’s what Debbie’s Blue Umbrella and sites like it deliver. They make Facebook look like a partyline back in the nineteen-fifties. Hundreds of privacy sites have sprung up since 9/11. That’s when the various first-world governments really started to get snoopy. The powers that be fear the Net, dude, and they’re right to fear it. Anyway, most of these EP sites—stands for extreme privacy—operate out of Central Europe. They are to Internet chat what Switzerland is to bank accounts. You with me?”

“Yeah.”

“The Blue Umbrella servers are in Olovo, a Bosnian ville that was mostly known for bullfights until 2005 or so. Encrypted servers. We’re talking NASA quality, okay? Traceback’s impossible, unless NSA or the Kang Sheng—that’s the Chinese version of the NSA—have got some super-secret software nobody knows about.”

And even if they do, Hodges thinks, they’d never put it to use in a case like the Mercedes Killer.

“Here’s another feature, especially handy in the age of sexting scandals. Mr. H., have you ever found something on the Net—like a picture or an article in a newspaper—that you wanted to print, and you couldn’t?”

“A few times, yeah. You hit print, and the Print Preview shows nothing but a blank page. It’s annoying.”

“Same thing on Debbie’s Blue Umbrella.” Jerome doesn’t sound annoyed; he sounds admiring. “I had a little back-and-forth with my new friend Berni—you know, how’s the weather there, what’re your favorite groups, that kind of thing—and when I tried to print our conversation, I got a pair of lips with a finger across them and a message that says SHHH.” Jerome spells this out, just to be sure Hodges gets it. “You can make a record of the conversation…”

You bet, Hodges thinks, looking fondly down at the jotted notes on his legal pad.

“… but you’d have to take screen-shots or something, which is a pain in the ass. You see what I mean about the privacy, right? These guys are serious about it.”

Hodges does see. He flips back to the first page of his legal pad and circles one of his earliest notes: COMPUTER SAVVY (UNDER 50?).

“When you click in, you get the usual choice—ENTER USERNAME or REGISTER NOW. Since I didn’t have a username, I clicked REGISTER NOW and got one. If you want to talk with me under the Blue Umbrella, I’m tyrone40. Next, there’s a questionnaire you fill out—age, sex, interests, things like that—and then you have to punch in your credit card number. It’s thirty bucks a month. I did it because I have faith in your powers of reimbursement.”

“Your faith will be rewarded, my son.”

“The computer thinks it over for ninety seconds or so—the Blue Umbrella spins and the screen says SORTING. Then you get a list of people with interests similar to yours. You just bang on a few and pretty soon you’re chatting up a storm.”

“Could people use this to exchange porn? I know the descriptor says you can’t, but—”

“You could use it to exchange fantasies, but no pix. Although I could see how weirdos—child abusers, crush freaks, that kind of thing—could use the Blue Umbrella to direct like-minded friends to sites where outlaw images are available.”

Hodges starts to ask what crush freaks are, then decides he doesn’t want to know.

“Mostly just innocent chat, then.”

“Well…”

“Well what?”

“I can see how crazies might use it to exchange badass info. Like how to build bombs and stuff.”

“Let’s say I already have a username. What happens then?”

“Do you?” The excitement is back in Jerome’s voice.

“Let’s say I do.”

“That would depend on whether you just made it up or if you got it from someone who wants to chat with you. Like he gave it to you on the phone or in an email.”

Hodges grins. Jerome, a true child of his times, has never considered the possibility that information could be conveyed by such a nineteenth-century vehicle as a letter.

“Say you got it from someone else,” Jerome goes on. “Like from the guy who stole that lady’s car. Like maybe he wants to talk to you about what he did.”

He waits. Hodges says nothing, but he is all admiration.

After a few seconds of silence, Jerome says, “Can’t blame a guy for trying. Anyway, you go on and enter the username.”

“When do I pay my thirty bucks?”

“You don’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because someone’s already paid it for you.” Jerome sounds sober now. Dead serious. “Probably don’t need to tell you to be careful, but I will, anyway. Because if you already have a username, this guy’s waiting for you.”

17

Brady stops on his way home to get them supper (subs from Little Chef tonight), but his mother is gorked out on the couch. The TV is showing another of those reality things, a program that pimps a bunch of good-looking young women to a hunky bachelor who looks like he might have the IQ of a floor lamp. Brady sees Ma has already eaten—sort of. On the coffee table is a half-empty bottle of Smirnoff’s and two cans of NutraSlim. High tea in hell, he thinks, but at least she’s dressed: jeans and a City College sweatshirt.

On the off-chance, he unwraps her sandwich and wafts it back and forth beneath her nose, but she only snorts and turns her head away. He decides to eat that one himself and put the other one in his private fridge. When he comes back from the garage, the hunky bachelor is asking one of his potential fuck-toys (a blonde, of course) if she likes to cook breakfast. The blonde’s simpering reply: “Do you like something hot in the morning?”

Holding the plate with his sandwich on it, he regards his mother. He knows it’s possible he’ll come home some evening and find her dead. He could even help her along, just pick up one of the throw pillows and settle it over her face. It wouldn’t be the first time murder was committed in this house. If he did that, would his life be better or worse?

His fear—unarticulated by his conscious mind but swimming around beneath—is that nothing would change.

He goes downstairs, voice-commanding the lights and computers. He sits in front of Number Three and goes on Debbie’s Blue Umbrella, sure that by now the fat ex-cop will have taken the bait.

There’s nothing.

He smacks his fist into his palm, feeling a dull throb at his temples that is the sure harbinger of a headache, a migraine that’s apt to keep him awake half the night. Aspirin doesn’t touch those headaches when they come. He calls them the Little Witches, only sometimes the Little Witches are big. He knows there are pills that are supposed to relieve headaches like that—he’s researched them on the Net—but you can’t get them without a prescription, and Brady is terrified of doctors. What if one of them discovered he was suffering from a brain tumor? A glioblastoma, which Wikipedia says is the worst? What if that’s why he killed the people at the job fair?

Don’t be stupid, a glio would have killed you months ago.

Okay, but suppose the doctor said his migraines were a sign of mental illness? Paranoid schizophrenia, something like that? Brady accepts that he is mentally ill, of course he is, normal people don’t drive into crowds of people or consider taking out the President of the United States in a suicide attack. Normal people don’t kill their little brothers. Normal men don’t pause outside their mothers’ doors, wondering if they’re naked.

But abnormal men don’t like other people to know they’re abnormal.

He shuts off his computer and wanders aimlessly around his control room. He picks up Thing Two, then puts it down again. Even this isn’t original, he’s discovered; car thieves have been using gadgets like this for years. He hasn’t dared to use it since the last time he used it on Mrs. Trelawney’s Mercedes, but maybe it’s time to bring good old Thing Two out of retirement—it’s amazing what people leave in their cars. Using Thing Two is a little dangerous, but not very. Not if he’s careful, and Brady can be very careful.

Fucking ex-cop, why hasn’t he taken the bait?

Brady rubs his temples.

18

Hodges hasn’t taken the bait because he understands the stakes: pot limit. If he writes the wrong message, he’ll never hear from Mr. Mercedes again. On the other hand, if he does what he’s sure Mr. Mercedes expects—coy and clumsy efforts to discover who the guy is—the conniving sonofabitch will run rings around him.

The question to be answered before he starts is simple: who is going to be the fish in this relationship, and who is going to be the fisherman?

He has to write something, because the Blue Umbrella is all he has. He can call on none of his old police resources. The letters Mr. Mercedes wrote to Olivia Trelawney and Hodges himself are worthless without a suspect. Besides, a letter is just a letter, while computer chat is…

“A dialogue,” he says.

Only he needs a lure. The tastiest lure imaginable. He can pretend he’s suicidal, it wouldn’t be hard, because until very recently he has been. He’s sure that meditations on the attractiveness of death would keep Mr. Mercedes talking for awhile, but for how long before the guy realized he was being played? This is no hopped-up moke who believes the police really are going to give him a million dollars and a 747 that will fly him to El Salvador. Mr. Mercedes is a very intelligent person who happens to be crazy.

Hodges draws his legal pad onto his lap and turns to a fresh page. Halfway down he writes half a dozen words in large capitals:

He puts a box around this, places the legal pad in the case file he has started, and closes the thickening folder. He sits a moment longer, looking at the screensaver photo of his daughter, who is no longer five and no longer thinks he’s God.

“Good night, Allie.”

He turns off his computer and goes to bed. He doesn’t expect to sleep, but he does.

19

He wakes up at 2:19 A.M. by the bedside clock with the answer as bright in his mind as a neon bar sign. It’s risky but right, the kind of thing you do without hesitation or you don’t do at all. He goes into his office, a large pale ghost in boxer shorts. He powers up his computer. He goes to Debbie’s Blue Umbrella and clicks GET STARTED NOW!

A new image appears. This time the young couple is on what looks like a magic carpet floating over an endless sea. The silver rain is falling, but they are safe and dry beneath the blue umbrella. There are two buttons below the carpet, REGISTER NOW on the left and ENTER PASSWORD on the right. Hodges clicks ENTER PASSWORD, and in the box that appears he types kermitfrog19. He hits return and a new screen appears. On it is this message:

He puts the cursor on Y and clicks his mouse. A box for his message appears. Hodges types quickly, without hesitation.

20

Three miles away, at 49 Elm Street in Northfield, Brady Hartsfield can’t sleep. His head thumps. He thinks: Frankie. My brother, who should have died when he choked on that apple slice. Life would have been so much simpler if things had happened that way.

He thinks of his mother, who sometimes forgets her nightgown and sleeps raw.

Most of all, he thinks of the fat ex-cop.

At last he gets up and leaves his bedroom, pausing for a moment outside his mother’s door, listening to her snore. The most unerotic sound in the universe, he tells himself, but still he pauses. Then he goes downstairs, opens the basement door, and closes it behind him. He stands in the dark and says, “Control.” But his voice is too hoarse and the dark remains. He clears his throat and tries again. “Control!”

The lights come on. Chaos lights up his computers and darkness stops the seven-screen countdown. He sits in front of his Number Three. Among the litter of icons is a small blue umbrella. He clicks on it, unaware that he’s been holding his breath until he lets it out in a long harsh gasp.

Brady hits Y and leans forward. His eager expression remains for a moment before puzzlement seeps in. Then, as he reads the short message over and over, puzzlement becomes first anger and then naked fury.

Brady feels an almost insurmountable urge to slam his fist through the screen but restrains it. He sits in his chair, trembling all over. His eyes are wide and unbelieving. A minute passes. Two. Three.

Pretty soon I’ll get up, he thinks. Get up and go back to bed.

Only what good will that do? He won’t be able to sleep.

“You fat fuck,” he whispers, unaware that hot tears have begun to spill from his eyes. “You fat stupid useless fuck. It was me! It was me! It was me!”

That is impossible.

He seizes on the necessity of hurting the fat ex-cop, and with the idea the ability to think returns. How should he do that? He considers the question for nearly half an hour, trying on and rejecting several scenarios. The answer, when it comes, is elegantly simple. The fat ex-cop’s friend—his only friend, so far as Brady has been able to ascertain—is a nigger kid with a white name. And what does the nigger kid love? What does his whole family love? The Irish setter, of course. Odell.

Brady recalls his earlier fantasy about poisoning a few gallons of Mr. Tastey’s finest, and starts laughing. He goes on the Internet and begins doing research.

My due diligence, he thinks, and smiles.

At some point he realizes his headache is gone.