Mr. Mercedes

1

Brady Hartsfield doesn’t need long to figure out how he’s going to poison Jerome Robinson’s canine pal, Odell. It helps that Brady is also Ralph Jones, a fictional fellow with just enough bona fides—plus a low-limit Visa card—to order things from places like Amazon and eBay. Most people don’t realize how easy it is to whomp up an Internet-friendly false identity. You just have to pay the bills. If you don’t, things can come unraveled in a hurry.

As Ralph Jones he orders a two-pound can of Gopher-Go and gives Ralphie’s mail drop address, the Speedy Postal not far from Discount Electronix.

The active ingredient in Gopher-Go is strychnine. Brady looks up the symptoms of strychnine poisoning on the Net and is delighted to find that Odell will have a tough time of it. Twenty minutes or so after ingestion, muscle spasms start in the neck and head. They quickly spread to the rest of the body. The mouth stretches in a grin (at least in humans; Brady doesn’t know about dogs). There may be vomiting, but by then too much of the poison has been absorbed and it’s too late. Convulsions set in and get worse until the backbone turns into a hard and constant arch. Sometimes the spine actually snaps. When death comes—as a relief, Brady is sure—it’s as a result of asphyxiation. The neural pathways tasked with running air to the lungs from the outside world just give up.

Brady can hardly wait.

At least it won’t be a long wait, he tells himself as he shuts off his seven computers and climbs the stairs. The stuff should be waiting for him next week. The best way to get it into the dog, he thinks, would be in a ball of nice juicy hamburger. All dogs like hamburger, and Brady knows exactly how he’s going to deliver Odell’s treat.

Barbara Robinson, Jerome’s little sister, has a friend named Hilda. The two girls like to visit Zoney’s GoMart, the convenience store a couple of blocks from the Robinson house. They say it’s because they like the grape Icees, but what they really like is hanging out with their other little friends. They sit on the low stone wall at the back of the store’s four-car parking lot, half a dozen chickadees gossiping and giggling and trading treats. Brady has seen them often when he’s driving the Mr. Tastey truck. He waves to them and they wave back.

Everybody likes the ice cream man.

Mrs. Robinson allows Barbara to make these trips once or twice a week (Zoney’s isn’t a drug hangout, a thing she has probably investigated for herself), but she has put conditions on her approval that Brady has had no trouble deducing. Barbara can never go alone; she always must be back in an hour; she and her friend must always take Odell. No dogs are allowed in the GoMart, so Barbara tethers him to the doorhandle of the outside restroom while she and Hilda go inside to get their grape-flavored ice.

That’s when Brady—driving his personal car, a nondescript Subaru—will toss Odell the lethal burger-ball. The dog is big; he may last twenty-four hours. Brady hopes so. Grief has a transitive power which is nicely expressed by the axiom shit rolls downhill. The more pain Odell feels, the more pain the nigger girl and her big brother will feel. Jerome will pass his grief on to the fat ex-cop, aka Kermit William Hodges, and the fat ex-cop will understand the dog’s death is his fault, payback for sending Brady that infuriating and disrespectful message. When Odell dies, the fat ex-cop will know—

Halfway up to the second floor, listening to his mother snoring, Brady stops, eyes wide with dawning realization.

The fat ex-cop will know.

And that’s the trouble, isn’t it? Because actions have consequences. It’s the reason why Brady might daydream about poisoning a load of the ice cream he sells the kiddies, but wouldn’t actually do such a thing. Not as long as he wants to keep flying under the radar, that is, and for now he does.

So far Hodges hasn’t gone to his pals in the police department with the letter Brady sent. At first Brady believed it was because Hodges wanted to keep it between the two of them, maybe take a shot at tracking down the Mercedes Killer himself and getting a little post-retirement glory, but now he knows better. Why would the fucking Det-Ret want to track him down when he thinks Brady’s nothing but a crank?

Brady can’t understand how Hodges could come to that conclusion when he, Brady, knew about the bleach and the hairnet, details never released to the press, but somehow he has. If Brady poisons Odell, Hodges will call in his police pals. Starting with his old partner, Huntley.

Worse, it may give the man Brady hoped to goad into suicide a new reason to live, defeating the whole purpose of the artfully composed letter. That would be completely unfair. Pushing the Trelawney bitch over the edge had been the greatest thrill of his life, far greater (for reasons he doesn’t understand, or care to) than killing all those people with her car, and he wanted to do it again. To get the chief investigator in the case to kill himself—what a triumph that would be!

Brady is standing halfway up the stairs, thinking hard.

The fat bastard still might do it, he tells himself. Killing the dog might be the final push he needs.

Only he doesn’t really buy this, and his head gives a warning throb.

He feels a sudden urge to rush back down to the basement, go on the Blue Umbrella, and demand that the fat ex-cop tell him what bullshit “withheld evidence” he’s talking about so he, Brady, can knock it down. But to do that would be a bad mistake. It would look needy, maybe even desperate.

Withheld evidence.

But I did it! I risked my freedom, I risked my life, and I did it! You can’t take away the credit! It’s not fair!

His head throbs again.

You stupid cocksucker, he thinks. One way or the other, you’re going to pay, but not until after the dog dies. Maybe your nigger friend will die, too. Maybe that whole nigger family will die. And after them, maybe a whole lot of other people. Enough to make what happened at City Center look like a picnic.

He goes up to his room and lies down on his bed in his underwear. His head is banging again, his arms are trembling (it’s as if he has ingested strychnine). He’ll lie here in agony until morning, unless—

He gets up and goes back down the hall. He stands outside his mother’s open door for almost four minutes, then gives up and goes inside. He gets into bed with her and his headache begins to recede almost at once. Maybe it’s the warmth. Maybe it’s the smell of her—shampoo, body lotion, booze. Probably it’s both.

She turns over. Her eyes are wide in the dark. “Oh, honeyboy. Are you having one of those nights?”

“Yes.” He feels the warmth of tears in his eyes.

“Little Witch?”

“Big Witch this time.”

“Want me to help you?” She already knows the answer; it’s throbbing against her stomach. “You do so much for me,” she says tenderly. “Let me do this for you.”

He closes his eyes. The smell of the booze on her breath is very strong. He doesn’t mind, although ordinarily he hates it. “Okay.”

She takes care of him swiftly and expertly. It doesn’t take long. It never does.

“There,” she says. “Go to sleep now, honeyboy.”

He does, almost at once.

When he wakes in the early morning light she’s snoring again, a lock of hair spit-stuck to the corner of her mouth. He gets out of bed and goes back to his own room. His mind is clear. The strychnine-laced gopher poison is on its way. When it arrives, he’ll poison the dog, and damn the consequences. God damn the consequences. As for those suburban niggers with the white-people names? They don’t matter. The fat ex-cop goes next, after he’s had a chance to fully experience Jerome Robinson’s pain and Barbara Robinson’s sorrow, and who cares if it’s suicide? The important thing is that he go. And after that…

“Something big,” he says as he pulls on a pair of jeans and a plain white tee. “A blaze of glory.” Just what the blaze will be he doesn’t know yet, but that’s okay. He has time, and he needs to do something first. He needs to demolish Hodges’s so-called “withheld evidence” and convince him that he, Brady, is indeed the Mercedes Killer, the monster Hodges failed to catch. He needs to rub it in until it hurts. He also needs it because if Hodges believes in this bogus “withheld evidence,” the other cops—the real cops—must believe it, too. That is unacceptable. He needs…

“Credibility!” Brady exclaims to the empty kitchen. “I need credibility!”

He sets about making breakfast: bacon and eggs. The smell may waft upstairs to Ma and tempt her. If not, no big deal. He’ll eat her share. He’s pretty hungry.

2

This time it works, although when Deborah Ann appears, she’s still belting her robe and barely awake. Her eyes are red-rimmed, her cheeks are pale, and her hair flies out every whichway. She no longer suffers hangovers, exactly, her brain and body have gotten too used to the booze for that, but she spends her mornings in a state of soft focus, watching game shows and popping Tums. Around two in the afternoon, when the world starts to sharpen up for her, she pours the day’s first drink.

If she remembers what happened last night, she doesn’t mention it. But then, she never does. Neither of them do.

We never talk about Frankie, either, Brady thinks. And if we did, what would we say? Gosh, too bad about that fall he took?

“Smells good,” she says. “Some for me?”

“All you want. Coffee?”

“Please. Lots of sugar.” She sits down at the table and stares at the television on the counter. It isn’t on, but she stares at it anyway. For all Brady knows, maybe she thinks it is on.

“You’re not wearing your uniform,” she says—meaning the blue button-up shirt with DISCOUNT ELECTRONIX on the pocket. He has three hanging in his closet. He irons them himself. Like vacuuming the floors and washing their clothes, ironing isn’t in Ma’s repertoire.

“Don’t need to go in until ten,” he says, and as if the words are a magic incantation, his phone wakes up and starts buzzing across the kitchen counter. He catches it just before it can fall off onto the floor.

“Don’t answer it, honeyboy. Pretend we went out for breakfast.”

It’s tempting, but Brady is as incapable of letting a phone ring as he is of giving up his muddled and ever-changing plans for some grand act of destruction. He looks at the caller ID and isn’t surprised to see TONES in the window. Anthony “Tones” Frobisher, the grand high panjandrum of Discount Electronix (Birch Hill Mall branch).

He picks up the phone and says, “It’s my late day, Tones.”

“I know, but I need you to make a service call. I really, really do.” Tones can’t make Brady take a call on his late day, hence the wheedling tone. “Plus it’s Mrs. Rollins, and you know she tips.”

Of course she does, she lives in Sugar Heights. The Cyber Patrol makes lots of service calls in Sugar Heights, and one of their customers—one of Brady’s customers—was the late Olivia Trelawney. He was in her house twice on calls after he began conversing with her beneath Debbie’s Blue Umbrella, and what a kick that was. Seeing how much weight she’d lost. Seeing how her hands had started to tremble. Also, having access to her computer had opened all sorts of possibilities.

“I don’t know, Tones…” But of course he’ll go, and not only because Mrs. Rollins tips. It’s fun to go rolling past 729 Lilac Drive, thinking: I’m responsible for those closed gates. All I had to do to give her the final push was add one little program to her Mac.

Computers are wonderful.

“Listen, Brady, if you take this call, you don’t have to work the store at all today, how’s that? Just return the Beetle and then hang out wherever until it’s time to fire up your stupid ice cream wagon.”

“What about Freddi? Why don’t you send her?” Flat-out teasing now. If Tones could have sent Freddi, she’d already be on her way.

“Called in sick. Says she got her period and it’s killing her. Of course it’s fucking bullshit. I know it, she knows it, and she knows I know it, but she’ll put in a sexual harassment claim if I call her on it. She knows I know that, too.”

Ma sees Brady smiling, and smiles back. She raises a hand, closes it, and turns it back and forth. Twist his balls, honeyboy. Brady’s smile widens into a grin. Ma may be a drunk, she may only cook once or twice a week, she can be as annoying as shit, but sometimes she can read him like a book.

“All right,” Brady says. “How about I take my own car?”

“You know I can’t give you a mileage allowance for your personal vehicle,” Tones says.

“Also, it’s company policy,” Brady says. “Right?”

“Well… yeah.”

Schyn Ltd., DE’s German parent company, believes the Cyber Patrol VWs are good advertising. Freddi Linklatter says that anyone who wants a guy driving a snot-green Beetle to fix his computer is insane, and on this point Brady agrees with her. Still, there must be a lot of insane people out there, because they never lack for service calls.

Although few tip as well as Paula Rollins.

“Okay,” Brady says, “but you owe me one.”

“Thanks, buddy.”

Brady kills the connection without bothering to say You’re not my buddy, and we both know it.

3

Paula Rollins is a full-figured blonde who lives in a sixteen-room faux Tudor mansion three blocks from the late Mrs. T.’s pile. She has all those rooms to herself. Brady doesn’t know exactly what her deal is, but guesses she’s some rich guy’s second or third ex–trophy wife, and that she did very well for herself in the settlement. Maybe the guy was too entranced by her knockers to bother with the prenup. Brady doesn’t care much, he only knows she has enough to tip well and she’s never tried to slap the make on him. That’s good. He has no interest in Mrs. Rollins’s full figure.

She does grab his hand and just about pull him through the door, though.

“Oh… Brady! Thank God!”

She sounds like a woman being rescued from a desert island after three days without food or water, but he hears the little pause before she says his name and sees her eyes flick down to read it off his shirt, even though he’s been here half a dozen times. (So has Freddi, for that matter; Paula Rollins is a serial computer abuser.) He doesn’t mind that she doesn’t remember him. Brady likes being forgettable.

“It just… I don’t know what’s wrong!”

As if the dimwitted twat ever does. Last time he was here, six weeks ago, it was a kernel panic, and she was convinced a computer virus had gobbled up all her files. Brady shooed her gently from the office and promised (not sounding too hopeful) to do what he could. Then he sat down, re-started the computer, and surfed for awhile before calling her in and telling her he had been able to fix the problem just in time. Another half hour, he said, and her files really would have been gone. She had tipped him eighty dollars. He and Ma had gone out to dinner that night, and split a not-bad bottle of champagne.

“Tell me what happened,” Brady says, grave as a neurosurgeon.

“I didn’t do anything,” she wails. She always wails. Many of his service call customers do. Not just the women, either. Nothing can unman a top-shelf executive more rapidly than the possibility that everything on his MacBook just went to data heaven.

She pulls him through the parlor (it’s as long as an Amtrak dining car) and into her office.

“I cleaned up myself, I never let the housekeeper in here—washed the windows, vacuumed the floor—and when I sat down to do my email, the damn computer wouldn’t even turn on!”

“Huh. Weird.” Brady knows Mrs. Rollins has a spic maid to do the household chores, but apparently the maid isn’t allowed in the office. Which is a good thing for her, because Brady has already spotted the problem, and if the maid had been responsible for it, she probably would have been fired.

“Can you fix it, Brady?” Thanks to the tears swimming in them, Mrs. Rollins’s big blue eyes are bigger than ever. Brady suddenly flashes on Betty Boop in those old cartoons you can look at on YouTube, thinks Poop-poop-pe-doop!, and has to restrain a laugh.

“I’ll sure try,” he says gallantly.

“I have to run across the street to Helen Wilcox’s,” she says, “but I’ll only be a few minutes. There’s fresh coffee in the kitchen, if you want it.”

So saying, she leaves him alone in her big expensive house, with fuck knows how many valuable pieces of jewelry scattered around upstairs. She’s safe, though. Brady would never steal from a service client. He might be caught in the act. Even if he weren’t, who would be the logical suspect? Duh. He didn’t get away with mowing down those job-seeking idiots at City Center only to be arrested for stealing a pair of diamond earrings he wouldn’t have any idea how to get rid of.

He waits until the back door shuts, then goes into the parlor to watch her accompany her world-class tits across the street. When she’s out of sight, he goes back to the office, crawls under her desk, and plugs in her computer. She must have yanked the plug so she could vacuum, then forgot to jack it back in.

Her password screen comes on. Idly, just killing time, he types PAULA, and her desktop, loaded with all her files, appears. God, people are so dumb.

He goes on Debbie’s Blue Umbrella to see if the fat ex-cop has posted anything new. He hasn’t, but Brady decides on the spur of the moment to send the Det-Ret a message after all. Why not?

He learned in high school that thinking too long about writing doesn’t work for him. Too many other ideas get into his head and start sliding all over each other. It’s better to just fire away. That was how he wrote to Olivia Trelawney—white heat, baby—and it’s also the way he wrote to Hodges, although he went over the message to the fat ex-cop a couple of times to make sure he was keeping his style consistent.

He writes in the same style now, only reminding himself to keep it short.

Brady looks this over and makes one change: a hyphen in the middle of hairnet. He can’t believe he’ll ever become a person of interest, but he knows that if he ever does, they’ll ask him to provide a writing sample. He almost wishes he could give them one. He wore a mask when he drove into the crowd, and he wears another when he writes as the Mercedes Killer.

He hits SEND, then pulls down Mrs. Rollins’s Internet history. For a moment he stops, bemused, when he sees several entries for White Tie and Tails. He knows what that is from something Freddi Linklatter told him: a male escort service. Paula Rollins has a secret life, it seems.

But then, doesn’t everybody?

It’s no business of his. He deletes his visit to Under Debbie’s Blue Umbrella, then opens his boxy service crate and takes out a bunch of random crap: utility discs, a modem (broken, but she won’t know that), various thumb-drives, and a voltage regulator that has nothing whatsoever to do with computer repair but looks technological. He also takes out a Lee Child paperback that he reads until he hears his client come in the back door twenty minutes later.

When Mrs. Rollins pokes her head into the study, the paperback is out of sight and Brady is packing up the random shit. She favors him with an anxious smile. “Any luck?”

“At first it looked bad,” Brady says, “but I tracked down your problem. The trimmer switch was bad and that shut down your danus circuit. In a case like that, the computer’s programmed not to start up, because if it did, you might lose all your data.” He looks at her gravely. “The darn thing might even catch fire. It’s been known to happen.”

“Oh… my… dear… Jesus,” she says, packing each word with drama and placing one hand high on her chest. “Are you sure it’s okay?”

“Good as gold,” he says. “Check it out.”

He starts the computer and looks politely away while she types in her numbfuck password. She opens a couple of files, then turns to him, smiling. “Brady, you are a gift from God.”

“My ma used to tell me the same thing until I got old enough to buy beer.”

She laughs as if this were the funniest thing she has heard in her whole life. Brady laughs with her, because he has a sudden vision: kneeling on her shoulders and driving a butcher knife from her own kitchen deep into her screaming mouth.

He can almost feel the gristle giving way.

4

Hodges has been checking the Blue Umbrella site frequently, and he’s reading the Mercedes Killer’s follow-up message only minutes after Brady hit SEND.

Hodges is grinning, a big one that smooths his skin and makes him almost handsome. Their relationship has been officially established: Hodges the fisherman, Mr. Mercedes the fish. But a wily fish, he reminds himself, one capable of making a sudden lunge and snapping the line. He will have to be played carefully, reeled toward the boat slowly. If Hodges is able to do that, if he’s patient, sooner or later Mr. Mercedes will agree to a meeting. Hodges is sure of it.

Because if he can’t nudge me into offing myself, that leaves just one alternative, and that’s murder.

The smart thing for Mr. Mercedes to do would be to just walk away; if he does that, the road ends. But he won’t. He’s pissed, but that’s only part of it, and the small part, at that. Hodges wonders if Mr. Mercedes knows just how crazy he is. And if he knows there’s one nugget of hard information here.

Up to this morning, Hodges has only suspected that Mr. Mercedes has been watching his house; now he knows. Motherfucker has been on the street, and more than once.

He grabs his legal pad and starts jotting possible follow-up messages. It has to be good, because his fish feels the hook. The pain of it makes him angry even though he doesn’t yet know what it is. He needs to be a lot angrier before he figures it out, and that means taking a risk. Hodges must jerk the line to seat the hook deeper, despite the risk the line may break. What…?

He remembers something Pete Huntley said at lunch, just a remark in passing, and the answer comes to him. Hodges writes on his pad, then rewrites, then polishes. He reads the finished message over and decides it will do. It’s short and mean. There’s something you forgot, sucka. Something a false confessor couldn’t know. Or a real confessor, for that matter… unless Mr. Mercedes checked out his rolling murder weapon from stem to stern before climbing in, and Hodges is betting the guy didn’t.

If he’s wrong, the line snaps and the fish swims away. But there’s an old saying: no risk, no reward.

He wants to send the message right away, but knows it’s a bad idea. Let the fish swim around in circles a little longer with that bad old hook in his mouth. The question is what to do in the meantime. TV never had less appeal for him.

He gets an idea—they’re coming in bunches this morning—and pulls out the bottom drawer of his desk. Here is a box filled with the small flip-up pads he used to carry with him when he and Pete were doing street interviews. He never expected to need one of these again, but he takes one now and stows it in the back pocket of his chinos.

It fits just right.

5

Hodges walks halfway down Harper Road, then starts knocking on doors, just like in the old days. Crossing and re-crossing the street, missing no one, working his way back. It’s a weekday, but a surprising number of people answer his knock or ring. Some are stay-at-home moms, but many are retirees like himself, fortunate enough to have paid for their homes before the bottom fell out of the economy, but in less than great shape otherwise. Not living day-to-day or even week-to-week, maybe, but having to balance out the cost of food against the cost of all those old-folks medicines as the end of the month nears.

His story is simple, because simple is always best. He says there have been break-ins a few blocks over—kids, probably—and he’s checking to see if anyone in his own neighborhood has noticed any vehicles that seem out of place, and have shown up more than once. They’d probably be cruising even slower than the twenty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit, he says. He doesn’t have to say any more; they all watch the cop shows and know what “casing the joint” means.

He shows them his ID, which has RETIRED stamped in red across the name and vitals below his photo. He’s careful to say that no, he hasn’t been asked by the police to do this canvassing (the last thing in the world he wants is one of his neighbors calling the Murrow Building downtown to check up on him), it was his own idea. He lives in the neighborhood, too, after all, and has a personal stake in its security.

Mrs. Melbourne, the widow whose flowers so fascinated Odell, invites him in for coffee and cookies. Hodges takes her up on it because she seems lonely. It’s his first real conversation with her, and he quickly realizes she’s eccentric at best, downright bonkers at worst. Articulate, though. He has to give her that. She explains about the black SUVs she’s observed (“With tinted windows you can’t see through, just like on 24”), and tells him about their special antennas. Whippers, she calls them, waving her hand back and forth to demonstrate.

“Uh-huh,” Hodges says. “Let me make a note of that.” He turns a page in his pad and jots I have to get out of here on the new one.

“That’s a good idea,” she says, bright-eyed. “I’ve just got to tell you how sorry I was when your wife left you, Detective Hodges. She did, didn’t she?”

“We agreed to disagree,” Hodges says with an amiability he doesn’t feel.

“It’s so nice to meet you in person and know you’re keeping an eye out. Have another cookie.”

Hodges glances at his watch, snaps his pad closed, and gets up. “I’d love to, but I’d better roll. Got a noon appointment.”

She scans his bulk and says, “Doctor?”

“Chiropractor.”

She frowns, transforming her face into a walnut shell with eyes. “Think that over, Detective Hodges. Back-crackers are dangerous. There are people who have lain down on those tables and never walked again.”

She sees him to the door. As he steps onto the porch, she says, “I’d check on that ice cream man, too. This spring it seems like he’s always around. Do you suppose Loeb’s Ice Cream checks out the people they hire to drive those little trucks? I hope so, because that one looks suspicious. He might be a peedaroast.”

“I’m sure their drivers have references, but I’ll look into it.”

“Another good idea!” she exclaims.

Hodges wonders what he’d do if she produced a long hook, like in the old-time vaudeville shows, and tried to yank him back inside. A childhood memory comes to him: the witch in Hansel and Gretel.

“Also—I just thought of this—I’ve seen several vans lately. They look like delivery vans—they have business names on them—but anyone can make up a business name, don’t you think?”

“It’s always possible,” Hodges says, descending the steps.

“You should call in to number seventeen, too.” She points down the hill. “It’s almost all the way down to Hanover Street. They have people who come late, and play loud music.” She sways forward in the doorway, almost bowing. “It could be a dope den. One of those crack houses.”

Hodges thanks her for the tip and trudges across the street. Black SUVs and the Mr. Tastey guy, he thinks. Plus the delivery vans filled with Al Qaeda terrorists.

Across the street he finds a stay-at-home dad, Alan Bowfinger by name. “Just don’t confuse me with Goldfinger,” he says, and invites Hodges to sit in one of the lawn chairs on the left side of his house, where there’s shade. Hodges is happy to take him up on this.

Bowfinger tells him that he makes a living writing greeting cards. “I specialize in the slightly snarky ones. Like on the outside it’ll say, ‘Happy Birthday! Who’s the fairest of them all?’ And when you open it up, there’s a piece of shiny foil with a crack running down the middle of it.”

“Yeah? And what’s the message?”

Bowfinger holds up his hands, as if framing it. “‘Not you, but we love you anyway.’”

“Kind of mean,” Hodges ventures.

“True, but it ends with an expression of love. That’s what sells the card. First the poke, then the hug. As to your purpose today, Mr. Hodges… or do I call you Detective?”

“Just Mister these days.”

“I haven’t seen anything but the usual traffic. No slow cruisers except people looking for addresses and the ice cream truck after school lets out.” Bowfinger rolls his eyes. “Did you get an earful from Mrs. Melbourne?”

“Well…”

“She’s a member of NICAP,” Bowfinger says. “That stands for National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena.”

“Weather stuff? Tornadoes and cloud formations?”

“Flying saucers.” Bowfinger raises his hands to the sky. “She thinks they walk among us.”

Hodges says something that would never have passed his lips if he’d still been on active duty and conducting an official investigation. “She thinks Mr. Tastey might be a peedaroast.”

Bowfinger laughs until tears squirt out of his eyes. “Oh God,” he says. “That guy’s been around for five or six years, driving his little truck and jingling his little bells. How many peeds do you think he’s roasted in all that time?”

“Don’t know,” Hodges says, getting to his feet. “Dozens, probably.” He holds out his hand and Bowfinger shakes it. Another thing Hodges is discovering about retirement: his neighbors have stories and personalities. Some of them are even interesting.

As he’s putting his notepad away, a look of alarm comes over Bowfinger’s face.

“What?” Hodges asks, at once on point.

Bowfinger points across the street and says, “You didn’t eat any of her cookies, did you?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“I’d stay close to the toilet for a few hours, if I were you.”

6

When he gets back to his house, his arches throbbing and his ankles singing high C, the light on his answering machine is blinking. It’s Pete Huntley, and he sounds excited. “Call me,” he says. “This is unbelievable. Un-fucking-real.”

Hodges is suddenly, irrationally sure that Pete and his pretty new partner Isabelle have nailed Mr. Mercedes after all. He feels a deep stab of jealousy, and—crazy but true—anger. He hits Pete on speed-dial, his heart hammering, but his call goes right to voicemail.

“Got your message,” Hodges says. “Call back when you can.”

He kills the phone, then sits still, drumming his fingers on the edge of his desk. He tells himself it doesn’t matter who catches the psycho sonofabitch, but it does. For one thing, it’s certainly going to mean that his correspondence with the perk (funny how that word gets in your head) will come out, and that may put him in some fairly warm soup. But it’s not the important thing. The important thing is that without Mr. Mercedes, things will go back to what they were: afternoon TV and playing with his father’s gun.

He takes out his yellow legal pad and begins transcribing notes on his neighborhood walk-around. After a minute or two of this, he tosses the pad back into the case-folder and slams it closed. If Pete and Izzy Jaynes have popped the guy, Mrs. Melbourne’s vans and sinister black SUVs don’t mean shit.

He thinks about going on Debbie’s Blue Umbrella and sending merckill a message: Did they catch you?

Ridiculous, but weirdly attractive.

His phone rings and he snatches it up, but it’s not Pete. It’s Olivia Trelawney’s sister.

“Oh,” he says. “Hi, Mrs. Patterson. How you doing?”

“I’m fine,” she says, “and it’s Janey, remember? Me Janey, you Bill.”

“Janey, right.”

“You don’t sound exactly thrilled to hear from me, Bill.” Is she being the tiniest bit flirty? Wouldn’t that be nice.

“No, no, I’m happy you called, but I don’t have anything to report.”

“I didn’t expect you would. I called about Mom. The nurse at Sunny Acres who’s most familiar with her case works the day shift in the McDonald Building, where my mother has her little suite of rooms. I asked her to call if Mom brightened up. She still does that.”

“Yes, you told me.”

“Well, the nurse called just a few minutes ago to tell me Mom’s back, at least for the time being. She might be clear for a day or two, then it’s into the clouds again. Do you still want to go see her?”

“I think so,” Hodges says cautiously, “but it would have to be this afternoon. I’m waiting on a call.”

“Is it about the man who took her car?” Janey’s excited. As I should be, Hodges tells himself.

“That’s what I need to find out. Can I call you back?”

“Absolutely. You have my cell number?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah,” she says, gently mocking. It makes him smile, in spite of his nerves. “Call me as soon as you can.”

“I will.”

He breaks the connection, and the phone rings while it’s still in his hand. This time it’s Pete, and he’s more excited than ever.

“Billy! I gotta go back, we’ve got him in an interview room—IR4, as a matter of fact, remember how you always used to say that was your lucky one?—but I had to call you. We got him, partner, we fucking got him!”

“Got who?” Hodges asks, keeping his voice steady. His heartbeat is steady now, too, but the beats are hard enough to feel in his temples: whomp and whomp and whomp.

“Fucking Davis!” Pete shouts. “Who else?”

Davis. Not Mr. Mercedes but Donnie Davis, the camera-friendly wife murderer. Bill Hodges closes his eyes in relief. It’s the wrong emotion to feel, but he feels it nevertheless.

He says, “So the body that game warden found near his cabin turned out to be Sheila Davis’s? You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

“Who’d you blow to get the DNA results so fast?” When Hodges was on the force, they were lucky to get DNA results within a calendar month of sample submission, and six weeks was the average.

“We don’t need DNA! For the trial, sure, but—”

“What do you mean, you don’t—”

“Shut up and listen, okay? He just walked in off the street and copped to it. No lawyer, no bullshit justifications. Listened to the Miranda and said he didn’t want a lawyer, only wanted to get it off his chest.”

“Jesus. As smooth as he was in all the interviews we had with him? Are you sure he’s not fucking with you? Playing some sort of long game?”

Thinking it’s the kind of thing Mr. Mercedes would try to do if they nailed him. Not just a game but a long game. Isn’t that why he tries to create alternate writing styles in his poison-pen letters?

“Billy, it’s not just his wife. You remember those dollies he had on the side? Girls with big hair and inflated tits and names like Bobbi Sue?”

“Sure. What about them?”

“When this breaks, those young ladies are going to get on their knees and thank God they’re still alive.”

“I’m not following you.”

“Turnpike Joe, Billy! Five women raped and killed at various Interstate rest stops between here and Pennsylvania, starting back in ninety-four and ending in oh-eight! Donnie Davis says it’s him! Davis is Turnpike Joe! He’s giving us times and places and descriptions. It all fits. This… it blows my mind!”

“Mine, too,” Hodges says, and he absolutely means it. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks, but I didn’t do anything except show up this morning.” Pete laughs wildly. “I feel like I won the Megabucks.”

Hodges doesn’t feel like that, but at least he hasn’t lost the Megabucks. He still has a case to work.

“I gotta get back in there, Billy, before he changes his mind.”

“Yeah, yeah, but Pete? Before you go?”

“What?”

“Get him a court-appointed.”

“Ah, Billy—”

“I’m serious. Interrogate the shit out of him, but before you start, announce—for the record—that you’re getting him lawyered up. You can wring him dry before anyone shows up at Murrow, but you have to get this right. Are you hearing me?”

“Yeah, okay. That’s a good call. I’ll have Izzy do it.”

“Great. Now get back in there. Nail him down.”

Pete actually crows. Hodges has read about people doing that, but hasn’t ever heard it done—except by roosters—until now. “Turnpike Joe, Billy! Fucking Turnpike Joe! Do you believe it?”

He hangs up before his ex-partner can reply. Hodges sits where he is for almost five minutes, waiting until a belated case of the shakes subsides. Then he calls Janey Patterson.

“It wasn’t about the man we’re looking for?”

“Sorry, no. Another case.”

“Oh. Too bad.”

“Yeah. You’ll still come with me to the nursing home?”

“You bet. I’ll be waiting on the sidewalk.”

Before leaving, he checks the Blue Umbrella site one last time. Nothing there, and he has no intention of sending his own carefully crafted message today. Tonight will be soon enough. Let the fish feel the hook awhile longer.

He leaves his house with no premonition that he won’t be back.

7

Sunny Acres is ritzy. Elizabeth Wharton is not.

She’s in a wheelchair, hunched over in a posture that reminds Hodges of Rodin’s Thinker. Afternoon sunlight slants in through the window, turning her hair into a silver cloud so fine it’s a halo. Outside the window, on a rolling and perfectly manicured lawn, a few golden oldies are playing a slow-motion game of croquet. Mrs. Wharton’s croquet days are over. As are her days of standing up. When Hodges last saw her—with Pete Huntley beside him and Olivia Trelawney sitting next to her—she was bent. Now she’s broken.

Janey, vibrant in tapered white slacks and a blue-and-white-striped sailor’s shirt, kneels beside her, stroking one of Mrs. Wharton’s badly twisted hands.

“How are you today, dear one?” she asks. “You look better.” If this is true, Hodges is horrified.

Mrs. Wharton peers at her daughter with faded blue eyes that express nothing, not even puzzlement. Hodges’s heart sinks. He enjoyed the ride out here with Janey, enjoyed looking at her, enjoyed getting to know her even more, and that’s good. It means the trip hasn’t been entirely wasted.

Then a minor miracle occurs. The old lady’s cataract-tinged eyes clear; the cracked lipstickless lips spread in a smile. “Hello, Janey.” She can only raise her head a little, but her eyes flick to Hodges. Now they look cold. “Craig.”

Thanks to their conversation on the ride out, Hodges knows who that is.

“This isn’t Craig, lovey. This is a friend of mine. His name is Bill Hodges. You’ve met him before.”

“No, I don’t believe…” She trails off—frowning now—then says, “You’re… one of the detectives?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He doesn’t even consider telling her he’s retired. Best to keep things on a straight line while there are still a few circuits working in her head.

Her frown deepens, creating rivers of wrinkles. “You thought Livvy left her key in her car so that man could steal it. She told you and told you, but you never believed her.”

Hodges copies Janey, taking a knee beside the wheelchair. “Mrs. Wharton, I now think we might have been wrong about that.”

“Of course you were.” She shifts her gaze back to her remaining daughter, looking up at her from beneath the bony shelf of her brow. It’s the only way she can look. “Where’s Craig?”

“I divorced him last year, Mom.”

She considers, then says, “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”

“I couldn’t agree more. Can Bill ask you a few questions?”

“I don’t see why not, but I want some orange juice. And my pain pills.”

“I’ll go down to the nurses’ suite and see if it’s time,” she says. “Bill, are you okay if I—?”

He nods and flicks two fingers in a go, go gesture. As soon as she’s out the door, Hodges gets to his feet, bypasses the visitor’s chair, and sits on Elizabeth Wharton’s bed with his hands clasped between his knees. He has his pad, but he’s afraid taking notes might distract her. The two of them regard each other silently. Hodges is fascinated by the silver nimbus around the old lady’s head. There are signs that one of the orderlies combed her hair that morning, but it’s gone its own wild way in the hours since. Hodges is glad. The scoliosis has twisted her body into a thing of ugliness, but her hair is beautiful. Crazy and beautiful.

“I think,” he says, “we treated your daughter badly, Mrs. Wharton.”

Yes indeed. Even if Mrs. T. was an unwitting accomplice, and Hodges hasn’t entirely dismissed the idea that she left her key in the ignition, he and Pete did a piss-poor job. It’s easy—too easy—to either disbelieve or disregard someone you dislike. “We were blinded by certain preconceptions, and for that I’m sorry.”

“Are you talking about Janey? Janey and Craig? He hit her, you know. She tried to get him to stop using that dope stuff he liked, and he hit her. She says only once, but I believe it was more.” She lifts one slow hand and taps her nose with a pale finger. “A mother can tell.”

“This isn’t about Janey. I’m talking about Olivia.”

“He made Livvy stop taking her pills. She said it was because she didn’t want to be a dope addict like Craig, but it wasn’t the same. She needed those pills.”

“Are you talking about her antidepressants?”

“They were pills that made her able to go out.” She pauses, considering. “There were other ones, too, that kept her from touching things over and over. She had strange ideas, my Livvy, but she was a good person, just the same. Underneath, she was a very good person.”

Mrs. Wharton begins to cry.

There’s a box of Kleenex on the nightstand. Hodges takes a few and holds them out to her, but when he sees how difficult it is for her to close her hand, he wipes her eyes for her.

“Thank you, sir. Is your name Hedges?”

“Hodges, ma’am.”

“You were the nice one. The other one was very mean to Livvy. She said he was laughing at her. Laughing all the time. She said she could see it in his eyes.”

Was that true? If so, he’s ashamed of Pete. And ashamed of himself for not realizing.

“Who suggested she stop taking her pills? Do you remember?”

Janey has come back with the orange juice and a small paper cup that probably holds her mother’s pain medication. Hodges glimpses her from the corner of his eye and uses the same two fingers to motion her away again. He doesn’t want Mrs. Wharton’s attention divided, or taking any pills that will further muddle her already muddled recollection.

Mrs. Wharton is silent. Then, just when Hodges is afraid she won’t answer: “It was her pen-pal.”

“Did she meet him under the Blue Umbrella? Debbie’s Blue Umbrella?”

“She never met him. Not in person.”

“What I mean—”

“The Blue Umbrella was make-believe.” From beneath the white brows, her eyes are calling him a perfect idiot. “It was a thing in her computer. Frankie was her computer pen-pal.”

He always feels a kind of electric shock in his midsection when fresh info drops. Frankie. Surely not the guy’s real name, but names have power and aliases often have meaning. Frankie.

“He told her to stop taking her medicine?”

“Yes, he said it was hooking her. Where’s Janey? I want my pills.”

“She’ll be back any minute, I’m sure.”

Mrs. Wharton broods into her lap for a moment. “Frankie said he took all the same medicines, and that’s why he did… what he did. He said he felt better after he stopped taking them. He said that after he stopped, he knew what he did was wrong. But it made him sad because he couldn’t take it back. That’s what he said. And that life wasn’t worth living. I told Livvy she should stop talking to him. I said he was bad. That he was poison. And she said…”

The tears are coming again.

“She said she had to save him.”

This time when Janey comes into the doorway, Hodges nods to her. Janey puts a pair of blue pills into her mother’s pursed and seeking mouth, then gives her a drink of juice.

“Thank you, Livvy.”

Hodges sees Janey wince, then smile. “You’re welcome, dear.” She turns to Hodges. “I think we should go, Bill. She’s very tired.”

He can see that, but is still reluctant to leave. There’s a feeling you get when the interview isn’t done. When there’s at least one more apple hanging on the tree. “Mrs. Wharton, did Olivia say anything else about Frankie? Because you’re right. He is bad. I’d like to find him so he can’t hurt anyone else.”

“Livvy never would have left her key in her car. Never.” Elizabeth Wharton sits hunched in her bar of sun, a human parenthesis in a fuzzy blue robe, unaware that she’s topped with a gauze of silver light. The finger comes up again—admonitory. She says, “That dog we had never threw up on the rug again. Just that once.”

Janey takes Hodges’s hand and mouths, Let’s go.

Habits die hard, and Hodges speaks the old formula as Janey bends down and kisses first her mother’s cheek and then the corner of her dry mouth. “Thank you for your time, Mrs. Wharton. You’ve been very helpful.”

As they reach the door, Mrs. Wharton speaks clearly. “She still wouldn’t have committed suicide if not for the ghosts.”

Hodges turns back. Beside him, Janey Patterson is wide-eyed.

“What ghosts, Mrs. Wharton?”

“One was the baby,” she says. “The poor thing who was killed with all those others. Livvy heard that baby in the night, crying and crying. She said the baby’s name was Patricia.”

“In her house? Olivia heard this in her house?”

Elizabeth Wharton manages the smallest of nods, a mere dip of the chin. “And sometimes the mother. She said the mother would accuse her.”

She looks up at them from her wheelchair hunch.

“She would scream, ‘Why did you let him murder my baby?’ That’s why Livvy killed herself.”

8

It’s Friday afternoon and the suburban streets are feverish with kids released from school. There aren’t many on Harper Road, but there are still some, and this gives Brady a perfect reason to cruise slowly past number sixty-three and peek in the window. Except he can’t, because the drapes are drawn. And the overhang to the left of the house is empty except for the lawnmower. Instead of sitting in his house and watching TV, where he belongs, the Det-Ret is sporting about in his crappy old Toyota.

Sporting about where? It probably doesn’t matter, but Hodges’s absence makes Brady vaguely uneasy.

Two little girls trot to the curb with money clutched in their hands. They have undoubtedly been taught, both at home and at school, to never approach strangers, especially strange men, but who could be less strange than good old Mr. Tastey?

He sells them a cone each, one chocolate and one vanilla. He joshes with them, asks how they got so pretty. They giggle. The truth is one’s ugly and the other’s worse. As he serves them and makes change, he thinks about the missing Corolla, wondering if this break in Hodges’s afternoon routine has anything to do with him. Another message from Hodges on the Blue Umbrella might cast some light, give an idea of where the ex-cop’s head is at.

Even if it doesn’t, Brady wants to hear from him.

“You don’t dare ignore me,” he says as the bells tinkle and chime over his head.

He crosses Hanover Street, parks in the strip mall, kills the engine (the annoying chimes fall blessedly silent), and hauls his laptop out from under the seat. He keeps it in an insulated case because the truck is always so fucking cold. He boots it up and goes on Debbie’s Blue Umbrella courtesy of the nearby coffee shop’s Wi-Fi.

Nothing.

“You fucker,” Brady whispers. “You don’t dare ignore me, you fucker.”

As he zips the laptop back into its case, he sees a couple of boys standing outside the comic book shop, talking and looking at him and grinning. Given his five years of experience, Brady estimates that they’re sixth- or seventh-graders with a combined IQ of one-twenty and a long future of collecting unemployment checks. Or a short one in some desert country.

They approach, the goofier-looking of the pair in the lead. Smiling, Brady leans out his window. “Help you boys?”

“We want to know if you got Jerry Garcia in there,” Goofy says.

“No,” Brady says, smiling more widely than ever, “but if I did, I’d sure let him out.”

They look so ridiculously disappointed, Brady almost laughs. Instead, he points down at Goofy’s pants. “Your fly’s unzipped,” he says, and when Goofy looks down, Brady flicks a finger at the soft underside of his chin. A little harder than he intended—actually quite a lot—but what the hell.

“Gotcha,” Brady says merrily.

Goofy smiles to show yes, he’s been gotten, but there’s a red weal just above his Adam’s apple and surprised tears swim in his eyes.

Goofy and Not Quite So Goofy start away. Goofy looks back over his shoulder. His lower lip is pushed out and now he looks like a third-grader instead of just another preadolescent come-stain who’ll be fucking up the halls of Beal Middle School come September.

“That really hurt,” he says, with a kind of wonder.

Brady’s mad at himself. A finger-flick hard enough to bring tears to the kid’s eyes means he’s telling the straight-up truth. It also means Goofy and Not Quite So Goofy will remember him. Brady can apologize, can even give them free cones to show his sincerity, but then they’ll remember that. It’s a small thing, but small things mount up and then maybe you have a big thing.

“Sorry,” he says, and means it. “I was just kidding around, son.”

Goofy gives him the finger, and Not Quite So Goofy adds his own middle digit to show solidarity. They go into the comics store, where—if Brady knows boys like these, and he does—they will be invited to either buy or leave after five minutes’ browsing.

They’ll remember him. Goofy might even tell his parents, and his parents might lodge a complaint with Loeb’s. It’s unlikely but not impossible, and whose fault was it that he’d given Goofy Boy’s unprotected neck a snap hard enough to leave a mark, instead of just the gentle flick he’d intended? The ex-cop has knocked Brady off-balance. He’s making him screw things up, and Brady doesn’t like that.

He starts the ice cream truck’s engine. The bells begin bonging a tune from the loudspeaker on the roof. Brady turns left on Hanover Street and resumes his daily round, selling cones and Happy Boys and Pola Bars, spreading sugar on the afternoon and obeying all speed limits.

9

Although there are plenty of parking spaces on Lake Avenue after seven P.M.—as Olivia Trelawney well knew—they are few and far between at five in the afternoon, when Hodges and Janey Patterson get back from Sunny Acres. Hodges spots one three or four buildings down, however, and although it’s small (the car behind the empty spot has poached a little), he shoehorns the Toyota into it quickly and easily.

“I’m impressed,” Janey says. “I could never have done that. I flunked my driver’s test on parallel parking the first two times I went.”

“You must have had a hardass.”

She smiles. “The third time I wore a short skirt, and that did the trick.”

Thinking about how much he’d like to see her in a short skirt—the shorter the better—Hodges says, “There’s really no trick to it. If you back toward the curb at a forty-five-degree angle, you can’t go wrong. Unless your car’s too big, that is. A Toyota’s perfect for city parking. Not like a—” He stops.

“Not like a Mercedes,” she finishes. “Come up and have coffee, Bill. I’ll even feed the meter.”

“I’ll feed it. In fact, I’ll max it out. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

“You learned some stuff from my mom, didn’t you? That’s why you were so quiet all the way back.”

“I did, and I’ll fill you in, but that’s not where the conversation starts.” He’s looking at her full in the face now, and it’s an easy face to look into. Christ, he wishes he were fifteen years younger. Even ten. “I need to be straight with you. I think you’re under the impression that I came looking for work, and that’s not the case.”

“No,” she says. “I think you came because you feel guilty about what happened to my sister. I simply took advantage of you. I’m not sorry, either. You were good with my mother. Kind. Very… very gentle.”

She’s close, her eyes a darker blue in the afternoon light and very wide. Her lips open as if she has more to say, but he doesn’t give her a chance. He kisses her before he can think about how stupid it is, how reckless, and is astounded when she kisses him back, even putting her right hand on the nape of his neck to make their contact a little firmer. It goes on for no more than five seconds, but it seems much longer to Hodges, who hasn’t had a kiss like this one in quite awhile.

She pulls back, brushes a hand through his hair, and says, “I’ve wanted to do that all afternoon. Now let’s go upstairs. I’ll make coffee and you make your report.”

But there’s no report until much later, and no coffee at all.

10

He kisses her again in the elevator. This time her hands link behind his neck, and his travel down past the small of her back to the white pants, snug across her bottom. He is aware of his too-big stomach pressing against her trim one and thinks she must be revolted by it, but when the elevator opens, her cheeks are flushed, her eyes are bright, and she’s showing small white teeth in a smile. She takes his hand and pulls him down the short hall between the elevator and the apartment door.

“Come on,” she says. “Come on, we’re going to do this, so come on, before one of us gets cold feet.”

It won’t be me, Hodges thinks. Every part of him is warm.

At first she can’t open the door because the hand holding the key is shaking too badly. It makes her laugh. He closes his fingers over hers, and together they push the Schlage into the slot.

The apartment where he first met this woman’s sister and mother is shadowy, because the sun has traveled around to the other side of the building. The lake has darkened to a cobalt so deep it’s almost purple. There are no sailboats, but he can see a freighter—

“Come on,” she says again. “Come on, Bill, don’t quit on me now.”

Then they’re in one of the bedrooms. He doesn’t know if it’s Janey’s or the one Olivia used on her Thursday-night stays, and he doesn’t care. The life of the last few months—the afternoon TV, the microwave dinners, his father’s Smith & Wesson revolver—seems so distant that it might have belonged to a fictional character in a boring foreign movie.

She tries to pull the striped sailor shirt over her head and it gets caught on the clip in her hair. She gives a frustrated, muffled laugh. “Help me with this damn thing, would you please—”

He runs his hands up her smooth sides—she gives a tiny jump at his initial touch—and beneath the inside-out shirt. He stretches the fabric and lifts. Her head pops free. She’s laughing in little out-of-breath gasps. Her bra is plain white cotton. He holds her by the waist and kisses between her breasts as she unbuckles his belt and pops the button on his slacks. He thinks, If I’d known this could happen at this stage of my life, I would have gotten back to the gym.

“Why—” he begins.

“Oh, shut up.” She slides a hand down the front of him, pushing the zipper with her palm. His pants fall around his shoes in a jingle of change. “Save the talk for later.” She grabs the hardness of him through his underpants and wiggles it like a gearshift, making him gasp. “That’s a good start. Don’t go limp on me, Bill, don’t you dare.”

They fall onto the bed, Hodges still in his boxer shorts, Janey in cotton panties as plain as her bra. He tries to roll her onto her back, but she resists.

“You’re not getting on top of me,” she says. “If you have a heart attack while we’re screwing, you’ll crush me.”

“If I have a heart attack while we’re screwing, I’ll be the most disappointed man to ever leave this world.”

“Stay still. Just stay still.”

She hooks her thumbs into the sides of his boxers. He cups her hanging breasts as she does it.

“Now lift your legs. And keep busy. Use your thumbs a little, I like that.”

He’s able to obey both of these commands with no trouble; he’s always been a multitasker.

A moment later she’s looking down at him, a lock of her hair tumbled over one of her eyes. She sticks out her lower lip and blows it back. “Keep still. Let me do the work. And stay with me. I don’t mean to be bossy, but I haven’t had sex in two years, and the last I did have sucked. I want to enjoy this. I deserve it.”

The clinging, slippery warmth of her encloses him in a warm hug, and he can’t help raising his hips.

“Stay still, I said. Next time you can move all you want, but this is mine.”

It’s difficult, but he does as she says.

Her hair tumbles into her eyes again, and this time she can’t use her lower lip to blow it back because she’s gnawing at it in little bites he thinks she’ll feel later. She spreads both hands and rubs them roughly through the graying hair on his chest, then down to the embarrassing swell of his gut.

“I need… to lose some weight,” he gasps.

“You need to shut up,” she says, then moves—just a little—and closes her eyes. “Oh God, that’s deep. And nice. You can worry about your diet program later, okay?” She begins to move again, pauses once to readjust the angle, then settles into a rhythm.

“I don’t know how long I can…”

“You better.” Her eyes are still closed. “You just better hold out, Detective Hodges. Count prime numbers. Think of the books you liked when you were a kid. Spell xylophone backwards. Just stay with me. I won’t need long.”

He stays with her just long enough.

11

Sometimes when he’s feeling upset, Brady Hartsfield retraces the route of his greatest triumph. It soothes him. On this Friday night he doesn’t go home after turning in the ice cream truck and making the obligatory joke or two with Shirley Orton in the front office. He drives his clunker downtown instead, not liking the front-end shimmy or the too-loud blat of the engine. Soon he will have to balance off the cost of a new car (a new used car) against the cost of repairs. And his mother’s Honda needs work even more desperately than his Subaru does. Not that she drives the Honda very often these days, and that’s good, considering how much of her time she spends in the bag.

His trip down Memory Lane begins on Lake Avenue, just past the bright lights of downtown, where Mrs. Trelawney always parked her Mercedes on Thursday nights, and wends up Marlborough Street to City Center. Only this evening he gets no farther than the condo. He brakes so suddenly that the car behind almost rear-ends him. The driver hits his horn in a long, outraged blast, but Brady pays no attention. It might as well have been a foghorn on the other side of the lake.

The driver pulls around him, buzzing down his passenger-side window to yell Asshole at the top of his lungs. Brady pays no attention to that, either.

There must be thousands of Toyota Corollas in the city, and hundreds of blue Toyota Corollas, but how many blue Toyota Corollas with bumper stickers reading SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL POLICE? Brady is betting there’s just one, and what the hell is the fat ex-cop doing in the old lady’s condominium apartment? Why is he visiting Mrs. Trelawney’s sister, who now lives there?

The answer seems obvious: Detective Hodges (Ret.) is hunting.

Brady is no longer interested in reliving last year’s triumph. He pulls an illegal (and completely out-of-character) U-turn, now heading for the North Side. Heading for home with a single thought in his head, blinking on and off like a neon sign.

You bastard. You bastard. You bastard.

Things are not going the way they are supposed to. Things are slipping out of his control. It’s not right.

Something needs to be done.

12

As the stars come out over the lake, Hodges and Janey Patterson sit in the kitchen nook, gobbling takeout Chinese and drinking oolong tea. Janey is wearing a fluffy white bathrobe. Hodges is in his boxers and tee-shirt. When he used the bathroom after making love (she was curled in the middle of the bed, dozing), he got on her scale and was delighted to see he’s four pounds lighter than the last time he weighed himself. It’s a start.

“Why me?” Hodges says now. “Don’t get me wrong, I feel incredibly lucky—even blessed—but I’m sixty-two and overweight.”

She sips tea. “Well, let’s think about that, shall we? In one of the old detective movies Ollie and I used to watch on TV when we were kids, I’d be the greedy vixen, maybe a nightclub cigarette girl, who tries to charm the crusty and cynical private detective with her fair white body. Only I’m not the greedy type—nor do I have to be, considering the fact that I recently inherited several million dollars—and my fair white body has started to sag in several vital places. As you may have noticed.”

He hasn’t. What he has noticed is that she hasn’t answered his question. So he waits.

“Not good enough?”

“Nope.”

Janey rolls her eyes. “I wish I could think of a way to answer you that’s gentler than ‘Men are very stupid’ or more elegant than ‘I was horny and wanted to brush away the cobwebs.’ I’m not coming up with much, so let’s go with those. Plus, I was attracted to you. It’s been thirty years since I was a dewy debutante and much too long since I got laid. I’m forty-four, and that allows me to reach for what I want. I don’t always get it, but I’m allowed to reach.”

He stares at her, honestly amazed. Forty-four?

She bursts into laughter. “You know what? That look’s the nicest compliment I’ve had in a long, long time. And the most honest one. Just that stare. So I’m going to push it a little. How old did you think I was?”

“Maybe forty. At the outside. Which would make me a cradle-robber.”

“Oh, bullshit. If you were the one with the money instead of me, everyone would take the younger-woman thing for granted. In that case, people would take it for granted if you were sleeping with a twenty-five-year-old.” She pauses. “Although that would be cradle-robbing, in my humble opinion.”

“Still—”

“You’re old, but not that old, and you’re on the heavyweight side, but not that heavy. Although you will be if you keep on the way you’re going.” She points her fork at him. “That’s the kind of honesty a woman can only afford after she’s slept with a man and still likes him well enough to eat dinner with him. I said I haven’t had sex in two years. That’s true, but do you know when I last had sex with a man I actually liked?”

He shakes his head.

“Try junior college. And he wasn’t a man, he was a second-string tackle with a big red pimple on the end of his nose. He was very sweet, though. Clumsy and far too quick, but sweet. He actually cried on my shoulder afterward.”

“So this wasn’t just… I don’t know…”

“A thank-you fuck? A mercy-fuck? Give me a little credit. And here’s a promise.” She leans forward, the robe gaping to show the shadowed valley between her breasts. “Lose twenty pounds and I’ll risk you on top.”

He can’t help laughing.

“It was great, Bill. I have no regrets, and I have a thing for big guys. The tackle with the pimple on his nose went about two-forty. My ex was a beanpole, and I should have known no good could come of it the first time I saw him. Can we leave it at that?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah,” she says, smiling, and stands up. “Come on in the living room. It’s time for you to make your report.”

13

He tells her everything except for his long afternoons watching bad TV and flirting with his father’s old service revolver. She listens gravely, not interrupting, her eyes seldom leaving his face. When he’s done, she gets a bottle of wine out of the fridge and pours them each a glass. They are big glasses, and he looks at his doubtfully.

“Don’t know if I should, Janey. I’m driving.”

“Not tonight you’re not. You’re staying here. Unless you’ve got a dog or a cat?”

Hodges shakes his head.

“Not even a parrot? In one of those old movies, you’d at least have a parrot in your office that would say rude things to prospective clients.”

“Sure. And you’d be my receptionist. Lola instead of Janey.”

“Or Velma.”

He grins. There’s a wavelength, and they’re on it.

She leans forward, once again creating that enticing view. “Profile this guy for me.”

“That was never my job. We had guys who specialized in that. One on the force and two on call from the psych department at the state university.”

“Do it anyway. I Googled you, you know, and it looks to me like you were just about the best the police department had. Commendations up the wazoo.”

“I got lucky a few times.”

It comes out sounding falsely modest, but luck really is a big part of it. Luck, and being ready. Woody Allen was right: eighty percent of success is just showing up.

“Take a shot, okay? If you do a good job, maybe we’ll revisit the bedroom.” She wrinkles her nose at him. “Unless you’re too old for twosies.”

The way he feels right now, he might not be too old for threesies. There have been a lot of celibate nights, which gives him an account to draw on. Or so he hopes. Part of him—a large part—still can’t believe this isn’t an incredibly detailed dream.

He sips his wine, rolling it around in his mouth, giving himself time to think. The top of her robe is closed again, which helps him concentrate.

“Okay. He’s probably young, that’s the first thing. I’m guessing between twenty and thirty-five. That’s partly because of his computer savvy, but not entirely. When an older guy murders a bunch of people, the ones he mostly goes after are family, co-workers, or both. Then he finishes by putting the gun to his own head. You look, you find a reason. A motive. Wife kicked him out, then got a restraining order. Boss downsized him, then humiliated him by having a couple of security guys stand by while he cleaned out his office. Loans overdue. Credit cards maxed out. House underwater. Car repo’d.”

“But what about serial killers? Wasn’t that guy in Kansas a middle-aged man?”

“Dennis Rader, yeah. And he was middle-aged when they bagged him, but only thirty or so when he started. Also, those were sex killings. Mr. Mercedes isn’t a sex-killer, and he’s not a serial killer in the traditional sense. He started with a bunch, but since then he’s settled on individuals—first your sister, now me. And he didn’t come after either of us with a gun or a stolen car, did he?”

“Not yet, anyway,” Janey says.

“Our guy is a hybrid, but he has certain things in common with younger men who kill. He’s more like Lee Malvo—one of the Beltway Snipers—than Rader. Malvo and his partner planned to kill six white people a day. Just random killings. Whoever had the bad luck to walk into their gunsights went down. Sex and age didn’t matter. They ended up getting ten, not a bad score for a couple of homicidal maniacs. The stated motive was racial, and with John Allen Muhammad—he was Malvo’s partner, much older, a kind of father figure—that might have been true, or partially true. I think Malvo’s motivation was a lot more complex, a whole stew of things he didn’t understand himself. Look closely and you’d probably find sexual confusion and upbringing were major players. I think the same is true with our guy. He’s young. He’s bright. He’s good at fitting in, so good that a lot of his associates don’t realize he’s basically a loner. When he’s caught, they’ll all say, ‘I can’t believe it was so-and-so, he was always so nice.’”

“Like Dexter Morgan on that TV show.”

Hodges knows the one she’s talking about and shakes his head emphatically. Not just because the show is fantasyland bullshit, either.

“Dexter knows why he’s doing what he’s doing. Our guy doesn’t. He’s almost certainly unmarried. He doesn’t date. He may be impotent. There’s a good chance he’s still living at home. If so, it’s probably with a single parent. If it’s Father, the relationship is cold and distant—ships passing in the night. If it’s Mother, there’s a good chance Mr. Mercedes is her surrogate husband.” He sees her start to speak and raises his hand. “That doesn’t mean they’re having a sexual relationship.”

“Maybe not, but I’ll tell you something, Bill. You don’t have to sleep with a guy to be having a sexual relationship with him. Sometimes it’s in the eye contact, or the clothes you wear when you know he’s going to be around, or what you do with your hands—touching, patting, caressing, hugging. Sex has got to be in this somewhere. I mean, that letter he sent you… the stuff about wearing a condom while he did it…” She shivers in her white robe.

“Ninety percent of that letter is white noise, but sure, sex is in it somewhere. Always is. Also anger, aggression, loneliness, feelings of inadequacy… but it doesn’t do to get lost in stuff like that. It’s not profiling, it’s analysis. Which was way above my pay-grade even when I had a pay-grade.”

“Okay…”

“He’s broken,” Hodges says simply. “And evil. Like an apple that looks okay on the outside, but when you cut it open, it’s black and full of worms.”

“Evil,” she says, almost sighing the word. Then, to herself rather than him: “Of course he is. He battened on my sister like a vampire.”

“He could have some kind of job where he meets the public, because he’s got a fair amount of surface charm. If so, it’s probably a low-paying job. He never advances because he’s unable to combine his above-average intelligence with long-term concentration. His actions suggest he’s a creature of impulse and opportunity. The City Center killings are a perfect example. I think he had his eye on your sister’s Mercedes, but I don’t think he knew what he was actually going to do with it until just a few days before the job fair. Maybe only a few hours. I just wish I could figure out how he stole it.”

He pauses, thinking that thanks to Jerome, he has a good idea about half of it: the spare key was very likely in the glove compartment all along.

“I think ideas for murder flip through this guy’s head as fast as cards in a good dealer’s fast shuffle. He’s probably thought of blowing up airliners, setting fires, shooting up schoolbuses, poisoning the water system, maybe assassinating the governor or the president.”

“Jesus, Bill!”

“Right now he’s fixated on me, and that’s good. It will make him easier to catch. It’s good for another reason, too.”

“Which is?”

“I’d rather keep him thinking small. Keep him thinking one-on-one. The longer he keeps doing that, the longer it will be before he decides to try putting on another horror show like the one at City Center, maybe on an even grander scale. You know what creeps me out? He’s probably already got a list of potential targets.”

“Didn’t he say in his letter that he had no urge to do it again?”

He grins. It lights up his whole face. “Yeah, he did. And you know how you tell when guys like this are lying? Their lips are moving. Only in the case of Mr. Mercedes, he’s writing letters.”

“Or communicating with his targets on the Blue Umbrella site. Like he did with Ollie.”

“Yeah.”

“If we assume he succeeded with her because she was psychologically fragile… forgive me, Bill, but does he have reason to believe he can succeed with you for the same reason?”

He looks at his glass of wine and sees it’s empty. He starts to pour himself another half a glass, thinks what that might do to his chances of a successful return engagement in the bedroom, and settles for a small puddle in the bottom instead.

“Bill?”

“Maybe,” he says. “Since my retirement, I’ve been drifting. But I’m not as lost as your sister…” Not anymore, at least. “… and that’s not the important thing. It’s not the take-away from the letters, and from the Blue Umbrella communications.”

“Then what is?”

“He’s been watching. That’s the take-away. It makes him vulnerable. Unfortunately, it also makes him dangerous to my known associates. I don’t think he knows I’ve been talking to you—”

“Quite a bit more than talking,” she says, giving her eyebrows a Groucho waggle.

“—but he knows Olivia had a sister, and we have to assume he knows you’re in the city. You need to start being super-careful. Make sure your door is locked when you’re here—”

“I always do.”

“—and don’t believe what you hear on the lobby intercom. Anyone can say he’s from a package service and needs a signature. Visually identify all comers before you open your door. Be aware of your surroundings when you go out.” He leans forward, the splash of wine untouched. He doesn’t want it anymore. “Big thing here, Janey. When you are out, keep an eye on traffic. Not just driving but when you’re on foot. Do you know the term BOLO?”

“Cop-speak for be on the lookout.”

“That’s it. When you’re out, you’re going to BOLO any vehicles that seem to keep reappearing in your immediate vicinity.”

“Like that lady’s black SUVs,” she says, smiling. “Mrs. Whozewhatsit.”

Mrs. Melbourne. Thinking of her tickles some obscure associational switch in the back of Hodges’s mind, but it’s gone before he can track it down, let alone scratch it.

Jerome’s got to be on the lookout, too. If Mr. Mercedes is cruising Hodges’s place, he’ll have seen Jerome mowing the lawn, putting on the screens, cleaning out the gutters. Both Jerome and Janey are probably safe, but probably isn’t good enough. Mr. Mercedes is a random bundle of homicide, and Hodges has set out on a course of deliberate provocation.

Janey reads his mind. “And yet you’re… what did you call it? Winding him up.”

“Yeah. And very shortly I’m going to steal some time on your computer and wind him up a little more. I had a message all worked out, but I’m thinking of adding something. My partner got a big solve today, and there’s a way I can use that.”

“What was it?”

There’s no reason not to tell her; it will be in the papers tomorrow, Sunday at the latest. “Turnpike Joe.”

“The one who kills women at rest stops?” And when he nods: “Does he fit your profile of Mr. Mercedes?”

“Not at all. But there’s no reason for our guy to know that.”

“What do you mean to do?”

Hodges tells her.

14

They don’t have to wait for the morning paper; the news that Donald Davis, already under suspicion for the murder of his wife, has confessed to the Turnpike Joe killings leads the eleven P.M. news. Hodges and Janey watch it in bed. For Hodges, the return engagement has been strenuous but sublimely satisfactory. He’s still out of breath, he’s sweaty and in need of a shower, but it’s been a long, long time since he felt this happy. This complete.

When the newscaster moves on to a puppy stuck in a drainpipe, Janey uses the remote to kill the TV. “Okay. It could work. But God, is it risky.”

He shrugs. “With no police resources to call on, I see it as my best way forward.” And it’s fine with him, because it’s the way he wants to go forward.

He thinks briefly of the makeshift but very effective weapon he keeps in his dresser drawer, the argyle sock filled with ball bearings. He imagines how satisfying it would be to use the Happy Slapper on the sonofabitch who ran one of the world’s heaviest passenger sedans into a crowd of defenseless people. That probably won’t happen, but it’s possible. In this best (and worst) of all worlds, most things are.

“What did you make of what my mother said at the end? About Olivia hearing ghosts?”

“I need to think about that a little more,” Hodges says, but he’s already thought about it, and if he’s right, he might have another path to Mr. Mercedes. Given his druthers, he wouldn’t involve Jerome Robinson any more than he already has, but if he’s going to follow up on old Mrs. Wharton’s parting shot, he may have to. He knows half a dozen cops with Jerome’s computer savvy and can’t call on a single one of them.

Ghosts, he thinks. Ghosts in the machine.

He sits up and swings his feet out onto the floor. “If I’m still invited to stay over, what I need right now is a shower.”

“You are.” She leans over and sniffs at the side of his neck, her hand lightly clamped on his upper arm giving him a pleasurable shiver. “And you certainly do.”

When he’s showered and back in his boxers, he asks her to power up her computer. Then, with her sitting beside him and looking on attentively, he slips under Debbie’s Blue Umbrella and leaves a message for merckill. Fifteen minutes later, and with Janey Patterson nestled next to him, he sleeps… and never so well since childhood.

15

When Brady gets home after several hours of aimless cruising, it’s late and there’s a note on the back door: Where you been, honeyboy? There’s homemade lasagna in the oven. He only has to look at the unsteady, downslanting script to know she was seriously loaded when she wrote it. He untacks the note and lets himself in.

Usually he checks on her first thing, but he smells smoke and hustles to the kitchen, where a blue haze hangs in the air. Thank God the smoke detector in here is dead (he keeps meaning to replace it and keeps forgetting, too many other fish to fry). Thanks are also due for the powerful stove fan, which has sucked up just enough smoke to keep the rest of the detectors from going off, although they soon will if he can’t air the place out. The oven is set at three-fifty. He turns it off. He opens the windows over the sink, then the back door. There’s a floor fan in the utility closet where they keep the cleaning supplies. He sets it up facing the runaway stove, and turns it on at the highest setting.

With that done he finally goes into the living room and checks on his mother. She’s crashed out on the couch, wearing a housedress that’s open up top and rucked to her thighs below, snoring so loudly and steadily she sounds like an idling chainsaw. He averts his eyes and goes back into the kitchen, muttering fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck under his breath.

He sits at the table with his head bent, his palms cupping his temples, and his fingers plunged deep into his hair. Why is it that when things go wrong, they have to keep on going wrong? He finds himself thinking of the Morton Salt motto: “When it rains it pours.”

After five minutes of airing-out, he risks opening the oven. As he regards the black and smoking lump within, any faint hunger pangs he might have felt when he got home pass away. Washing will not clean that pan; an hour of scouring and a whole box of Brillo pads will not clean that pan; an industrial laser probably wouldn’t clean that pan. That pan is a gone goose. It’s only luck that he didn’t get home to find the fucking fire department here and his mother offering them vodka collinses.

He shuts the oven—he doesn’t want to look at that nuclear meltdown—and goes back to look at his mother instead. Even as his eyes are running up and down her bare legs, he’s thinking, It would be better if she did die. Better for her and better for me.

He goes downstairs, using his voice commands to turn on the lights and his bank of computers. He goes to Number Three, centers the cursor on the Blue Umbrella icon… and hesitates. Not because he’s afraid there won’t be a message from the fat ex-cop but because he’s afraid there will be. If so, it won’t be anything he wants to read. Not the way things are going. His head is fucked up already, so why fuck it up more?

Except there might be an answer to what the cop was doing at the Lake Avenue condo. Has he been questioning Olivia Trelawney’s sister? Probably. At sixty-two, he’s surely not boffing her.

Brady clicks the mouse, and sure enough:

Brady settles the cursor on N and circles the curved back of his mouse with the pad of his index finger. Daring himself to push it and end this thing right here and right now. It’s obvious he won’t be able to nudge the fat ex-cop into suicide the way he did Mrs. Trelawney, so why not? Isn’t that the smart thing?

But he has to know.

More importantly, the Det-Ret doesn’t get to win.

He moves the cursor to Y, clicks, and the message—quite a long one this time—flashes onto the screen.

If it isn’t my false-confessing friend again. I shouldn’t even respond, guys like you are a dime a dozen, but as you point out, I’m retired and even talking to a nut is better than Dr. Phil and all those late-night infomercials. One more 30-minute OxiClean ad and I’ll be as crazy as you are, HAHAHA. Also, I owe you thanks for introducing me to this site, which I otherwise would not have found. I have already made 3 new (and non-crazy) friends. One is a lady with a delightfully dirty mouth!!! So OK, my “friend,” let me clue you in.

First, anyone who watches CSI could figure out that the Mercedes Killer was wearing a hairnet and used bleach on the clown mask. I mean, DUH.

Second, if you were really the guy who stole Mrs. Trelawney’s Mercedes, you would have mentioned the valet key. That’s something you couldn’t have figured out from watching CSI. So, at the risk of repeating myself, DUH.

Third (I hope you’re taking notes), I got a call from my old partner today. He caught a bad guy, one who specializes in TRUE confessions. Check the news, my friend, and then guess what else this guy’s going to confess to in the next week or so.

Have a nice night and BTW, why don’t you go bother someone else with your fantasies?

Brady vaguely remembers some cartoon character—maybe it was Foghorn Leghorn, the big rooster with the southern accent—who would get so mad first his neck and then his head would turn into a thermometer with the temperature going up and up from BAKE to BROIL to NUKE. Brady can almost feel that happening to him as he reads this arrogant, insulting, infuriating post.

Valet key?

Valet key?

“What are you talking about?” he says, his voice somewhere between a whisper and a growl. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

He gets up and strides around in an unsteady circle on legs like stilts, yanking at his hair so hard his eyes water. His mother is forgotten. The blackened lasagna is forgotten. Everything is forgotten except for this hateful post.

He has even had the nerve to put in a smiley-face!

A smiley-face!

Brady kicks his chair, hurting his toes and sending it rolling all the way across the room, where it bangs the wall. Then he turns and runs back to his Number Three computer, hunching over it like a vulture. His first impulse is to reply immediately, to call the fucking cop a liar, an idiot with fat-induced early-onset Alzheimer’s, an anal ranger who sucks his nigger yardboy’s cock. Then some semblance of rationality—fragile and wavering—reasserts itself. He retrieves his chair and goes to the city paper’s website. He doesn’t even have to click on BREAKING NEWS in order to see what Hodges has been raving about; it’s right there on the front page of tomorrow’s paper.

Brady follows local crime news assiduously, and knows both Donald Davis’s name and his handsomely chiseled features. He knows the cops have been chasing Davis for the murder of his wife, and Brady has no doubt the man did it. Now the idiot has confessed, but not just to her murder. According to the newspaper story, Davis has also confessed to the rape-murders of five more women. In short, he’s claiming to be Turnpike Joe.

At first Brady is unable to connect this with the fat ex-cop’s hectoring message. Then it comes to him in a baleful burst of inspiration: while he’s in a breast-baring mood, Donnie Davis also means to confess to the City Center Massacre. May have done so already.

Brady whirls around like a dervish—once, twice, three times. His head is splitting. His pulse is thudding in his chest, his neck, his temples. He can even feel it in his gums and tongue.

Did Davis say something about a valet key? Is that what brought this on?

“There was no valet key,” Brady says… only how can he be sure of that? What if there was? And if there was… if they hang this on Donald Davis and snatch away Brady Hartsfield’s great triumph… after the risks he took…

He can no longer hold back. He sits down at his Number Three again and writes a message to kermitfrog19. Just a short one, but his hands are shaking so badly it takes him almost five minutes. He sends it as soon as he’s done, without bothering to read it over.

Brady shuts off his computer and goes upstairs, leaving his mother to snore on the couch instead of helping her to bed. He takes three aspirin, adds a fourth, and then lies in his own bed, wide-eyed and shaking, until the first streaks of dawn come up in the east. At last he drops off for two hours, sleep that is thin and dream-haunted and unrestful.

16

Hodges is making scrambled eggs when Janey comes into the kitchen on Saturday morning in her white robe, her hair wet from the shower. With it combed back from her face, she looks younger than ever. He thinks again, Forty-four?

“I looked for bacon, but didn’t see any. Of course it might still be there. My ex claims that the great majority of American men suffer from the disease of Refrigerator Blindness. I don’t know if there’s a help line for that.”

She points at his midsection.

“Okay,” he says. And then, because she seems to like it: “Yeah.”

“And by the way, how’s your cholesterol?”

He smiles and says, “Toast? It’s whole grain. As you probably know, since you bought it.”

“One slice. No butter, just a little jam. What are you going to do today?”

“Not sure yet.” Although he’s thinking he’d like to check in with Radney Peeples out in Sugar Heights if Radney’s on duty and being Vigilant. And he needs to talk to Jerome about computers. Endless vistas there.

“Have you checked the Blue Umbrella?”

“Wanted to make you breakfast first. And me.” It’s true. He woke up actually wanting to feed his body rather than trying to plug some empty hole in his head. “Also, I don’t know your password.”

“It’s Janey.”

“My advice? Change it. Actually it’s the advice of the kid who works for me.”

“Jerome, right?”

“That’s the one.”

He has scrambled half a dozen eggs and they eat them all, split right down the middle. It has crossed his mind to ask if she had any regrets about last night, but decides the way she’s going through her breakfast answers the question.

With the dishes in the sink, they go on her computer and sit silently for nearly four minutes, reading and re-reading the latest message from merckill.

“Holy cow,” she says at last. “You wanted to wind him up, and I’d say he’s fully wound. Do you see all the mistakes?” She points out complartment and uynlocked. “Is that part of his—what did you call it?—stylistic masking?”

“I don’t think so.” Hodges is looking at wouldn’tr and smiling. He can’t help smiling. The fish is feeling the hook, and it’s sunk deep. It hurts. It burns. “I think that’s the kind of typing you do when you’re mad as hell. The last thing he expected was that he’d have a credibility problem. It’s making him crazy.”

“Er,” she says.

“Huh?”

“Crazier. Send him another message, Bill. Poke him harder. He deserves it.”

“All right.” He thinks, then types.

17

When he’s dressed, she walks down the hall with him and treats him to a lingering kiss at the elevator.

“I still can’t believe last night happened,” he tells her.

“Oh, it did. And if you play your cards right, it might happen again.” She searches his face with those blue eyes of hers. “But no promises or long-term commitments, okay? We take it as it comes. A day at a time.”

“At my age, I take everything that way.” The elevator doors open. He steps in.

“Stay in touch, cowboy.”

“I will.” The elevator doors start to close. He stops them with his hand. “And remember to BOLO, cowgirl.”

She nods solemnly, but he doesn’t miss the twinkle in her eye. “Janey will BOLO her ass off.”

“Keep your cell phone handy, and it might be wise to program nine-one-one on your speed dial.”

He drops his hand. She blows him a kiss. The doors roll shut before he can blow one back.

His car is where he left it, but the meter must have run out before the free parking kicked in, because there’s a ticket stuck under the windshield wiper. He opens the glove compartment, stuffs the ticket inside, and fishes out his phone. He’s good at giving Janey advice that he doesn’t take himself—since he pulled the pin, he’s always forgetting the damned Nokia, which is pretty prehistoric, as cell phones go. These days hardly anyone calls him anyway, but this morning he has three messages, all from Jerome. Numbers two and three—one at nine-forty last night, the other at ten-forty-five—are impatient inquiries about where he is and why he doesn’t call. They are in Jerome’s normal voice. The original message, left at six-thirty yesterday evening, begins in his exuberant Tyrone Feelgood Delight voice.

“Massah Hodges, where you at? Ah needs to jaw to y’all!” Then he becomes Jerome again. “I think I know how he did it. How he stole the car. Call me.”

Hodges checks his watch and decides Jerome probably won’t be up quite yet, not on Saturday morning. He decides to drive over there, with a stop at his house first to pick up his notes. He turns on the radio, gets Bob Seger singing “Old Time Rock and Roll,” and bellows along: take those old records off the shelf.

18

Once upon a simpler time, before apps, iPads, Samsung Galaxies, and the world of blazing-fast 4G, weekends were the busiest days of the week at Discount Electronix. Now the kids who used to come in to buy CDs are downloading Vampire Weekend from iTunes, while their elders are surfing eBay or watching the TV shows they missed on Hulu.

This Saturday morning the Birch Hill Mall DE is a wasteland.

Tones is down front, trying to sell an old lady an HDTV that’s already an antique. Freddi Linklatter is out back, chain-smoking Marlboro Reds and probably rehearsing her latest gay rights rant. Brady is sitting at one of the computers in the back row, an ancient Vizio that he’s rigged to leave no keystroke tracks, let alone a history. He’s staring at Hodges’s latest message. One eye, his left, has picked up a rapid, irregular tic.

Brady’s rage is so great he feels frozen in place. Yet he’s also still burning. He thinks he will stay this way, hunched over the piece-of-shit Vizio ridiculously sale-priced at eighty-seven dollars and eighty-seven cents, until he either dies of frostbite or goes up in flames or somehow does both at the same time.

But when a shadow rises on the wall, Brady finds he can move after all. He clicks away from the fat ex-cop’s message just before Freddi bends over to peer at the screen. “What you looking at, Brades? You moved awful fast to hide it, whatever it was.”

“A National Geographic documentary. It’s called When Lesbians Attack.”

“Your humor,” she says, “might be exceeded by your sperm count, but I tend to doubt it.”

Tones Frobisher joins them. “Got a service call over on Edgemont,” he says. “Which one of you wants it?”

Freddi says, “Given a choice between a service call in Hillbilly Heaven and having a wild weasel stuck up my ass, I’d have to pick the weasel.”

“I’ll take it,” Brady says. He’s decided he has an errand to run. One that can’t wait.

19

Jerome’s little sis and a couple of her friends are jumping rope in the Robinson driveway when Hodges arrives. All of them are wearing sparkly tees with silkscreens of some boy band on them. He cuts across the lawn, his case-folder in one hand. Barbara comes over long enough to give him a high-five and a dap, then hurries back to grab her end of the rope. Jerome, dressed in shorts and a City College tee-shirt with the sleeves torn off, is sitting on the porch steps and drinking orange juice. Odell is by his side. He tells Hodges his folks are off Krogering, and he’s got babysitting duty until they get back.

“Not that she really needs a sitter anymore. She’s a lot hipper than our parents think.”

Hodges sits down beside him. “You don’t want to take that for granted. Trust me on this, Jerome.”

“Meaning what, exactly?”

“Tell me what you came up with first.”

Instead of answering, Jerome points to Hodges’s car, parked at the curb so as not to interfere with the girls’ game. “What year is that?”

“Oh-four. No show-stopper, but it gets good mileage. Want to buy it?”

“I’ll pass. Did you lock it?”

“Yeah.” Even though this is a good neighborhood and he’s sitting right here looking at it. Force of habit.

“Give me your keys.”

Hodges digs in his pocket and hands them over. Jerome examines the fob and nods. “PKE,” he says. “Started to come into use during the nineteen-nineties, first as an accessory but pretty much standard equipment since the turn of the century. Do you know what it stands for?”

As lead detective on the City Center Massacre (and frequent interviewer of Olivia Trelawney), Hodges certainly does. “Passive keyless entry.”

“Right.” Jerome pushes one of the two buttons on the fob. At the curb, the parking lights of Hodges’s Toyota flash briefly. “Now it’s open.” He pushes the other button. The lights flash again. “Now it’s locked. And you’ve got the key.” He puts it in Hodges’s palm. “All safe and sound, right?”

“Based on this discussion, maybe not.”

“I know some guys from the college who have a computer club. I’m not going to tell you their names, so don’t ask.”

“Wouldn’t think of it.”

“They’re not bad guys, but they know all the bad tricks—hacking, cloning, info-jacking, stuff like that. They tell me that PKE systems are pretty much a license to steal. When you push the button to lock or unlock your car, the fob emits a low-frequency radio signal. A code. If you could hear it, it would sound like the boops and beeps you get when you speed-dial a fax number. With me?”

“So far, yeah.”

In the driveway the girls chant Sally-in-the-alley while Barbara Robinson darts deftly in and out of the loop, her sturdy brown legs flashing and her pigtails bouncing.

“My guys tell me that it’s easy to capture that code, if you have the right gadget. You can modify a garage door opener or a TV remote to do it, only with something like that, you have to be really close. Say within twenty yards. But you can also build one that’s more powerful. All the components are available at your friendly neighborhood electronics store. Total cost, about a hundred bucks. Range up to a hundred yards. You watch for the driver to exit the target vehicle. When she pushes the button to lock her car, you push your button. Your gadget captures the signal and stores it. She walks away, and when she’s gone, you push your button again. The car unlocks, and you’re in.”

Hodges looks at his key, then at Jerome. “This works?”

“Yes indeed. My friends say it’s tougher now—the manufacturers have modified the system so that the signal changes every time you push the button—but not impossible. Any system created by the mind of man can be hacked by the mind of man. You feel me?”

Hodges hardly hears him, let alone feels him. He’s thinking about Mr. Mercedes before he became Mr. Mercedes. He might have purchased one of the gadgets Jerome has just told him about, but it’s just as likely he built it himself. And was Mrs. Trelawney’s Mercedes the first car he ever used it on? Unlikely.

I have to check on car robberies downtown, he thinks. Starting in… let’s say 2007 and going right through until early spring of 2009.

He has a friend in records, Marlo Everett, who owes him one. Hodges is confident Marlo will run an unofficial check for him without a lot of questions. And if she comes up with a bunch of reports where the investigating officer concludes that “complainant may have forgotten to lock his vehicle,” he’ll know.

In his heart he knows already.

“Mr. Hodges?” Jerome is looking at him a little uncertainly.

“What is it, Jerome?”

“When you were working on the City Center case, didn’t you check out this PKE thing with the cops who handle auto theft? I mean, they have to know about it. It’s not new. My friends say it’s even got a name: stealing the peek.”

“We talked to the head mechanic from the Mercedes dealership, and he told us a key was used,” Hodges says. To his own ears, the reply sounds weak and defensive. Worse: incompetent. What the head mechanic did—what they all did—was assume a key had been used. One left in the ignition by a ditzy lady none of them liked.

Jerome offers a cynical smile that looks odd and out of place on his young face. “There’s stuff that people who work at car dealerships don’t talk about, Mr. Hodges. They don’t lie, exactly, they just banish it from their minds. Like how airbag deployment can save your life but also drive your glasses into your eyes and blind you. The high rollover rate of some SUVs. Or how easy it is to steal a PKE signal. But the auto theft guys must be hip, right? I mean, they must.”

The dirty truth is Hodges doesn’t know. He should, but he doesn’t. He and Pete were in the field almost constantly, working double shifts and getting maybe five hours of sleep a night. The paperwork piled up. If there was a memo from auto theft, it will probably be in the case files somewhere. He doesn’t dare ask his old partner about it, but realizes he may have to tell Pete everything soon. If he can’t work it out for himself, that is.

In the meantime, Jerome needs to know everything. Because the guy Hodges is dicking with is crazy.

Barbara comes running up, sweaty and out of breath. “Jay, can me n Hilda n Tonya watch Regular Show?”

“Go for it,” Jerome says.

She throws her arms around him and presses her cheek to his. “Will you make us pancakes, my darling brother?”

“No.”

She quits hugging and stands back. “You’re bad. Also lazy.”

“Why don’t you go down to Zoney’s and get some Eggos?”

“No money is why.”

Jerome digs into his pocket and hands her a five. This earns him another hug.

“Am I still bad?”

“No, you’re good! Best brother ever!”

“You can’t go without your homegirls,” Jerome says.

“And take Odell,” Hodges says.

Barbara giggles. “We always take Odell.”

Hodges watches the girls bop down the sidewalk in their matching tees (talking a mile a minute and trading Odell’s leash back and forth), with a feeling of deep disquiet. He can hardly put the Robinson family in lockdown, but those three girls look so little.

“Jerome? If somebody tried to mess with them, would Odell—?”

“Protect them?” Jerome is grave now. “With his life, Mr. H. With his life. What’s on your mind?”

“Can I continue to count on your discretion?”

“Yassuh!”

“Okay, I’m going to put a lot on you. But in return, you have to promise to call me Bill from now on.”

Jerome considers. “It’ll take some getting used to, but okay.”

Hodges tells him almost everything (he omits where he spent the night), occasionally referring to the notes on his legal pad. By the time he finishes, Barbara and her friends are returning from the GoMart, tossing a box of Eggos back and forth and laughing. They go inside to eat their mid-morning treat in front of the television.

Hodges and Jerome sit on the porch steps and talk about ghosts.

20

Edgemont Avenue looks like a war zone, but being south of Lowbriar, at least it’s a mostly white war zone, populated by the descendants of the Kentucky and Tennessee hillfolk who migrated here to work in the factories after World War II. Now the factories are closed, and a large part of the population consists of drug addicts who switched to brown-tar heroin when Oxy got too expensive. Edgemont is lined with bars, pawnshops, and check-cashing joints, all of them shut up tight on this Saturday morning. The only two stores open for business are a Zoney’s and the site of Brady’s service call, Batool’s Bakery.

Brady parks in front, where he can see anybody trying to break into his Cyber Patrol Beetle, and totes his case inside to the good smells. The greaseball behind the counter is arguing with a Visa-waving customer and pointing to a cardboard sign reading CASH ONLY TIL COMPUTER FIX.

Paki Boy’s computer is suffering the dreaded screen freeze. While continuing to monitor his Beetle at thirty-second intervals, Brady plays the Screen Freeze Boogie, which consists of pushing alt, ctrl, and del at the same time. This brings up the machine’s Task Manager, and Brady sees at once that the Explorer program is currently listed as non-responsive.

“Bad?” Paki Boy asks anxiously. “Please tell me not bad.”

On another day, Brady would string this out, not because guys like Batool tip—they don’t—but to see him sweat a few extra drops of Crisco. Not today. This is just his excuse to get off the floor and go to the mall, and he wants to finish as soon as possible.

“Nah, gotcha covered, Mr. Batool,” he says. He highlights END TASK and reboots Paki Boy’s PC. A moment later the cash register function is back up, complete with all four credit card icons.

“You genius!” Batool cries. For one awful moment, Brady is afraid the perfume-smelling sonofabitch is going to hug him.

21

Brady leaves Hillbilly Heaven and drives north toward the airport. There’s a Home Depot in the Birch Hill Mall where he could almost certainly get what he wants, but he makes the Skyway Shopping Complex his destination instead. What he’s doing is risky, reckless, and unnecessary. He won’t make matters worse by doing it in a store only one corridor over from DE. You don’t shit where you eat.

Brady does his business at Skyway’s Garden World and sees at once that he’s made the right choice. The store is huge, and on this midday late-spring Saturday, it’s crammed with shoppers. In the pesticide aisle, Brady adds two cans of Gopher-Go to a shopping cart already loaded with camouflage items: fertilizer, mulch, seeds, and a short-handled gardening claw. He knows it’s madness to be buying poison in person when he’s already ordered some which will come to his safe mail-drop in another few days, but he can’t wait. Absolutely cannot. He probably won’t be able to actually poison the nigger family’s dog until Monday—and it might even be Tuesday or Wednesday—but he has to be doing something. He needs to feel he’s… how did Shakespeare put it? Taking arms against a sea of troubles.

He stands in line with his shopping cart, telling himself that if the checkout girl (another greaseball, the city is drowning in them) says anything about the Gopher-Go, even something completely innocuous like This stuff really works, he’ll drop the whole thing. Too great a chance of being remembered and identified: Oh yes, he was being the nervous young man with the garden claw and the gopher poison.

He thinks, Maybe I should have worn sunglasses. It’s not like I’d stand out, half the men in here are wearing them.

Too late now. He left his Ray-Bans back at Birch Hill, in his Subaru. All he can do is stand here in the checkout line and tell himself not to sweat. Which is like telling someone not to think of a blue polar bear.

I was noticing him because he was having the sweat, the greaseball checkout girl (a relative of Batool the Baker, for all Brady knows) will tell the police. Also because he was buying the gopher poison. The kind having the strychnine.

For a moment he almost flees, but now there are people behind him as well as ahead of him, and if he breaks from the line, won’t people notice that? Won’t they wonder—

A nudge from behind him. “You’re up, buddy.”

Out of options, Brady rolls his cart forward. The cans of Gopher-Go are a screaming yellow in the bottom of his shopping cart; to Brady they seem the very color of insanity, and that’s just as it should be. Being here is insane.

Then a comforting thought comes to him, one that’s as soothing as a cool hand on a fevered brow: Driving into those people at City Center was even more insane… but I got away with it, didn’t I?

Yes, and he gets away with this. The greaseball runs his purchases under the scanner without so much as a glance at him. Nor does she look up when she asks him if it will be cash or credit.

Brady pays cash.

He’s not that insane.

Back in the VW (he’s parked it between two trucks, where its fluorescent green hardly shows at all), he sits behind the wheel, taking deep breaths until his heartbeat is steady again. He thinks about the immediate road ahead, and that calms him even more.

First, Odell. The mutt will die a miserable death, and the fat ex-cop will know it’s his own fault, even if the Robinsons do not. (From a purely scientific standpoint, Brady will be interested to see if the Det-Ret owns up. He thinks Hodges won’t.) Second, the man himself. Brady will give him a few days to marinate in his guilt, and who knows? He may opt for suicide after all. Probably not, though. So Brady will kill him, method yet to be determined. And third…

A grand gesture. Something that will be remembered for a hundred years. The question is, what might that grand gesture be?

Brady keys the ignition and tunes the Beetle’s shitty radio to BAM-100, where every weekend is a rock-block weekend. He catches the end of a ZZ Top block and is about to punch the button for KISS-92 when his hand freezes. Instead of switching the station, he turns the volume up. Fate is speaking to him.

The deejay informs Brady that the hottest boy band in the country is coming to town for one gig only—that’s right, ’Round Here will be playing the MAC next Thursday. “The show’s already almost sold out, children, but the BAM-100 Good Guys are holding on to a dozen tickets, and we’ll be giving em out in pairs starting on Monday, so listen for the cue to call in and—”

Brady switches the radio off. His eyes are distant, hazy, contemplative. The MAC is what people in the city call the Midwest Culture and Arts Complex. It takes up a whole city block and has a gigantic auditorium.

He thinks, What a way to go out. Oh my God, what a way that would be.

He wonders what exactly the capacity of the MAC’s Mingo Auditorium might be. Three thousand? Maybe four? He’ll go online tonight and check it out.

22

Hodges grabs lunch at a nearby deli (a salad instead of the loaded burger his stomach is rooting for) and goes home. His pleasant exertions of the previous night have caught up with him, and although he owes Janey a call—they have business at the late Mrs. Trelawney’s Sugar Heights home, it seems—he decides that his next move in the investigation will be a short nap. He checks the answering machine in the living room, but the MESSAGE WAITING window shows zero. He peeks beneath Debbie’s Blue Umbrella and finds nothing new from Mr. Mercedes. He lies down and sets his internal alarm for an hour. His last thought before closing his eyes is that he left his cell phone in the glove compartment of his Toyota again.

Ought to go get that, he thinks. I gave her both numbers, but she’s new school instead of old school, and that’s the one she’d call first if she needed me.

Then he’s asleep.

It’s the old school phone that wakes him, and when he rolls over to grab it, he sees that his internal alarm, which never let him down during his years as a cop, has apparently decided it is also retired. He’s slept for almost three hours.

“Hello?”

“Do you never check your messages, Bill?” Janey.

It crosses his mind to tell her the battery in his cell phone died, but lying is no way to start a relationship, even one of the day-at-a-time variety. And that’s not the important thing. Her voice is blurry and hoarse, as if she’s been shouting. Or crying.

He sits up. “What’s wrong?”

“My mother had a stroke this morning. I’m at Warsaw County Memorial Hospital. That’s the one closest to Sunny Acres.”

He swings his feet out onto the floor. “Christ, Janey. How bad is it?”

“Bad. I’ve called my aunt Charlotte in Cincinnati and uncle Henry in Tampa. They’re both coming. Aunt Charlotte will undoubtedly drag my cousin Holly along.” She laughs, but the sound has no humor in it. “Of course they’re coming—it’s that old saying about following the money.”

“Do you want me to come?”

“Of course, but I don’t know how I’d explain you to them. I can’t very well introduce you as the man I hopped into bed with almost as soon as I met him, and if I tell them I hired you to investigate Ollie’s death, it’s apt to show up on one of Uncle Henry’s kids’ Facebook pages before midnight. When it comes to gossip, Uncle Henry’s worse than Aunt Charlotte, but neither one of them is exactly a model of discretion. At least Holly’s just weird.” She takes a deep, watery breath. “God, I could sure use a friendly face right now. I haven’t seen Charlotte and Henry in years, neither of them showed up at Ollie’s funeral, and they sure haven’t made any effort to keep up with my life.”

Hodges thinks it over and says, “I’m a friend, that’s all. I used to work for the Vigilant security company in Sugar Heights. You met me when you came back to inventory your sister’s things and take care of the will with the lawyer. Chum.”

“Schron.” She takes a deep, watery breath. “That could work.”

It will. When it comes to spinning stories, no one can do it with a straighter face than a cop. “I’m on my way.”

“But… don’t you have things to take care of in the city? To investigate?”

“Nothing that won’t wait. It’ll take me an hour to get there. With Saturday traffic, maybe even less.”

“Thank you, Bill. With all my heart. If I’m not in the lobby—”

“I’ll find you, I’m a trained detective.” He’s slipping into his shoes.

“I think if you’re coming, you better bring a change of clothes. I’ve rented three rooms in the Holiday Inn down the street. I’ll rent one for you as well. The advantages of having money. Not to mention an Amex Platinum Card.”

“Janey, it’s an easy drive back to the city.”

“Sure, but she might die. If it happens today or tonight, I’m really going to need a friend. For the… you know, the…”

Tears catch her and she can’t finish. Hodges doesn’t need her to, because he knows what she means. For the arrangements.

Ten minutes later he’s on the road, headed east toward Sunny Acres and Warsaw County Memorial. He expects to find Janey in the ICU waiting room, but she’s outside, sitting on the bumper of a parked ambulance. She gets into his Toyota when he pulls up beside her, and one look at her drawn face and socketed eyes tells him everything he needs to know.

She holds together until he parks in the visitors’ lot, then breaks down. Hodges takes her in his arms. She tells him that Elizabeth Wharton passed from the world at quarter past three, central daylight time.

About the same time I was putting on my shoes, Hodges thinks, and hugs her tighter.

23

Little League season is in full swing, and Brady spends that sunny Saturday afternoon at McGinnis Park, where a full slate of games is being played on three fields. The afternoon is warm and business is brisk. Lots of tweenybop girls have come to watch their little brothers do battle, and as they stand in line waiting for their ice cream, the only thing they seem to be talking about (the only thing Brady hears them talking about, anyway) is the upcoming ’Round Here concert at the MAC. It seems they are all going. Brady has decided that he will go, too. He just needs to dope out a way to get in wearing his special vest—the one loaded with the ball bearings and blocks of plastic explosive.

My final bow, he thinks. A headline for the ages.

The thought improves his mood. So does selling out his entire truckload of goodies—even the JuCee Stix are gone by four o’clock. Back at the ice cream factory, he hands the keys over to Shirley Orton (who never seems to leave) and asks if he can switch with Rudy Stanhope, who’s down for the Sunday afternoon shift. Sundays—always assuming the weather cooperates—are busy days, with Loeb’s three trucks working not just McGinnis but the city’s other four large parks. He accompanies his request with the boyishly winning smile Shirley is a sucker for.

“In other words,” Shirley says, “you want two afternoons off in a row.”

“You got it.” He explains that his mother wants to visit her brother, which means at least one overnight and possibly two. There is no brother, of course, and when it comes to trips, the only one his mother is interested in making these days is the scenic tour that takes her from the couch to the liquor cabinet and back to the couch.

“I’m sure Rudy will say okay. Don’t you want to call him yourself?”

“If the request comes from you, it’s a done deal.”

The bitch giggles, which puts acres of flesh in rather disturbing motion. She makes the call while Brady’s changing into his street clothes. Rudy is happy to give up his Sunday shift and take Brady’s on Tuesday. This gives Brady two free afternoons to stake out Zoney’s GoMart, and two should be enough. If the girl doesn’t show up with the dog on either day, he’ll call in sick on Wednesday. If he has to, but he doesn’t think it will take that long.

After leaving Loeb’s, Brady does a little Krogering of his own. He picks up half a dozen items they need—staples like eggs, milk, butter, and Cocoa Puffs—then swings by the meat counter and picks up a pound of hamburger. Ninety percent lean. Nothing but the best for Odell’s last meal.

At home, he opens the garage and unloads everything he bought at Garden World, being careful to put the canisters of Gopher-Go on a high shelf. His mother rarely comes out here, but it doesn’t do to take chances. There’s a mini-fridge under the worktable; Brady got it at a yard sale for seven bucks, a total steal. It’s where he keeps his soft drinks. He stows the package of hamburger behind the Cokes and Mountain Dews, then totes the rest of the groceries inside. What he finds in the kitchen is delightful: his mother shaking paprika over a tuna salad that actually looks tasty.

She catches his look and laughs. “I wanted to make up for the lasagna. I’m sorry about that, but I was just so tired.”

So drunk is what you were, he thinks, but at least she hasn’t given up entirely.

She pouts her lips, freshly dressed in lipstick. “Give Mommy a kiss, honeyboy.”

Honeyboy puts his arms around her and gives her a lingering kiss. Her lipstick tastes of something sweet. Then she slaps him briskly on the ass and tells him to go down and play with his computers until dinner’s ready.

Brady leaves the cop a brief one-sentence message—I’m going to fuck you up, Grampa. Then he plays Resident Evil until his mother calls him to dinner. The tuna salad is great, and he has two helpings. She actually can cook when she wants, and he says nothing as she pours the first drink of the evening, an extra-big one to make up for the two or three smaller ones she denied herself that afternoon. By nine o’clock, she’s snoring on the couch again.

Brady uses the opportunity to go online and learn all about the upcoming ’Round Here concert. He watches a YouTube video where a giggle of girls discusses which of the five boys is the hottest. The consensus is Cam, who sings lead on “Look Me in My Eyes,” a piece of audio vomit Brady vaguely recalls hearing on the radio last year. He imagines those laughing faces torn apart by ball bearings, those identical Guess jeans in burning tatters.

Later, after he’s helped his mother up to bed and he’s sure she’s totally conked, he gets the hamburger, puts it in a bowl, and mixes in two cups of Gopher-Go. If that isn’t enough to kill Odell, he’ll run the goddam mutt over with the ice cream truck.

This thought makes him snicker.

He puts the poisoned hamburger in a Baggie and stows it back in the mini-fridge, taking care to hide it behind the cans of soda again. He also takes care to wash both his hands and the mixing bowl in plenty of hot, soapy water.

That night, Brady sleeps well. There are no headaches and no dreams about his dead brother.

24

Hodges and Janey are loaned a phone-friendly room down the hall from the hospital lobby, and there they split up the deathwork.

He’s the one who gets in touch with the funeral home (Soames, the same one that handled Olivia Trelawney’s exit rites) and makes sure the hospital is prepared to release the body when the hearse arrives. Janey, using her iPad with a casual efficiency Hodges envies, downloads an obituary form from the city paper. She fills it out quickly, speaking occasionally under her breath as she does so; once Hodges hears her murmur the phrase in lieu of flowers. When the obit’s emailed back, she produces her mother’s address book from her purse and begins making calls to the old lady’s few remaining friends. She’s warm with them, and calm, but also quick. Her voice wavers only once, while she’s talking to Althea Greene, her mother’s nurse and closest companion for almost ten years.

By six o’clock—roughly the same time Brady Hartsfield arrives home to find his mother putting the finishing touches on her tuna salad—most of the t’s have been crossed and the i’s dotted. At ten to seven, a white Cadillac hearse pulls into the hospital drive and rolls around back. The guys inside know where to go; they’ve been here plenty of times.

Janey looks at Hodges, her face pale, her mouth trembling. “I’m not sure I can—”

“I’ll take care of it.”

The transaction is like any other, really; he gives the mortician and his assistant a signed death certificate, they give him a receipt. He thinks, I could be buying a car. When he comes back to the hospital lobby, he spies Janey outside, once more sitting on the bumper of the ambulance. He sits down next to her and takes her hand. She squeezes his fingers hard. They watch the white hearse until it’s out of sight. Then he leads her back to his car and they drive the two blocks to the Holiday Inn.

Henry Sirois, a fat man with a moist handshake, shows up at eight. Charlotte Gibney appears an hour later, herding an overloaded bellman ahead of her and complaining about the terrible service on her flight. And the crying babies, she says—you don’t want to know. They don’t, but she tells them anyway. She’s as skinny as her brother is fat, and regards Hodges with a watery, suspicious eye. Lurking by Aunt Charlotte’s side is her daughter Holly, a spinster roughly Janey’s age but with none of Janey’s looks. Holly Gibney never speaks above a mutter and seems to have a problem making eye contact.

“I want to see Betty,” Aunt Charlotte announces after a brief dry embrace with her niece. It’s as if she thinks Mrs. Wharton might be laid out in the motel lobby, lilies at her head and carnations at her feet.

Janey explains that the body has already been transported to Soames Funeral Home in the city, where Elizabeth Wharton’s earthly remains will be cremated on Wednesday afternoon, after a viewing on Tuesday and a brief nondenominational service on Wednesday morning.

“Cremation is barbaric,” Uncle Henry announces. Everything these two say seems to be an announcement.

“It’s what she wanted.” Janey speaks quietly, politely, but Hodges observes the color rising in her cheeks.

He thinks there may be trouble, perhaps a demand to see a written document specifying cremation over burial, but they hold their peace. Perhaps they’re remembering all those millions Janey inherited from her sister—money that is Janey’s to share. Or not. Uncle Henry and Aunt Charlotte might even be considering all the visits they did not make to their elderly sister during her final suffering years. The visits Mrs. Wharton got during those years were made by Olivia, whom Aunt Charlotte does not mention by name, only calling her “the one with the problems.” And of course it was Janey, still hurting from her abusive marriage and rancorous divorce, who was there at the end.

The five of them have a late dinner in the almost deserted Holiday Inn dining room. From the speakers overhead, Herb Alpert toots his horn. Aunt Charlotte has a salad and complains about the dressing, which she has specified should come on the side. “They can put it in a little pitcher, but bottled from the supermarket is still bottled from the supermarket,” she announces.

Her muttering daughter orders something that sounds like sneezebagel hellbun. It turns out to be a cheeseburger, well done. Uncle Henry opts for fettuccini alfredo and sucks it down with the efficiency of a high-powered Rinse N Vac, fine droplets of perspiration appearing on his forehead as he approaches the finish line. He sops up the remains of the sauce with a chunk of buttered bread.

Hodges does most of the talking, recounting stories from his days with Vigilant Guard Service. The job is fictional, but the stories are mostly true, adapted from his years as a cop. He tells them about the burglar who got caught trying to squirm through a basement window and lost his pants in his efforts to wriggle free (this earns a small smile from Holly); the twelve-year-old boy who stood behind his bedroom door and cold-cocked a home invader with his baseball bat; the housekeeper who stole several pieces of her employer’s jewelry only to have them drop out of her underwear while she served dinner. There are darker stories, many of them, that he keeps to himself.

Over dessert (which Hodges skips, Uncle Henry’s unapologetic gluttony serving as a minatory power of example), Janey invites the new arrivals to stay at the house in Sugar Heights starting tomorrow, and the three of them toddle off to their prepaid rooms. Charlotte and Henry seem cheered by the prospect of inspecting at first hand just how the other half lives. As for Holly… who knows?

The newcomers’ rooms are on the first floor. Janey and Hodges are on the third. As they reach the side-by-side doors, she asks if he will sleep with her.

“No sex,” she says. “I never felt less sexy in my life. Basically, I just don’t want to be alone.”

That’s okay with Hodges. He doubts if he would be capable of getting up to dickens, anyway. His stomach and leg muscles are still sore from last night… and, he reminds himself, last night she did almost all the work. Once they’re beneath the coverlet, she snuggles up to him. He can hardly believe the warmth and firmness of her. The thereness of her. It’s true he feels no desire at the moment, but he’s glad the old lady had the courtesy to stroke out after he got his ashes hauled rather than before. Not very nice, but there it is. Corinne, his ex, used to say that men were born with a shitty-bone.

She pillows her head on his shoulder. “I’m so glad you came.”

“Me too.” It’s the absolute truth.

“Do you think they know we’re in bed together?”

Hodges considers. “Aunt Charlotte knows, but she’d know even if we weren’t.”

“And you can be sure of that because you’re a trained—”

“Right. Go to sleep, Janey.”

She does, but when he wakes up in the early hours of the morning, needing to use the toilet, she’s sitting by the window, looking out at the parking lot and crying. He puts a hand on her shoulder.

She looks up. “I woke you. I’m sorry.”

“Nah, this is my usual three A.M. pee-muster. Are you all right?”

“Yes. Yeah.” She smiles, then wipes at her eyes with her fisted hands, like a child. “Just hating on myself for shipping Mom off to Sunny Acres.”

“But she wanted to go, you said.”

“Yes. She did. It doesn’t seem to change how I feel.” Janey looks at him, eyes bleak and shining with tears. “Also hating on myself for letting Olivia do all the heavy lifting while I stayed in California.”

“As a trained detective, I deduce you were trying to save your marriage.”

She gives him a wan smile. “You’re a good guy, Bill. Go on and use the bathroom.”

When he comes back, she’s curled up in bed again. He puts his arms around her and they sleep spoons the rest of the night.

25

Early on Sunday morning, before taking her shower, Janey shows him how to use her iPad. Hodges ducks beneath Debbie’s Blue Umbrella and finds a new message from Mr. Mercedes. It’s short and to the point: I’m going to fuck you up, Grampa.

“Yeah, but tell me how you really feel,” he says, and surprises himself by laughing.

Janey comes out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, steam billowing around her like a Hollywood special effect. She asks him what he’s laughing about. Hodges shows her the message. She doesn’t find it so funny.

“I hope you know what you’re doing.”

Hodges hopes so, too. Of one thing he’s sure: when he gets back home, he’ll take the Glock .40 he carried on the job out of his bedroom safe and start carrying it again. The Happy Slapper is no longer enough.

The phone next to the double bed warbles. Janey answers, converses briefly, hangs up. “That was Aunt Charlotte. She suggests the Fun Crew meet for breakfast in twenty minutes. I think she’s anxious to get to Sugar Heights and start checking the silverware.”

“Okay.”

“She also shared that the bed was much too hard and she had to take an allergy pill because of the foam pillows.”

“Uh-huh. Janey, is Olivia’s computer still at the Sugar Heights house?”

“Sure. In the room she used for her study.”

“Can you lock that room so they can’t get in there?”

She pauses in the act of hooking her bra, for a moment frozen in that pose, elbows back, a female archetype. “Hell with that, I’ll just tell them to keep out. I am not going to be intimidated by that woman. And what about Holly? Can you understand anything she says?”

“I thought she ordered a sneezebagel for dinner,” Hodges admits.

Janey collapses into the chair he awoke to find her crying in last night, only now she’s laughing. “Sweetie, you’re one bad detective. Which in this sense means good.”

“Once the funeral stuff is over and they’re gone—”

“Thursday at the latest,” she says. “If they stay longer, I’ll have to kill them.”

“And no jury on earth would convict you. Once they’re gone, I want to bring my friend Jerome in to look at that computer. I’d bring him in sooner, but—”

“They’d be all over him. And me.”

Hodges, thinking of Aunt Charlotte’s bright and inquisitive eyes, agrees.

“Won’t the Blue Umbrella stuff be gone? I thought it disappeared every time you left the site.”

“It’s not Debbie’s Blue Umbrella I’m interested in. It’s the ghosts your sister heard in the night.”

26

As they walk down to the elevator, he asks Janey something that’s been troubling him ever since she called yesterday afternoon. “Do you think the questions about Olivia brought on your mother’s stroke?”

She shrugs, looking unhappy. “There’s no way to tell. She was very old—at least seven years older than Aunt Charlotte, I think—and the constant pain beat her up pretty badly.” Then, reluctantly: “It could have played a part.”

Hodges runs a hand through his hastily combed hair, mussing it again. “Ah, Jesus.”

The elevator dings. They step in. She turns to him and grabs both of his hands. Her voice is swift and urgent. “I’ll tell you something, though. If I had to do it over again, I still would. Mom had a long life. Ollie, on the other hand, deserved a few more years. She wasn’t terribly happy, but she was doing okay until that bastard got to her. That… that cuckoo bird. Stealing her car and using it to kill eight people and hurt I don’t know how many more wasn’t enough for him, was it? Oh, no. He had to steal her mind.”

“So we push forward.”

“Goddam right we do.” Her hands tighten on his. “This is ours, Bill. Do you get that? This is ours.”

He wouldn’t have stopped anyway, the bit is in his teeth, but the vehemence of her reply is good to hear.

The elevator doors open. Holly, Aunt Charlotte, and Uncle Henry are waiting in the lobby. Aunt Charlotte regards them with her inquisitive crow’s eyes, probably prospecting for what Hodges’s old partner used to call the freshly fucked look. She asks what took them so long, then, without waiting for an answer, tells them that the breakfast buffet looks very thin. If they were hoping for an omelet to order, they’re out of luck.

Hodges thinks that Janey Patterson is in for several very long days.

27

Like the day before, Sunday is brilliant and summery. Like the day before, Brady sells out by four, at least two hours before dinnertime approaches and the parks begin emptying. He thinks about calling home and finding out what his mom wants for supper, then decides to grab takeout from Long John Silver’s and surprise her. She loves the Langostino Lobster Bites.

As it turns out, Brady is the one surprised.

He comes into the house from the garage, and his greeting—Hey, Mom, I’m home!—dies on his lips. This time she’s remembered to turn off the stove, but the smell of the meat she charred for her lunch hangs in the air. From the living room there comes a muffled drumming sound and a strange gurgling cry.

There’s a skillet on one of the front burners. He peers into it and sees crumbles of burnt hamburger rising like small volcanic islands from a film of congealed grease. On the counter is a half-empty bottle of Stoli and a jar of mayonnaise, which is all she ever uses to dress her hamburgers.

The grease-spotted takeout bags drop from his hands. Brady doesn’t even notice.

No, he thinks. It can’t be.

It is, though. He throws open the kitchen refrigerator and there, on the top shelf, is the Baggie of poisoned meat. Only now half of it is gone.

He stares at it stupidly, thinking, She never checks the mini-fridge in the garage. Never. That’s mine.

This is followed by another thought: How do you know what she checks when you’re not here? For all you know she’s been through all your drawers and looked under your mattress.

That gurgling cry comes again. Brady runs for the living room, kicking one of the Long John Silver’s bags under the kitchen table and leaving the refrigerator door open. His mother is sitting bolt upright on the couch. She’s in her blue silk lounging pajamas. The shirt is covered with a bib of blood-streaked vomit. Her belly protrudes, straining the buttons; it’s the belly of a woman who is seven months pregnant. Her hair stands out from her parchment-pale face in a mad spray. Her nostrils are clotted with blood. Her eyes bulge. She’s not seeing him, or so he thinks at first, but then she holds out her hands.

“Mom! Mom!”

His initial idea is to thump her on the back, but he looks at the mostly eaten hamburger on the coffee table next to the remains of what must have been a perfectly enormous screwdriver, and knows back-thumps will do no good. The stuff’s not lodged in her throat. If only it were.

The drumming sound he heard when he came in recommences as her feet begin to piston up and down. It’s as if she’s marching in place. Her back arches. Her arms fly straight up. Now she’s simultaneously marching and signaling that the field goal is good. One foot shoots out and kicks the coffee table. Her screwdriver glass falls over.

“Mom!”

She throws herself back against the sofa cushions, then forward. Her agonized eyes stare at him. She gurgles a muffled something that might or might not be his name.

What do you do for poisoning victims? Was it raw eggs? Or Coca-Cola? No, Coke’s for upset stomachs, and she’s gone far beyond that.

Have to stick my fingers down her throat, he thinks. Make her gag it up.

But then her teeth begin doing their own march and he pulls his tentatively extended hand back, pressing the palm over his mouth instead. He sees that she has already bitten her lower lip almost to tatters; that’s where the blood on her shirt has come from. Some of it, anyway.

“Brayvie!” She draws in a hitching breath. What follows is guttural but understandable. “Caw… nie… wha… whan!”

Call 911.

He goes to the phone and picks it up before realizing he really can’t do that. Think of the unanswerable questions that would ensue. He puts it back down and whirls to her.

“Why did you go snooping out there, Mom? Why?”

“Brayvie! Nie-wha-whan!”

“When did you eat it? How long has it been?”

Instead of answering, she begins to march again. Her head snaps up and her bulging eyes regard the ceiling for a second or two before her head snaps forward again. Her back doesn’t move at all; it’s as if her head is mounted on bearings. The gurgling sounds return—the sound of water trying to go down a partially clogged drain. Her mouth yawns and she belches vomit. It lands in her lap with a wet splat, and oh God, it’s half blood.

He thinks of all the times he’s wished her dead. But I never wanted it to be like this, he thinks. Never like this.

An idea lights up his mind like a single bright flare over a stormy ocean. He can find out how to treat her online. Everything’s online.

“I’m going to take care of it,” he says, “but I have to go downstairs for a few minutes. You just… you hang in there, Mom. Try…”

He almost says Try to relax.

He runs into the kitchen, toward the door that leads to his control room. Down there he’ll find out how to save her. And even if he can’t, he won’t have to watch her die.

28

The word to turn on the lights is control, but although he speaks it three times, the basement remains in darkness. Brady realizes the voice-recognition program isn’t working because he doesn’t sound like himself, and is it any wonder? Any fucking wonder at all?

He uses the switch instead and goes down, first shutting the door—and the beastly sounds coming from the living room—behind him.

He doesn’t even try to voice-ac his bank of computers, just turns on his Number Three with the button behind the monitor. The countdown to Total Erasure appears and he stops it by typing in his password. But he doesn’t seek out poison antidotes; it’s far too late for that, and now that he’s sitting here in his safe place, he allows himself to know it.

He also knows how this happened. She was good yesterday, staying sober long enough to make a nice supper for them, so she rewarded herself today. Got schnockered, then decided she’d better eat a little something to soak up the booze before her honeyboy got home. Didn’t find anything in the pantry or the refrigerator that tickled her fancy. Oh but say, what about the mini-fridge in the garage? Soft drinks wouldn’t interest her, but perhaps there were snacks. Only what she found was even better, a Baggie filled with nice fresh hamburger.

It makes Brady think of an old saying—whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. Is that the Peter Principle? He goes online to find out. After some investigation he discovers it’s not the Peter Principle but Murphy’s Law. Named after a man named Edward Murphy. The guy made aircraft parts. Who knew?

He surfs a few other sites—actually quite a few—and plays a few hands of solitaire. When there’s a particularly loud thump from upstairs, he decides to listen to a few tunes on his iPod. Something cheery. The Staple Singers, maybe.

And as “Respect Yourself” plays in the middle of his head, he goes on Debbie’s Blue Umbrella to see if there’s a message from the fat ex-cop.

29

When he can put it off no longer, Brady creeps upstairs. Twilight has come. The smell of seared hamburger is almost gone, but the smell of puke is still strong. He goes into the living room. His mother is on the floor next to the coffee table, which is now overturned. Her eyes glare up at the ceiling. Her lips are pulled back in a great big grin. Her hands are claws. She’s dead.

Brady thinks, Why did you have to go out in the garage when you got hungry? Oh Mom, Mommy, what in God’s name possessed you?

Whatever can go wrong will go wrong, he thinks, and then, looking at the mess she’s made, he wonders if they have any carpet cleaner.

This is Hodges’s fault. It all leads back to him.

He’ll deal with the old Det-Ret, and soon. Right now, though, he has a more pressing problem. He sits down to consider it, taking the chair he uses on the occasions when he watches TV with her. He realizes she’ll never watch another reality show. It’s sad… but it does have its funny side. He imagines Jeff Probst sending flowers with a card reading From all your Survivor pals, and he just has to chuckle.

What is he to do with her? The neighbors won’t miss her because she never ever had anything to do with them, called them stuck-up. She has no friends, either, not even of the barfly type, because she did all her drinking at home. Once, in a rare moment of self-appraisal, she told him she didn’t go out to the bars because they were full of drunks just like her.

“That’s why you didn’t taste that shit and stop, isn’t it?” he asks the corpse. “You were too fucking loaded.”

He wishes they had a freezer case. If they did, he’d cram her body into it. He saw that in a movie once. He doesn’t dare put her in the garage; that seems a little too public, somehow. He supposes he could wrap her in a rug and take her down to the basement, she’d certainly fit under the stairs, but how would he get any work done, knowing she was there? Knowing that, even inside a roll of rug, her eyes were glaring?

Besides, the basement’s his place. His control room.

In the end he realizes there’s only one thing to do. He grabs her under the arms and drags her toward the stairs. By the time he gets her there, her pajama pants have slid down, revealing what she sometimes calls (called, he reminds himself) her winky. Once, when he was in bed with her and she was giving him relief for a particularly bad headache, he tried to touch her winky and she slapped his hand away. Hard. Don’t you ever, she had said. That’s where you came from.

Brady pulls her up the stairs, a riser at a time. The pajama pants work down to her ankles and puddle there. He remembers how she did a sit-down march on the couch in her last extremity. How awful. But, like the thing about Jeff Probst sending flowers, it had its funny side, although it wasn’t the kind of joke you could explain to people. It was kind of Zen.

Down the hall. Into her bedroom. He straightens up, wincing at the pain in his lower back. God, she’s so heavy. It’s as if death has stuffed her with some dense mystery meat.

Never mind. Get it done.

He yanks up her pants, making her decent again—as decent as a corpse in vomit-soaked pj’s can be—and lifts her onto her bed, groaning as fresh pain settles into his back. When he straightens up this time, he can feel his spine crackling. He thinks about taking off her nightclothes and replacing them with something clean—one of the XL tee-shirts she sometimes wears to bed, maybe—but that would mean more lifting and manipulation of what is now just pounds of silent flesh hanging from bone coathangers. What if he threw his back out?

He could at least take off her top, that caught most of the mess, but then he’d have to look at her boobs. Those she did let him touch, but only once in awhile. My handsome boy, she’d say on these occasions. Running her fingers through his hair or massaging his neck where the headaches settled, crouched and snarling. My handsome honeyboy.

In the end he just pulls the bedspread up, covering her entirely. Especially those staring, glaring eyes.

“Sorry, Mom,” he says, looking down at the white shape. “Not your fault.”

No. It’s the fat ex-cop’s fault. Brady bought the Gopher-Go to poison the dog, true, but only as a way of getting to Hodges and messing with his head. Now it’s Brady’s head that’s a mess. Not to mention the living room. He’s got a lot of work to do down there, but he has something else to do first.

30

He’s got control of himself again and this time his voice commands work. He doesn’t waste time, just sits down in front of his Number Three and logs on to Debbie’s Blue Umbrella. His message to Hodges is brief and to the point.