Mr. Mercedes

1

Hodges walks out of the kitchen with a can of beer in his hand, sits down in the La-Z-Boy, and puts the can down on the little table to his left, next to the gun. It’s a .38 Smith & Wesson M&P revolver, M&P standing for Military and Police. He pats it absently, the way you’d pat an old dog, then picks up the remote control and turns on Channel Seven. He’s a little late, and the studio audience is already applauding.

He’s thinking of a fad, brief and baleful, that inhabited the city in the late eighties. Or maybe the word he really wants is infected, because it had been like a transient fever. The city’s three papers had written editorials about it all one summer. Now two of those papers are gone and the third is on life support.

The host comes striding onstage in a sharp suit, waving to the audience. Hodges has watched this show almost every weekday since his retirement from the police force, and he thinks this man is too bright to be doing this job, one that’s a little like scuba diving in a sewer without a wetsuit. He thinks the host is the sort of man who sometimes commits suicide and afterward all his friends and close relatives say they never had a clue anything was wrong; they talk about how cheerful he was the last time they saw him.

At this thought, Hodges gives the revolver another absent pat. It is the Victory model. An oldie but a goodie. His own gun, when he was active, was a Glock .40. He bought it—officers in this city are expected to buy their service weapons—and now it’s in the safe in his bedroom. Safe in the safe. He unloaded it and put it in there after the retirement ceremony and hasn’t looked at it since. No interest. He likes the .38, though. He has a sentimental attachment to it, but there’s something beyond that. A revolver never jams.

Here is the first guest, a young woman in a short blue dress. Her face is a trifle on the vacant side but she’s got a knockout bod. Somewhere inside that dress, Hodges knows, there will be the sort of tattoo now referred to as a tramp-stamp. Maybe two or three. The men in the audience whistle and stomp their feet. The women in the audience applaud more gently. Some roll their eyes. This is the kind of woman you don’t like to catch your husband staring at.

The woman is pissed right from go. She tells the host that her boyfriend has had a baby with another woman and he goes over to see them all the time. She still loves him, she says, but she hates that—

The next couple of words are bleeped out, but Hodges can lipread fucking whore. The audience cheers. Hodges takes a sip of his beer. He knows what comes next. This show has all the predictability of a soap opera on Friday afternoon.

The host lets her run on for a bit and then introduces… THE OTHER WOMAN! She also has a knockout bod and several yards of big blond hair. There’s a tramp-stamp on one ankle. She approaches the other woman and says, “I understand how you feel, but I love him, too.”

She’s got more on her mind, but that’s as far as she gets before Knockout Bod One goes into action. Someone offstage rings a bell, as if this were the start of a prizefight. Hodges supposes it is, since all the guests on this show must be compensated; why else would they do it? The two women punch and claw for a few seconds, and then the two beefcakes with SECURITY printed on their tee-shirts, who have been watching from the background, separate them.

They shout at each other for awhile, a full and fair exchange of views (much of it bleeped out), as the host watches benignly, and this time it’s Knockout Bod Two who initiates the fight, swinging a big roundhouse slap that rocks Knockout Bod One’s head back. The bell rings again. They fall to the stage, their dresses rucking up, clawing and punching and slapping. The audience goes bugshit. The security beefcakes separate them and the host gets between them, talking in a voice that is soothing on top, inciteful beneath. The two women declare the depth of their love, spitting it into each other’s faces. The host says they’ll be right back and then a C-list actress is selling a diet pill.

Hodges takes another sip of his beer and knows he won’t even finish half the can. It’s funny, because when he was on the cops, he was damned near an alcoholic. When the drinking broke up his marriage, he assumed he was an alcoholic. He summoned all his willpower and reined it in, promising himself he would drink just as much as he goddam wanted once he had his forty in—a pretty amazing number, when fifty percent of city cops retired after twenty-five and seventy percent after thirty. Only now that he has his forty, alcohol no longer interests him much. He forced himself to get drunk a few times, just to see if he could still do it, and he could, but being drunk turned out to be no better than being sober. Actually it was a little worse.

The show returns. The host says he has another guest, and Hodges knows who that will be. The audience does, too. They yap their anticipation. Hodges picks up his father’s gun, looks into the barrel, and puts it back down on the DirecTV guide.

The man over whom Knockout Bod One and Knockout Bod Two are in such strenuous conflict emerges from stage right. You knew what he was going to look like even before he comes strutting out and yup, he’s the guy: a gas station attendant or a Target warehouse carton-shuffler or maybe the fella who detailed your car (badly) at the Mr. Speedy. He’s skinny and pale, with black hair clumping over his forehead. He’s wearing chinos and a crazy green and yellow tie that has a chokehold on his throat just below his prominent Adam’s apple. The pointy toes of suede boots poke out beneath his pants. You knew that the women had tramp-stamps and you know this man is hung like a horse and shoots sperm more powerful than a locomotive and faster than a speeding bullet; a virginal maid who sits on a toilet seat after this guy jerked off will get up pregnant. Probably with twins. On his face is the half-smart grin of a cool dude in a loose mood. Dream job: lifetime disability. Soon the bell will ring and the women will go at each other again. Later, after they have heard enough of his smack, they will look at each other, nod slightly, and attack him together. This time the security personnel will wait a little longer, because this final battle is what the audience, both in the studio and at home, really wants to see: the hens going after the rooster.

That brief and baleful fad in the late eighties—the infection—was called “bum fighting.” Some gutter genius or other got the idea, and when it turned a profit, three or four other entrepreneurs leaped in to refine the deal. What you did was pay a couple of bums thirty bucks each to go at each other at a set time and in a set place. The place Hodges remembered best was the service area behind a sleazy crab-farm of a strip club called Bam Ba Lam, over on the East Side. Once the fight card was set, you advertised (by word of mouth in those days, with widespread Internet use still over the horizon), and charged spectators twenty bucks a head. There had been better than two hundred at the one Hodges and Pete Huntley had busted, most of them making odds and fading each other like mad motherfuckers. There had been women, too, some in evening dress and loaded with jewelry, watching as those two wetbrain stewbums went at each other, flailing and kicking and falling down and getting up and yelling incoherencies. The crowd had been laughing and cheering and urging the combatants on.

This show is like that, only there are diet pills and insurance companies to fade the action, so Hodges supposes the contestants (that’s what they are, although the host calls them “guests”) walk away with a little more than thirty bucks and a bottle of Night Train. And there are no cops to break it up, because it’s all as legal as lottery tickets.

When the show is over, the take-no-prisoners lady judge will show up, robed in her trademark brand of impatient righteousness, listening with barely suppressed rage to the small-shit petitioners who come before her. Next up is the fat family psychologist who makes his guests cry (he calls this “breaking through the wall of denial”), and invites them to leave if any of them dare question his methods. Hodges thinks the fat family psychologist might have learned those methods from old KGB training videos.

Hodges eats this diet of full-color shit every weekday afternoon, sitting in the La-Z-Boy with his father’s gun—the one Dad carried as a beat cop—on the table beside him. He always picks it up a few times and looks into the barrel. Inspecting that round darkness. On a couple of occasions he has slid it between his lips, just to see what it feels like to have a loaded gun lying on your tongue and pointing at your palate. Getting used to it, he supposes.

If I could drink successfully, I could put this off, he thinks. I could put it off for at least a year. And if I could put it off for two, the urge might pass. I might get interested in gardening, or birdwatching, or even painting. Tim Quigley took up painting, down in Florida. In a retirement community that was loaded with old cops. By all accounts Quigley had really enjoyed it, and had even sold some of his work at the Venice Art Festival. Until his stroke, that was. After the stroke he’d spent eight or nine months in bed, paralyzed all down his right side. No more painting for Tim Quigley. Then off he went. Booya.

The fight bell is ringing, and sure enough, both women are going after the scrawny guy in the crazy tie, painted fingernails flashing, big hair flying. Hodges reaches for the gun again, but he has no more than touched it when he hears the clack of the front door slot and the flump of the mail hitting the hall floor.

Nothing of importance comes through the mail slot in these days of email and Facebook, but he gets up anyway. He’ll look through it and leave his father’s M&P .38 for another day.

2

When Hodges returns to his chair with his small bundle of mail, the fight-show host is saying goodbye and promising his TV Land audience that tomorrow there will be midgets. Whether of the physical or mental variety he does not specify.

Beside the La-Z-Boy there are two small plastic waste containers, one for returnable bottles and cans, the other for trash. Into the trash goes a circular from Walmart promising ROLLBACK PRICES; an offer for burial insurance addressed to OUR FAVORITE NEIGHBOR; an announcement that all DVDs are going to be fifty percent off for one week only at Discount Electronix; a postcard-sized plea for “your important vote” from a fellow running for a vacancy on the city council. There’s a photograph of the candidate, and to Hodges he looks like Dr. Oberlin, the dentist who terrified him as a child. There’s also a circular from Albertsons supermarket. This Hodges puts aside (covering up his father’s gun for the time being) because it’s loaded with coupons.

The last thing appears to be an actual letter—a fairly thick one, by the feel—in a business-sized envelope. It is addressed to Det. K. William Hodges (Ret.) at 63 Harper Road. There is no return address. In the upper lefthand corner, where one usually goes, is his second smile-face of the day’s mail delivery. Only this one’s not the winking Walmart Rollback Smiley but rather the email emoticon of Smiley wearing dark glasses and showing his teeth.

This stirs a memory, and not a good one.

No, he thinks. No.

But he rips the letter open so fast and hard the envelope tears and four typed pages spill out—not real typing, not typewriter typing, but a computer font that looks like it.

Dear Detective Hodges, the heading reads.

He reaches out without looking, knocks the Albertsons circular to the floor, finger-walks across the revolver without even noticing it, and seizes the TV remote. He hits the kill-switch, shutting up the take-no-prisoners lady judge in mid-scold, and turns his attention to the letter.

3

Not bad, Hodges thinks. Not bad at all.

Here was another Mr. Smiley in sunglasses.

Below this was yet another smile-face. And below that:

4

Hodges sits where he is for two minutes, four minutes, six, eight. Completely still. He holds the letter in his hand, looking at the Andrew Wyeth print on the wall. At last he puts the pages on the table beside his chair and picks up the envelope. The postmark is right here in the city, which doesn’t surprise him. His correspondent wants him to know he’s close by. It’s part of the taunt. As his correspondent would say, it’s…

Part of the fun!

New chemicals and computer-assisted scanning processes can pick up excellent fingerprints from paper, but Hodges knows that if he turns this letter in to Forensics, they will find no prints on it but his. This guy is crazy, but his self-assessment—one crafty perp—is absolutely correct. Only he wrote perk, not perp, and he wrote it twice. Also…

Wait a minute, wait a minute.

What do you mean, when you turn it in?

Hodges gets up, goes to the window carrying the letter, and looks out on Harper Road. The Harrison girl putts by on her moped. She’s really too young to have one of those things, no matter what the law allows, but at least she’s wearing her helmet. The Mr. Tastey truck jangles by; in warm weather it works the city’s East Side between school’s out and dusk. A little black smart car trundles by. The graying hair of the woman behind the wheel is up in rollers. Or is it a woman? It could be a man wearing a wig and a dress. The rollers would be the perfect final touch, wouldn’t they?

That’s what he wants you to think.

But no. Not exactly.

Not what. It’s how the self-styled Mercedes Killer (except he was right, it was really the papers and the TV news that styled him that) wants him to think.

It’s the ice cream man!

No, it’s the man dressed as a woman in the smart car!

Uh-uh, it’s the guy driving the liquid propane truck, or the meter-reader!

How did you spark paranoia like that? It helps to casually let drop that you know more than the ex-detective’s address. You know he’s divorced and at least imply that he has a kid or kids somewhere.

Looking out at the grass now, noticing that it needs cutting. If Jerome doesn’t come around pretty soon, Hodges thinks, I’ll have to call him.

Kid or kids? Don’t kid yourself. He knows my ex is Corinne and we have one adult child, a daughter named Alison. He knows Allie’s thirty and lives in San Francisco. He probably knows she’s five-six and plays tennis. All that stuff is readily available on the Net. These days, everything is.

His next move should be to turn this letter over to Pete and Pete’s new partner, Isabelle Jaynes. They inherited the Mercedes thing, along with a few other danglers, when Hodges pulled the pin. Some cases are like idle computers; they go to sleep. This letter will wake up the Mercedes case in a hurry.

He traces the progress of the letter in his mind.

From the mail slot to the hall floor. From the hall floor to the La-Z-Boy. From the La-Z-Boy to here by the window, where he can now observe the mail truck going back the way it came—Andy Fenster done for the day. From here to the kitchen, where the letter would go into a totally unnecessary Glad bag, the kind with the zip top, because old habits are strong habits. Next to Pete and Isabelle. From Pete to Forensics for a complete dilation and curettage, where the unnecessariness of the Glad bag would be conclusively proved by: no prints, no hairs, no DNA of any kind, paper available by the caseload at every Staples and Office Depot in the city, and—last but not least—standard laser printing. They may be able to tell what kind of computer was used to compose the letter (about this he can’t be sure; he knows little about computers, and when he has trouble with his he turns to Jerome, who lives handily nearby), and if so, it would turn out to be a Mac or a PC. Big whoop.

From Forensics the letter would bounce back to Pete and Isabelle, who’d no doubt convene the sort of idiotic kop kolloquium you see on BBC crime shows like Luther and Prime Suspect (which his psychopathic correspondent probably loves). This kolloquium would be complete with whiteboard and photo enlargements of the letter, maybe even a laser pointer. Hodges watches some of those British crime shows, too, and believes Scotland Yard somehow missed the old saying about too many cooks spoiling the broth.

The kop kolloquium would accomplish only one thing, and Hodges believes it’s what the psycho wants: with ten or a dozen detectives in attendance, the existence of the letter will inevitably leak to the press. The psycho is probably not telling the truth when he says he has no urge to repeat his crime, but of one thing Hodges is completely sure: he misses being in the news.

Dandelions are sprouting on the lawn. It is definitely time to call Jerome. Lawn aside, Hodges misses his face around the place. Cool kid.

Something else. Even if the psycho is telling the truth about feeling no urge to perpetrate another mass slaughter (unlikely, but not out of the question), he’s still extremely interested in death. The letter’s subtext could not be clearer. Off yourself. You’re thinking about it already, so take the next step. Which also happens to be the final step.

Has he seen me playing with Dad’s .38?

Seen me putting it in my mouth?

Hodges has to admit it’s possible; he has never even thought of pulling the shades. Feeling stupidly safe in his living room when anybody could have a set of binocs. Or Jerome could have seen. Jerome bopping up the walk to ask about chores: what he is pleased to call chos fo hos.

Only if Jerome had seen him playing with that old revolver, he would have been scared to death. He would have said something.

Does Mr. Mercedes really masturbate when he thinks about running those people down?

In his years on the police force, Hodges has seen things he would never talk about with anyone who has not also seen them. Such toxic memories lead him to believe that his correspondent could be telling the truth about the masturbation, just as he is certainly telling the truth about having no conscience. Hodges has read there are wells in Iceland so deep you can drop a stone down them and never hear the splash. He thinks some human souls are like that. Things like bum fighting are only halfway down such wells.

He returns to his La-Z-Boy, opens the drawer in the table, and takes out his cell phone. He replaces it with the .38 and closes the drawer. He speed-dials the police department, but when the receptionist asks how she can direct his call, Hodges says: “Oh, damn. I just punched the wrong button on my phone. Sorry to have bothered you.”

“No bother, sir,” she says with a smile in her voice.

No calls, not yet. No action of any kind. He needs to think about this.

He really, really needs to think about this.

Hodges sits looking at his television, which is off on a weekday afternoon for the first time in months.

5

That evening he drives down to Newmarket Plaza and has a meal at the Thai restaurant. Mrs. Buramuk serves him personally. “Haven’t seen you long time, Officer Hodges.” It comes out Offica Hutches.

“Been cooking for myself since I retired.”

“You let me cook. Much better.”

When he tastes Mrs. Buramuk’s Tom Yum Gang again, he realizes how sick he is of half-raw fried hamburgers and spaghetti with Newman’s Own sauce. And the Sang Kaya Fug Tong makes him realize how tired he is of Pepperidge Farm coconut cake. If I never eat another slice of coconut cake, he thinks, I could live just as long and die just as happy. He drinks two cans of Singha with his meal, and it’s the best beer he’s had since the Raintree retirement party, which went almost exactly as Mr. Mercedes said; there was even a stripper “shaking her tailfeathers.” Along with everything else.

Had Mr. Mercedes been lurking at the back of the room? As the cartoon possum was wont to say, “It’s possible, Muskie, it’s possible.”

At home again, he sits in the La-Z-Boy and takes up the letter. He knows what the next step must be—if he’s not going to turn it over to Pete Huntley, that is—but he also knows better than to try doing it after a couple of brewskis. So he puts the letter in the drawer on top of the .38 (he never did bother with the Glad bag) and gets another beer. The one from the fridge is just an Ivory Special, the local brand, but it tastes every bit as good as the Singha.

When it’s gone, Hodges powers up his computer, opens Firefox, and types in Under Debbie’s Blue Umbrella. The descriptor beneath isn’t very descriptive: A social site where interesting people exchange interesting views. He thinks of going further, then shuts the computer down. Not that, either. Not tonight.

He has been going to bed late, because that means fewer hours spent tossing and turning, going over old cases and old mistakes, but tonight he turns in early and knows he’ll sleep almost at once. It’s a wonderful feeling.

His last thought before he goes under is of how Mr. Mercedes’s poison-pen letter finished up. Mr. Mercedes wants him to commit suicide. Hodges wonders what he would think if he knew he had given this particular ex–Knight of the Badge and Gun a reason to live, instead. At least for awhile.

Then sleep takes him. He gets a full and restful six hours before his bladder wakes him. He gropes to the bathroom, pees himself empty, and goes back to bed, where he sleeps for another three hours. When he wakes, sunshine is slanting in the windows and the birds are twittering. He heads into the kitchen, where he cooks himself a full breakfast. As he’s sliding a couple of hard-fried eggs onto a plate already loaded with bacon and toast, he stops, startled.

Someone is singing.

It’s him.

6

Once his breakfast dishes are in the dishwasher, he goes into the study to tear the letter down. This is a thing he’s done at least two dozen times before, but never on his own; as a detective he always had Pete Huntley to help him, and before Pete, two previous partners. Most of the letters were threatening communications from ex-husbands (and an ex-wife or two). Not much challenge in those. Some were extortion demands. Some were blackmail—really just another form of extortion. One was from a kidnapper demanding a paltry and unimaginative ransom. And three—four, counting the one from Mr. Mercedes—were from self-confessed murderers. Two of those were clearly fantasy. One might or might not have been from the serial killer they called Turnpike Joe.

What about this one? True or false? Real or fantasy?

Hodges opens his desk drawer, takes out a yellow legal pad, tears off the week-old grocery list on the top. Then he plucks one of the Uni-Ball pens from the cup beside his computer. He considers the detail about the condom first. If the guy really was wearing one, he took it with him… but that makes sense, doesn’t it? Condoms can hold fingerprints as well as jizz. Hodges considers other details: how the seatbelt locked when the guy plowed into the crowd, the way the Mercedes bounced when it went over the bodies. Stuff that wouldn’t have been in any of the newspapers, but also stuff he could have made up. He even said…

Hodges scans the letter, and here it is: My imagination is very powerful.

But there were two details he could not have made up. Two details that had been withheld from the news media.

On his legal pad, below IS IT REAL?, Hodges writes: HAIRNET. BLEACH.

Mr. Mercedes had taken the net with him just as he had taken the condom (probably still hanging off his dick, assuming it had been there at all), but Gibson in Forensics had been positive there was one, because Mr. Mercedes had left the clown mask and there had been no hairs stuck to the rubber. About the swimming-pool smell of DNA-killing bleach there had been no doubt. He must have used a lot.

But it isn’t just those things; it’s everything. The assuredness. There’s nothing tentative here.

He hesitates, then prints: THIS IS THE GUY.

Hesitates again. Scribbles out GUY and prints BASTARD.

7

It’s been awhile since he thought like a cop, and even longer since he did this kind of work—a special kind of forensics that doesn’t require cameras, microscopes, or special chemicals—but once he buckles down to it, he warms up fast. He starts with a series of headings.

Here he stops, tapping the pen against his lower lip and reading the letter through again from Dear Detective Hodges to Hope this letter has cheered you up! Then he adds two more headings on the sheet, which is now getting crowded.

He is far from sure about these last two. Sports metaphors have become common, especially among political pundits, and these days there are octogenarians on Facebook and Twitter. Hodges himself may be tapping only twelve percent of his Mac’s potential (that’s what Jerome claims), but that doesn’t make him part of the majority. You had to start somewhere, though, and besides, the letter has a young feel.

He has always been talented at this sort of work, and a lot more than twelve percent of it is intuition.

He’s listed nearly a dozen examples under UNUSUAL WORDS, and now circles two: compatriots and Spontaneous Ejaculation. Beside them he adds a name: Wambaugh. Mr. Mercedes is a shitbag, but a bright, book-reading shitbag. He has a large vocabulary and doesn’t make spelling errors. Hodges can imagine Jerome Robinson saying, “Spellchecker, my man. I mean, duh?”

Sure, sure, these days anyone with a word processing program can spell like a champ, but Mr. Mercedes has written Wambaugh, not Wombough, or even Wombow, which is how it sounds. Just the fact that he’s remembered to put in that silent gh suggests a fairly high level of intelligence. Mr. Mercedes’s missive may not be high-class literature, but his writing is a lot better than the dialogue in shows like NCIS or Bones.

Homeschooled, public-schooled, or self-taught? Does it matter? Maybe not, but maybe it does.

Hodges doesn’t think self-taught, no. The writing is too… what?

“Expansive,” he says to the empty room, but it’s more than that. “Outward. This guy writes outward. He learned with others. And wrote for others.”

A shaky deduction, but it’s supported by certain flourishes—those FANCY PHRASES. Must begin by congratulating you, he writes. Literally hundreds of cases, he writes. And—twice—Was I on your mind. Hodges logged As in his high school English classes, Bs in college, and he remembers what that sort of thing is called: incremental repetition. Does Mr. Mercedes imagine his letter being published in the newspaper, circulated on the Internet, quoted (with a certain reluctant respect) on Channel Four News at Six?

“Sure you do,” Hodges says. “Once upon a time you read your themes in class. You liked it, too. Liked being in the spotlight. Didn’t you? When I find you—if I find you—I’ll find that you did as well in your English classes as I did.” Probably better. Hodges can’t remember ever using incremental repetition, unless it was by accident.

Only there are four public high schools in the city and God knows how many private ones. Not to mention prep schools, junior colleges, City College, and St. Jude’s Catholic University. Plenty of haystacks for a poisoned needle to hide in. If he even went to school here at all, and not in Miami or Phoenix.

Plus, he’s a sly dog. The letter is full of false fingerprints—the capitalized phrases like Lead Boots and Note of Concern, the phrases in quotation marks, the extravagant use of exclamation points, the punchy one-sentence paragraphs. If asked to provide a writing sample, Mr. Mercedes would include none of those stylistic devices. Hodges knows that as well as he knows his own unfortunate first name: Kermit, as in kermitfrog19.

But.

This asshole isn’t quite as smart as he thinks. The letter almost certainly contains two real fingerprints, one smudged and one crystal clear.

The smudged print is his persistent use of numbers instead of the words for numbers: 27, not twenty-seven; 40 instead of forty. Det. 1st Grade instead of Det. First Grade. There are a few exceptions (he has written one regret instead of 1 regret), but Hodges thinks they are the ones that prove the general rule. The numbers might only be more camouflage, he knows that, but the chances are good Mr. Mercedes is genuinely unaware of it.

If I could get him in IR4 and tell him to write Forty thieves stole eighty wedding rings…?

Only K. William Hodges is never going to be in an interview room again, including IR4, which had been his favorite—his lucky IR, he always thought it. Unless he gets caught fooling with this shit, that is, and then he’s apt to be on the wrong side of the metal table.

All right, then. Pete gets the guy in an IR. Pete or Isabelle or both of them. They get him to write 40 thieves stole 80 wedding rings. What then?

Then they ask him to write The cops caught the perp hiding in the alley. Only they’d want to slur the perp part. Because, for all his writing skill, Mr. Mercedes thinks the word for a criminal doer is perk. Maybe he also thinks the word for a special privilege is a perp, as in Traveling 1st class was one of the CEO’s perps.

Hodges wouldn’t be surprised. Until college, he himself had thought that the fellow who threw the ball in a baseball game, the thing you poured water out of, and the framed objects you hung on the wall to decorate your apartment were all spelled the same. He had seen the word picture in all sorts of books, but his mind somehow refused to record it. His mother said straighten that pitcher, Kerm, it’s crooked, his father sometimes gave him money for the pitcher show, and it had simply stuck in his head.

I’ll know you when I find you, honeybunch, Hodges thinks. He prints the word and circles it again and again, hemming it in. You’ll be the asshole who calls a perp a perk.

8

He takes a walk around the block to clear his head, saying hello to people he hasn’t said hello to in a long time. Weeks, in some cases. Mrs. Melbourne is working in her garden, and when she sees him, she invites him in for a piece of her coffee cake.

“I’ve been worried about you,” she says when they’re settled in the kitchen. She has the bright, inquisitive gaze of a crow with its eye on a freshly squashed chipmunk.

“Getting used to retirement has been hard.” He takes a sip of her coffee. It’s lousy, but plenty hot.

“Some people never get used to it at all,” she says, measuring him with those bright eyes. She wouldn’t be too shabby in IR4, Hodges thinks. “Especially ones who had high-pressure jobs.”

“I was a little at loose ends to start with, but I’m doing better now.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Does that nice Negro boy still work for you?”

“Jerome? Yes.” Hodges smiles, wondering how Jerome would react if he knew someone in the neighborhood thinks of him as that nice Negro boy. Probably he would bare his teeth in a grin and exclaim, I sho is! Jerome and his chos fo hos. Already with his eye on Harvard. Princeton as a fallback.

“He’s slacking off,” she says. “Your lawn’s gotten rather shaggy. More coffee?”

Hodges declines with a smile. Hot can only do so much for bad coffee.

9

Back home again. Legs tingling, head filled with fresh air, mouth tasting like newspaper in a birdcage, but brain buzzing with caffeine.

He logs on to the city newspaper site and calls up several stories about the slaughter at City Center. What he wants isn’t in the first story, published under scare headlines on April eleventh of ’09, or the much longer piece in the Sunday edition of April twelfth. It’s in the Monday paper: a picture of the abandoned kill-car’s steering wheel. The indignant caption: HE THOUGHT IT WAS FUNNY. In the center of the wheel, pasted over the Mercedes emblem, is a yellow smile-face. The kind that wears sunglasses and shows its teeth.

There was a lot of police anger about that photo, because the detectives in charge—Hodges and Huntley—had asked the news media to hold back the smile icon. The editor, Hodges remembers, had been fawningly apologetic. A missed communication, he said. Won’t happen again. Promise. Scout’s honor.

“Mistake, my ass,” he remembers Pete fuming. “They had a picture that’d shoot a few steroids into their saggy-ass circulation, and they fucking used it.”

Hodges enlarges the news photo until that grinning yellow face fills the computer screen. The mark of the beast, he thinks, twenty-first-century style.

This time the number he speed-dials isn’t PD Reception but Pete’s cell. His old partner picks up on the second ring. “Yo, you ole hossy-hoss. How’s retirement treating you?” He sounds really pleased, and that makes Hodges smile. It also makes him feel guilty, yet the thought of backing off never crosses his mind.

“I’m good,” he says, “but I miss your fat and hypertensive face.”

“Sure you do. And we won in Iraq.”

“Swear to God, Peter. How about we have lunch and catch up a little? You pick the place and I’ll buy.”

“Sounds good, but I already ate today. How about tomorrow?”

“My schedule is jammed, Obama was coming by for my advice on the budget, but I suppose I could rearrange a few things. Seeing’s how it’s you.”

“Go fuck yourself, Kermit.”

“When you do it so much better?” The banter is an old tune with simple lyrics.

“How about DeMasio’s? You always liked that place.”

“DeMasio’s is fine. Noon?”

“That works.”

“And you’re sure you’ve got time for an old whore like me?”

“Billy, you don’t even need to ask. Want me to bring Isabelle?”

He doesn’t, but says: “If you want.”

Some of the old telepathy must still be working, because after a brief pause Pete says, “Maybe we’ll make it a stag party this time.”

“Whatever,” Hodges says, relieved. “Looking forward.”

“Me too. Good to hear your voice, Billy.”

Hodges hangs up and looks at the teeth-bared smile-face some more. It fills his computer screen.

10

He sits in his La-Z-Boy that night, watching the eleven o’clock news. In his white pajamas he looks like an overweight ghost. His scalp gleams mellowly through his thinning hair. The big story is the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico where the oil is still gushing. The newsreader says the bluefin tuna are endangered, and the Louisiana shellfish industry may be destroyed for a generation. In Iceland, a billowing volcano (with a name the newsreader mangles to something like Eeja-fill-kull) is still screwing up transatlantic air travel. In California, police are saying they may have finally gotten a break in the Grim Sleeper serial killer case. No names, but the suspect (the perk, Hodges thinks) is described as “a well-groomed and well-spoken African-American.” Hodges thinks, Now if only someone would bag Turnpike Joe. Not to mention Osama bin Laden.

The weather comes on. Warm temperatures and sunny skies, the weather girl promises. Time to break out the bathing suits.

“I’d like to see you in a bathing suit, my dear,” Hodges says, and uses the remote to turn off the TV.

He takes his father’s .38 out of the drawer, unloads it as he walks into the bedroom, and puts it in the safe with his Glock. He has spent a lot of time during the last two or three months obsessing about the Victory .38, but tonight it hardly crosses his mind as he locks it away. He’s thinking about Turnpike Joe, but not really; these days Joe is someone else’s problem. Like the Grim Sleeper, that well-spoken African-American.

Is Mr. Mercedes also African-American? It’s technically possible—no one saw anything but the pullover clown mask, a long-sleeved shirt, and yellow gloves on the steering wheel—but Hodges thinks not. God knows there are plenty of black people capable of murder in this city, but there’s the weapon to consider. The neighborhood where Mrs. Trelawney’s mother lived is predominantly wealthy and predominantly white. A black man hanging around a parked Mercedes SL500 would have been noticed.

Well. Probably. People can be stunningly unobservant. But experience has led Hodges to believe rich people tend to be slightly more observant than the general run of Americans, especially when it comes to their expensive toys. He doesn’t want to say they’re paranoid, but…

The fuck they’re not. Rich people can be generous, even the ones with bloodcurdling political views can be generous, but most believe in generosity on their own terms, and underneath (not so deep, either), they’re always afraid someone is going to steal their presents and eat their birthday cake.

How about neat and well spoken, then?

Yes, Hodges decides. No hard evidence, but the letter suggests he is. Mr. Mercedes may dress in suits and work in an office, or he may dress in jeans and Carhartt shirts and balance tires in a garage, but he’s no slob. He may not talk a lot—such creatures are careful in all aspects of their lives, and that includes promiscuous blabbing—but when he does talk, he’s probably direct and clear. If you were lost and needed directions, he’d give you good ones.

As he’s brushing his teeth, Hodges thinks: DeMasio’s. Pete wants to have lunch at DeMasio’s.

That’s okay for Pete, who still carries the badge and gun, and it seemed okay to Hodges when they were talking on the phone, because then Hodges had been thinking like a cop instead of a retiree who’s thirty pounds overweight. It probably would be okay—broad daylight and all—but DeMasio’s is on the edge of Lowtown, which is not a vacation community. A block west of the restaurant, beyond the turnpike spur overpass, the city turns into a wasteland of vacant lots and abandoned tenements. Drugs are sold openly on streetcorners, there’s a burgeoning trade in illegal weaponry, and arson is the neighborhood sport. If you can call Lowtown a neighborhood, that is. The restaurant itself—a really terrific Italian joint—is safe, though. The owner is connected, and that makes it like Free Parking in Monopoly.

Hodges rinses his mouth, goes back into the bedroom, and—still thinking of DeMasio’s—looks doubtfully at the closet where the safe is hidden behind the hanging pants, shirts, and the sportcoats he no longer wears (he’s now too big for all but two of them).

Take the Glock? The Victory, maybe? The Victory’s smaller.

No to both. His carry-concealed license is still in good standing, but he’s not going strapped to a lunch with his old partner. It would make him self-conscious, and he’s already self-conscious about the digging he plans to do. He goes to his dresser instead, lifts up a pile of underwear, and looks underneath. The Happy Slapper is still there, has been there since his retirement party.

The Slapper will do. Just a little insurance in a high-risk part of town.

Satisfied, he goes to bed and turns out the light. He puts his hands into the mystic cool pocket under the pillow and thinks of Turnpike Joe. Joe has been lucky so far, but eventually he’ll be caught. Not just because he keeps hitting those highway rest areas but because he can’t stop killing. He thinks of Mr. Mercedes writing, That is not true in my case, because I have absolutely no urge to do it again.

Telling the truth, or lying the way he was lying with his CAPITALIZED PHRASES and MANY EXCLAMATION POINTS and ONE-SENTENCE PARAGRAPHS?

Hodges thinks he’s lying—perhaps to himself as well as to K. William Hodges, Det. Ret.—but right now, as Hodges lies here with sleep coming on, he doesn’t care. What matters is the guy thinks he’s safe. He’s positively smug about it. He doesn’t seem to realize the vulnerability he has exposed by writing a letter to the man who was, until his retirement, the lead detective on the City Center case.

You need to talk about it, don’t you? Yes you do, honeybunch, don’t lie to your old uncle Billy. And unless that Debbie’s Blue Umbrella site is another red herring, like all those quotation marks, you’ve even opened a conduit into your life. You want to talk. You need to talk. And if you could goad me into something, that would just be the cherry on top of a sundae, wouldn’t it?

In the dark, Hodges says: “I’m willing to listen. I’ve got plenty of time. I’m retired, after all.”

Smiling, he falls asleep.

11

The following morning, Freddi Linklatter is sitting on the edge of the loading dock and smoking a Marlboro. Her Discount Electronix jacket is folded neatly beside her with her DE gimme cap placed on top of it. She’s talking about some Jesus-jumper who gave her hassle. People are always giving her hassle, and she tells Brady all about it on break. She gives him chapter and verse, because Brady is a good listener.

“So he says to me, he goes, All homosexuals are going to hell, and this tract explains all about it. So I take it, right? There’s a picture on the front of these two narrow-ass gay guys—in leisure suits, I swear to God—holding hands and staring into a cave filled with flames. Plus the devil! With a pitchfork! I am not shitting you. Still, I try to discuss it with him. I’m under the impression that he wants to have a dialogue. So I say, I go, You ought to get your face out of the Book of LaBitticus or whatever it is long enough to read a few scientific studies. Gays are born gay, I mean, hello? He goes, That is simply not true. Homosexuality is learned behavior and can be unlearned. So I can’t believe it, right? I mean, you have got to be shitting me. But I don’t say that. What I say is, Look at me, dude, take a real good look. Don’t be shy, go top to bottom. What do you see? And before he can toss some more of his bullshit, I go, You see a guy, is what you see. Only God got distracted before he could slap a dick on me and went on to the next in line. So then he goes…”

Brady sticks with her—more or less—until Freddi gets to the Book of LaBitticus (she means Leviticus, but Brady doesn’t care enough to correct her), and then mostly loses her, keeping track just enough to throw in the occasional uh-huh. He doesn’t really mind the monologue. It’s soothing, like the LCD Soundsystem he sometimes listens to on his iPod when he goes to sleep. Freddi Linklatter is way tall for a girl, at six-two or -three she towers over Brady, and what she’s saying is true: she looks like a girl about as much as Brady Hartsfield looks like Vin Diesel. She’s togged out in straight-leg 501s, motorcycle skids, and a plain white tee that hangs dead straight, without even a touch of tits. Her dark blond hair is butched to a quarter inch. She wears no earrings and no makeup. She probably thinks Max Factor is a statement about what some guy did to some girl out behind old Dad’s barn.

He says yeah and uh-huh and right, all the time wondering what the old cop made of his letter, and if the old cop will try to get in touch at the Blue Umbrella. He knows that sending the letter was a risk, but not a very big one. He made up a prose style that’s completely different from his own. The chances of the old cop picking up anything useful from the letter are slim to nonexistent.

Debbie’s Blue Umbrella is a slightly bigger risk, but if the old cop thinks he can trace him down that way, he’s in for a big surprise. Debbie’s servers are in Eastern Europe, and in Eastern Europe computer privacy is like cleanliness in America: next to godliness.

“So he goes, I swear this is true, he goes, There are plenty of young Christian women in our church who could show you how to fix yourself up, and if you grew your hair out, you’d look quite pretty. Do you believe it? So I tell him, With a little lipum-stickum, you’d look darn pretty yourself. Put on a leather jacket and a dog collar and you might luck into a hot date at the Corral. Get your first squirt on the Tower of Power. So that buzzes him bigtime and he goes, If you’re going to get personal about this…”

Anyway, if the old cop wants to follow the computer trail, he’ll have to turn the letter over to the cops in the technical section, and Brady doesn’t think he’ll do that. Not right away, at least. He’s got to be bored sitting there with nothing but the TV for company. And the revolver, of course, the one he keeps beside him with his beer and magazines. Can’t forget the revolver. Brady has never seen him actually stick it in his mouth, but several times he’s seen him holding it. Shiny happy people don’t hold guns in their laps that way.

“So I tell him, I go, Don’t get mad. Somebody pushes back against your precious ideas, you guys always get mad. Have you noticed that about the Christers?”

He hasn’t but says he has.

“Only this one listened. He actually did. And we ended up going down to Hosseni’s Bakery and having coffee. Where, I know this is hard to believe, we actually did have something approaching a dialogue. I don’t hold out much hope for the human race, but every now and then…”

Brady is pretty sure his letter will pep the old cop up, at least to start with. He didn’t get all those citations for being stupid, and he’ll see right through the veiled suggestion that he commit suicide the way Mrs. Trelawney did. Veiled? Not very. It’s pretty much right out front. Brady believes the old cop will go all gung ho, at least for awhile. But when he fails to get anywhere, it will make the fall even more jarring. Then, assuming the old cop takes the Blue Umbrella bait, Brady can really go to work.

The old cop is thinking, If I can get you talking, I can goad you.

Only Brady is betting the old cop never read Nietzsche; Brady’s betting the old cop is more of a John Grisham man. If he reads at all. When you gaze into the abyss, Nietzsche wrote, the abyss also gazes into you.

I am the abyss, old boy. Me.

The old cop is certainly a bigger challenge than poor guilt-ridden Olivia Trelawney… but getting to her was such a hot hit to the nervous system that Brady can’t help wanting to try it again. In some ways prodding Sweet Livvy into high-siding it was a bigger thrill than cutting a bloody swath through that pack of job-hunting assholes at City Center. Because it took brains. It took dedication. It took planning. And a little bit of help from the cops didn’t hurt, either. Did they guess their faulty deductions were partly to blame for Sweet Livvy’s suicide? Probably not Huntley, such a possibility would never cross his plodder’s mind. Ah, but Hodges. He might have his doubts. A few little mice nibbling at the wires back there in his smart-cop brain. Brady hopes so. If not, he may get a chance to tell him. On the Blue Umbrella.

Mostly, though, it was him. Brady Hartsfield. Credit where credit is due. City Center was a sledgehammer. On Olivia Trelawney, he used a scalpel.

“Are you listening to me?” Freddi asks.

He smiles. “Guess I drifted away there for a minute.”

Never tell a lie when you can tell the truth. The truth isn’t always the safest course, but mostly it is. He wonders idly what she’d say if he told her, Freddi, I am the Mercedes Killer. Or if he said, Freddi, there are nine pounds of homemade plastic explosive in my basement closet.

She is looking at him as if she can read these thoughts, and Brady has a moment of unease. Then she says, “It’s working two jobs, pal. That’ll wear you down.”

“Yes, but I’d like to get back to college, and nobody’s going to pay for it but me. Also there’s my mother.”

“The wino.”

He smiles. “My mother is actually more of a vodka-o.”

“Invite me over,” Freddi says grimly. “I’ll drag her to a fucking AA meeting.”

“Wouldn’t work. You know what Dorothy Parker said, right? You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.”

Freddi considers this for a moment, then throws back her head and voices a Marlboro-raspy laugh. “I don’t know who Dorothy Parker is, but I’m gonna save that one.” She sobers. “Seriously, why don’t you just ask Frobisher for more hours? That other job of yours is strictly rinky-dink.”

“I’ll tell you why he doesn’t ask Frobisher for more hours,” Frobisher says, stepping out onto the loading platform. Anthony Frobisher is young and geekily bespectacled. In this he is like most of the Discount Electronix employees. Brady is also young, but better-looking than Tones Frobisher. Not that this makes him handsome. Which is okay. Brady is willing to settle for nondescript.

“Lay it on us,” Freddi says, and mashes her cigarette out. Across the loading zone behind the big-box store, which anchors the south end of the Birch Hill Mall, are the employees’ cars (mostly old beaters) and three VW Beetles painted bright green. These are always kept spotless, and late-spring sun twinkles on their windshields. On the sides, in blue, is COMPUTER PROBLEMS? CALL THE DISCOUNT ELECTRONIX CYBER PATROL!

“Circuit City is gone and Best Buy is tottering,” Frobisher says in a schoolteacherly voice. “Discount Electronix is also tottering, along with several other businesses that are on life support thanks to the computer revolution: newspapers, book publishers, record stores, and the United States Postal Service. Just to mention a few.”

“Record stores?” Freddi asks, lighting another cigarette. “What are record stores?”

“That’s a real gut-buster,” Frobisher says. “I have a friend who claims dykes lack a sense of humor, but—”

“You have friends?” Freddi asks. “Wow. Who knew?”

“—but you obviously prove him wrong. You guys don’t have more hours because the company is now surviving on computers alone. Mostly cheap ones made in China and the Philippines. The great majority of our customers no longer want the other shit we sell.” Brady thinks only Tones Frobisher would say the great majority. “This is partly because of the technological revolution, but it’s also because—”

Together, Freddi and Brady chant, “—Barack Obama is the worst mistake this country ever made!”

Frobisher regards them sourly for a moment, then says, “At least you listen. Brady, you’re off at two, is that correct?”

“Yes. My other gig starts at three.”

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

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

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

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

“If telling the truth makes a man a turd, then a turd I shall be.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He disappears inside before she can return his serve.

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

“Me, either,” Brady says quietly.

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

Why would she not?

After all, it had sort of been her idea.

12

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

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

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

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

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

Pete shakes his head, grinning.

“Youth, middle age, and you look fuckin terrific.”

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

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

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

“Thanks.”

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

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

“What’s that?” Hodges asks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Your nose is growing, Pinocchio.”

“No, seriously. All I want is an update.”

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

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

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

“Still can’t persuade her to charge him?”

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

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

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

Hodges leans forward, his food temporarily forgotten. “When was this?”

“Last month.”

“And you didn’t tell me?”

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

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

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

“What about the Park Rapist?”

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

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

“We are, and we’ll get him.”

“It would be nice if you got him before he rapes another fiftysomething on her way home from work.”

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

“I know,” Hodges says. Soothingly. “Pawnshop guy?”

Pete breaks into a broad grin. “Young Aaron Jefferson.”

“Huh?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Why wait?”

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

“But you’ve got him.”

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

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

The waiter looks insulted. “Yes, sir. Always.”

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

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

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

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

“Fuck you. What about the Mercedes Killer?”

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

“I know.”

“Do you think he knew, Billy?”

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

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

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

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

“So you’ve got nothing.”

“Dead in the water.”

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

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

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

“That or something else,” Hodges says.

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

“Yeah?”

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

“Yeah,” Hodges says. He doesn’t.

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

Sure he does.

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

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

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

“Then why hope for plenty of people?”

Pete considers this, then smiles a slow smile. “You have a point there.”

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

“Wonder about her how?” Pete asks.

“If she was telling the truth after all. About the key.”

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

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

Just a dog.

“I wonder, though,” Hodges says. Hoping he seems thoughtful rather than pushy.

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

“I suppose.”

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

Hodges makes a be-my-guest gesture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Right.”

“Then roll.”

“Okay. Thanks for lunch.”

“One other thing—hear anything about Turnpike Joe?”

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

“Go, go.”

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

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

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

He wonders how sharp his own nose is these days.

13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes you can just get bored with afternoon TV.

14

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

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

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

“What the hell is that?” Pete asked.

“I think a wedding ring,” Hodges said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, sir, absolutely.”

“Just routine, right? A stolen-car inquiry.”

“You got it.”

Hodges turned to Pete. “Front of the cabin. Notice anything?”

“No airbag deployment. He disabled them. Speaks to premeditation.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plus, there was the mask.

But…

But.

15

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

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

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

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

“You keep saying she,” Pete said. They hadn’t mentioned the owner’s name.

“Hey, come on.” The mechanic smiling a little now. “This is Mrs. Trelawney’s Mercedes. Olivia Trelawney. She bought it at our dealership and we service it every four months, like clockwork. We only service a few twelve-cylinders, and I know them all.” And then, speaking nothing but the utter grisly truth: “This baby’s a tank.”

The killer drove the Benz in between the two container boxes, killed the engine, pulled off his mask, doused it with bleach, and exited the car (the gloves and hairnet probably tucked inside his jacket). Then a final fuck-you as he walked away into the fog: he locked the car with Olivia Ann Trelawney’s smart key.

There was your but.

16

She warned us to be quiet because her mother was sleeping, Hodges remembers. Then she gave us coffee and cookies. Sitting in DeMasio’s, he sips the last of his current cup while he waits for his credit card to be returned. He thinks about the living room in that whopper of a condo apartment, with its kick-ass view of the lake.

Along with coffee and cookies, she had given them the wide-eyed of-course-I-didn’t look, the one that is the exclusive property of solid citizens who have never been in trouble with the police. Who can’t imagine such a thing. She even said it out loud, when Pete asked if it was possible she had left her ignition key in her car when she parked it on Lake Avenue just a few doors down from her mother’s building.

“Of course I didn’t.” The words had come through a cramped little smile that said I find your idea silly and more than a bit insulting.

The waiter returns at last. He puts down the little silver tray, and Hodges slips a ten and a five into his hand before he can straighten up. At DeMasio’s the waiters split tips, a practice of which Hodges strongly disapproves. If that makes him old school, so be it.

“Thank you, sir, and buon pomeriggio.”

“Back atcha,” Hodges says. He tucks away his receipt and his Amex, but doesn’t rise immediately. There are some crumbs left on his dessert plate, and he uses his fork to snare them, just as he used to do with his mother’s cakes when he was a little boy. To him those last few crumbs, sucked slowly onto the tongue from between the tines of the fork, always seemed like the sweetest part of the slice.

17

That crucial first interview, only hours after the crime. Coffee and cookies while the mangled bodies of the dead were still being identified. Somewhere relatives were weeping and rending their garments.

Mrs. Trelawney walking into the condo’s front hall, where her handbag sat on an occasional table. She brought the bag back, rummaging, starting to frown, still rummaging, starting to be a little worried. Then smiling. “Here it is,” she said, and handed it over.

The detectives looked at the smart key, Hodges thinking how ordinary it was for something that went with such an expensive car. It was basically a black plastic stick with a lump on the end of it. The lump was stamped with the Mercedes logo on one side. On the other were three buttons. One showed a padlock with its shackle down. On the button beside it, the padlock’s shackle was up. The third button was labeled PANIC. Presumably if a mugger attacked you as you were unlocking your car, you could push that one and the car would start screaming for help.

“I can see why you had a little trouble locating it in your purse,” Pete remarked in his best just-passing-the-time-of-day voice. “Most people put a fob on their keys. My wife has hers on a big plastic daisy.” He smiled fondly as if Maureen were still his wife, and as if that perfectly turned-out fashion plate would ever have been caught dead hauling a plastic daisy out of her purse.

“How nice for her,” Mrs. Trelawney said. “When may I have my car back?”

“That’s not up to us, ma’am,” Hodges said.

She sighed and straightened the boatneck top of her dress. It was the first of dozens of times they saw her do it. “I’ll have to sell it, of course. I’d never be able to drive it after this. It’s so upsetting. To think my car…” Now that she had her purse in hand, she prospected again and brought out a wad of pastel Kleenex. She dabbed at her eyes with them. “It’s very upsetting.”

“I’d like you to take us through it one more time,” Pete said.

She rolled her eyes, which were red-rimmed and bloodshot. “Is that really necessary? I’m exhausted. I was up most of the night with my mother. She couldn’t go to sleep until four. She’s in such pain. I’d like a nap before Mrs. Greene comes in. She’s the nurse.”

Hodges thought, Your car was just used to kill eight people, and only eight if all the others live, and you want a nap. Later he would not be sure if that was when he started to dislike Mrs. Trelawney, but it probably was. When some people were in distress, you wanted to enfold them and say there-there as you patted them on the back. With others you wanted to slap them a hard one across the chops and tell them to man up. Or, in Mrs. T.’s case, to woman up.

“We’ll be as quick as we can,” Pete promised. He didn’t tell her that this would be the first of many interviews. By the time they were done with her, she would hear herself telling her story in her sleep.

“Oh, very well, then. I arrived here at my mother’s shortly after seven o’clock on Thursday evening…”

She visited at least four times a week, she said, but Thursdays were her night to stay over. She always stopped at B’hai, a very nice vegetarian restaurant located in Birch Hill Mall, and got their dinners, which she warmed up in the oven. (“Although Mother eats very little now, of course. Because of the pain.”) She told them she always scheduled her Thursday trips so she arrived after seven, because that was when the all-night parking began, and most of the streetside spaces were empty. “I won’t parallel park. I simply can’t do it.”

“What about the garage down the block?” Hodges asked.

She looked at him as though he were crazy. “It costs sixteen dollars to park there overnight. The streetside spaces are free.”

Pete was still holding the key, although he hadn’t yet told Mrs. Trelawney they would be taking it with them. “You stopped at Birch Hill and ordered takeout for you and your mother at—” He consulted his notebook. “B’hai.”

“No, I ordered ahead. From my house on Lilac Drive. They are always glad to hear from me. I am an old and valued customer. Last night it was kookoo sabzi for Mother—that’s an herbal omelet with spinach and cilantro—and gheymeh for me. Gheymeh is a lovely stew with peas, potatoes, and mushrooms. Very easy on the stomach.” She straightened her boatneck. “I’ve had terrible acid reflux ever since I was in my teens. One learns to live with it.”

“I assume your order was—” Hodges began.

“And sholeh zard for dessert,” she added. “That’s rice pudding with cinnamon. And saffron.” She flashed her strangely troubled smile. Like the compulsive straightening of her boatneck tops, the smile was a Trelawneyism with which they would become very familiar. “It’s the saffron that makes it special. Even Mother always eats the sholeh zard.”

“Sounds tasty,” Hodges said. “And your order, was it boxed and ready to go when you got there?”

“Yes.”

“One box?”

“Oh no, three.”

“In a bag?”

“No, just the boxes.”

“Must have been quite a struggle, getting all that out of your car,” Pete said. “Three boxes of takeout, your purse…”

“And the key,” Hodges said. “Don’t forget that, Pete.”

“Also, you’d want to get it all upstairs as fast as possible,” Pete said. “Cold food’s no fun.”

“I see where you’re going with this,” Mrs. Trelawney said, “and I assure you…” A slight pause. “… you gentlemen that you are barking up the wrong path. I put my key in my purse as soon as I turned off the engine, it’s the first thing I always do. As for the boxes, they were tied together in a stack…” She held her hands about eighteen inches apart to demonstrate. “… and that made them very easy to handle. I had my purse over my arm. Look.” She crooked her arm, hung her purse on it, and marched around the big living room, holding a stack of invisible boxes from B’hai. “See?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Hodges said. He thought he saw something else as well.

“As for hurrying—no. There was no need, since the dinners need to be heated up, anyway.” She paused. “Not the sholeh zard, of course. No need to heat up rice pudding.” She uttered a small laugh. Not a giggle, Hodges thought, but a titter. Given that her husband was dead, he supposed you could even call it a widder-titter. His dislike added another layer—almost thin enough to be invisible, but not quite. No, not quite.

“So let me review your actions once you got here to Lake Avenue,” Hodges said. “Where you arrived at a little past seven.”

“Yes. Five past, perhaps a little more.”

“Uh-huh. You parked… what? Three or four doors down?”

“Four at most. All I need are two empty spaces, so I can pull in without backing. I hate to back. I always turn the wrong way.”

“Yes, ma’am, my wife has exactly the same problem. You turned off the engine. You removed the key from the ignition and put it in your purse. You put your purse over your arm and picked up the boxes with the food in them—”

“The stack of boxes. Tied together with good stout string.”

“The stack, right. Then what?”

She looked at him as though he were, of all the idiots in a generally idiotic world, the greatest. “Then I went to my mother’s building. Mrs. Harris—the housekeeper, you know—buzzed me in. On Thursdays, she leaves as soon as I arrive. I took the elevator up to the nineteenth floor. Where you are now asking me questions instead of telling me when I can deal with my car. My stolen car.”

Hodges made a mental note to ask the housekeeper if she had noticed Mrs. T.’s Mercedes when she left.

Pete asked, “At what point did you take your key from your purse again, Mrs. Trelawney?”

“Again? Why would I—”

He held the key up—Exhibit A. “To lock your car before you entered the building. You did lock it, didn’t you?”

A brief uncertainty flashed in her eyes. They both saw it. Then it was gone. “Of course I did.”

Hodges pinned her gaze. It shifted away, toward the lake view out the big picture window, and he caught it again. “Think carefully, Mrs. Trelawney. People are dead, and this is important. Do you specifically remember juggling those boxes of food so you could get your key out of your purse and push the LOCK button? And seeing the headlights flash an acknowledgement? They do that, you know.”

“Of course I know.” She bit at her lower lip, realized she was doing it, stopped.

“Do you remember that specifically?”

For a moment all expression left her face. Then that superior smile burst forth in all its irritating glory. “Wait. Now I remember. I put the key in my purse after I gathered up my boxes and got out. And after I pushed the button that locks the car.”

“You’re sure,” Pete said.

“Yes.” She was, and would remain so. They both knew that. The way a solid citizen who hit and ran would say, when he was finally tracked down, that of course it was a dog he’d hit.

Pete flipped his notebook closed and stood up. Hodges did likewise. Mrs. Trelawney looked more than eager to escort them to the door.

“One more question,” Hodges said as they reached it.

She raised carefully plucked eyebrows. “Yes?”

“Where’s your spare key? We ought to take that one, too.”

There was no blank look this time, no cutting away of the eyes, no hesitation. She said, “I have no spare key, and no need of one. I’m very careful of my things, Officer. I’ve owned my Gray Lady—that’s what I call it—for five years, and the only key I’ve ever used is now in your partner’s pocket.”

18

The table where he and Pete ate their lunch has been cleared of everything but his half-finished glass of water, yet Hodges goes on sitting there, staring out the window at the parking lot and the overpass that marks the unofficial border of Lowtown, where Sugar Heights residents like the late Olivia Trelawney never venture. Why would they? To buy drugs? Hodges is sure there are druggies in the Heights, plenty of them, but when you live there, the dealers make housecalls.

Mrs. T. was lying. She had to lie. It was that or face the fact that a single moment of forgetfulness had led to horrific consequences.

Suppose, though—just for the sake of argument—that she was telling the truth.

Okay, let’s suppose. But if we were wrong about her leaving her Mercedes unlocked with the key in the ignition, how were we wrong? And what did happen?

He sits looking out the window, remembering, unaware that some of the waiters have begun to look at him uneasily—the overweight retiree sitting slumped in his seat like a robot with dead batteries.

19

The deathcar had been transported to Police Impound on a carrier, still locked. Hodges and Huntley received this update when they got back to their own car. The head mechanic from Ross Mercedes had just arrived, and was pretty sure he could unlock the damn thing. Eventually.

“Tell him not to bother,” Hodges said. “We’ve got her key.”

There was a pause at the other end, and then Lieutenant Morrissey said, “You do? You’re not saying she—”

“No, no, nothing like that. Is the mechanic standing by, Lieutenant?”

“He’s in the yard, looking at the damage to the car. Damn near tears, is what I heard.”

“He might want to save a drop or two for the dead people,” Pete said. He was driving. The windshield wipers beat back and forth. The rain was coming harder. “Just sayin.”

“Tell him to get in touch with the dealership and check something,” Hodges said. “Then have him call me on my cell.”

The traffic was snarled downtown, partly because of the rain, partly because Marlborough Street had been blocked off at City Center. They had made only four blocks when Hodges’s cell rang. It was Howard McGrory, the mechanic.

“Did you have someone at the dealership check on what I was curious about?” Hodges asked him.

“No need,” McGrory said. “I’ve worked at Ross since 1987. Must have seen a thousand Mercs go out the door since then, and I can tell you they all go out with two keys.”

“Thanks,” Hodges said. “We’ll be there soon. Got some more questions for you.”

“I’ll be here. This is terrible. Terrible.”

Hodges ended the call and passed on what McGrory had said.

“Are you surprised?” Pete asked. Ahead was an orange DETOUR sign that would vector them around City Center… unless they wanted to light their blues, that was, and neither did. What they needed now was to talk.

“Nope,” Hodges said. “It’s standard operating procedure. Like the Brits say, an heir and a spare. They give you two keys when you buy your new car—”

“—and tell you to put one in a safe place, so you can lay hands on it if you lose the one you carry around. Some people, if they need the spare a year or two later, they’ve forgotten where they put it. Women who carry big purses—like that suitcase the Trelawney woman had—are apt to dump both keys into it and forget all about the extra one. If she’s telling the truth about not putting it on a fob, she was probably using them interchangeably.”

“Yeah,” Hodges said. “She gets to her mother’s, she’s preoccupied with the thought of spending another night dealing with Mom’s pain, she’s juggling the boxes and her purse…”

“And left the key in the ignition. She doesn’t want to admit it—not to us and not to herself—but that’s what she did.”

“Although the warning chime…” Hodges said doubtfully.

“Maybe a big noisy truck was going by as she was getting out and she didn’t hear the chime. Or a police car, winding its siren. Or maybe she was just so deep in her own thoughts she ignored it.”

It made sense then and even more later when McGrory told them the deathcar hadn’t been jimmied to gain entry or hotwired to start. What troubled Hodges—the only thing that troubled him, really—was how much he wanted it to make sense. Neither of them had liked Mrs. Trelawney, she of the boatneck tops, perfectly plucked brows, and squeaky widder-titter. Mrs. Trelawney who hadn’t asked for any news of the dead and injured, not so much as a single detail. She wasn’t the doer—no way was she—but it would be good to stick her with some of the blame. Give her something to think about besides veggie dinners from B’hai.

“Don’t complicate what’s simple,” his partner repeated. The traffic snarl had cleared and he put the pedal down. “She was given two keys. She claims she only had one. And now it’s the truth. The bastard who killed those people probably threw the one she left in the ignition down a handy sewer when he walked away. The one she showed us was the spare.”

That had to be the answer. When you heard hoofbeats, you didn’t think zebras.

20

Someone is shaking him gently, the way you shake a heavy sleeper. And, Hodges realizes, he almost has been asleep. Or hypnotized by recollection.

It’s Elaine, the DeMasio’s hostess, and she’s looking at him with concern. “Detective Hodges? Are you all right?”

“Fine. But it’s just Mr. Hodges now, Elaine. I’m retired.”

He sees concern in her eyes, and something more. Something worse. He’s the only patron left in the restaurant. He observes the waiters clustered around the doorway to the kitchen, and suddenly sees himself as they and Elaine must be seeing him, an old fellow who’s been sitting here long after his dining companion (and everyone else) has left. An old overweight fellow who sucked the last of his cake off his fork like a child sucking a lollipop and then just stared out the window.

They’re wondering if I’m riding into the Kingdom of Dementia on the Alzheimer’s Express, he thinks.

He smiles at Elaine—his number one, wide and charming. “Pete and I were talking about old cases. I was thinking about one. Kind of replaying it. Sorry. I’ll clear out now.”

But when he gets up he staggers and bumps the table, knocking over the half-empty water glass. Elaine grabs his shoulder to steady him, looking more concerned than ever.

“Detective… Mr. Hodges, are you okay to drive?”

“Sure,” he says, too heartily. Pins and needles are doing windsprints from his ankles to his crotch and then back down to his ankles again. “Just had two glasses of beer. Pete drank the rest. My legs went to sleep, that’s all.”

“Oh. Are you better now?”

“Fine,” he says, and his legs really are better. Thank God. He remembers reading somewhere that older men, especially older overweight men, should not sit too long. A blood clot can form behind the knee. You get up, the released clot does its own lethal windsprint up to the heart, and it’s angel, angel, down we go.

She walks with him to the door. Hodges finds himself thinking of the private nurse whose job it was to watch over Mrs. T.’s mother. What was her name? Harris? No, Harris was the housekeeper. The nurse was Greene. When Mrs. Wharton wanted to go into the living room, or visit the jakes, did Mrs. Greene escort her the way Elaine is escorting him now? Of course she did.

“Elaine, I’m fine,” he says. “Really. Sober mind. Body in balance.” He holds his arms out to demonstrate.

“All right,” she says. “Come see us again, and next time don’t wait so long.”

“It’s a promise.”

He looks at his watch as he pushes out into the bright sunshine. Past two. He’s missing his afternoon shows, and doesn’t mind a bit. The lady judge and the Nazi psychologist can go fuck themselves. Or each other.

21

He walks slowly into the parking lot, where the only cars left, other than his, likely belong to the restaurant staff. He takes his keys out and jingles them on his palm. Unlike Mrs. T.’s, the key to his Toyota is on a ring. And yes, there’s a fob—a rectangle of plastic with a picture of his daughter beneath. Allie at seventeen, smiling and wearing her City High lacrosse uni.

In the matter of the Mercedes key, Mrs. Trelawney never recanted. Through all the interviews, she continued to insist she’d only ever had the one. Even after Pete Huntley showed her the invoice, with PRIMARY KEYS (2) on the list of items that went with her new car when she took possession back in 2004, she continued to insist. She said the invoice was mistaken. Hodges remembers the iron certainty in her voice.

Pete would say that she copped to it in the end. There was no need of a note; suicide is a confession by its very nature. Her wall of denial finally crumbled. Like when the guy who hit and ran finally gets it off his chest. Yes, okay, it was a kid, not a dog. It was a kid and I was looking at my cell phone to see whose call I missed and I killed him.

Hodges remembers how their subsequent interviews with Mrs. T. had produced a weird kind of amplifying effect. The more she denied, the more they disliked. Not just Hodges and Huntley but the whole squad. And the more they disliked, the more stridently she denied. Because she knew how they felt. Oh yes. She was self-involved, but not stu—

Hodges stops, one hand on the sun-warmed doorhandle of his car, the other shading his eyes. He’s looking into the shadows beneath the turnpike overpass. It’s almost mid-afternoon, and the denizens of Lowtown have begun to rise from their crypts. Four of them are in those shadows. Three big ’uns and one little ’un. The big ’uns appear to be pushing the little ’un around. The little ’un is wearing a pack, and as Hodges watches, one of the big ’uns rips it from his back. This provokes a burst of troll-like laughter.

Hodges strolls down the broken sidewalk to the overpass. He doesn’t think about it and he doesn’t hurry. He stuffs his hands in his sportcoat pockets. Cars and trucks drone by on the turnpike extension, projecting their shapes on the street below in a series of shadow-shutters. He hears one of the trolls asking the little kid how much money he’s got.

“Ain’t got none,” the little kid says. “Lea me lone.”

“Turn out your pockets and we see,” Troll Two says.

The kid tries to run instead. Troll Three wraps his arms around the kid’s skinny chest from behind. Troll One grabs at the kid’s pockets and squeezes. “Yo, yo, I hear foldin money,” he says, and the little kid’s face squinches up in an effort not to cry.

“My brother finds out who you are, he bust a cap on y’asses,” he says.

“That’s a terrifyin idea,” Troll One says. “Just about make me want to pee my—”

Then he sees Hodges, ambling into the shadows to join them with his belly leading the way. His hands deep in the pockets of his old shapeless houndstooth check, the one with the patches on the elbows, the one he can’t bear to give up even though he knows it’s shot to shit.

“Whatchoo want?” Troll Three asks. He’s still hugging the kid from behind.

Hodges considers trying a John Wayne drawl, and decides not to. The only Wayne these scuzzbags would know is L’il. “I want you to leave the little man alone,” he says. “Get out of here. Right now.”

Troll One lets go of the little ’un’s pockets. He is wearing a hoodie and the obligatory Yankees cap. He puts his hands on his slim hips and cocks his head to one side, looking amused. “Fuck off, fatty.”

Hodges doesn’t waste time. There are three of them, after all. He takes the Happy Slapper from his right coat pocket, liking its old comforting weight. The Slapper is an argyle sock. The foot part is filled with ball bearings. It’s knotted at the ankle to make sure the steel balls stay in. He swings it at the side of Troll One’s neck in a tight, flat arc, careful to steer clear of the Adam’s apple; hit a guy there, you were apt to kill him, and then you were stuck in the bureaucracy.

There’s a metallic thwap. Troll One lurches sideways, his look of amusement turning to pained surprise. He stumbles off the curb and falls into the street. He rolls onto his back, gagging, clutching his neck, staring up at the underside of the overpass.

Troll Three starts forward. “Fuckin—” he begins, and then Hodges lifts his leg (pins and needles all gone, thank God) and kicks him briskly in the crotch. He hears the seat of his trousers rip and thinks, Oh you fat fuck. Troll Three lets out a yowl of pain. Under here, with the cars and trucks passing overhead, the sound is strangely flat. He doubles over.

Hodges’s left hand is still in his coat. He extends his index finger so it pokes out the pocket and points it at Troll Two. “Hey, fuckface, no need to wait for the little man’s big brother. I’ll bust a cap on your ass myself. Three-on-one pisses me off.”

“No, man, no!” Troll Two is tall, well built, maybe fifteen, but his terror regresses him to no more than twelve. “Please, man, we ’us just playin!”

“Then run, playboy,” Hodges says. “Do it now.”

Troll Two runs.

Troll One, meanwhile, has gotten on his knees. “You gonna regret this, fat ma—”

Hodges takes a step toward him, lifting the Slapper. Troll One sees it, gives a girly shriek, covers his neck.

“You better run, too,” Hodges says, “or the fat man’s going to tool up on your face. When your mama gets to the emergency room, she’ll walk right past you.” In that moment, with his adrenaline flowing and his blood pressure probably over two hundred, he absolutely means it.

Troll One gets up. Hodges makes a mock lunge at him, and Troll One jerks back most satisfyingly.

“Take your friend with you and pack some ice on his balls,” Hodges says. “They’re going to swell.”

Troll One gets his arm around Troll Three, and they hobble toward the Lowtown side of the overpass. When Troll One considers himself safe, he turns back and says, “I see you again, fat man.”

“Pray to God you don’t, fuckwit,” Hodges says.

He picks up the backpack and hands it to the kid, who’s looking at him with wide mistrustful eyes. He might be ten. Hodges drops the Slapper back into his pocket. “Why aren’t you in school, little man?”

“My mama sick. I goin to get her medicine.”

This is a lie so audacious that Hodges has to grin. “No, you’re not,” he says. “You’re skipping.”

The kid says nothing. This is five-o, nobody else would step to it the way this guy did. Nobody else would have a loaded sock in his pocket, either. Safer to dummy up.

“You go skip someplace safer,” Hodges says. “There’s a playground on Eighth Avenue. Try there.”

“They sellin the rock on that playground,” the kid says.

“I know,” Hodges says, almost kindly, “but you don’t have to buy any.” He could add You don’t have to run any, either, but that would be naïve. Down in Lowtown, most of the shorties run it. You can bust a ten-year-old for possession, but try making it stick.

He starts back to the parking lot, on the safe side of the overpass. When he glances back, the kid is still standing there and looking at him. Pack dangling from one hand.

“Little man,” Hodges says.

The kid looks at him, saying nothing.

Hodges lifts one hand and points at him. “I did something good for you just now. Before the sun goes down tonight, I want you to pass it on.”

Now the kid’s look is one of utter incomprehension, as if Hodges just lapsed into a foreign language, but that’s all right. Sometimes it seeps through, especially with the young ones.

People would be surprised, Hodges thinks. They really would.

22

Brady Hartsfield changes into his other uniform—the white one—and checks his truck, quickly going through the inventory sheet the way Mr. Loeb likes. Everything is there. He pops his head in the office to say hi to Shirley Orton. Shirley is a fat pig, all too fond of the company product, but he wants to stay on her good side. Brady wants to stay on everyone’s good side. Much safer that way. She has a crush on him, and that helps.

“Shirley, you pretty girly!” he cries, and she blushes all the way up to the hairline of her pimple-studded forehead. Little piggy, oink-oink-oink, Brady thinks. You’re so fat your cunt probably turns inside out when you sit down.

“Hi, Brady. West Side again?”

“All week, darlin. You okay?”

“Fine.” Blushing harder than ever.

“Good. Just wanted to say howdy.”

Then he’s off, obeying every speed limit even though it takes him forty fucking minutes to get into his territory driving that slow. But it has to be that way. Get caught speeding in a company truck after the schools let out for the day, you get canned. No recourse. But when he gets to the West Side—this is the good part—he’s in Hodges’s neighborhood, and with every reason to be there. Hide in plain sight, that’s the old saying, and as far as Brady is concerned, it’s a wise saying, indeed.

He turns off Spruce Street and cruises slowly down Harper Road, right past the old Det-Ret’s house. Oh look here, he thinks. The niggerkid is out front, stripped to the waist (so all the stay-at-home mommies can get a good look at his sweat-oiled sixpack, no doubt) and pushing a Lawn-Boy.

About time you got after that, Brady thinks. It was looking mighty shaggy. Not that the old Det-Ret probably took much notice. The old Det-Ret was too busy watching TV, eating Pop-Tarts, and playing with that gun he kept on the table beside his chair.

The niggerkid hears him coming even over the roar of the mower and turns to look. I know your name, niggerkid, Brady thinks. It’s Jerome Robinson. I know almost everything about the old Det-Ret. I don’t know if he’s queer for you, but I wouldn’t be surprised. It could be why he keeps you around.

From behind the wheel of his little Mr. Tastey truck, which is covered with happy kid decals and jingles with happy recorded bells, Brady waves. The niggerkid waves back and smiles. Sure he does.

Everybody likes the ice cream man.