3
Paula Rollins is a full-figured blonde who lives in a sixteen-room faux Tudor mansion three blocks from the late Mrs. T.’s pile. She has all those rooms to herself. Brady doesn’t know exactly what her deal is, but guesses she’s some rich guy’s second or third ex–trophy wife, and that she did very well for herself in the settlement. Maybe the guy was too entranced by her knockers to bother with the prenup. Brady doesn’t care much, he only knows she has enough to tip well and she’s never tried to slap the make on him. That’s good. He has no interest in Mrs. Rollins’s full figure.
She does grab his hand and just about pull him through the door, though.
“Oh . . . Brady! Thank God!”
She sounds like a woman being rescued from a desert island after three days without food or water, but he hears the little pause before she says his name and sees her eyes flick down to read it off his shirt, even though he’s been here half a dozen times. (So has Freddi, for that matter; Paula Rollins is a serial computer abuser.) He doesn’t mind that she doesn’t remember him. Brady likes being forgettable.
“It just . . . I don’t know what’s wrong!”
As if the dimwitted twat ever does. Last time he was here, six weeks ago, it was a kernel panic, and she was convinced a computer virus had gobbled up all her files. Brady shooed her gently from the office and promised (not sounding too hopeful) to do what he could. Then he sat down, re-started the computer, and surfed for awhile before calling her in and telling her he had been able to fix the problem just in time. Another half hour, he said, and her files really would have been gone. She had tipped him eighty dollars. He and Ma had gone out to dinner that night, and split a not-bad bottle of champagne.
“Tell me what happened,” Brady says, grave as a neurosurgeon.
“I didn’t do anything,” she wails. She always wails. Many of his service call customers do. Not just the women, either. Nothing can unman a top-shelf executive more rapidly than the possibility that everything on his MacBook just went to data heaven.
She pulls him through the parlor (it’s as long as an Amtrak dining car) and into her office.
“I cleaned up myself, I never let the housekeeper in here—washed the windows, vacuumed the floor—and when I sat down to do my email, the damn computer wouldn’t even turn on!”
“Huh. Weird.” Brady knows Mrs. Rollins has a spic maid to do the household chores, but apparently the maid isn’t allowed in the office. Which is a good thing for her, because Brady has already spotted the problem, and if the maid had been responsible for it, she probably would have been fired.
“Can you fix it, Brady?” Thanks to the tears swimming in them, Mrs. Rollins’s big blue eyes are bigger than ever. Brady suddenly flashes on Betty Boop in those old cartoons you can look at on YouTube, thinks Poop-poop-pe-doop!, and has to restrain a laugh.
“I’ll sure try,” he says gallantly.
“I have to run across the street to Helen Wilcox’s,” she says, “but I’ll only be a few minutes. There’s fresh coffee in the kitchen, if you want it.”
So saying, she leaves him alone in her big expensive house, with f*ck knows how many valuable pieces of jewelry scattered around upstairs. She’s safe, though. Brady would never steal from a service client. He might be caught in the act. Even if he weren’t, who would be the logical suspect? Duh. He didn’t get away with mowing down those job-seeking idiots at City Center only to be arrested for stealing a pair of diamond earrings he wouldn’t have any idea how to get rid of.
He waits until the back door shuts, then goes into the parlor to watch her accompany her world-class tits across the street. When she’s out of sight, he goes back to the office, crawls under her desk, and plugs in her computer. She must have yanked the plug so she could vacuum, then forgot to jack it back in.
Her password screen comes on. Idly, just killing time, he types PAULA, and her desktop, loaded with all her files, appears. God, people are so dumb.
He goes on Debbie’s Blue Umbrella to see if the fat ex-cop has posted anything new. He hasn’t, but Brady decides on the spur of the moment to send the Det-Ret a message after all. Why not?
He learned in high school that thinking too long about writing doesn’t work for him. Too many other ideas get into his head and start sliding all over each other. It’s better to just fire away. That was how he wrote to Olivia Trelawney—white heat, baby—and it’s also the way he wrote to Hodges, although he went over the message to the fat ex-cop a couple of times to make sure he was keeping his style consistent.
He writes in the same style now, only reminding himself to keep it short.
How did I know about the hairnet and bleach, Detective Hodges? THAT STUFF was withheld evidence because it was never in the paper or on TV. You say you are not stupid but IT SURE LOOKS THAT WAY TO ME. I think all that TV you watch has rotted your brain.
WHAT withheld evidence?
I DARE YOU TO ANSWER THIS.
Brady looks this over and makes one change: a hyphen in the middle of hairnet. He can’t believe he’ll ever become a person of interest, but he knows that if he ever does, they’ll ask him to provide a writing sample. He almost wishes he could give them one. He wore a mask when he drove into the crowd, and he wears another when he writes as the Mercedes Killer.
He hits SEND, then pulls down Mrs. Rollins’s Internet history. For a moment he stops, bemused, when he sees several entries for White Tie and Tails. He knows what that is from something Freddi Linklatter told him: a male escort service. Paula Rollins has a secret life, it seems.
But then, doesn’t everybody?
It’s no business of his. He deletes his visit to Under Debbie’s Blue Umbrella, then opens his boxy service crate and takes out a bunch of random crap: utility discs, a modem (broken, but she won’t know that), various thumb-drives, and a voltage regulator that has nothing whatsoever to do with computer repair but looks technological. He also takes out a Lee Child paperback that he reads until he hears his client come in the back door twenty minutes later.
When Mrs. Rollins pokes her head into the study, the paperback is out of sight and Brady is packing up the random shit. She favors him with an anxious smile. “Any luck?”
“At first it looked bad,” Brady says, “but I tracked down your problem. The trimmer switch was bad and that shut down your danus circuit. In a case like that, the computer’s programmed not to start up, because if it did, you might lose all your data.” He looks at her gravely. “The darn thing might even catch fire. It’s been known to happen.”
“Oh . . . my . . . dear . . . Jesus,” she says, packing each word with drama and placing one hand high on her chest. “Are you sure it’s okay?”
“Good as gold,” he says. “Check it out.”
He starts the computer and looks politely away while she types in her numbf*ck password. She opens a couple of files, then turns to him, smiling. “Brady, you are a gift from God.”
“My ma used to tell me the same thing until I got old enough to buy beer.”
She laughs as if this were the funniest thing she has heard in her whole life. Brady laughs with her, because he has a sudden vision: kneeling on her shoulders and driving a butcher knife from her own kitchen deep into her screaming mouth.
He can almost feel the gristle giving way.
4
Hodges has been checking the Blue Umbrella site frequently, and he’s reading the Mercedes Killer’s follow-up message only minutes after Brady hit SEND.
Hodges is grinning, a big one that smooths his skin and makes him almost handsome. Their relationship has been officially established: Hodges the fisherman, Mr. Mercedes the fish. But a wily fish, he reminds himself, one capable of making a sudden lunge and snapping the line. He will have to be played carefully, reeled toward the boat slowly. If Hodges is able to do that, if he’s patient, sooner or later Mr. Mercedes will agree to a meeting. Hodges is sure of it.
Because if he can’t nudge me into offing myself, that leaves just one alternative, and that’s murder.
The smart thing for Mr. Mercedes to do would be to just walk away; if he does that, the road ends. But he won’t. He’s pissed, but that’s only part of it, and the small part, at that. Hodges wonders if Mr. Mercedes knows just how crazy he is. And if he knows there’s one nugget of hard information here.
I think all that TV you watch has rotted your brain.
Up to this morning, Hodges has only suspected that Mr. Mercedes has been watching his house; now he knows. Motherf*cker has been on the street, and more than once.
He grabs his legal pad and starts jotting possible follow-up messages. It has to be good, because his fish feels the hook. The pain of it makes him angry even though he doesn’t yet know what it is. He needs to be a lot angrier before he figures it out, and that means taking a risk. Hodges must jerk the line to seat the hook deeper, despite the risk the line may break. What . . . ?
He remembers something Pete Huntley said at lunch, just a remark in passing, and the answer comes to him. Hodges writes on his pad, then rewrites, then polishes. He reads the finished message over and decides it will do. It’s short and mean. There’s something you forgot, sucka. Something a false confessor couldn’t know. Or a real confessor, for that matter . . . unless Mr. Mercedes checked out his rolling murder weapon from stem to stern before climbing in, and Hodges is betting the guy didn’t.
If he’s wrong, the line snaps and the fish swims away. But there’s an old saying: no risk, no reward.
He wants to send the message right away, but knows it’s a bad idea. Let the fish swim around in circles a little longer with that bad old hook in his mouth. The question is what to do in the meantime. TV never had less appeal for him.
He gets an idea—they’re coming in bunches this morning—and pulls out the bottom drawer of his desk. Here is a box filled with the small flip-up pads he used to carry with him when he and Pete were doing street interviews. He never expected to need one of these again, but he takes one now and stows it in the back pocket of his chinos.
It fits just right.
5
Hodges walks halfway down Harper Road, then starts knocking on doors, just like in the old days. Crossing and re-crossing the street, missing no one, working his way back. It’s a weekday, but a surprising number of people answer his knock or ring. Some are stay-at-home moms, but many are retirees like himself, fortunate enough to have paid for their homes before the bottom fell out of the economy, but in less than great shape otherwise. Not living day-to-day or even week-to-week, maybe, but having to balance out the cost of food against the cost of all those old-folks medicines as the end of the month nears.
His story is simple, because simple is always best. He says there have been break-ins a few blocks over—kids, probably—and he’s checking to see if anyone in his own neighborhood has noticed any vehicles that seem out of place, and have shown up more than once. They’d probably be cruising even slower than the twenty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit, he says. He doesn’t have to say any more; they all watch the cop shows and know what “casing the joint” means.
He shows them his ID, which has RETIRED stamped in red across the name and vitals below his photo. He’s careful to say that no, he hasn’t been asked by the police to do this canvassing (the last thing in the world he wants is one of his neighbors calling the Murrow Building downtown to check up on him), it was his own idea. He lives in the neighborhood, too, after all, and has a personal stake in its security.
Mrs. Melbourne, the widow whose flowers so fascinated Odell, invites him in for coffee and cookies. Hodges takes her up on it because she seems lonely. It’s his first real conversation with her, and he quickly realizes she’s eccentric at best, downright bonkers at worst. Articulate, though. He has to give her that. She explains about the black SUVs she’s observed (“With tinted windows you can’t see through, just like on 24”), and tells him about their special antennas. Whippers, she calls them, waving her hand back and forth to demonstrate.
“Uh-huh,” Hodges says. “Let me make a note of that.” He turns a page in his pad and jots I have to get out of here on the new one.
“That’s a good idea,” she says, bright-eyed. “I’ve just got to tell you how sorry I was when your wife left you, Detective Hodges. She did, didn’t she?”
“We agreed to disagree,” Hodges says with an amiability he doesn’t feel.
“It’s so nice to meet you in person and know you’re keeping an eye out. Have another cookie.”
Hodges glances at his watch, snaps his pad closed, and gets up. “I’d love to, but I’d better roll. Got a noon appointment.”
She scans his bulk and says, “Doctor?”
“Chiropractor.”
She frowns, transforming her face into a walnut shell with eyes. “Think that over, Detective Hodges. Back-crackers are dangerous. There are people who have lain down on those tables and never walked again.”
She sees him to the door. As he steps onto the porch, she says, “I’d check on that ice cream man, too. This spring it seems like he’s always around. Do you suppose Loeb’s Ice Cream checks out the people they hire to drive those little trucks? I hope so, because that one looks suspicious. He might be a peedaroast.”
“I’m sure their drivers have references, but I’ll look into it.”
“Another good idea!” she exclaims.
Hodges wonders what he’d do if she produced a long hook, like in the old-time vaudeville shows, and tried to yank him back inside. A childhood memory comes to him: the witch in Hansel and Gretel.
“Also—I just thought of this—I’ve seen several vans lately. They look like delivery vans—they have business names on them—but anyone can make up a business name, don’t you think?”
“It’s always possible,” Hodges says, descending the steps.
“You should call in to number seventeen, too.” She points down the hill. “It’s almost all the way down to Hanover Street. They have people who come late, and play loud music.” She sways forward in the doorway, almost bowing. “It could be a dope den. One of those crack houses.”
Hodges thanks her for the tip and trudges across the street. Black SUVs and the Mr. Tastey guy, he thinks. Plus the delivery vans filled with Al Qaeda terrorists.
Across the street he finds a stay-at-home dad, Alan Bowfinger by name. “Just don’t confuse me with Goldfinger,” he says, and invites Hodges to sit in one of the lawn chairs on the left side of his house, where there’s shade. Hodges is happy to take him up on this.
Bowfinger tells him that he makes a living writing greeting cards. “I specialize in the slightly snarky ones. Like on the outside it’ll say, ‘Happy Birthday! Who’s the fairest of them all?’ And when you open it up, there’s a piece of shiny foil with a crack running down the middle of it.”
“Yeah? And what’s the message?”
Bowfinger holds up his hands, as if framing it. “‘Not you, but we love you anyway.’”
“Kind of mean,” Hodges ventures.
“True, but it ends with an expression of love. That’s what sells the card. First the poke, then the hug. As to your purpose today, Mr. Hodges . . . or do I call you Detective?”
“Just Mister these days.”
“I haven’t seen anything but the usual traffic. No slow cruisers except people looking for addresses and the ice cream truck after school lets out.” Bowfinger rolls his eyes. “Did you get an earful from Mrs. Melbourne?”
“Well . . .”
“She’s a member of NICAP,” Bowfinger says. “That stands for National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena.”
“Weather stuff? Tornadoes and cloud formations?”
“Flying saucers.” Bowfinger raises his hands to the sky. “She thinks they walk among us.”
Hodges says something that would never have passed his lips if he’d still been on active duty and conducting an official investigation. “She thinks Mr. Tastey might be a peedaroast.”
Bowfinger laughs until tears squirt out of his eyes. “Oh God,” he says. “That guy’s been around for five or six years, driving his little truck and jingling his little bells. How many peeds do you think he’s roasted in all that time?”
“Don’t know,” Hodges says, getting to his feet. “Dozens, probably.” He holds out his hand and Bowfinger shakes it. Another thing Hodges is discovering about retirement: his neighbors have stories and personalities. Some of them are even interesting.
As he’s putting his notepad away, a look of alarm comes over Bowfinger’s face.
“What?” Hodges asks, at once on point.
Bowfinger points across the street and says, “You didn’t eat any of her cookies, did you?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“I’d stay close to the toilet for a few hours, if I were you.”
6
When he gets back to his house, his arches throbbing and his ankles singing high C, the light on his answering machine is blinking. It’s Pete Huntley, and he sounds excited. “Call me,” he says. “This is unbelievable. Un-f*cking-real.”
Hodges is suddenly, irrationally sure that Pete and his pretty new partner Isabelle have nailed Mr. Mercedes after all. He feels a deep stab of jealousy, and—crazy but true—anger. He hits Pete on speed-dial, his heart hammering, but his call goes right to voicemail.
“Got your message,” Hodges says. “Call back when you can.”
He kills the phone, then sits still, drumming his fingers on the edge of his desk. He tells himself it doesn’t matter who catches the psycho sonofabitch, but it does. For one thing, it’s certainly going to mean that his correspondence with the perk (funny how that word gets in your head) will come out, and that may put him in some fairly warm soup. But it’s not the important thing. The important thing is that without Mr. Mercedes, things will go back to what they were: afternoon TV and playing with his father’s gun.
He takes out his yellow legal pad and begins transcribing notes on his neighborhood walk-around. After a minute or two of this, he tosses the pad back into the case-folder and slams it closed. If Pete and Izzy Jaynes have popped the guy, Mrs. Melbourne’s vans and sinister black SUVs don’t mean shit.
He thinks about going on Debbie’s Blue Umbrella and sending merckill a message: Did they catch you?
Ridiculous, but weirdly attractive.
His phone rings and he snatches it up, but it’s not Pete. It’s Olivia Trelawney’s sister.
“Oh,” he says. “Hi, Mrs. Patterson. How you doing?”
“I’m fine,” she says, “and it’s Janey, remember? Me Janey, you Bill.”
“Janey, right.”
“You don’t sound exactly thrilled to hear from me, Bill.” Is she being the tiniest bit flirty? Wouldn’t that be nice.
“No, no, I’m happy you called, but I don’t have anything to report.”
“I didn’t expect you would. I called about Mom. The nurse at Sunny Acres who’s most familiar with her case works the day shift in the McDonald Building, where my mother has her little suite of rooms. I asked her to call if Mom brightened up. She still does that.”
“Yes, you told me.”
“Well, the nurse called just a few minutes ago to tell me Mom’s back, at least for the time being. She might be clear for a day or two, then it’s into the clouds again. Do you still want to go see her?”
“I think so,” Hodges says cautiously, “but it would have to be this afternoon. I’m waiting on a call.”
“Is it about the man who took her car?” Janey’s excited. As I should be, Hodges tells himself.
“That’s what I need to find out. Can I call you back?”
“Absolutely. You have my cell number?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah,” she says, gently mocking. It makes him smile, in spite of his nerves. “Call me as soon as you can.”
“I will.”
He breaks the connection, and the phone rings while it’s still in his hand. This time it’s Pete, and he’s more excited than ever.
“Billy! I gotta go back, we’ve got him in an interview room—IR4, as a matter of fact, remember how you always used to say that was your lucky one?—but I had to call you. We got him, partner, we f*cking got him!”
“Got who?” Hodges asks, keeping his voice steady. His heartbeat is steady now, too, but the beats are hard enough to feel in his temples: whomp and whomp and whomp.
“F*cking Davis!” Pete shouts. “Who else?”
Davis. Not Mr. Mercedes but Donnie Davis, the camera-friendly wife murderer. Bill Hodges closes his eyes in relief. It’s the wrong emotion to feel, but he feels it nevertheless.
He says, “So the body that game warden found near his cabin turned out to be Sheila Davis’s? You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
“Who’d you blow to get the DNA results so fast?” When Hodges was on the force, they were lucky to get DNA results within a calendar month of sample submission, and six weeks was the average.
“We don’t need DNA! For the trial, sure, but—”
“What do you mean, you don’t—”
“Shut up and listen, okay? He just walked in off the street and copped to it. No lawyer, no bullshit justifications. Listened to the Miranda and said he didn’t want a lawyer, only wanted to get it off his chest.”
“Jesus. As smooth as he was in all the interviews we had with him? Are you sure he’s not f*cking with you? Playing some sort of long game?”
Thinking it’s the kind of thing Mr. Mercedes would try to do if they nailed him. Not just a game but a long game. Isn’t that why he tries to create alternate writing styles in his poison-pen letters?
“Billy, it’s not just his wife. You remember those dollies he had on the side? Girls with big hair and inflated tits and names like Bobbi Sue?”
“Sure. What about them?”
“When this breaks, those young ladies are going to get on their knees and thank God they’re still alive.”
“I’m not following you.”
“Turnpike Joe, Billy! Five women raped and killed at various Interstate rest stops between here and Pennsylvania, starting back in ninety-four and ending in oh-eight! Donnie Davis says it’s him! Davis is Turnpike Joe! He’s giving us times and places and descriptions. It all fits. This . . . it blows my mind!”
“Mine, too,” Hodges says, and he absolutely means it. “Congratulations.”
“Thanks, but I didn’t do anything except show up this morning.” Pete laughs wildly. “I feel like I won the Megabucks.”
Hodges doesn’t feel like that, but at least he hasn’t lost the Megabucks. He still has a case to work.
“I gotta get back in there, Billy, before he changes his mind.”
“Yeah, yeah, but Pete? Before you go?”
“What?”
“Get him a court-appointed.”
“Ah, Billy—”
“I’m serious. Interrogate the shit out of him, but before you start, announce—for the record—that you’re getting him lawyered up. You can wring him dry before anyone shows up at Murrow, but you have to get this right. Are you hearing me?”
“Yeah, okay. That’s a good call. I’ll have Izzy do it.”
“Great. Now get back in there. Nail him down.”
Pete actually crows. Hodges has read about people doing that, but hasn’t ever heard it done—except by roosters—until now. “Turnpike Joe, Billy! F*cking Turnpike Joe! Do you believe it?”
He hangs up before his ex-partner can reply. Hodges sits where he is for almost five minutes, waiting until a belated case of the shakes subsides. Then he calls Janey Patterson.
“It wasn’t about the man we’re looking for?”
“Sorry, no. Another case.”
“Oh. Too bad.”
“Yeah. You’ll still come with me to the nursing home?”
“You bet. I’ll be waiting on the sidewalk.”
Before leaving, he checks the Blue Umbrella site one last time. Nothing there, and he has no intention of sending his own carefully crafted message today. Tonight will be soon enough. Let the fish feel the hook awhile longer.
He leaves his house with no premonition that he won’t be back.