by Stephen King
In the stall, with her skirt up and her bag between her sensible loafers, she closed her eyes. Mindful that tiled rooms like this were natural amplifiers, she prayed silently.
This is Holly Gibney again, and I need help. You know I’m not good with strangers even one at a time, and tonight I have six of them to deal with. Seven, if Mr. Maitland’s widow is here. I’m not terrified, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was scared. Bill could do things like this, but I’m not him. Just help me to do it the way he would. Help me to understand their natural disbelief and not be afraid of it.
She finished aloud, but in a whisper. “Please God, help me not to frack up.” She paused, then added, “I’m not smoking.”
5
The meeting took place in Howard Gold’s conference room, and while it was smaller than the one on The Good Wife (Holly had watched all seven seasons, and had now moved on to the sequel), it was very nice. Tasteful pictures, polished mahogany table, leather chairs. Mrs. Maitland had indeed come. She was sitting at Mr. Gold’s right as Howie took his place at the head of the table and asked who was watching her girls.
Marcy gave him a wan smile. “Lukesh and Chandra Patel volunteered. Their son was on Terry’s team. In fact, Baibir was on third base when . . .” She looked at Detective Anderson. “When your men arrested him. Baibir was heartbroken. He didn’t understand.”
Anderson crossed his arms and said nothing. His wife put a hand on his shoulder and murmured something no one else was meant to hear. Anderson nodded.
“I’m going to call this meeting to order,” Mr. Gold said. “I have no agenda, but perhaps our visitor would like to begin. This is Holly Gibney, a private detective Alec hired to investigate the Dayton end of this business, assuming the two cases really are connected. That’s one of the things we’re here to determine, if possible.”
“I’m not a private detective,” Holly demurred. “My partner, Peter Huntley, is the one with the private investigator’s license. What our company mostly does is repo work and skip-tracing. We do take on an occasional criminal investigation where we’re unlikely to be scolded by the police. We’ve had good luck with missing pets, for instance.”
That sounded lame, and she felt blood heating her face.
“Ms. Gibney is being a trifle too modest,” Alec said. “I believe you were involved with running a violent fugitive named Morris Bellamy to earth.”
“That was my partner’s case,” Holly said. “My first partner. Bill Hodges. He’s since passed away, Mr. Pelley—Alec—as you know.”
“Yes,” Alec said. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
The Latino man Detective Anderson had introduced as Yunel Sablo of the State Police now cleared his throat. “I believe,” he said, “that you and Mr. Hodges were also involved in a case of mass vehicular homicide and intended terrorism. A young man named Hartsfield. And that you, Ms. Gibney, were personally responsible for stopping him before he could cause an explosion in a crowded auditorium. One that might have killed thousands of young people.”
A murmur went around the table. Holly felt her face growing hotter. She would have liked to tell them that she had failed, that she had only halted Brady’s homicidal ambitions for awhile, that he had come back to cause yet more deaths before being stopped for good, but this was neither the time nor the place.
Lieutenant Sablo wasn’t finished. “I think you received a commendation from the city?”
“There were actually three of us who got commendations, but all it amounted to was a gold key and a bus pass good for ten years.” She looked around at them, unhappily aware that she was still blushing like a sixteen-year-old. “That was a long time ago. As for this case, I’d rather save my report for last. And my conclusions.”
“Like the final chapter in one of those old British drawing-room mysteries,” Mr. Gold said, smiling. “We all tell what we know, then you stand up and astound us with an explanation of who done it, and how.”
“Good luck with that,” Bill Samuels said. “Just thinking about the Peterson case makes my head hurt.”
“I believe we have most of the pieces,” Holly said, “but I don’t believe they’re all out on the table, even now. What I keep remembering—I’m sure you’ll think it’s silly—is that old saying about how Macy’s doesn’t tell Gimbels. But now Macy’s and Gimbels are both here—”
“Not to mention Saks, Nordstrom’s, and Needless Markup,” Howie said. Then, seeing Holly’s expression: “I’m not joshing you, Ms. Gibney, I’m agreeing with you. Everything on the table. Who starts?”
“Yune should,” Anderson said. “Since I’m on administrative leave.”
Yune put a briefcase on the table and took out his laptop. “Mr. Gold, can you show me how to use the projection gadget?”
Howie obliged, and Holly watched closely, so she would know how to do it herself when her turn came. Once the right cords were connected, Howie dimmed the lights a bit.
“Okay,” Yune said. “Apologies to you, Ms. Gibney, if I’m beating you to some of the stuff you found out while you were in Dayton.”
“Perfectly all right,” Holly said.
“I spoke with Captain Bill Darwin of the Dayton Police Department, and Sergeant George Highsmith of the Trotwood PD. When I told them we had a similar case, possibly connected by a stolen van that had been near both their crime scene and ours, they were willing to help, and thanks to the magic of telecommunication, I should have it all right here. If this gadget works, that is.”
Yune’s desktop appeared on the screen. He clicked on a file marked HOLMES. The first image was that of a man in an orange county jail jumpsuit. He had short-cropped auburn hair and beard stubble on his cheeks. His eyes were slightly squinted, giving him a look that could have been sinister or simply stunned at the sudden turn his life had taken. Holly had seen the mug shot on the front page of the Dayton Daily News, April 30th issue.
“This is Heath James Holmes,” Yune said. “Thirty-four. Arrested for the murders of Amber and Jolene Howard. I have crime scene pictures of the girls, but won’t show them to you. You wouldn’t sleep. The mutilations are the worst I’ve ever seen.”
Silence from the seven people watching. Jeannie was clutching her husband’s arm. Marcy was staring at Holmes’s photo as if mesmerized, with a hand over her mouth.
“Other than a minor juvenile bust for joyriding in a stolen car and a couple of speeding tickets, Holmes’s record is squeaky clean. His twice-yearly work evaluations, first at Kindred Hospital and then at the Heisman Memory Unit, are excellent. Co-workers and patients spoke highly of him. There are comments like always friendly and genuinely caring and goes the extra mile.”
“People said all those things about Terry,” Marcy murmured.
“Means nothing,” Samuels protested. “People said the same things about Ted Bundy.”
Yune continued. “Holmes told co-workers he planned to spend his one-week vacation with his mother in Regis, a small town thirty miles north of Dayton and Trotwood. Midway through his vacation week, the bodies of the Howard girls were discovered by a postman on his delivery rounds. The guy saw a huge flock of crows congregated at a ravine about a mile from the Howard home, and stopped to investigate. Given what he found, he probably wishes he hadn’t.”
He clicked, and two little blond girls replaced Heath Holmes’s squint and stubble. The photo had been taken at a carnival or an amusement park; Holly could see a Tilt-a-Whirl in the background. Amber and Jolene were smiling and holding up cones of cotton candy like prizes.
“No victim-blaming here, but the Howard girls were a handful. Alcoholic mother, father not in the picture, low-income home in a lousy neighborhood. The school had them tabbed as ‘at-risk students,’ and they had skipped out on several occasions. Which they did on Monday, April 23rd, at about ten in the morning. It was Amber’s free period, and Jolene said she had to use the bathroom, so they probably planned it in advance.”
“Escape from Alcatraz,” Bill Samuels said.
<
br /> Nobody laughed.
Yune continued. “They were seen shortly before noon in a little beer-and-grocery about five blocks from the school. This is a still, taken from the store’s surveillance camera.”
The black-and-white image was crisp and clear—like something out of an old film noir, Holly thought. She stared at the two towheads, one with a couple of sodas and the other with a couple of candybars. They were dressed in jeans and tees. Neither looked pleased; the girl with the candybars was pointing, her mouth wide open and her brow furrowed.
“The clerk knew they were supposed to be in school and wouldn’t sell to them,” Yune said.
“No kidding,” Howie said. “You can almost hear the older one giving him hell.”
“True,” Yune said, “but that’s not the interesting part. Check out the upper right corner of the picture. On the sidewalk and looking in the window. Here, I’ll zoom it a little.”
Marcy murmured something very softly. It might have been Christ.
“It’s him, isn’t it?” Samuels said. “It’s Holmes. Watching them.”
Yune nodded. “That clerk was the last person to report seeing Amber and Jolene alive. But at least one more camera picked them up.”
He clicked, and another photo from another surveillance camera came up on the screen at the front of the conference room. This one had its electronic eye trained on an island of gas pumps. The time-code in the corner said 12:19 PM, April 23rd. Holly thought this must be the photo her nurse informant had mentioned. Candy Wilson had guessed that the vehicle in it was probably Holmes’s truck, a Chevy Tahoe that was “all fancied up,” but she had been wrong. The picture showed Heath Holmes in mid-stride, returning to a panel truck with DAYTON LANDSCAPING & POOLS printed on the side. His gas presumably paid for, he was returning to the vehicle with a soda in each hand. Leaning out the driver’s side window to take them was Amber, the older of the two Howard girls.
“When was that truck stolen?” Ralph asked.
“April 14th,” Yune said.
“He stashed it until he was ready. Which means this was a planned crime.”
“It would seem so, yes.”
Jeannie said, “And those girls just . . . got in with him?”
Yune shrugged. “Again, no victim-blaming—you can’t blame a couple of kids this young for making bad choices—but this picture does suggest they were with him willingly, at least to start with. Mrs. Howard told Sergeant Highsmith that the older girl made a habit of ‘hooking rides’ when she wanted to go someplace, even though she was told repeatedly it was dangerous behavior.”
Holly thought the two surveillance photos told a simple story. The outsider had seen the girls refused service at the beer-and-grocery, and offered to get them their sodas and candy a little bit further along, when he gassed up. After that, he might have told them he’d take them home or wherever else they might want to go. Just a nice guy helping out a couple of girls playing hooky—hell, he’d been young once himself.
“Holmes was next seen a little after six PM,” Yune resumed. “This was in a Waffle House on the outskirts of Dayton. He had blood on his face, hands, and shirt. He told the waitress and the short-order cook that he’d had a bloody nose, and washed up in the men’s. When he came out, he ordered some food to go. As he left, the cook and the waitress saw he also had spots of blood on the back of his shirt and the seat of his pants, which made his story seem a little less likely, being as how most people have their noses on in front. The waitress took down his plate number and called the police. They both later picked Holmes out of a six-pack. Hard to mistake that auburn hair.”
“Still driving the panel truck when he stopped at the Waffle House?” Ralph asked.
“Uh-huh. It was found abandoned in the Regis municipal parking lot shortly after the girls were found. There was a lot of blood in the back, his fingerprints and the girls’ fingerprints all over everything. Some in blood. Again, the resemblance to the Frank Peterson killing is very strong. Striking, in fact.”
“How close to his house in Regis was this panel truck found?” Holly asked.
“Less than half a mile. Police theorize he dumped it, strolled home, changed out of his bloody clothes, and cooked Mama a nice supper. The police got a hit on the fingerprints almost right away, but it took them a couple of days to cut through the red tape and get a name.”
“Because Holmes’s one bust, the joyriding thing, happened when he was still legally a minor,” Ralph said.
“Sí, señor. On April 26th, Holmes went in to the Heisman Memory Unit. When the lady in charge—Mrs. June Kelly—asked him what he was doing there during his vacation, he said he had to get something out of his locker, and he thought he’d check on a couple of patients while he was there. This struck her a bit odd, because while the nurses do have lockers, the orderlies only have these plastic cubby things in the break room. Also, orderlies are told from the jump that the correct word when referring to the paying clientele is residents, and Holmes usually just called them his guys and gals. All friendly-like. Anyway, one of the guys he checked on that day was Terry Maitland’s father, and the police found blond hairs in the man’s bathroom. Hairs that forensics matched to Jolene Howard’s.”
“Pretty goddam convenient,” Ralph said. “Did nobody suggest it might be a plant?”
“The way the evidence kept stacking up, they just assumed he was careless or wanted to be caught,” Yune said. “The panel truck, the fingerprints, the surveillance photos . . . girls’ underpants found in the basement . . . and finally the icing on the cake, a DNA match. Cheek swabs taken in custody matched semen the perp left at the scene.”
“My God,” Bill Samuels said. “It really is déjà vu all over again.”
“With one big exception,” Yune said. “Heath Holmes wasn’t lucky enough to get filmed at a lecture that happened to be going on at the same time the Howard girls were being abducted and murdered. His mother swore he had been in Regis the whole time, said he’d never gone in to the Heisman, and he certainly hadn’t gone to Trotwood. ‘Why would he?’ she said. ‘It’s a shitty town full of shitty people.’ ”
“Her testimony would have cut zero ice with a jury,” Samuels said. “Hey, if your mom won’t lie for you, who will?”
“Other people in the neighborhood saw him during his vacation week,” Yune went on. “He cut his mother’s grass, he fixed her gutters, he painted the stoop, and he helped the lady across the street plant some flowers. This was on the same day the Howard girls were taken. Also, that tricked-out truck of his was kind of hard to miss when he was driving around and doing errands.”
Howie asked, “The lady across the street, could she place him with her anywhere near the time those two girls were killed?”
“She said around ten in the morning. Close to an alibi, but no cigar. Regis is a lot nearer to Trotwood than Flint is to Cap City. Cops theorized that as soon as he finished helping the neighbor with her petunias or whatever, he drove to the municipal lot, swapped his Tahoe for the panel truck, and went hunting.”
“Terry was luckier than Mr. Holmes,” Marcy said, looking first at Ralph and then at Bill Samuels. Ralph met her gaze; Samuels either could not or would not. “Just not lucky enough.”
Yune said, “I’ve got one more thing—another piece of the puzzle, Ms. Gibney would say—but I’m going to save it until Ralph recaps the Maitland investigation, both pro and con.”
Ralph made short work of this, speaking in concise sentences, as if testifying in court. He made a point of telling them what Claude Bolton had told him—that Terry had nicked him with a fingernail while shaking his hand. After telling them about the discovery of the clothes out in Canning Township—pants, underwear, socks, sneakers, but no shirt—he circled back to the man he’d seen on the courthouse steps. He said he wasn’t certain that the man had been using the shirt Terry had been wearing at the Dubrow train station to cover his presumably scarred and hairless head, but he believed that it could have been.
>
“There must have been TV coverage at the courthouse,” Holly said. “Have you checked it?”
Ralph and Lieutenant Sablo exchanged a look.
“We did,” Ralph said, “but that man’s not there. Not in any of the footage.”
There was a general stirring, and Jeannie was holding his arm again—clutching it, really. Ralph gave her hand a reassuring pat, but he was looking at the woman who had flown here from Dayton. Holly didn’t look puzzled. She looked satisfied.
6
“The man who killed the Howard girls used a panel truck,” Yune said, “and when he was done with it, he dumped it in an easily discoverable location. The man who killed Frank Peterson did the same with the van he used to abduct the boy; actually drew attention to it by leaving it behind Shorty’s Pub and speaking to a couple of witnesses—the way Holmes spoke to the cook and the waitress in the Waffle House. The Ohio cops found plenty of fingerprints in the panel truck, both the killer’s and his victims’; we found plenty in the van. But the van prints included at least one set that went unidentified. Until late today, that is.”
Ralph leaned forward, intent.
“Let me show you some stuff.” Yune fiddled with his laptop. Two fingerprints appeared on the screen. “These are from the kid who stole the van in upstate New York. One from the van, one from his intake when he was arrested in El Paso. Now check this out.”
He fiddled some more, and the two prints came together perfectly.
“That takes care of Merlin Cassidy. Now here’s Frank Peterson—one print from the ME, and one from the van.”
The overlay again showed a perfect match.
“Next, Maitland. One print from the van—one of many, I might add—and the other from his intake at the Flint City PD.”
