by Stephen King
Are you a reporter? Mrs Kelly had asked. We’ve had quite enough of your kind.
All right, reporters had come to call, also the police, and Mrs Kelly, as the out-front person at the Heisman Memory Unit, had had to put up with them. But their questions hadn’t been about Terry Maitland, or she would have known he was dead. So what had been the great big fracking deal?
Holly set her coffee aside, took her iPad from her shoulder-bag, powered it up, and verified that she had five bars, which would save her from having to go back to the Starbucks. She paid a small fee to access the archives of the local paper (duly noting it for her expense report), and began her search on April 19th, the day Merlin Cassidy had dumped the van. Also the day it had almost certainly been re-stolen. She went through the local news carefully, and found nothing relating to the Memory Unit. That was true for the following five days, as well, although there was plenty of other news: car crashes, two home invasions, a nightclub fire, an explosion at a gas station, an embezzlement scandal involving a school department official, a manhunt for two missing sisters (white) from nearby Trotwood, a police officer accused of shooting an unarmed teenager (black), a synagogue defaced with a swastika.
Then, on April 25th, front page headline screamed that Amber and Jolene Howard, the missing Trotwood girls, had been found dead and mutilated in a ravine not far from their home. An unnamed police source said ‘those little girls were subjected to acts of unbelievable savagery.’ And yes, both girls had been sexually molested.
Terry Maitland had been in Dayton on April 25th. Of course he had been with his family, but …
There were no new developments on the 26th of April, the day Terry Maitland had visited his father for the last time, and nothing on the 27th, the day the Maitland family had flown home to Flint City. Then, on Saturday the 28th, the police announced that they were questioning ‘a person of interest.’ Two days later, the person of interest was arrested. His name was Heath Holmes. He was thirty-four years of age, a Dayton resident who was employed as an orderly at the Heisman Memory Unit.
Holly picked up her latte, drank half of it in large gulps, then stared off into the shadowy depths of the park with wide eyes. She checked her Fitbit. Her pulse was galloping along at a hundred and ten beats a minute, and it wasn’t just caffeine pushing it.
She went back to the Daily News archives, scrolling through May and into June, following the thread of the story. Unlike Terry Maitland, Heath Holmes had survived his arraignment, but very much like Terry (Jeannie Anderson would have called it a confluence), he would never be tried for the murders of Amber and Jolene Howard. He had committed suicide in Montgomery County Jail on June 7th.
She checked her Fitbit again and saw her pulse was now up to one-twenty. She chugged down the rest of her latte anyway. Living dangerously.
Bill, I wish you were on this with me. I wish that so much. And Jerome, him, too. The three of us would have grabbed the reins and ridden this pony until it stopped running.
But Bill was dead, Jerome was in Ireland, and she wouldn’t get any closer to figuring this out than she already was. At least not on her own. But that didn’t mean she was done in Dayton. No, not quite.
She went back to her hotel room, ordered a sandwich from room service (damn the expense) and opened her laptop. She added what she now knew to the notes she had taken during her telephone conversation with Alec Pelley. She stared at the screen, and as she scrolled back and forth, an old saying of her mother’s popped into her head: Macy’s doesn’t tell Gimbels. The police in Dayton didn’t know about Frank Peterson’s murder, and the police in Flint City didn’t know about the murders of the Howard sisters. Why would they? The killings had taken place in different regions of the country and months apart. No one knew that Terry Maitland had been in both places, and no one knew about the connection to the Heisman Memory Unit. Every case had an information highway running through it, and this one was washed out in at least two places.
‘But I know,’ Holly said. ‘At least some of it. I do. Only …’
The knock at the door made her jump. She let in the room service waiter, signed the check, added a ten per cent tip (after making sure a service gratuity was not included), and hustled him out. Then she paced the room, munching away at a BLT she hardly tasted.
What didn’t she know that could be known? She was bothered, almost haunted, by the idea that the puzzle she was trying to work had missing pieces. Not because Alec Pelley had purposely held things back, she didn’t think that at all, but possibly because there was information – vital information – that he considered unimportant.
She supposed she could call Mrs Maitland, only the woman would cry and be all sad and Holly wouldn’t know how to comfort her, she never did. Once not so long ago she had helped Jerome Robinson’s sister through a bad patch, but as a rule she was terrible at things like that. Plus, the poor woman’s mind would be fogged by her grief, and she also might neglect important facts, those little things that could make a whole picture out of the fragments, like the three or four jigsaw pieces that always seem to fall off the table and onto the floor, and you couldn’t see the whole picture until you hunted around and found them.
The person most apt to know all the details, the small ones as well as the big ones, was the detective who had done most of the witness interviews and arrested Maitland. After working with Bill Hodges, Holly believed in police detectives. Not all of them were good, to be sure; she’d had little respect for Isabelle Jaynes, Pete Huntley’s partner after Bill had retired from the force, and this one, Ralph Anderson, had made a bad mistake by arresting Maitland in a public place. A bad choice didn’t necessarily make him a bad detective, though, and Pelley had explained the crucial mitigating circumstance: Terry Maitland had been in close contact with Anderson’s son. Certainly the interviews Anderson had done seemed thorough enough. She thought he was the one most likely to have any missing pieces.
It was something to think about. In the meantime, a return visit to the Heisman Memory Unit was in order.
7
She arrived at two thirty, this time driving around to the left side of the building, where signs announced EMPLOYEE PARKING and KEEP AMBULANCE BAY CLEAR. She chose a space at the far end of the lot, backing in so she could watch the building. By two forty-five, cars began to drift in as those working the three-to-eleven shift arrived. Around three, the day shift employees – mostly orderlies, some nurses, a couple of guys in suits, which probably made them doctors – began to leave. One of the suits drove away in a Cadillac, the other in a Porsche. They were doctors, all right. She evaluated the others carefully, and settled on a target. She was a middle-aged nurse wearing a tunic covered with dancing teddy bears. Her car was an old Honda Civic with rust on the sides, a cracked taillight that had been mended with duct tape, and a fading I’M WITH HILLARY sticker on the bumper. Before getting in, she paused to light a cigarette. The car was old and cigarettes were expensive. Better and better.
Holly followed her out of the parking lot, then three miles west, the city giving way first to a pleasant suburb, then to one not so pleasant. Here the woman turned into the driveway of a tract house on a street where others just like it stood almost hip to hip, many with cheap plastic toys marooned on the little patches of lawn. Holly parked at the curb, said a brief prayer for strength, patience, and wisdom, and got out.
‘Ma’am? Nurse? Pardon me?’
The woman turned. She had the creased face and prematurely gray hair of a heavy smoker, so it was hard to tell her age. Maybe forty-five, maybe fifty. No wedding ring.
‘Can I help you?’
‘Yes, and I’ll pay for your help,’ Holly said. ‘One hundred dollars in cash, if you’ll talk to me about Heath Holmes, and his connection to Peter Maitland.’
‘Did you follow me from my job?’
‘Actually, I did.’
The woman’s brows contracted. ‘Are you a reporter? Mrs Kelly said there’d been a woman reporter around, and promised t
o fire anyone who talked to her.’
‘I’m the woman she mentioned, but I’m not a reporter. I’m an investigator, and Mrs Kelly will never find out you talked to me.’
‘Let me see some ID.’
Holly handed over her driver’s license and a Finders Keepers bail bondsman’s card. The woman examined them closely, then handed them back. ‘I’m Candy Wilson.’
‘It’s nice to meet you.’
‘Uh-huh, that’s good, but if I’m going to put my job on the line for you, it will cost two hundred.’ She paused, then added: ‘And fifty.’
‘All right,’ Holly said. She guessed she could talk the woman down to two hundred, maybe even a hundred and fifty, but she wasn’t good at bargaining (which her mother always called haggling). Also, this lady looked like she needed it.
‘You better come inside,’ Wilson said. ‘The neighbors on this street have long noses.’
8
The house smelled strongly of cigarettes, which made Holly really crave one for the first time in ages. Wilson plunked down in an easy chair, which, like her taillight, was mended with duct tape. Beside it was a standing ashtray of a type Holly hadn’t seen since her grandfather died (of emphysema). Wilson plucked a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of her nylon pants and flicked her Bic. She did not offer the pack to Holly, which was no surprise, given the price of smokes these days, but for which Holly was grateful, anyway. She might have taken one.
‘Money first,’ Candy Wilson said.
Holly, who had not neglected to stop at an ATM on her second trip to the Memory Unit, took her wallet from her purse and counted out the correct amount. Wilson re-counted it, then put it in her pocket with her cigarettes.
‘Hope you’re telling the truth about keeping your mouth shut, Holly. God knows I need this money, my asshole husband cleaned out our bank account when he left, but Mrs Kelly doesn’t kid around. She’s like one of the dragons on that Thrones show.’
Holly once more zipped a thumbnail across her lips and turned the invisible key. Candy Wilson smiled and seemed to relax. She looked around the living room, which was small and dark and furnished in Early American Yard Sale. ‘Ugly fucking place, isn’t it? We had a nice house over on the west side. No mansion, but better than this pit. My asshole husband sold it right out from under me before he sailed off into the sunset. You know what they say, there are none so blind as those who will not see. I almost wish we’d had kids, so I could turn them against him.’
Bill would have known how to reply to this, but Holly didn’t, so she took out her notebook and went to the matter at hand. ‘Heath Holmes worked as an orderly at the Heisman.’
‘Yes indeed. Handsome Heath, we used to call him. It was sort of a joke and sort of not. He wasn’t any Chris Pine or Tom Hiddleston, but he wasn’t hard to look at, either. Nice guy, too. Everybody thought so. Which only goes to prove that you never know what’s in a man’s heart. I found that out with my asshole husband, but at least he never raped and mutilated any little girls. Seen their pictures in the paper?’
Holly nodded. Two cute blondes, wearing identical pretty smiles. Twelve and ten, the exact ages of Terry Maitland’s daughters. Another of those things that felt like a connection. Maybe it wasn’t, but the whisper that the two cases were actually one had begun to grow louder in Holly’s mind. A few more facts of the right kind, and it would become a shout.
‘Who does that?’ Wilson asked, but the question was rhetorical. ‘A monster, that’s who.’
‘How long did you work with him, Ms Wilson?’
‘Call me Candy, why don’t you? I let people call me by my first name when they pay my utilities for the next month. I worked with him for seven years, and never had a clue.’
‘The paper said he was on vacation when the girls were killed.’
‘Yeah, went up to Regis, about thirty miles north of here. To his mother’s. Who told the cops he was there the whole time.’ Wilson rolled her eyes.
‘The paper also said he had a record.’
‘Well, yeah, but nothing gross, just a joyride in a stolen car when he was seventeen.’ She frowned at her cigarette. ‘Paper wasn’t supposed to have that, you know, he was a juvenile and those records are supposed to be sealed. If they weren’t, he probably wouldn’t have gotten the job at Heisman, even with all his army training and his five years working at Walter Reed. Maybe, but probably not.’
‘You speak as if you knew him pretty well.’
‘I’m not defending him, don’t get that idea. I had drinks with him, sure, but it wasn’t a date situation, nothing like that. A bunch of us used to go out to the Shamrock sometimes after work – this was back when I still had some money and could buy a round when it was my turn. Those days are gone, honey. Anyway, we used to call ourselves the Forgetful Five, on account of—’
‘I think I get it,’ Holly said.
‘Yeah, I bet you do, and we knew all the Alzheimer’s jokes. Most of them are kind of mean, and lots of our patients are actually pretty nice, but we told them to kind of … I don’t know …’
‘Whistle past the graveyard?’ Holly suggested.
‘Yes, that’s it. You want a beer, Holly?’
‘Okay. Thanks.’ She didn’t have much of a taste for beer, and it wasn’t really recommended when you were taking Lexapro, but she wanted to keep the conversation rolling.
Wilson brought back a couple of Bud Lights. She offered Holly a glass no more than she had offered one of her cigarettes.
‘Yeah, I knew about the joyride bust,’ she said, once more sitting in the mended easy chair. It gave a tired woof. ‘We all did. You know how people talk when they’ve had a few. But it was nothing like what he did in April. I still can’t believe it. I kissed that guy under the mistletoe at last year’s Christmas party.’ She either shuddered or pretended to.
‘So he was on vacation the week of April 23rd …’
‘If you say so. I just know it was in the spring, because of my allergies.’ So saying, she lit a fresh cigarette. ‘Said he was going up to Regis, said he and his mom were going to have a service for his dad, who died a year ago. “A memory service,” he called it. And maybe he did go, but he came back to kill those girls from Trotwood. No question about it, because people saw him and there was surveillance video from a gas station that showed him filling up.’
‘Filling what up?’ Holly asked. ‘Was it a van?’ This was leading the witness, and Bill wouldn’t have approved, but she couldn’t help herself.
‘I don’t know. Not sure the papers said. Probably his truck. He had a Tahoe, all fancied up. Custom tires, lots of chrome. And a camper cap. He could have put them in there. Drugged them, maybe, until he was ready to … you know … use them.’
‘Oough,’ Holly said. She couldn’t help it.
Candy Wilson nodded. ‘Yeah. Kind of thing you don’t want to imagine, but you just can’t help it. At least I can’t. They also found his DNA, as I’m sure you know, because that was in the paper, too.’
‘Yes.’
‘And I saw him that week, because he came in to work one day. “Just can’t stay away from this place, can you?” I asked him. He didn’t say anything, just gave me a creepy smile and kept walking down B Wing. I never saw him smile like that, never. I bet he still had their blood under his fingernails. Maybe even on his cock and balls. Christ, it gives me the willies just thinking about it.’
It gave Holly the willies, too, but she didn’t say so, only took a sip of her beer and asked what day that had been.
‘I don’t know off the top of my head, but after those girls disappeared. You know what? I bet I can tell you exactly, because I had a hair appointment that same day after work. To have it colored. Haven’t been to the beauty parlor since, as I’m sure you can plainly see. Just a minute.’
She went to a little desk in the corner of the room, came up with an appointment book, and flipped back through the pages. ‘Here it is, Debbie’s Hairport. April 26th.’
Holly
wrote it down, and added an exclamation point. That was the day of Terry’s last visit to see his father. He and his family had flown home the following day.
‘Did Peter Maitland know Mr Holmes?’
Wilson laughed. ‘Peter Maitland doesn’t really know anybody, hon. He had some clear days last year, and even early this year he remembered enough to get to the caff on his own and ask for chocolate – the things they really like are the things most of them remember the longest. Now he just sits and stares. If I get that shit, I’m going to take a bunch of pills and die while I still have enough working brain cells to remember what the pills are for. But if you’re asking if Heath knew Maitland, the answer is sure, you bet. Some of the orderlies switch around, but Heath stuck pretty much to the odd-numbered suites on B Wing. He used to say that some part of them knew him, even when most of their brains were gone. And Maitland is in suite B-5.’
‘Did he visit Maitland’s room on the day you saw him?’
‘Must have. I know something that wasn’t in the paper, but you can bet your ass it would have been a big deal at Heath’s trial, if he’d ever had one.’
‘What, Candy? What was it, what?’
‘When the cops found out he’d been in to the Memory Unit after the murders, they searched all the B Wing suites, paying especially close attention to Maitland’s, because Cam Melinsky said he saw Heath coming out of there. Cam’s a janitor. He noticed Heath especially because he – Cam, I mean – was washing the hall floor, and Heath took a slip and went on his ass.’
‘You’re sure of this, Candy?’
‘I am, and here’s the big thing. My best friend on the nursing staff is a woman named Penny Prudhomme, and she heard one of the cops talking on his phone after they searched B-5. He said they found hair in the room, and it was blond. What do you think of that?’
