by Stephen King
“They create the same pattern, over and over. Ignore the slight variations, you said, and look for the underlying sameness. Because even the smartest doers—like Turnpike Joe, who killed all those women at rest stops—seem to have a switch inside their brains that’s stuck on Repeat. Brady Hartsfield was a connoisseur of suicide—”
“He was an architect of suicide,” Holly says. She’s looking down at the newspaper, her brow furrowed, her face paler than ever. It’s hard for Hodges to relive the Hartsfield business (at least he’s finally managed to quit going to see the son of a bitch in his room in the Brain Injury Clinic), but it’s even harder for Holly. He hopes she won’t backslide and start smoking again, but it wouldn’t surprise him if she did.
“Call it what you want, but the pattern was there. He goaded his own mother into suicide, for Christ’s sake.”
Hodges says nothing to this, although he has always doubted Pete’s belief that Deborah Hartsfield killed herself when she discovered—perhaps by accident—that her son was the Mercedes Killer. For one thing, they have no proof that Mrs. Hartsfield ever did find out. For another, it was gopher poison the woman ingested, and that had to be a nasty way to go. It’s possible that Brady murdered his mother, but Hodges has never really believed that, either. If he loved anyone, it was her. Hodges thinks the gopher poison might have been intended for someone else … and perhaps not for a person at all. According to the autopsy, it had been mixed in with hamburger, and if there was anything dogs liked, it was a ball of raw ground meat.
The Robinsons have a dog, a loveable floppy-eared mutt. Brady would have seen him many times, because he was watching Hodges’s house and because Jerome usually brought the dog along when he cut Hodges’s lawn. The gopher poison could have been meant for Odell. This is an idea Hodges has never mentioned to any of the Robinsons. Or to Holly, for that matter. And hey, it’s probably bullshit, but in Hodges’s opinion, it’s as likely as Pete’s idea that Brady’s mom offed herself.
Izzy opens her mouth, then shuts it when Pete holds up a hand to forestall her—he is, after all, still the senior member of their partnership, and by quite a few years.
“Izzy’s getting ready to say Martine Stover was murder, not suicide, but I think there’s a very good chance that the idea came from Martine herself, or that she and her mother talked it over and came to a mutual agreement. Which makes them both suicides in my book, even though it won’t get written up that way in the official report.”
“I assume you’ve checked on the other City Center survivors?” Hodges asks.
“All alive except for Gerald Stansbury, who died just after Thanksgiving last year,” Pete says. “Had a heart attack. His wife told me coronary disease runs in his family, and that he lived longer than both his father and brother. Izzy’s right, this is probably nothing, but I thought you and Holly should know.” He looks at each of them in turn. “You haven’t had any bad thoughts about pulling the pin, have you?”
“No,” Hodges says. “Not lately.”
Holly merely shakes her head, still looking down at the newspaper.
Hodges asks, “I don’t suppose anyone found a mysterious letter Z in young Mr. Frias’s bedroom after he and Ms. Countryman committed suicide?”
“Of course not,” Izzy says.
“That you know of,” Hodges corrects. “Isn’t that what you mean? Considering you just found this one today?”
“Jesus please us,” Izzy says. “This is silly.” She looks pointedly at her watch and stands.
Pete gets up, too. Holly remains seated, looking down at her filched copy of Inside View. Hodges also stays put, at least for the moment. “You’ll go back to the Frias-Countryman photos, right, Pete? Check it out, just to be sure?”
“Yes,” Pete says. “And Izzy’s probably right, I was silly to get you two out here.”
“I’m glad you did.”
“And … I still feel bad about the way we handled Mrs. Trelawney, okay?” Pete is looking at Hodges, but Hodges has an idea he’s really speaking to the thin, pale woman with the junk newspaper in her lap. “I never once doubted that she left her key in the ignition. I closed my mind to any other possibility. I promised myself I’d never do that again.”
“I understand,” Hodges says.
“One thing I believe we all can agree on,” Izzy says, “is that Hartsfield’s days of running people down, blowing people up, and architecting suicides are behind him. So unless we’ve all stumbled into a movie called Son of Brady, I suggest we exit the late Ms. Ellerton’s house and get on with our lives. Any objections to that idea?”
There are none.
7
Hodges and Holly stand in the driveway for a moment before getting into the car, letting the cold January wind rush past them. It’s out of the north, blowing straight down from Canada, so the usually present smell of the large, polluted lake to the east is refreshingly absent. There are only a few houses at this end of Hilltop Court, and the closest has a FOR SALE sign on it. Hodges notices that Tom Saubers is the agent, and he smiles. Tom was also badly hurt in the Massacre, but has come almost all the way back. Hodges is always amazed by the resilience of which some men and women are capable. It doesn’t exactly give him hope for the human race, but …
Actually, it does.
In the car, Holly puts the folded Inside View on the floor long enough to fasten her seatbelt, then picks it up again. Neither Pete nor Isabelle objected to her taking it. Hodges isn’t sure they even noticed. Why would they? To them, the Ellerton house isn’t really a crime scene, although the letter of the law may call it that. Pete was uneasy, true, but Hodges thinks that had little to do with cop intuition and was a quasi-superstitious response instead.
Hartsfield should have died when Holly hit him with my Happy Slapper, Hodges thinks. That would have been better for all of us.
“Pete will go back and look at the pictures from the Frias-Countryman suicides,” he tells Holly. “Due diligence, and all that. But if he finds a Z scratched somewhere—on a baseboard, on a mirror—I will be one surprised human being.”
She doesn’t reply. Her eyes are far away.
“Holly? Are you there?”
She starts a little. “Yes. Just planning how I’ll locate Nancy Alderson in Chagrin Falls. It shouldn’t take too long with all the search programs I’ve got, but you’ll have to talk to her. I can do cold calls now if I absolutely have to, you know that—”
“Yes. You’ve gotten good at it.” Which is true, although she always makes such calls with her trusty box of Nicorette close at hand. Not to mention a stash of Twinkies in her desk for backup.
“But I can’t be the one to tell her that her employers—her friends, for all we know—are dead. You’ll have to do it. You’re good at things like that.”
Hodges feels that nobody is very good at things like that, but doesn’t bother saying so. “Why? The Alderson woman wouldn’t have been there since last Friday.”
“She deserves to know,” Holly says. “The police will get in touch with any relatives, that’s their job, but they’re not going to call the housekeeper. At least I don’t think so.”
Hodges doesn’t, either, and Holly’s right—the Alderson woman deserves to know, if only so she doesn’t turn up to find an X of police tape on the door. But somehow he doesn’t think that’s Holly’s only interest in Nancy Alderson.
“Your friend Pete and Miss Pretty Gray Eyes hardly did anything,” Holly says. “There was fingerprint powder in Martine Stover’s bedroom, sure, and on her wheelchair, and in the bathroom where Mrs. Ellerton killed herself, but none upstairs where she slept. They probably went up long enough to make sure there wasn’t a body stashed under the bed or in the closet, and called it good.”
“Hold on a second. You went upstairs?”
“Of course. Somebody needed to investigate thoroughly, and those two sure weren’t doing it. As far as they’re concerned, they know exactly what happened. Pete only called you because he was spooked
.”
Spooked. Yes, that was it. Exactly the word he was looking for and hadn’t been able to find.
“I was spooked, too,” Holly says matter-of-factly, “but that doesn’t mean I lost my wits. The whole thing was wrong. Wrong wrong wrong, and you need to talk to the housekeeper. I’ll tell you what to ask her, if you can’t figure it out for yourself.”
“Is this about the Z on the bathroom counter? If you know something I don’t, I wish you’d fill me in.”
“It’s not what I know, it’s what I saw. Didn’t you notice what was beside that Z?”
“A Magic Marker.”
She gives him a look that says you can do better.
Hodges calls on an old cop technique that comes in especially handy when giving trial testimony: he looks at the picture again, this time in his mind. “There was a power cord plugged into the wall beside the basin.”
“Yes! At first I thought it must be for an e-reader and Mrs. Ellerton left it plugged in there because she spent most of her time in that part of the house. It would be a convenient charging point, because all the plugs in Martine’s bedroom were probably in use for her life-support gear. Don’t you think so?”
“Yeah, that could be.”
“Only I have both a Nook and a Kindle—”
Of course you do, he thinks.
“—and neither of them has cords like that. Those cords are black. This one was gray.”
“Maybe she lost the original charging cord and bought a replacement at Tech Village.” Pretty much the only game in town for electronic supplies, now that Discount Electronix, Brady Hartsfield’s old employer, has declared bankruptcy.
“No. E-readers have prong-type plug-ins. This one was wider, like for an electronic tablet. Only my iPad also has that kind, and the one in the bathroom was much smaller. That cord was for some kind of handheld device. So I went upstairs to look for it.”
“Where you found … ?”
“Just an old PC on a desk by the window in Mrs. Ellerton’s bedroom. And I mean old. It was hooked up to a modem.”
“Oh my God, no!” Hodges exclaims. “Not a modem!”
“This is not funny, Bill. Those women are dead.”
Hodges takes a hand from the wheel and holds it up in a peace gesture. “Sorry. Go on. This is the part where you tell me you powered up her computer.”
Holly looks slightly discomfited. “Well, yes. But only in the service of an investigation the police are clearly not going to make. I wasn’t snooping.”
Hodges could argue the point, but doesn’t.
“It wasn’t password protected, so I looked at Mrs. Ellerton’s search history. She visited quite a few retail sites, and lots of medical sites having to do with paralysis. She seemed very interested in stem cells, which makes sense, considering her daughter’s condi—”
“You did all this in ten minutes?”
“I’m a fast reader. But you know what I didn’t find?”
“I’m guessing anything to do with suicide.”
“Yes. So how did she know about the helium thing? For that matter, how did she know to dissolve those pills in vodka and put them in her daughter’s feeding tube?”
“Well,” Hodges says, “there’s this ancient arcane ritual called reading books. You may have heard of it.”
“Did you see any books in that living room?”
He replays the living room just as he did the photo of Martine Stover’s bathroom, and Holly is right. There were shelves of knickknacks, and that picture of big-eyed waifs, and the flatscreen TV. There were magazines on the coffee table, but spread in a way that spoke more to decoration than to voracious reading. Plus, none of them was exactly The Atlantic Monthly.
“No,” he says, “no books in the living room, although I saw a couple in the photo of Stover’s bedroom. One of them looked like a Bible.” He glances at the folded Inside View in her lap. “What have you got in there, Holly? What are you hiding?”
When Holly flushes, she goes totally Defcon 1, the blood crashing to her face in a way that’s alarming. It happens now. “It wasn’t stealing,” she says. “It was borrowing. I never steal, Bill. Never!”
“Cool your jets. What is it?”
“The thing that goes with the power cord in the bathroom.” She unfolds the newspaper to reveal a bright pink gadget with a dark gray screen. It’s bigger than an e-reader, smaller than an electronic tablet. “When I came downstairs, I sat in Mrs. Ellerton’s chair to think a minute. I ran my hands between the arms and the cushion. I wasn’t even hunting for something, I was just doing it.”
One of Holly’s many self-comforting techniques, Hodges assumes. He’s seen many in the years since he first met her in the company of her overprotective mother and aggressively gregarious uncle. In their company? No, not exactly. That phrase suggested equality. Charlotte Gibney and Henry Sirois had treated her more like a mentally defective child out on a day pass. Holly is a different woman now, but traces of the old Holly still remain. And that’s okay with Hodges. After all, everyone casts a shadow.
“That’s where it was, down on the right side. It’s a Zappit.”
The name chimes a faint chord far back in his memory, although when it comes to computer chip–driven gadgetry, Hodges is far behind the curve. He’s always screwing up with his own home computer, and now that Jerome Robinson is away, Holly is the one who usually comes over to his house on Harper Road to straighten him out. “A whatsit?”
“A Zappit Commander. I’ve seen advertisements online, although not lately. They come pre-loaded with over a hundred simple electronic games like Tetris, Simon, and SpellTower. Nothing complicated like Grand Theft Auto. So tell me what it was doing there, Bill. Tell me what it was doing in a house where one of the women was almost eighty and the other one couldn’t turn on a light switch, let alone play video games.”
“It seems odd, all right. Not downright bizarre, but on the odd side, for sure.”
“And the cord was plugged in right next to that letter Z,” she says. “Not Z for the end, like a suicide note, but Z for Zappit. At least that’s what I think.”
Hodges considers the idea.
“Maybe.” He wonders again if he has encountered that name before, or if it’s only what the French call faux souvenir—a false memory. He could swear it has some connection to Brady Hartsfield, but he can’t trust that idea, because Brady is very much on his mind today.
How long has it been since I’ve gone to visit him? Six months? Eight? No, longer than that. Quite a bit longer.
The last time was not long after the business having to do with Pete Saubers and the cache of stolen money and notebooks Pete discovered, practically buried in his backyard. On that occasion, Hodges found Brady much the same as ever—a gorked-out young man dressed in a plaid shirt and jeans that never got dirty. He was sitting in the same chair he was always sitting in when Hodges visited Room 217 in the Brain Injury Clinic, just staring out at the parking garage across the way.
The only real difference that day had been outside Room 217. Becky Helmington, the head nurse, had moved on to the surgical wing of Kiner Memorial, thereby closing Hodges’s conduit to rumors about Brady. The new head nurse was a woman with stony scruples and a face like a closed fist. Ruth Scapelli refused Hodges’s offer of fifty dollars for any little tidbits about Brady and threatened to report him if he ever offered her money for patient information again. “You’re not even on his visitors list,” she said.
“I don’t want information about him,” Hodges had said. “I’ve got all the information about Brady Hartsfield I’m ever going to need. I just want to know what the staff is saying about him. Because there have been rumors, you know. Some of them pretty wild.”
Scapelli favored him with a disdainful look. “There’s loose talk in every hospital, Mr. Hodges, and always about patients who are famous. Or infamous, as is the case with Mr. Hartsfield. I held a staff meeting shortly after Nurse Helmington moved from Brain Injury to her current situatio
n, and informed my people that the talk about Mr. Hartsfield was to stop immediately, and if I caught wind of more rumors, I would trace them to their source and see that the person or persons spreading them was dismissed. As for you …” Looking down her nose at him, the fist of her face tightening even more. “I can’t believe that a former police officer, and a decorated one at that, would resort to bribery.”
Not long after that rather humiliating encounter, Holly and Jerome Robinson cornered him and staged a mini-intervention, telling Hodges that his visits to Brady had to end. Jerome had been especially serious that day, his usual cheerful patter nowhere to be found.
“There’s nothing you can do in that room but hurt yourself,” Jerome had said. “We always know when you’ve been to see him, because you go around with a little gray cloud over your head for the next two days.”
“More like a week,” Holly added. She wouldn’t look at him, and she was twisting her fingers in a way that made Hodges want to grab them and make her stop before she broke something. Her voice, however, was firm and sure. “There’s nothing left inside him, Bill. You need to accept that. And if there was, he’d be happy every time you showed up. He’d see what he’s doing to you and be happy.”
That was the convincer, because Hodges knew it was the truth. So he stays away. It was kind of like quitting smoking: hard at first, easier as time went by. Now whole weeks sometimes pass without thoughts of Brady and Brady’s terrible crimes.
There’s nothing left inside him.
Hodges reminds himself of that as he drives back into the heart of the city, where Holly will kick her computer into high gear and start hunting down Nancy Alderson. Whatever happened in that house at the end of Hilltop Court—the chain of thoughts and conversations, of tears and promises, all ending in the dissolved pills injected into the feeding tube and the tank of helium with the laughing children decaled on the side—it can have nothing to do with Brady Hartsfield, because Holly literally bashed his brains out. If Hodges sometimes doubts, it’s because he can’t stand the idea that Brady has somehow escaped punishment. That in the end, the monster eluded him. Hodges didn’t even get to swing the ball bearing–loaded sock he calls his Happy Slapper, because he was busy suffering a heart attack at the time.
