by Stephen King
“No, I don’t think that.” Hodges is remembering something Holly said about Brady Hartsfield yesterday. She used the word architect. “I think you’ve got it right. Murder-suicide.”
Holly gives him a brief look of wounded surprise before lowering her eyes again.
“But will you do something for me?”
“If I can,” Pete says.
“I tried the game console, but the screen stayed blank. Probably a dead battery. I didn’t want to open the battery compartment, because that little slide panel would be a place to check for fingerprints.”
“I’ll see that it’s dusted, but I doubt—”
“Yeah, I do, too. What I really want is for one of your cyber-wonks to boot it up and check the various game applications. See if there’s anything out of the ordinary.”
“Okay,” Pete says, and shifts slightly in his seat when Izzy rolls her eyes. Hodges can’t be sure, but he thinks Pete just kicked her ankle under the table.
“I have to go,” Hodges says, and grabs for his wallet. “Missed my appointment yesterday. Can’t miss another one.”
“We’ll pick up the check,” Izzy says. “After you brought us all this valuable evidence, it’s the least we can do.”
Holly mutters something else under her breath. This time Hodges can’t be sure, even with his trained Holly-ear, but he thinks it might have been bitch.
20
On the sidewalk, Holly jams an unfashionable but somehow charming plaid hunting cap down to her ears and then thrusts her hands into her coat pockets. She won’t look at him, only starts walking toward the office a block away. Hodges’s car is parked outside Dave’s, but he hurries after her.
“Holly.”
“You see how she is.” Walking faster. Still not looking at him.
The pain in his gut is creeping back, and he’s losing his breath. “Holly, wait. I can’t keep up.”
She turns to him, and he’s alarmed to see her eyes are swimming with tears.
“There’s more to it! More more more! But they’re just going to sweep it under the rug and they didn’t even say the real reason which is so Pete can have a nice retirement party without this hanging over his head the way you had to retire with the Mercedes Killer hanging over yours and so the papers don’t make a big deal of it and you know there’s more to it I know you do and I know you have to get your test results I want you to get them because I’m so worried, but those poor women … I just don’t think … they don’t deserve to … to just be shoveled under!”
She halts at last, trembling. The tears are already freezing on her cheeks. He tilts her face to look at him, knowing she would shrink away if anyone else tried to touch her that way—yes, even Jerome Robinson, and she loves Jerome, probably has since the day the two of them discovered the ghost-program Brady left in Olivia Trelawney’s computer, the one that finally pushed her over the edge and caused her to take her own overdose.
“Holly, we’re not done with this. In fact I think we might just be getting started.”
She looks him squarely in the face, another thing she will do with no one else. “What do you mean?”
“Something new has come up, something I didn’t want to tell Pete and Izzy. I don’t know what the hell to make of it. There’s no time to tell you now, but when I get back from the doctor’s, I’ll tell you everything.”
“All right, that’s fine. Go on, now. And although I don’t believe in God, I’ll say a prayer for your test results. Because a little prayer can’t hurt, can it?”
“No.”
He gives her a quick hug—long hugs don’t work with Holly—and starts back to his car, once more thinking of that thing she said yesterday, about Brady Hartsfield being an architect of suicide. A pretty turn of phrase from a woman who writes poetry in her spare time (not that Hodges has ever seen any, or is likely to), but Brady would probably sneer at it, consider it a mile short of the mark. Brady would consider himself a prince of suicide.
Hodges climbs into the Prius Holly nagged him into buying and heads for Dr. Stamos’s office. He’s doing a little praying himself: Let it be an ulcer. Even the bleeding kind that needs surgery to sew it up.
Just an ulcer.
Please nothing worse than that.
21
He doesn’t have to spend time cooling his heels in the waiting room today. Although he’s five minutes early and the room is as full as it was on Monday, Marlee the cheerleader receptionist sends him in before he even has a chance to sit down.
Belinda Jensen, Stamos’s nurse, usually greets him at his yearly physicals with smiling good cheer, but she’s not smiling this morning, and as Hodges steps on the scale, he remembers his yearly physical is a bit overdue. By four months. Actually closer to five.
The armature on the old-fashioned scale balances at 165. When he retired from the cops in ’09, he weighed 230 at the mandatory exit physical. Belinda takes his blood pressure, pokes something in his ear to get his current temperature, then leads him past the exam rooms and directly to Dr. Stamos’s office at the end of the corridor. She knocks a knuckle on the door, and when Stamos says “Please come in,” she leaves Hodges at once. Usually voluble, full of tales about her fractious children and bumptious husband, she has today spoken hardly a word.
Can’t be good, Hodges thinks, but maybe it’s not too bad. Please God, not too bad. Another ten years wouldn’t be a lot to ask for, would it? Or if You can’t do that, how about five?
Wendell Stamos is a fiftysomething with a fast-receding hairline and the broad-shouldered, trim-waisted build of a pro jock who’s stayed in shape after retirement. He looks at Hodges gravely and invites him to sit down. Hodges does so.
“How bad?”
“Bad,” Dr. Stamos says, then hastens to add, “but not hopeless.”
“Don’t skate around it, just tell me.”
“It’s pancreatic cancer, and I’m afraid we caught it … well … rather late in the game. Your liver is involved.”
Hodges finds himself fighting a strong and dismaying urge to laugh. No, more than laugh, to just throw back his head and yodel like Heidi’s fucking grandfather. He thinks it was Stamos saying bad but not hopeless. It makes him remember an old joke. Doctor tells his patient there’s good news and bad news; which does the patient want first? Hit me with the bad news, says the patient. Well, says the doctor, you have an inoperable brain tumor. The patient starts to blubber and asks what the good news can possibly be after learning a thing like that. The doctor leans forward, smiling confidentially, and says, I’m fucking my receptionist, and she’s gorgeous.
“I’ll want you to see a gastroenterologist immediately. I’m talking today. The best one in this part of the country is Henry Yip, at Kiner. He’ll refer you to a good oncologist. I’m thinking that guy will want to start you on chemo and radiation. These can be difficult for the patient, debilitating, but are far less arduous than even five years ago—”
“Stop,” Hodges says. The urge to laugh has thankfully passed.
Stamos stops, looking at him in a brilliant shaft of January sun. Hodges thinks, Barring a miracle, this is the last January I’m ever going to see. Wow.
“What are the chances? Don’t sugarcoat it. There’s something hanging fire in my life right now, might be something big, so I need to know.”
Stamos sighs. “Very slim, I’m afraid. Pancreatic cancer is just so goddamned stealthy.”
“How long?”
“With treatment? Possibly a year. Even two. And a remission is not entirely out of the ques—”
“I need to think about this,” Hodges says.
“I’ve heard that many times after I’ve had the unpleasant task of giving this kind of diagnosis, and I always tell my patients what I’m now going to tell you, Bill. If you were standing on top of a burning building and a helicopter appeared and dropped a rope ladder, would you say you needed to think about it before climbing up?”
Hodges mulls that over, and the urge to laugh retur
ns. He’s able to restrain it, but not a smile. It’s broad and charming. “I might,” he says, “if the helicopter in question only had two gallons of gas left in the tank.”
22
When Ruth Scapelli was twenty-three, before she began to grow the hard shell that encased her in later years, she had a short and bumpy affair with a not-exactly-honest man who owned a bowling alley. She became pregnant and gave birth to a daughter she named Cynthia. This was in Davenport, Iowa, her hometown, where she was working toward her RN at Kaplan University. She was amazed to find herself a mother, more amazed still to realize that Cynthia’s father was a slack-bellied forty-year-old with a tattoo reading LOVE TO LIVE AND LIVE TO LOVE on one hairy arm. If he had offered to marry her (he didn’t), she would have declined with an inward shudder. Her aunt Wanda helped her raise the child.
Cynthia Scapelli Robinson now lives in San Francisco, where she has a fine husband (no tattoos) and two children, the older of whom is an honor roll student in high school. Her household is a warm one. Cynthia works hard to keep it that way, because the atmosphere in her aunt’s home, where she did most of her growing up (and where her mother began to develop that formidable shell) was always chilly, full of recriminations and scoldings that usually began You forgot to. The emotional atmosphere was mostly above freezing, but rarely went higher than forty-five degrees. By the time Cynthia was in high school, she was calling her mother by her first name. Ruth Scapelli never objected to this; in fact, she found it a bit of a relief. She missed her daughter’s nuptials due to work commitments, but sent a wedding present. It was a clock-radio. These days Cynthia and her mother talk on the phone once or twice a month, and occasionally exchange emails. Josh doing fine in school, made the soccer team is followed by a terse reply: Good for him. Cynthia has never actually missed her mother, because there was never all that much to miss.
This morning she rises at seven, fixes breakfast for her husband and the two boys, sees Hank off to work, sees the boys off to school, then rinses the dishes and gets the dishwasher going. That is followed by a trip to the laundry room, where she loads the washer and gets that going. She does these morning chores without once thinking You must not forget to, except someplace down deep she is thinking it, and always will. The seeds sown in childhood put down deep roots.
At nine thirty she makes herself a second cup of coffee, turns on the TV (she rarely looks at it, but it’s company), and powers up her laptop to see if she has any emails other than the usual come-ons from Amazon and Urban Outfitters. This morning there’s one from her mother, sent last night at 10:44 PM, which translates to 8:44, West Coast time. She frowns at the subject line, which is a single word: Sorry.
She opens it. Her heartbeat speeds up as she reads.
I’m awful. I’m an awful worthless bitch. No one will stand up for me. This is what I have to do. I love you.
I love you. When is the last time her mother said that to her? Cynthia—who says it to her boys at least four times a day—honestly can’t remember. She grabs her phone off the counter where it’s been charging, and calls first her mother’s cell, then the landline. She gets Ruth Scapelli’s short, no-nonsense message on both: “Leave a message. I’ll call you back if that seems appropriate.” Cynthia tells her mother to call her right away, but she’s terribly afraid her mother may not be able to do that. Not now, perhaps not later, perhaps not at all.
She paces the circumference of her sunny kitchen twice, chewing at her lips, then picks up her cell again and gets the number for Kiner Memorial Hospital. She resumes pacing as she waits to be transferred to the Brain Injury Clinic. She’s finally connected to a nurse who identifies himself as Steve Halpern. No, Halpern tells her, Nurse Scapelli hasn’t come in, which is surprising. Her shift starts at eight, and in the Midwest it’s now twenty to one.
“Try her at home,” he advises. “She’s probably taking a sick day, although it’s unlike her not to call in.”
You don’t know the half of it, Cynthia thinks. Unless, that is, Halpern grew up in a house where the mantra was You forgot to.
She thanks him (can’t forget that, no matter how worried she may be) and gets the number of a police department two thousand miles away. She identifies herself and states the problem as calmly as possible.
“My mother lives at 298 Tannenbaum Street. Her name is Ruth Scapelli. She’s the head nurse at the Kiner Hospital Brain Injury Clinic. I got an email from her this morning that makes me think …”
That she’s badly depressed? No. It might not be enough to get the cops out there. Besides, it’s not what she really thinks. She takes a deep breath.
“That makes me think she might be considering suicide.”
23
CPC 54 pulls into the driveway at 298 Tannenbaum Street. Officers Amarilis Rosario and Jason Laverty—known as Toody and Muldoon because their car number was featured in an old cop sitcom—get out and approach the door. Rosario rings the doorbell. There’s no answer, so Laverty knocks, good and hard. There’s still no answer. He tries the door on the off chance, and it opens. They look at each other. This is a good neighborhood, but it’s still the city, and in the city most people lock their doors.
Rosario pokes her head in. “Mrs. Scapelli? This is Police Officer Rosario. Want to give us a shout?”
There is no shout.
Her partner chimes in. “Officer Laverty, ma’am. Your daughter is worried about you. Are you okay?”
Nothing. Laverty shrugs and gestures to the open door. “Ladies first.”
Rosario steps in, unsnapping the strap on her service weapon without even thinking about it. Laverty follows. The living room is empty but the TV is on, the sound muted.
“Toody, Toody, I don’t like this,” Rosario says. “Can you smell it?”
Laverty can. It’s the smell of blood. They find the source in the kitchen, where Ruth Scapelli lies on the floor next to an overturned chair. Her arms are splayed out as if she tried to break her fall. They can see the deep cuts she’s made, long ones up the forearms almost to the elbows, short ones across the wrists. Blood is splattered on the easy-clean tiles, and a great deal more is on the table, where she sat to do the deed. A butcher knife from the wooden block beside the toaster lies on the lazy Susan, placed with grotesque neatness between the salt and pepper shakers and the ceramic napkin holder. The blood is dark, coagulating. Laverty guesses she’s been dead for twelve hours, at least.
“Maybe there was nothing good on TV,” he says.
Rosario gives him a dark look and takes a knee close to the body, but not close enough to get blood on her uni, which just came back from the cleaners the day before. “She drew something before she lost consciousness,” she says. “See it there on the tile by her right hand? Drew it in her own blood. What do you make of it? Is it a 2?”
Laverty leans down for a close look, hands on his knees. “Hard to tell,” he says. “Either a 2 or a Z.”
BRADY
“My boy is a genius,” Deborah Hartsfield used to tell her friends. To which she would add, with a winning smile: “It’s not bragging if it’s the truth.”
This was before she started drinking heavily, when she still had friends. Once she’d had another son, Frankie, but Frankie was no genius. Frankie was brain-damaged. One evening when he was four years old, he fell down the cellar stairs and died of a broken neck. That was the story Deborah and Brady told, anyway. The truth was a little different. A little more complex.
Brady loved to invent things, and one day he’d invent something that would make the two of them rich, would put them on that famous street called Easy. Deborah was sure of it, and told him so often. Brady believed it.
He managed just Bs and Cs in most of his courses, but in Computer Science I and II he was a straight-A star. By the time he graduated from North Side High, the Hartsfield house was equipped with all sorts of gadgets, some of them—like the blue boxes by which Brady stole cable TV from Midwest Vision—highly illegal. He had a workroom in the base
ment where Deborah rarely ventured, and it was there that he did his inventing.
Little by little, doubt crept in. And resentment, doubt’s fraternal twin. No matter how inspired his creations were, none were moneymakers. There were guys in California—Steve Jobs, for instance—who made incredible fortunes and changed the world just tinkering in their garages, but the things Brady came up with never quite made the grade.
His design for the Rolla, for instance. It was to be a computer-powered vacuum cleaner that would run by itself, turning on gimbals and starting in a new direction each time it met an obstacle. That looked like a sure winner until Brady spotted a Roomba vacuum cleaner in a fancy-shmancy appliance store on Lacemaker Lane. Someone had beaten him to the punch. The phrase a day late and a dollar short occurred to him. He pushed it away, but sometimes at night when he couldn’t sleep, or when he was coming down with one of his migraines, it recurred.
Yet two of his inventions—and minor ones at that—made the slaughter at City Center possible. They were modified TV remotes he called Thing One and Thing Two. Thing One could change traffic signals from red to green, or vice-versa. Thing Two was more sophisticated. It could capture and store signals sent from automobile key fobs, allowing Brady to unlock those vehicles after their clueless owners had departed. At first he used Thing Two as a burglary tool, opening cars and tossing them for cash or other valuables. Then, as the idea of driving a big car into a crowd of people took vague shape in his mind (along with fantasies of assassinating the President or maybe a hot shit movie star), he used Thing Two on Mrs. Olivia Trelawney’s Mercedes, and discovered she kept a spare key in her glove compartment.
That car he left alone, filing the existence of the spare key away for later use. Not long after, like a message from the dark powers that ran the universe, he read in the newspaper that a job fair was to be held at City Center on the tenth of April.
