Mr. Mercedes (43 page)

“Jerome? Checking in. All quiet.”

He puts his phone down on the back stoop and takes out the flat leather case, glad he thought of it. Inside are his father's lock-picks—three silver rods with hooks of varying sizes at the ends. He selects the medium pick. A good choice; it slides in easily. He fiddles around, turning the pick first one way, then the other, feeling for the mechanism. He's just about to pause and check in with Jerome again when the pick catches. He twists, quick and hard, just as his father taught him, and there's a click as the locking button pops up on the kitchen side of the door. Meanwhile, his phone is squawking his name. He picks it up.

“Jerome? All quiet.”

“You had me worried,” Jerome says. “What are you doing?”

“Breaking and entering.”

13

Hodges steps into the Hartsfield kitchen. The smell hits him at once. It's faint, but it's there. Holding his cell phone in his left hand and his father's .38 in the right, Hodges follows his nose first into the living room—empty, although the TV remote and scattering of catalogs on the coffee table makes him think that the couch is Mrs. Hartsfield's downstairs nest—and then up the stairs. The smell gets stronger as he goes. It's not a stench yet, but it's headed in that direction.

There's a short upstairs hall with one door on the right and two on the left. He clears the righthand room first. It's guest quarters where no guests have stayed for a long time. It's as sterile as an operating theater.

He checks in with Jerome again before opening the first door on the left. This is where the smell is coming from. He takes a deep breath and enters fast, crouching until he's assured himself there's no one behind the door. He opens the closet—this door is the kind that folds on a center hinge—and shoves back the clothes. No one.

“Jerome? Checking in.”

“Is anyone there?”

Well . . . sort of. The coverlet of the double bed has been pulled up over an unmistakable shape.

“Wait one.”

He looks under the bed and sees nothing but a pair of slippers, a pair of pink sneakers, a single white ankle sock, and a few dust kitties. He pulls the coverlet back and there's Brady Hartsfield's mother. Her skin is waxy-pale, with a faint green undertint. Her mouth hangs ajar. Her eyes, dusty and glazed, have settled in their sockets. He lifts an arm, flexes it slightly, lets it drop. Rigor has come and gone.

“Listen, Jerome. I've found Mrs. Hartsfield. She's dead.”

“Oh my God.” Jerome's usually adult voice cracks on the last word. “What are you—”

“Wait one.”

“You already said that.”

Hodges puts his phone on the night table and draws the coverlet down to Mrs. Hartsfield's feet. She's wearing blue silk pajamas. The shirt is stained with what appears to be vomit and some blood, but there's no visible bullet hole or stab wound. Her face is swollen, yet there are no ligature marks or bruises on her neck. The swelling is just the slow death-march of decomposition. He pulls up her pajama top enough so he can see her belly. Like her face, it's slightly swollen, but he's betting that's gas. He leans close to her mouth, looks inside, and sees what he expected: clotted goop on her tongue and in the gutters between her gums and her cheeks. He's guessing she got drunk, sicked up her last meal, and went out like a rock star. The blood could be from her throat. Or an aggravated stomach ulcer.

He picks up the phone and says, “He might have poisoned her, but it's more likely she did it to herself.”

“Booze?”

“Probably. Without a postmortem, there's no way to tell.”

“What do you want us to do?”

“Sit tight.”

“We still don't call the police?”

“Not yet.”

“Holly wants to talk to you.”

There's a moment of dead air, then she's on the line, and clear as a bell. She sounds calm. Calmer than Jerome, actually.

“Her name is Deborah Hartsfield. The kind of Deborah that ends in an H.”

“Good job. Give the phone back to Jerome.”

A second later Jerome says, “I hope you know what you're doing.”

I don't, he thinks as he checks the bathroom. I've lost my mind and the only way to get it back is to let go of this. You
know
that.

But he thinks of Janey giving him his new hat—his snappy private eye fedora—and knows he can't. Won't.

The bathroom is clean . . . or almost. There's some hair in the sink. Hodges sees it but doesn't take note of it. He's thinking of the crucial difference between accidental death and murder. Murder would be bad, because killing close family members is all too often how a serious nutcase starts his final run. If it was an accident or suicide, there might still be time. Brady could be hunkered down somewhere, trying to decide what to do next.

Which is too close to what I'm doing, Hodges thinks.

The last upstairs room is Brady's. The bed is unmade. The desk is piled helter-skelter with books, most of them science fiction. There's a
Terminator
poster on the wall, with Schwarzenegger wearing dark glasses and toting a futuristic elephant gun.

I'll be back, Hodges thinks, looking at it.

“Jerome? Checking in.”

“The guy from across the street is still scoping us. Holly thinks we should come inside.”

“Not yet.”

“When?”

“When I'm sure this place is clear.”

Brady has his own bathroom. It's as neat as a GI's footlocker on inspection day. Hodges gives it a cursory glance, then goes back downstairs. There's a small alcove off the living room, with just enough space for a small desk. On it is a laptop. A purse hangs by its strap from the back of the chair. On the wall is a large framed photograph of the woman upstairs and a teenage version of Brady Hartsfield. They're standing on a beach somewhere with their arms around each other and their cheeks pressed together. They're wearing identical million-dollar smiles. It's more girlfriend-­boyfriend than mother-son.

Hodges looks with fascination upon Mr. Mercedes in his salad days. There's nothing in his face that suggests homicidal tendencies, but of course there almost never is. The resemblance between the two of them is faint, mostly in the shape of the noses and the color of the hair. She was a pretty woman, really just short of beautiful, but Hodges is willing to guess that Brady's father didn't have similar good looks. The boy in the photo seems . . . ordinary. A kid you'd pass on the street without a second glance.

That's probably the way he likes it, Hodges thinks. The Invisible Man.

He goes back into the kitchen and this time sees a door beside the stove. He opens it and looks at steep stairs descending into darkness. Aware that he makes a perfect silhouette for anyone who might be down there, Hodges moves to one side while he feels for the light switch. He finds it and steps into the doorway again with the gun leveled. He sees a worktable. Beyond it, a waist-high shelf runs the length of the room. On it is a line of computers. It makes him think of Mission Control at Cape Canaveral.

“Jerome? Checking in.”

Without waiting for an answer, he goes down with the gun in one hand and his phone in the other, perfectly aware of what a grotesque perversion of all established police procedure this is. What if Brady is under the stairs with his own gun, ready to shoot ­Hodges's feet off at the ankles? Or suppose he's set up a boobytrap? He can do it; this Hodges now knows all too well.

He strikes no tripwire, and the basement is empty. There's a storage closet, the door standing open, but nothing is stored there. He sees only empty shelves. In one corner is a litter of shoeboxes. They also appear to be empty.

The message, Hodges thinks, is Brady either killed his mother or came home and found her dead. Either way, he then decamped. If he
did
have explosives, they were on those closet shelves (possibly in the shoeboxes) and he took them along.

Hodges goes upstairs. It's time to bring in his new partners. He doesn't want to drag them in deeper than they already are, but there are those computers downstairs. He knows jack shit about computers. “Come around to the back,” he says. “The kitchen door is open.”

14

Holly steps in, sniffs, and says, “Oough. Is that Deborah Hartsfield?”

“Yes. Try not to think about it. Come downstairs, you guys. I want you to look at something.”

In the basement, Jerome runs a hand over the worktable. “Whatever else he is, he's Mr. Awesomely Neat.”

“Are you going to call the police, Mr. Hodges?” Holly is biting her lips again. “You probably are and I can't stop you, but my mother is going to be
so
mad at me. Also, it doesn't seem fair, since we're the ones who found out who he is.”

“I haven't decided
what
I'm going to do,” Hodges says, although she's right; it doesn't seem fair at all. “But I'd sure like to know what's on those computers. That might help me make up my mind.”

“He won't be like Olivia,” Holly says. “He'll have a
good
password.”

Jerome picks one of the computers at random (it happens to be Brady's Number Six; not much on that one) and pushes the recessed button on the back of the monitor. It's a Mac, but there's no chime. Brady hates that cheery chime, and has turned it off on all his computers.

Number Six flashes gray, and the boot-up worry-circle starts going round and round. After five seconds or so, gray turns to blue. This should be the password screen, even Hodges knows that, but instead a large 20 appears on the screen. Then 19, 18, and 17.

He and Jerome stare at it in perplexity.

“No, no!” Holly nearly screams it. “Turn it
of
f
!”

When neither of them moves immediately, she darts forward and pushes the power button behind the monitor again, holding it down until the screen goes dark. Then she lets out a breath and actually smiles.

“Jeepers! That was a close one!”

“What are you thinking?” Hodges asks. “That they're wired up to explode, or something?”

“Maybe they only lock up,” Holly says, “but I bet it's a suicide program. If the countdown gets to zero, that kind of program scrubs the data.
All
the data. Maybe just in the one that's on, but in all of them if they're wired together. Which they probably are.”

“So how do you stop it?” Jerome asks. “Keyboard command?”

“Maybe that. Maybe voice-ac.”

“Voice-what?” Hodges asks.

“Voice-activated command,” Jerome tells him. “Brady says
Milk Duds
or
underwear
and the countdown stops.”

Holly giggles through her fingers, then gives Jerome a timid push on the shoulder. “You're silly,” she says.

15

They sit at the kitchen table with the back door open to let in fresh air. Hodges has an elbow on one of the placemats and his brow cupped in his palm. Jerome and Holly keep quiet, letting him think it through. At last he raises his head.

“I'm going to call it in. I don't want to, and if it was just between Hartsfield and me, I probably wouldn't. But I've got you two to consider—”

“Don't do it on my account,” Jerome says. “If you see a way to go on, I'll stick with you.”

Of course you will, Hodges thinks. You might think you know what you're risking, but you don't. When you're seventeen, the future is strictly theoretical.

As for Holly . . . previously he would have said she was a kind of human movie screen, with every thought in her head projected large on her face, but at this moment she's inscrutable.

“Thanks, Jerome, only . . .” Only this is hard. Letting go is hard, and this will be the second time he has to relinquish Mr. Mercedes.

But.

“It's not just us, see? He could have more explosive, and if he uses it on a crowd . . .” He looks directly at Holly. “. . . the way he used your cousin Olivia's Mercedes on a crowd, it would be on me. I won't take that chance.”

Speaking carefully, enunciating each word as if to make up for what has probably been a lifetime of mumbling, Holly says, “No one can catch him but you.”

“Thanks, but no,” he says gently. “The police have resources. They'll start by putting a BOLO out on his car, complete with license plate number. I can't do that.”

It sounds good but he doesn't believe it
is
good. When he's not taking insane risks like the one he took at City Center, Brady's one of the smart ones. He will have stashed the car somewhere—maybe in a downtown parking lot, maybe in one of the airport parking lots, maybe in one of those endless mall parking lots. His ride is no Mercedes-Benz; it's an unobtrusive shit-colored Subaru, and it won't be found today or tomorrow. They might still be looking for it next week. And if they
do
find it, Brady won't be anywhere near it.

“No one but you,” she insists. “And only with us to help you.”

“Holly—”

“How can you give up?” she cries at him. She balls one hand into a fist and strikes herself in the middle of the forehead with it, leaving a red mark. “How can you? Janey
liked
you! She was even sort of your girlfriend! Now she's
dead
! Like the woman upstairs! Both of them,
dead
!”

She goes to hit herself again and Jerome takes her hand. “Don't,” he says. “Please don't hit yourself. It makes me feel terrible.”

Holly starts to cry. Jerome hugs her clumsily. He's black and she's white, he's seventeen and she's in her forties, but to Hodges Jerome looks like a father comforting his daughter after she came home from school and said no one invited her to the Spring Dance.

Hodges looks out at the small but neatly kept Hartsfield backyard. He also feels terrible, and not just on Janey's account, although that is bad enough. He feels terrible for the people at City Center. He feels terrible for Janey's sister, whom they refused to believe, who was reviled in the press, and who was then driven to suicide by the man who lived in this house. He even feels terrible about his failure to pay heed to Mrs. Melbourne. He knows that Pete Huntley would let him off the hook on that one, and that makes it worse. Why? Because Pete isn't as good at this job as he, Hodges, still is. Pete never will be, not even on his best day. A good enough guy, and a hard worker, but . . .