“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 flat-screen 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.