Right to the heart of the matter, Hodges thinks admiringly. That’s my Holly.
“I went to see him just after the business with the Saubers family, and once more later on. Midsummer, that would have been. Then you and Jerome cornered me and said I had to stop. So I did.”
“We did it for your own good.”
“I know that, Holly. Now eat your sandwich.”
She takes a bite, dabs mayo from the corner of her mouth, and asks him how Hartsfield seemed on his last visit.
“The same . . . mostly. Just sitting there, looking out at the parking garage. I talk, I ask him questions, he says nothing. He gives Academy Award brain damage, no doubt about that. But there have been stories about him. That he has some kind of mind-power. That he can turn the water on and off in his bathroom, and does it sometimes to scare the staff. I’d call it bullshit, but when Becky Helmington was the head nurse, she said she’d actually seen stuff on a couple of occasions—rattling blinds, the TV going on by itself, the bottles on his IV stand swinging back and forth. And she’s what I’d call a credible witness. I know it’s hard to believe—”
“Not so hard. Telekinesis, sometimes called psychokinesis, is a documented phenomenon. You never saw anything like that yourself during any of your visits?”
“Well . . .” He pauses, remembering. “Something did happen on my second-to-last visit. There was a picture on the table beside his bed—him and his mother with their arms around each other and their cheeks pressed together. On vacation somewhere. There was a bigger version in the house on Elm Street. You probably remember it.”
“Of course I do. I remember everything we saw in that house, including some of the cheesecake photos of her he had on his computer.” She crosses her arms over her small bosom and makes a moue of distaste. “That was a very unnatural relationship.”
“Tell me about it. I don’t know if he ever actually had sex with her—”
“Oough!”
“—but I think he probably wanted to, and at the very least she enabled his fantasies. Anyway, I grabbed the picture and talked some smack about her, trying to get a rise out of him, trying to get him to respond. Because he’s in there, Holly, and I mean all present and accounted for. I was sure of it then and I’m sure of it now. He just sits there, but inside he’s the same human wasp that killed those people at City Center and tried to kill a whole lot more at Mingo Auditorium.”
“And he used Debbie’s Blue Umbrella to talk with you, don’t forget that.”
“After last night I’m not likely to.”
“Tell me the rest of what happened that time.”
“For just a second he stopped looking out his window at the parking garage across the way. His eyes . . . they rolled in their sockets, and he looked at me. Every hair on the nape of my neck stood up at attention, and the air felt . . . I don’t know . . . electric.” He forces himself to say the rest. It’s like pushing a big rock up a steep hill. “I arrested some bad doers when I was on the cops, some very bad doers—one was a mother who killed her three-year-old for insurance that didn’t amount to a hill of beans—but I never felt the presence of evil in any of them once they were caught. It’s like evil’s some kind of vulture that flies away once these mokes are locked up. But I felt it that day, Holly. I really did. I felt it in Brady Hartsfield.”
“I believe you,” she says in a voice so small it’s barely a -whisper.
“And he had a Zappit. That’s the connection I was trying to make. If it is a connection, and not just a coincidence. There was a guy, I don’t know his last name, everyone just called him Library Al, who used to hand Zappits out along with Kindles and paperbacks when he made his rounds. I don’t know if Al was an orderly or a volunteer. Hell, he might even have been one of the janitors, doing a little good deed on the side. I think the only reason I didn’t pick up on that right away was the Zappit you found at the Ellerton house was pink. The one in Brady’s room was blue.”
“How could what happened to Janice Ellerton and her daughter have anything to do with Brady Hartsfield? Unless . . . has anyone reported any telekinetic activity outside of his room? Have there been rumors of that?”
“Nope, but right around the time the Saubers business finished up, a nurse committed suicide in the Brain Injury Clinic. Sliced her wrists in a bathroom right down the hall from Hartsfield’s room. Her name was Sadie MacDonald.”
“Are you thinking . . .”
She’s picking at her sandwich again, shredding the lettuce and dropping it onto her plate. Waiting for him.
“Go on, Holly. I’m not going to say it for you.”
“You’re thinking Brady talked her into it somehow? I don’t see how that could be possible.”
“I don’t, either, but we know Brady has a fascination with suicide.”
“This Sadie MacDonald . . . did she happen to have one of those Zappit things?”
“God knows.”