“It was eighteen minutes,” Holly informs him as Hodges pulls into traffic. “Because you were speeding, which is counterproductive. If you keep your speed to exactly twenty miles an hour, you can catch almost all the lights. They’re timed. I’ve told you that several times. Now tell me what the doctor said. Did you get an A on your tests?”
Hodges considers his options, which are only two: tell the truth or prevaricate. Holly nagged him into going to the doctor because he’s been having stomach issues. Just pressure at first, now some pain. Holly may have personality problems, but she’s a very efficient nagger. Like a dog with a bone, Hodges sometimes thinks.
“The results weren’t back yet.” This is not quite a lie, he tells himself, because they weren’t back to me yet.
She looks at him doubtfully as he merges onto the Crosstown Expressway. Hodges hates it when she looks at him that way.
“I’ll keep after this,” he says. “Trust me.”
“I do,” she says. “I do, Bill.”
That makes him feel even worse.
She bends, opens her briefcase, and takes out her iPad. “I looked up some stuff while I was waiting for you. Want to hear it?”
“Hit me.”
“Martine Stover was fifty at the time Brady Hartsfield crippled her, which would make her fifty-six as of today. I suppose she could be fifty-seven, but since this is only January, I think that’s very unlikely, don’t you?”
“Odds are against, all right.”
“At the time of the City Center event, she was living with her mother in a house on Sycamore Street. Not far from Brady Hartsfield and his mother, which is sort of ironic when you think of it.”
Also close to Tom Saubers and his family, Hodges muses. He and Holly had a case involving the Saubers family not long ago, and that one also had a connection to what the local newspaper had taken to calling the Mercedes Massacre. There were all sorts of connections, when you thought about it, perhaps the strangest being that the car Hartsfield had used as a murder weapon belonged to Holly Gibney’s cousin.
“How does an elderly woman and her severely crippled daughter make the jump from the Tree Streets to Ridgedale?”
“Insurance. Martine Stover had not one or two whopping big policies, but three. She was sort of a freak about insurance.” Hodges reflects that only Holly could say that approvingly. “There were several articles about her afterward, because she was the most badly hurt of those who survived. She said she knew that if she didn’t get a job at City Center, she’d have to start cashing her policies in, one by one. After all, she was a single woman with a widowed, unemployed mother to support.”
“Who ended up taking care of her.”
Holly nods. “Very strange, very sad. But at least there was a financial safety net, which is the purpose of insurance. They even moved up in the world.”
“Yes,” Hodges says, “but now they’re out of it.”
To this Holly makes no reply. Up ahead is the Ridgedale exit. Hodges takes it.
5
Pete Huntley has put on weight, his belly hanging over his belt buckle, but Isabelle Jaynes is as smashing as ever in her tight faded jeans and blue blazer. Her misty gray eyes go from Hodges to Holly and then back to Hodges again.
“You’ve gotten thin,” she says. This could be either a compliment or an accusation.
“He’s having stomach problems, so he had some tests,” Holly says. “The results were supposed to be in today, but—”
“Let’s not go there, Hols,” Hodges says. “This isn’t a medical consultation.”
“You two are more like an old married couple every day,” Izzy says.
Holly replies in a matter-of-fact voice. “Marriage to Bill would spoil our working relationship.”
Pete laughs and Holly shoots him a puzzled glance as they step inside the house.
It’s a handsome Cape Cod, and although it’s on top of a hill and the day is cold, the house is toasty-warm. In the foyer, all four of them put on thin rubber gloves and bootees. How it all comes back, Hodges thinks. As if I was never away.
In the living room there’s a painting of big-eyed waifs hung on one wall, a big-screen TV hung on another. There’s an easy chair in front of the tube with a coffee table beside it. On the table is a careful fan of celebrity mags like OK! and scandal rags like Inside View. In the middle of the room there are two deep grooves in the rug. Hodges thinks, This is where they sat in the evenings to watch TV. Or maybe all day long. Mom in her easy chair, Martine in her wheelchair. Which must have weighed a ton, judging by those marks.
“What was her mother’s name?” he asks.
“Janice Ellerton. Husband James died twenty years ago, according to . . .” Old-school like Hodges, Pete carries a notebook instead of an iPad. Now he consults it. “According to Yvonne Carstairs. She and the other aide, Georgina Ross, found the bodies when they arrived this morning shortly before six. They got paid extra for turning up early. The Ross woman wasn’t much help—”
“She was gibbering,” Izzy says. “Carstairs was okay, though. Kept her head throughout. Called the police right away, and we were on-scene by six forty.”
“How old was Mom?” Hodges asks.