“While one of the cops is calling Division, the other one hears snores coming from upstairs. Like a chainsaw on idle, he said. So they go up, guns drawn, and in one of the three guest bedrooms, count em, three, the place is fucking huge, they find an old fart fast asleep. They wake him up and he gives his name as Alvin Brooks.”
“Library Al!” Hodges shouts. “From the hospital! The first Zappit I ever saw was one he showed me!”
“Yeah, that’s the guy. He had a Kiner ID badge in his shirt pocket. And without prompting, he says he killed Mrs. Babineau. Claims he did it while he was hypnotized. So they cuff him, take him downstairs, and sit him on the couch. That’s where Izzy and me found him when we entered the scene half an hour or so later. I don’t know what’s wrong with the guy, whether he had a nervous breakdown or what, but he’s on Planet Purple. He keeps going off on tangents, spouting all sorts of weird shit.”
Hodges recollects something Al said to him on one of his last visits to Brady’s room—right around Labor Day weekend of 2014, that would have been. “Never so good as what you don’t see.”
“Yeah.” Pete sounds surprised. “Like that. And when Izzy asked who hypnotized him, he said it was the fish. The ones by the beautiful sea.”
To Hodges, this now makes sense.
“On further questioning—I did it, by then Izzy must have been in the kitchen, busy ditching the whole thing without asking for my input—he said Dr. Z told him to, I quote, ‘make his mark.’ Ten times, he said, and sure enough, there are ten Zs, including the one on the deceased’s forehead. I asked him if Dr. Z was Dr. Babineau, and he said no, Dr. Z was Brady Hartsfield. Crazy, see?”
“Yeah,” Hodges says.
“I asked him if he shot Dr. Babineau, too. He just shook his head and said he wanted to go back to sleep. Right around then Izzy comes tripping back from the kitchen and says Chief Horgan called the SKIDs, on account of Dr. B. is a high-profile guy and this is going to be a high-profile case, and besides, a pair of them happened to be right here in the city, waiting to be called to testify in a case, isn’t that convenient. She won’t meet my eye, she’s all flushed, and when I start pointing around at all the Zs, asking her if they don’t look familiar, she won’t talk about it.”
Hodges has never heard such anger and frustration in his old partner’s voice.
“So then my cell rings, and . . . you remember when I reached out to you this morning I said the doc on call took a sample of the residue in Hartsfield’s mouth? Before the ME guy even got there?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, the phone call was from that doc. Simonson, his name is. The ME’s analysis won’t be back for two days at the soonest, but Simonson did one right away. The stuff in Hartsfield’s mouth was a combination of Vicodin and Ambien. Hartsfield wasn’t prescribed either one, and he could hardly dance his way down to the nearest med locker and score some, could he?”
Hodges, who already knows what Brady was taking for pain, agrees that that would be unlikely.
“Right now Izzy’s in the house, probably watching from the background and keeping her mouth shut while the SKIDs question this Brooks guy, who honest-to-God can’t remember his own name unless he’s prompted. Otherwise he calls himself Z-Boy. Like something out of a Marvel comic book.”
Clutching the pen in his hand almost hard enough to snap it in two, Hodges prints more headline caps on the pad, with Holly bending over to read as he writes: LIBRARY AL LEFT THE MESSAGE ON DEBBIE’S BLUE UMBRELLA.
Holly stares at him with wide eyes.
“Just before the SKIDs arrived—man, they didn’t take long—I asked Brooks if he also killed Brady Hartsfield. Izzy says to him, ‘Don’t answer that!’”
“She said what?” Hodges exclaims. He doesn’t have much room in his head right now to worry about Pete’s deteriorating relationship with his partner, but he’s still amazed. Izzy’s a police detective, after all, not Library Al’s defense attorney.
“You heard me. Then she looks at me and says, ‘You haven’t given him the words.’ So I turn to one of the uniforms and ask, ‘Did you guys Mirandize this gentleman?’ And of course they say yeah. I look at Izzy and she’s redder in the face than ever, but she won’t back down. She says, ‘If we fuck this up, it won’t come back on you, you’re done in another couple of weeks, but it’ll come back on me, and hard.’”
“So the state boys turn up . . .”
“Yeah, and now I’m out here in the late Mrs. Babineau’s potting shed, or whatever the fuck it is, freezing my ass off. The richest part of the city, Kerm, and I’m in a shack colder than a welldigger’s belt buckle. I bet Izzy knows I’m calling you, too. Tattling to my dear old uncle Kermit.”
Pete is probably right about that. But if Miss Pretty Gray Eyes is as set on climbing the ladder as Pete believes, she’s probably thinking of an uglier word: snitching.
“This Brooks guy is out of whatever little mind he’s got left, which makes him the perfect donkey to pin the tail on when this hits the media. You know how they’re going to lay it out?”