11
As the ATF strike force, led by Agent Kosinsky, begins its inventory of the cavernous storage area behind King Virtue Pawn & Loan’s humble fa?ade, a gray Mercedes sedan is pulling to the curb in front of 49 Elm Street. Hodges is behind the wheel. Today Holly is riding shotgun—because, she claims (with at least some logic), the car is more hers than theirs.
“Someone is home,” she points out. “There’s a very badly maintained Honda Civic in the driveway.”
Hodges notes the shuffling approach of an old man from the house directly across the street. “I will now speak with Mr. Concerned Citizen. You two will keep your mouths shut.”
He rolls down his window. “Help you, sir?”
“I thought maybe I could help you,” the old guy says. His bright eyes are busy inventorying Hodges and his passengers. Also the car, which doesn’t surprise Hodges. It’s a mighty fine car. “If you’re looking for Brady, you’re out of luck. That in the driveway is Missus Hartsfield’s car. Haven’t seen it move in weeks. Not sure it even runs anymore. Maybe Missus Hartsfield went off with him, because I haven’t seen her today. Usually I do, when she toddles out to get her post.” He points to the mailbox beside the door of 49. “She likes the catalogs. Most women do.” He extends a knuckly hand. “Hank Beeson.”
Hodges shakes it briefly, then flashes his ID, careful to keep his thumb over the expiration date. “Good to meet you, Mr. Beeson. I’m Detective Bill Hodges. Can you tell me what kind of car Mr. Hartsfield drives? Make and model?”
“It’s a brown Subaru. Can’t help you with the model or the year. All those rice-burners look the same to me.”
“Uh-huh. Have to ask you to go back to your house now, sir. We may come by to ask you a few questions later.”
“Did Brady do something wrong?”
“Just a routine call,” Hodges says. “Go on back to your house, please.”
Instead of doing that, Beeson bends lower for a look at Jerome. “Aren’t you kinda young to be on the cops?”
“I’m a trainee,” Jerome says. “Better do as Detective Hodges says, sir.”
“I’m goin, I’m goin.” But he gives the trio another stem-to-stern onceover first. “Since when do city cops drive around in Mercedes-Benzes?”
Hodges has no answer for that, but Holly does. “It’s a RICO car. RICO stands for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations. We take their stuff. We can use it any way we want because we’re the police.”
“Well, yeah. Sure. Stands to reason.” Beeson looks partly satisfied and partly mystified. But he goes back to his house, where he soon appears to them again, this time looking out a front window.
“RICO is the feds,” Hodges says mildly.
Holly tips her head fractionally toward their observer, and there’s a faint smile on her hard-used lips. “Do you think he knows that?” When neither of them answers, she becomes businesslike. “What do we do now?”
“If Hartsfield’s in there, I’m going to make a citizen’s arrest. If he’s not but his mother is, I’m going to interview her. You two are going to stay in the car.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Jerome says, but by the expression on his face—Hodges can see it in the rearview mirror—he knows this objection will be overruled.
“It’s the only one I have,” Hodges says.
He gets out of the car. Before he can close the door, Holly leans toward him and says: “There’s no one home.” He doesn’t say anything, but she nods as if he had. “Can’t you feel it?”
Actually, he can.
12
Hodges walks up the driveway, noting the drawn drapes in the big front window. He looks briefly in the Honda and sees nothing worth noting. He tries the passenger door. It opens. The air inside is hot and stale, with a faintly boozy smell. He shuts the door, climbs the porch steps, and rings the doorbell. He hears it cling-clong inside the house. Nobody comes. He tries it again, then knocks. Nobody comes. He hammers with the side of his fist, very aware that Mr. Beeson from across the street is taking all this in. Nobody comes.
He strolls to the garage and peers through one of the windows in the overhead door. A few tools, a mini-fridge, not much else.
He takes out his cell phone and calls Jerome. This block of Elm Street is very still, and he can hear—faintly—the AC/DC ringtone as the call goes through. He sees Jerome answer.
“Have Holly jump on her iPad and check the city tax records for the owner’s name at 49 Elm. Can she do that?”
He hears Jerome asking Holly.
“She says she’ll see what she can do.”
“Good. I’m going around back. Stay on the line. I’ll check in with you at roughly thirty-second intervals. If more than a minute goes by without hearing from me, call nine-one-one.”
“You positive you want to do this, Bill?”
“Yes. Be sure Holly knows that getting the name isn’t a big deal. I don’t want her getting squirrelly.”
“She’s chill,” Jerome says. “Already tapping away. Just make sure you stay in touch.”
“Count on it.”
He walks between the garage and the house. The backyard is small but neatly kept. There’s a circular bed of flowers in the middle. Hodges wonders who planted them, Mom or Sonny Boy. He mounts three wooden steps to the back stoop. There’s an aluminum screen door with another door inside. The screen door is unlocked. The house door isn’t.
“Jerome? Checking in. All quiet.”
He peers through the glass and sees a kitchen. It’s squared away. There are a few plates and glasses in the drainer by the sink. A neatly folded dishwiper hangs over the oven handle. There are two placemats on the table. No placemat for Poppa Bear, which fits the profile he has fleshed out on his yellow legal pad. He knocks, then hammers. Nobody comes.
“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.”