Holly picked up her latte, drank half of it in large gulps, then stared off into the shadowy depths of the park with wide eyes. She checked her Fitbit. Her pulse was galloping along at a hundred and ten beats a minute, and it wasn’t just caffeine pushing it.
She went back to the Daily News archives, scrolling through May and into June, following the thread of the story. Unlike Terry Maitland, Heath Holmes had survived his arraignment, but very much like Terry (Jeannie Anderson would have called it a confluence), he would never be tried for the murders of Amber and Jolene Howard. He had committed suicide in Montgomery County Jail on June 7th.
She checked her Fitbit again and saw her pulse was now up to one-twenty. She chugged down the rest of her latte anyway. Living dangerously.
Bill, I wish you were on this with me. I wish that so much. And Jerome, him, too. The three of us would have grabbed the reins and ridden this pony until it stopped running.
But Bill was dead, Jerome was in Ireland, and she wouldn’t get any closer to figuring this out than she already was. At least not on her own. But that didn’t mean she was done in Dayton. No, not quite.
She went back to her hotel room, ordered a sandwich from room service (damn the expense) and opened her laptop. She added what she now knew to the notes she had taken during her telephone conversation with Alec Pelley. She stared at the screen, and as she scrolled back and forth, an old saying of her mother’s popped into her head: Macy’s doesn’t tell Gimbels. The police in Dayton didn’t know about Frank Peterson’s murder, and the police in Flint City didn’t know about the murders of the Howard sisters. Why would they? The killings had taken place in different regions of the country and months apart. No one knew that Terry Maitland had been in both places, and no one knew about the connection to the Heisman Memory Unit. Every case had an information highway running through it, and this one was washed out in at least two places.
‘But I know,’ Holly said. ‘At least some of it. I do. Only …’
The knock at the door made her jump. She let in the room service waiter, signed the check, added a ten per cent tip (after making sure a service gratuity was not included), and hustled him out. Then she paced the room, munching away at a BLT she hardly tasted.
What didn’t she know that could be known? She was bothered, almost haunted, by the idea that the puzzle she was trying to work had missing pieces. Not because Alec Pelley had purposely held things back, she didn’t think that at all, but possibly because there was information – vital information – that he considered unimportant.
She supposed she could call Mrs Maitland, only the woman would cry and be all sad and Holly wouldn’t know how to comfort her, she never did. Once not so long ago she had helped Jerome Robinson’s sister through a bad patch, but as a rule she was terrible at things like that. Plus, the poor woman’s mind would be fogged by her grief, and she also might neglect important facts, those little things that could make a whole picture out of the fragments, like the three or four jigsaw pieces that always seem to fall off the table and onto the floor, and you couldn’t see the whole picture until you hunted around and found them.
The person most apt to know all the details, the small ones as well as the big ones, was the detective who had done most of the witness interviews and arrested Maitland. After working with Bill Hodges, Holly believed in police detectives. Not all of them were good, to be sure; she’d had little respect for Isabelle Jaynes, Pete Huntley’s partner after Bill had retired from the force, and this one, Ralph Anderson, had made a bad mistake by arresting Maitland in a public place. A bad choice didn’t necessarily make him a bad detective, though, and Pelley had explained the crucial mitigating circumstance: Terry Maitland had been in close contact with Anderson’s son. Certainly the interviews Anderson had done seemed thorough enough. She thought he was the one most likely to have any missing pieces.
It was something to think about. In the meantime, a return visit to the Heisman Memory Unit was in order.
7
She arrived at two thirty, this time driving around to the left side of the building, where signs announced EMPLOYEE PARKING and KEEP AMBULANCE BAY CLEAR. She chose a space at the far end of the lot, backing in so she could watch the building. By two forty-five, cars began to drift in as those working the three-to-eleven shift arrived. Around three, the day shift employees – mostly orderlies, some nurses, a couple of guys in suits, which probably made them doctors – began to leave. One of the suits drove away in a Cadillac, the other in a Porsche. They were doctors, all right. She evaluated the others carefully, and settled on a target. She was a middle-aged nurse wearing a tunic covered with dancing teddy bears. Her car was an old Honda Civic with rust on the sides, a cracked taillight that had been mended with duct tape, and a fading I’M WITH HILLARY sticker on the bumper. Before getting in, she paused to light a cigarette. The car was old and cigarettes were expensive. Better and better.
Holly followed her out of the parking lot, then three miles west, the city giving way first to a pleasant suburb, then to one not so pleasant. Here the woman turned into the driveway of a tract house on a street where others just like it stood almost hip to hip, many with cheap plastic toys marooned on the little patches of lawn. Holly parked at the curb, said a brief prayer for strength, patience, and wisdom, and got out.
‘Ma’am? Nurse? Pardon me?’
The woman turned. She had the creased face and prematurely gray hair of a heavy smoker, so it was hard to tell her age. Maybe forty-five, maybe fifty. No wedding ring.
‘Can I help you?’
‘Yes, and I’ll pay for your help,’ Holly said. ‘One hundred dollars in cash, if you’ll talk to me about Heath Holmes, and his connection to Peter Maitland.’
‘Did you follow me from my job?’
‘Actually, I did.’
The woman’s brows contracted. ‘Are you a reporter? Mrs Kelly said there’d been a woman reporter around, and promised to fire anyone who talked to her.’
‘I’m the woman she mentioned, but I’m not a reporter. I’m an investigator, and Mrs Kelly will never find out you talked to me.’
‘Let me see some ID.’
Holly handed over her driver’s license and a Finders Keepers bail bondsman’s card. The woman examined them closely, then handed them back. ‘I’m Candy Wilson.’
‘It’s nice to meet you.’
‘Uh-huh, that’s good, but if I’m going to put my job on the line for you, it will cost two hundred.’ She paused, then added: ‘And fifty.’
‘All right,’ Holly said. She guessed she could talk the woman down to two hundred, maybe even a hundred and fifty, but she wasn’t good at bargaining (which her mother always called haggling). Also, this lady looked like she needed it.
‘You better come inside,’ Wilson said. ‘The neighbors on this street have long noses.’
8
The house smelled strongly of cigarettes, which made Holly really crave one for the first time in ages. Wilson plunked down in an easy chair, which, like her taillight, was mended with duct tape. Beside it was a standing ashtray of a type Holly hadn’t seen since her grandfather died (of emphysema). Wilson plucked a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of her nylon pants and flicked her Bic. She did not offer the pack to Holly, which was no surprise, given the price of smokes these days, but for which Holly was grateful, anyway. She might have taken one.
‘Money first,’ Candy Wilson said.
Holly, who had not neglected to stop at an ATM on her second trip to the Memory Unit, took her wallet from her purse and counted out the correct amount. Wilson re-counted it, then put it in her pocket with her cigarettes.