بخش 03 - فصل 16

16

Pete doesn’t say hello. What he says is, “Take it, Kerm. Take it and beat it until the truth falls out. Bitch is in the house with a couple of SKIDs, and I’m out back in a whatever-it-is. Potting shed, I think, and it’s cold as hell.”

Hodges is at first too surprised to answer, and not because a pair of SKIDs—the city cops’ acronym for State Criminal Investigation Division detectives—is on some scene Pete is working. He’s surprised (in truth almost flabbergasted) because in all their long association he’s only heard Pete use the b-word in connection with an actual woman a single time. That was when speaking of his mother-in-law, who urged Pete’s wife to leave, and took her in, along with the children, when she finally did. The bitch he’s talking about this time can only be his partner, aka Miss Pretty Gray Eyes.

“Kermit? Are you there?”

“I’m here,” Hodges says. “Where are you?”

“Sugar Heights. Dr. Felix Babineau’s house on scenic Lilac Drive. Hell, his fucking estate. You know who Babineau is, I know you do. No one kept closer tabs on Brady Hartsfield than you. For awhile there he was your fucking hobby.”

“Who you’re talking about, yes. What you’re talking about, no.”

“This whole thing is going to blow up, partner, and Izzy doesn’t want to get hit with the shrapnel when it does. She’s got ambitions, see? Chief of Detectives in ten years, maybe Chief of Police in fifteen. I get it, but that doesn’t mean I like it. She called Chief Horgan behind my back, and Horgan called the SKIDs. If it’s not officially their case now, it will be by noon. They’ve got their perp, but the shit’s not right. I know it, and Izzy does, too. She just doesn’t give a rat’s ass.”

“You need to slow down, Pete. Tell me what’s going on.”

Holly is hovering anxiously. Hodges shrugs his shoulders and raises a finger: wait.

“Housekeeper gets here at seven thirty, okay? Nora Everly by name. And at the top of the drive she sees Babineau’s BMW on the lawn, with a bullet hole in the windshield. She looks inside, sees blood on the steering wheel and the seat, calls 911. There’s a cop car five minutes away—in the Heights there’s always one five minutes away—and when it arrives, Everly’s sitting in her car with all the doors locked, shaking like a leaf. The unis tell her to stay put, and go to the door. The place is unlocked. Mrs. Babineau—Cora—is lying dead in the hall, and I’m sure the bullet the ME digs out of her will match the one forensics dug out of the Beemer. On her forehead—are you ready for this?—there’s the letter Z in black ink. More all around the downstairs, including one on the TV screen. Just like the one at the Ellerton place, and I think it was right about then my partner decided she wanted no part of this particular tarbaby.”

Hodges says, “Yeah, probably,” just to keep Pete talking. He grabs the pad beside Holly’s computer and prints BABINEAU’S WIFE MURDERED in big block letters, like a newspaper headline. Her hand flies to her mouth.

“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?”

Hodges does, but lets Pete say it.

“Brooks got it in his head that he was some avenger of justice called Z-Boy. He came here, he killed Mrs. Babineau when she opened the door, then killed the doc himself when Babineau got in his Beemer and tried to flee. Brooks then drove to the hospital and fed Hartsfield a bunch of pills from the Babineaus’ private stash. I don’t doubt that part, because they had a fucking pharmacy in their medicine cabinet. And sure, he could have gotten up to the Brain Injury Clinic without any problem, he’s got an ID card, and he’s been a hospital fixture for the last six or seven years, but why? And what did he do with Babineau’s body? Because it’s not here.”

“Good question.”

Pete plunges on. “They’ll say Brooks loaded it into his own car and ditched it somewhere, probably in a ravine or a culvert, and probably when he was coming back from feeding Hartsfield those pills, but why do that when he left the woman’s body lying right there in the hall? And why come back here in the first place?”

“They’ll say—”

“Yeah, that he’s crazy! Sure they will! Perfect answer for anything that doesn’t make sense! And if Ellerton and Stover come up at all—which they probably won’t—they’ll say he killed them, too!”

If they do, Hodges thinks, Nancy Alderson will backstop the story, at least to a degree. Because it was undoubtedly Library Al that she saw watching the house on Hilltop Court.

“They’ll hang Brooks out to dry, wade through the press coverage, and call it good. But there’s more to it, Kerm. Got to be. If you know anything, if you’ve got even a single thread to pull, pull it. Promise me you will.”

I have more than one, Hodges thinks, but Babineau’s the key, and Babineau has disappeared.

“How much blood was in the car, Pete?”

“Not a lot, but forensics has already confirmed it’s Babineau’s type. That’s not conclusive, but . . . shit. I gotta go. Izzy and one of the SKID guys just came out the back door. They’re looking for me.”

“All right.”

“Call me. And if you need anything I can access, let me know.”

“I will.”

Hodges ends the call and looks up, wanting to fill Holly in, but Holly is no longer beside him.

“Bill.” Her voice is low. “Come in here.”

Puzzled, he walks to the door of his office, where he stops dead. Jerome is behind the desk, sitting in Hodges’s swivel chair. His long legs are splayed out and he’s looking at Dinah Scott’s Zappit. His eyes are wide open but empty. His mouth hangs ajar. There are fine drops of spittle on his lower lip. A tune is tinkling from the gadget’s tiny speaker, but not the same tune as last night—Hodges is sure of it.

“Jerome?” He takes a step forward, but before he can take another, Holly grabs him by the belt. Her grip is surprisingly strong.

“No,” she says in the same low voice. “You shouldn’t startle him. Not when he’s like that.”

“What, then?”

“I had a year of hypnotherapy when I was in my thirties. I was having problems with . . . well, never mind what I was having problems with. Let me try.”

“Are you sure?”

She looks at him, her face now pale, her eyes fearful. “No, but we can’t leave him like that. Not after what happened to Barbara.”

The Zappit in Jerome’s limp hands gives off a bright blue flash. Jerome doesn’t react, doesn’t blink, only continues staring at the screen while the music tinkles.

Holly takes a step forward, then another. “Jerome?”

No answer.

“Jerome, can you hear me?”

“Yes,” Jerome says, not looking up from the screen.

“Jerome, where are you?”

And Jerome says, “At my funeral. Everyone is there. It’s beautiful.”