بخش 03 - فصل 07

7

Hodges spends the evening slowly eating his yogurt and watching the Weather Channel. The winter storm, ridiculously dubbed Eugenie by the Weather Channel wonks, is still coming and is expected to hit the city sometime late tomorrow.

“Hard to be more exact as of now,” the balding, bespectacled wonk says to the knockout blond wonk in the red dress. “This one gives new meaning to the term stop-and-go traffic.”

The knockout wonk laughs as if her partner in meteorology has said something outrageously witty, and Hodges uses the remote to turn them off.

The zapper, he thinks, looking at it. That’s what everyone calls these things. Quite the invention, when you stop to think of it. You can access hundreds of different channels by remote control. Never even have to get up. As if you’re inside the television instead of in your chair. Or in both places at the same time. Sort of a miracle, really.

As he goes into the bathroom to brush his teeth, his cell phone buzzes. He looks at the screen and has to laugh, even though it hurts to do it. Now that he’s in the privacy of his own home, with nobody to be bothered by the home run text alert, his old partner calls instead.

“Hey, Pete, nice to know you still remember my number.”

Pete has no time for banter. “I’m going to tell you something, Kermit, and if you decide to run with it, I’m like Sergeant Schultz on Hogan’s Heroes. Remember him?”

“Sure.” What Hodges feels in his gut right now isn’t a pain-cramp, but one of excitement. Weird how similar they are. “I know nothing.”

“Right. It has to be that way, because as far as this department is concerned, the murder of Martine Stover and the suicide of her mother is officially a closed case. We are certainly not going to reopen it because of a coincidence, and that’s right from the top. Are we clear on that?”

“As glass,” Hodges says. “What’s the coincidence?”

“The head nurse in the Kiner Brain Injury Clinic committed suicide last night. Ruth Scapelli.”

“I heard,” Hodges says.

“While on one of your pilgrimages to visit the delightful Mr. Hartsfield, I presume.”

“Yeah.” No need to tell Pete that he never got in to see the delightful Mr. Hartsfield.

“Scapelli had one of those game gadgets. A Zappit. She apparently threw it in the trash before she bled out. One of the forensics guys found it.”

“Huh.” Hodges goes back into the living room and sits down, wincing when his body folds in the middle. “And that’s your idea of a coincidence?”

“Not necessarily mine,” Pete says heavily.

“But?”

“But I just want to retire in peace, goddammit! If there’s a ball to carry on this one, Izzy can carry it.”

“But Izzy don’t want to carry no steenkin ball.”

“No. Neither does the captain, or the commish.”

Hearing this, Hodges is forced to slightly revise his opinion of his old partner as a burnt-out case. “You actually spoke to them? Tried to keep this thing alive?”

“To the captain. Over Izzy Jaynes’s objections, may I add. Her strident objections. The captain talked to the commish. Late this evening I got the word to drop it, and you know why.”

“Yeah. Because it connects to Brady two ways. Martine Stover was one of his City Center victims. Ruth Scapelli was his nurse. It would take a moderately bright reporter about six minutes to put those things together and stir up a nice fat scare story. That’s what you got from Captain Pedersen?”

“That’s what I got. No one in police administration wants the spotlight back on Hartsfield, not when he’s still judged incompetent to assist in his own defense and thus unable to stand trial. Hell, no one in city government wants it.”

Hodges is silent, thinking hard—maybe as hard as ever in his life. He learned the phrase to cross the Rubicon way back in high school, and grasped its meaning without Mrs. Bradley’s explanation: to make an irrevocable decision. What he learned later, sometimes to his sorrow, is that one comes upon most Rubicons unprepared. If he tells Pete that Barbara Robinson also had a Zappit and may also have had suicide on her mind when she left school and went to Lowtown, Pete will almost have to go back to Pedersen. Two Zappit-related suicides can be written off as coincidence, but three? And okay, Barbara didn’t actually succeed, thank God, but she’s another person with a connection to Brady. She was at the ’Round Here concert, after all. Along with Hilda Carver and Dinah Scott, who also received Zappits. But are the police capable of believing what he’s starting to believe? It’s an important question, because Hodges loves Barbara Robinson and does not want to see her privacy violated without some concrete result to show for it.

“Kermit? Are you there?”

“Yeah. Just thinking. Did the Scapelli woman have any visitors last night?”

“Can’t tell you, because the neighbors haven’t been interviewed. It was a suicide, not a murder.”

“Olivia Trelawney also committed suicide,” Hodges says. “Remember?”

It’s Pete’s turn to be silent. Of course he remembers, and he also remembers it was an assisted suicide. Hartsfield planted a nasty malware worm in her computer, made her think she was being haunted by the ghost of a young mother killed at City Center. It helped that most people in the city had come to believe Olivia Trelawney’s carelessness with her ignition key was partially responsible for the massacre.

“Brady always enjoyed—”

“I know what he always enjoyed,” Pete says. “No need to belabor the point. I’ve got one other scrap for you, if you want it.”

“Hit me.”

“I spoke to Nancy Alderson around five this afternoon.”

Good for you, Pete, Hodges thinks. Doing a little more than punching the clock in your last few weeks.

“She said that Mrs. Ellerton already bought her daughter a new computer. For her online class. Said it’s under the basement stairs, still in the carton. Ellerton was going to give it to Martine for her birthday next month.”

“Planning for the future, in other words. Not the act of a suicidal woman, is it?”

“No, I wouldn’t say so. I have to go, Kerm. The ball is in your court. Play it or let it lie. Up to you.”

“Thanks, Pete. I appreciate the heads-up.”

“I wish it was like the old days,” Pete says. “We would have gone after this thing and let the chips fall.”

“But it’s not.” Hodges is rubbing his side again.

“No. It’s not. You take care of yourself. Put on some goddam weight.”

“I’ll give it my best shot,” Hodges says, but he’s talking to no one. Pete is gone.

He brushes his teeth, takes a painkiller, and climbs slowly into his pajamas. Then he goes to bed and stares up into the darkness, waiting for sleep or morning, whichever comes first.