بخش 02 - فصل 21

21

When Holly comes back, she’s got her iPad. ‘Mission accomplished. They’re off to Teaberry Lane on the Number Four.’

‘How did the Saubers girl seem?’

‘Much better. She and Barbara were practicing some dance step they learned on TV while we waited for the bus. They tried to get me to do it with them.’

‘And did you?’

‘No. Homegirl don’t dance.’

She doesn’t smile when she says this, but she still might be joking. He knows she sometimes does these days, but it’s always hard to tell. Much of Holly Gibney is still a mystery to Hodges, and he guesses that will always be the case.

‘Will Barb’s mom get the story out of them, do you think? She’s pretty perceptive, and a weekend can be a long time when you’re sitting on a big secret.’

‘Maybe, but I don’t think so,’ Holly says. ‘Tina was a lot more relaxed once she got it off her chest.’

Hodges smiles. ‘If she was dancing at the bus stop, I guess she was. So what do you think, Holly?’

‘About which part?’

‘Let’s start with the money.’

She taps at her iPad, brushing absently at her hair to keep it out of her eyes. ‘It started coming in February of 2010, and stopped in September of last year. That’s forty-four months. If the brother—’

‘Pete.’

‘If Pete sent his parents five hundred dollars a month over that period, that comes to twenty-two thousand dollars. Give or take. Not exactly a fortune, but—’

‘But a mighty lot for a kid,’ Hodges finishes. ‘Especially if he started sending it when he was Tina’s age.’

They look at each other. That she will sometimes meet his gaze like this is, in a way, the most extraordinary part of her change from the terrified woman she was when he first met her. After a silence of perhaps five seconds, they speak at the same time.

‘So—’ ‘How did—’

‘You first,’ Hodges says, laughing.

Without looking at him (it’s a thing she can only do in short bursts, even when she’s absorbed by some problem), Holly says, ‘That conversation he had with Tina about buried treasure – gold and jewels and doubloons. I think that’s important. I don’t think he stole that money. I think he found it.’

‘Must have. Very few thirteen-year-olds pull bank jobs, no matter how desperate they are. But where does a kid stumble across that kind of loot?’

‘I don’t know. I can craft a computer search with a timeline and get a dump of cash robberies, I suppose. We can be pretty sure it happened before 2010, if he found the money in February of that year. Twenty-two thousand dollars is a large enough haul to have been reported in the papers, but what’s the search protocol? What are the parameters? How far back should I go? Five years? Ten? I bet an info dump going back to just oh-five would be pretty big, because I’d need to search the whole tristate area. Don’t you think so?’

‘You’d only get a partial catch even if you searched the whole Midwest.’ Hodges is thinking of Oliver Madden, who probably conned hundreds of people and dozens of organizations during the course of his career. He was an expert when it came to creating false bank accounts, but Hodges is betting that Ollie didn’t put much trust in banks when it came to his own money. No, he would have wanted a cushy cash reserve.

‘Why only partial?’

‘You’re thinking about banks, check-cashing joints, fast credit outfits. Maybe the dog track or the concession take from a Groundhogs game. But it might not have been public money. The thief or thieves could have knocked over a high-stakes poker game or ripped off a meth dealer over on Edgemont Avenue in Hillbilly Heaven. For all we know, the cash could have come from a home invasion in Atlanta or San Diego or anyplace in between. Cash from that kind of theft might not even have been reported.’

‘Especially if it was never reported to Internal Revenue in the first place,’ Holly says. ‘Right right right. So where does that leave us?’

‘Needing to talk to Peter Saubers, and frankly, I can’t wait. I thought I’d seen it all, but I’ve never seen anything like this.’

‘You could talk to him tonight. He’s not going on his class trip until tomorrow. I took Tina’s phone number. I could call her and get her brother’s.’

‘No, let’s let him have his weekend. He’s probably left already. Maybe it will calm him down, give him time to think. And let Tina have hers. Monday afternoon will be soon enough.’

‘What about the black notebook she saw? The Moleskine? Any ideas about that?’

‘Probably has nothing at all to do with the money. Could be his 50 Shades of Fun fantasy journal about the girl who sits behind him in homeroom.’

Holly makes a hmph sound to show what she thinks of that and begins to pace. ‘You know what bugs me? The lag.’

‘The lag?’

‘The money stopped coming last September, along with a note that said he’s sorry there isn’t more. But as far as we know, Peter didn’t start getting weird until April or May of this year. For seven months he’s fine, then he grows a moustache and starts exhibiting symptoms of anxiety. What happened? Any ideas on that?’

One possibility stands out. ‘He decided he wanted more money, maybe so his sister could go to Barbara’s school. He thought he knew a way to get it, but something went wrong.’

‘Yes! That’s what I think, too!’ She crosses her arms over her breasts and cups her elbows, a self-comforting gesture Hodges has seen often. ‘I wish Tina had seen what was in that notebook, though. The Moleskine notebook.’

‘Is that a hunch, or are you following some chain of logic I don’t see?’

‘I’d like to know why he was so anxious for her not to see it, that’s all.’ Having successfully evaded Hodges’s question, she heads for the door. ‘I’m going to build a computer search on robberies between 2001 and 2009. I know it’s a longshot, but it’s a place to start. What are you going to do?’

‘Go home. Think this over. Tomorrow I’m repo’ing cars and looking for a bail-jumper named Dejohn Frasier, who is almost certainly staying with his stepmom or ex-wife. Also, I’ll watch the Indians and possibly go to a movie.’

Holly lights up. ‘Can I go to the movies with you?’

‘If you like.’

‘Can I pick?’

‘Only if you promise not to drag me to some idiotic romantic comedy with Jennifer Aniston.’

‘Jennifer Aniston is a very fine actress and a badly underrated comedienne. Did you know she was in the original Leprechaun movie, back in 1993?’

‘Holly, you’re a font of information, but you’re dodging the issue here. Promise me no rom-com, or I go on my own.’

‘I’m sure we can find something mutually agreeable,’ Holly says, not quite meeting his eyes. ‘Will Tina’s brother be all right? You don’t think he’d really try to kill himself, do you?’

‘Not based on his actions. He put himself way out on a limb for his family. Guys like that, ones with empathy, usually aren’t suicidal. Holly, does it seem strange to you that the little girl figured out Peter was behind the money, and their parents don’t seem to have a clue?’

The light in Holly’s eyes goes out, and for a moment she looks very much like the Holly of old, the one who spent most of her adolescence in her room, the kind of neurotic isolate the Japanese call hikikomori.

‘Parents can be very stupid,’ she says, and goes out.

Well, Hodges thinks, yours certainly were, I think we can agree on that.

He goes to the window, clasps his hands behind his back, and stares out at lower Marlborough, where the afternoon rush hour traffic is building. He wonders if Holly has considered the second plausible source of the boy’s anxiety: that the mokes who hid the money have come back and found it gone.

And have somehow found out who took it.