End of Watch (Bill Hodges Trilogy #3)(12)

Actually, it does.

In the car, Holly puts the folded Inside View on the floor long enough to fasten her seatbelt, then picks it up again. Neither Pete nor Isabelle objected to her taking it. Hodges isn’t sure they even noticed. Why would they? To them, the Ellerton house isn’t really a crime scene, although the letter of the law may call it that. Pete was uneasy, true, but Hodges thinks that had little to do with cop intuition and was a quasi-superstitious response instead.

Hartsfield should have died when Holly hit him with my Happy Slapper, Hodges thinks. That would have been better for all of us.

‘Pete will go back and look at the pictures from the Frias-Countryman suicides,’ he tells Holly. ‘Due diligence, and all that. But if he finds a Z scratched somewhere – on a baseboard, on a mirror – I will be one surprised human being.’

She doesn’t reply. Her eyes are far away.

‘Holly? Are you there?’

She starts a little. ‘Yes. Just planning how I’ll locate Nancy Alderson in Chagrin Falls. It shouldn’t take too long with all the search programs I’ve got, but you’ll have to talk to her. I can do cold calls now if I absolutely have to, you know that—’

‘Yes. You’ve gotten good at it.’ Which is true, although she always makes such calls with her trusty box of Nicorette close at hand. Not to mention a stash of Twinkies in her desk for backup.

‘But I can’t be the one to tell her that her employers – her friends, for all we know – are dead. You’ll have to do it. You’re good at things like that.’

Hodges feels that nobody is very good at things like that, but doesn’t bother saying so. ‘Why? The Alderson woman wouldn’t have been there since last Friday.’

‘She deserves to know,’ Holly says. ‘The police will get in touch with any relatives, that’s their job, but they’re not going to call the housekeeper. At least I don’t think so.’

Hodges doesn’t, either, and Holly’s right – the Alderson woman deserves to know, if only so she doesn’t turn up to find an X of police tape on the door. But somehow he doesn’t think that’s Holly’s only interest in Nancy Alderson.

‘Your friend Pete and Miss Pretty Gray Eyes hardly did anything,’ Holly says. ‘There was fingerprint powder in Martine Stover’s bedroom, sure, and on her wheelchair, and in the bathroom where Mrs Ellerton killed herself, but none upstairs where she slept. They probably went up long enough to make sure there wasn’t a body stashed under the bed or in the closet, and called it good.’

‘Hold on a second. You went upstairs?’

‘Of course. Somebody needed to investigate thoroughly, and those two sure weren’t doing it. As far as they’re concerned, they know exactly what happened. Pete only called you because he was spooked.’

Spooked. Yes, that was it. Exactly the word he was looking for and hadn’t been able to find.

‘I was spooked, too,’ Holly says matter-of-factly, ‘but that doesn’t mean I lost my wits. The whole thing was wrong. Wrong wrong wrong, and you need to talk to the housekeeper. I’ll tell you what to ask her, if you can’t figure it out for yourself.’

‘Is this about the Z on the bathroom counter? If you know something I don’t, I wish you’d fill me in.’

‘It’s not what I know, it’s what I saw. Didn’t you notice what was beside that Z?’

‘A Magic Marker.’

She gives him a look that says you can do better.

Hodges calls on an old cop technique that comes in especially handy when giving trial testimony: he looks at the picture again, this time in his mind. ‘There was a power cord plugged into the wall beside the basin.’

‘Yes! At first I thought it must be for an e-reader and Mrs Ellerton left it plugged in there because she spent most of her time in that part of the house. It would be a convenient charging point, because all the plugs in Martine’s bedroom were probably in use for her life-support gear. Don’t you think so?’

‘Yeah, that could be.’

‘Only I have both a Nook and a Kindle—’

Of course you do, he thinks.

‘—and neither of them has cords like that. Those cords are black. This one was gray.’

‘Maybe she lost the original charging cord and bought a replacement at Tech Village.’ Pretty much the only game in town for electronic supplies, now that Discount Electronix, Brady Hartsfield’s old employer, has declared bankruptcy.

‘No. E-readers have prong-type plug-ins. This one was wider, like for an electronic tablet. Only my iPad also has that kind, and the one in the bathroom was much smaller. That cord was for some kind of handheld device. So I went upstairs to look for it.’

‘Where you found …?’

‘Just an old PC on a desk by the window in Mrs Ellerton’s bedroom. And I mean old. It was hooked up to a modem.’

‘Oh my God, no!’ Hodges exclaims. ‘Not a modem!’

‘This is not funny, Bill. Those women are dead.’

Hodges takes a hand from the wheel and holds it up in a peace gesture. ‘Sorry. Go on. This is the part where you tell me you powered up her computer.’

Holly looks slightly discomfited. ‘Well, yes. But only in the service of an investigation the police are clearly not going to make. I wasn’t snooping.’