End of Watch (Bill Hodges Trilogy #3)(6)

‘Dr Stamos? Shall I call Mr Hodges in?’

He looks up at her, startled, then at his desk clock. ‘Oh God, yes. Mondays suck, huh?’

‘Can’t trust that day,’ she says, and turns to go.

‘I love my job, but I hate this part of it,’ Stamos says.

It’s Marlee’s turn to be startled. She turns to look at him.

‘Never mind. Talking to myself. Send him in. Let’s get this over with.’

Marlee looks out into the hall just in time to see the elevator door closing at the far end.





4


Hodges calls Holly from the parking garage next to the medical center, and when he gets to the Turner Building on Lower Marlborough, where their office is located, she’s standing out front with her briefcase planted between her sensible shoes. Holly Gibney: late forties now, tallish and slim, brown hair usually scrooped back in a tight bun, this morning wearing a bulky North Face parka with the hood up and framing her small face. You’d call that face plain, Hodges thinks, until you saw the eyes, which are beautiful and full of intelligence. And you might not really see them for a long time, because as a rule, Holly Gibney doesn’t do eye contact.

Hodges slides his Prius to the curb and she jumps in, taking off her gloves and holding her hands up to the passenger-side heating vent. ‘It took you a very long time to get here.’

‘Fifteen minutes. I was on the other side of town. I caught all the red lights.’

‘It was eighteen minutes,’ Holly informs him as Hodges pulls into traffic. ‘Because you were speeding, which is counterproductive. If you keep your speed to exactly twenty miles an hour, you can catch almost all the lights. They’re timed. I’ve told you that several times. Now tell me what the doctor said. Did you get an A on your tests?’

Hodges considers his options, which are only two: tell the truth or prevaricate. Holly nagged him into going to the doctor because he’s been having stomach issues. Just pressure at first, now some pain. Holly may have personality problems, but she’s a very efficient nagger. Like a dog with a bone, Hodges sometimes thinks.

‘The results weren’t back yet.’ This is not quite a lie, he tells himself, because they weren’t back to me yet.

She looks at him doubtfully as he merges onto the Crosstown Expressway. Hodges hates it when she looks at him that way.

‘I’ll keep after this,’ he says. ‘Trust me.’

‘I do,’ she says. ‘I do, Bill.’

That makes him feel even worse.

She bends, opens her briefcase, and takes out her iPad. ‘I looked up some stuff while I was waiting for you. Want to hear it?’

‘Hit me.’

‘Martine Stover was fifty at the time Brady Hartsfield crippled her, which would make her fifty-six as of today. I suppose she could be fifty-seven, but since this is only January, I think that’s very unlikely, don’t you?’

‘Odds are against, all right.’

‘At the time of the City Center event, she was living with her mother in a house on Sycamore Street. Not far from Brady Hartsfield and his mother, which is sort of ironic when you think of it.’

Also close to Tom Saubers and his family, Hodges muses. He and Holly had a case involving the Saubers family not long ago, and that one also had a connection to what the local newspaper had taken to calling the Mercedes Massacre. There were all sorts of connections, when you thought about it, perhaps the strangest being that the car Hartsfield had used as a murder weapon belonged to Holly Gibney’s cousin.

‘How does an elderly woman and her severely crippled daughter make the jump from the Tree Streets to Ridgedale?’

‘Insurance. Martine Stover had not one or two whopping big policies, but three. She was sort of a freak about insurance.’ Hodges reflects that only Holly could say that approvingly. ‘There were several articles about her afterward, because she was the most badly hurt of those who survived. She said she knew that if she didn’t get a job at City Center, she’d have to start cashing her policies in, one by one. After all, she was a single woman with a widowed, unemployed mother to support.’

‘Who ended up taking care of her.’

Holly nods. ‘Very strange, very sad. But at least there was a financial safety net, which is the purpose of insurance. They even moved up in the world.’

‘Yes,’ Hodges says, ‘but now they’re out of it.’

To this Holly makes no reply. Up ahead is the Ridgedale exit. Hodges takes it.





5


Pete Huntley has put on weight, his belly hanging over his belt buckle, but Isabelle Jaynes is as smashing as ever in her tight faded jeans and blue blazer. Her misty gray eyes go from Hodges to Holly and then back to Hodges again.

‘You’ve gotten thin,’ she says. This could be either a compliment or an accusation.

‘He’s having stomach problems, so he had some tests,’ Holly says. ‘The results were supposed to be in today, but—’

‘Let’s not go there, Hols,’ Hodges says. ‘This isn’t a medical consultation.’

‘You two are more like an old married couple every day,’ Izzy says.

Holly replies in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘Marriage to Bill would spoil our working relationship.’