Mr. Mercedes (Unnamed Trilogy #1)(41)

It probably would, but Hodges doesn’t care for the idea. Too many prospective buyers tromping in and out. Which is probably stupid, but there it is.

“Do you have a safe-deposit box?”

“No, but I could rent one. I use Bank of America, just two blocks over.”

“I’d like that better,” Hodges says, going to the door.

“Thank you for doing this,” she says, and holds out both of her hands. As if he has asked her to dance. “You don’t know what a relief it is.”

He takes the offered hands, squeezes them lightly, then lets go, although he would have been happy to hold them longer.

“Two other things. First, your mother. How often do you visit her?”

“Every other day or so. Sometimes I take her food from the Iranian restaurant she and Ollie liked—the Sunny Acres kitchen staff is happy to warm it up—and sometimes I bring her a DVD or two. She likes the oldies, like with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. I always bring her something, and she’s always happy to see me. On her good days she does see me. On her bad ones, she’s apt to call me Olivia. Or Charlotte. That’s my aunt. I also have an uncle.”

“The next time she has a good day, you ought to call me so I can go see her.”

“All right. I’ll go with you. What’s the other thing?”

“This lawyer you mentioned. Schron. Did he strike you as competent?”

“Sharpest knife in the drawer, that was my impression.”

“If I do find something out, maybe even put a name on the guy, we’re going to need someone like that. We’ll go see him, we’ll turn over the letters—”

“Letters? I only found the one.”

Hodges thinks Ah, shit, then regroups. “The letter and the copy, I mean.”

“Oh, right.”

“If I find the guy, it’s the job of the police to arrest him and charge him. Schron’s job is to make sure we don’t get arrested for going off the reservation and investigating on our own.”

“That would be criminal law, isn’t it? I’m not sure he does that kind.”

“Probably not, but if he’s good, he’ll know somebody who does. Someone who’s just as good as he is. Are we agreed on that? We have to be. I’m willing to poke around, but if this turns into police business, we let the police take over.”

“I’m fine with that,” Janey says. Then she stands on tiptoe, puts her hands on the shoulders of his too-tight coat, and plants a kiss on his cheek. “I think you’re a good guy, Bill. And the right guy for this.”

He feels that kiss all the way down in the elevator. A lovely little warm spot. He’s glad he took pains about shaving before leaving the house.

11

The silver rain falls without end, but the young couple—lovers? friends?—are safe and dry under the blue umbrella that belongs to someone, likely a fictional someone, named Debbie. This time Hodges notices that it’s the boy who appears to be speaking, and the girl’s eyes are slightly widened, as if in surprise. Maybe he’s just proposed to her?

Jerome pops this romantic thought like a balloon. “Looks like a  p**n  site, doesn’t it?”

“Now what would a young pre–Ivy Leaguer like yourself know about  p**n  sites?”

They are seated side by side in Hodges’s study, looking at the Blue Umbrella start-up page. Odell, Jerome’s Irish setter, is lying on his back behind them, rear legs splayed, tongue hanging from one side of his mouth, staring at the ceiling with a look of good-humored contemplation. Jerome brought him on a leash, but only because that’s the law inside the city limits. Odell knows enough to stay out of the street and is about as harmless to passersby as a dog can be.

“I know what you know and what everybody with a computer knows,” Jerome says. In his khaki slacks and button-down Ivy League shirt, his hair a close-cropped cap of curls, he looks to Hodges like a young Barack Obama, only taller. Jerome is six-five. And around him is the faint, pleasantly nostalgic aroma of Old Spice aftershave. “Porn sites are thicker than flies on roadkill. You surf the Net, you can’t help bumping into them. And the ones with the innocent-sounding names are the ones most apt to be loaded.”

“Loaded how?”

“With the kinds of images that can get you arrested.”

“Kiddie  p**n , you mean.”

“Or torture  p**n . Ninety-nine percent of the whips-and-chains stuff is faked. The other one percent . . .” Jerome shrugs.

“And you know this how?”

Jerome gives him a look—straight, frank, and open. Not an act, just the way he is, and what Hodges likes most about the kid. His mother and father are the same way. Even his little sis.

“Mr. Hodges, everybody knows. If they’re under thirty, that is.”

“Back in the day, people used to say don’t trust anyone over thirty.”

Jerome smiles. “I trust em, but when it comes to computers, an awful lot of em are clueless. They beat up their machines, then expect em to work. They open bareback email attachments. They go to websites like this, and all at once their computer goes HAL 9000 and starts downloading pictures of teenage escorts or terrorist videos that show people getting their heads chopped off.”

It was on the tip of Hodge’s tongue to ask who Hal 9000 is—it sounds like a gangbanger tag to him—but the thing about terrorist videos diverts him. “That actually happens?”