Mr. Mercedes (Unnamed Trilogy #1)(97)

24

Hodges is in Interrogation Room 4 again—IR4, his lucky room—but this time he’s on the wrong side of the table, facing Pete Huntley and Pete’s new partner, a stunner with long red hair and eyes of misty gray. The interrogation is collegial, but that doesn’t change the basic facts: his car has been blown up and a woman has been killed. Another fact is that an interrogation is an interrogation.

“Did it have anything to do with the Mercedes Killer?” Pete asks. “What do you think, Billy? I mean, that’s the most likely, wouldn’t you say? Given the vic was Olivia Trelawney’s sister?”

There it is: the vic. The woman he slept with after he’d come to a point in his life where he thought he’d never sleep with any woman again. The woman who made him laugh and gave him comfort, the woman who was his partner in this last investigation as much as Pete Huntley ever was. The woman who wrinkled her nose at him and mocked his yeah.

Don’t you ever let me hear you call them the vics, Frank Sledge told him, back in the old days . . . but right now he has to take it.

“I don’t see how it can,” he says mildly. “I know how it looks, but sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and a coincidence is just a coincidence.”

“How did you—” Isabelle Jaynes begins, then shakes her head. “That’s the wrong question. Why did you meet her? Were you investigating the City Center thing on your own?” Playing the uncle on a grand scale is what she doesn’t say, perhaps in deference to Pete. After all, it’s Pete’s old running buddy they’re questioning, this chunky man in rumpled suit pants and a blood-spotted white shirt, the tie he put on this morning now pulled halfway down his big chest.

“Could I have a drink of water before we get started? I’m still shook up. She was a nice lady.”

Janey was a hell of a lot more than that, but the cold part of his mind, which is—for the time being—keeping the hot part in a cage, tells him this is the right way to go, the route that will lead into the rest of his story the way a narrow entrance ramp leads to a four-lane highway. Pete gets up and goes out. Isabelle says nothing until he gets back, just regards Hodges with those misty gray eyes.

Hodges drinks half the paper cup in a swallow, then says, “Okay. It goes back to that lunch we had at DeMasio’s, Pete. Remember?”

“Sure.”

“I asked you about all the cases we were working—the big ones, I mean—when I retired, but the one I was really interested in was the City Center Massacre. I think you knew that.”

Pete says nothing, but smiles slightly.

“Do you remember me asking if you ever wondered about Mrs. Trelawney? Specifically if she was telling the truth about not having an extra key?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What I was really wondering was if we gave her a fair shake. If we were wearing blinders because of how she was.”

“What do you mean, how she was?” Isabelle asks.

“A pain in the ass. Twitchy and haughty and quick to take offense. To get a little perspective, turn it around a minute and think of all the people who believed Donald Davis when he claimed he was innocent. Why? Because he wasn’t twitchy and haughty and quick to take offense. He could really put that grief-stricken haunted-husband thing across, and he was good-looking. I saw him on Channel Six once, and that pretty blond anchor’s thighs were practically squeezing together.”

“That’s disgusting,” Isabelle says, but she says it with a smile.

“Yeah, but true. He was a charmer. Olivia Trelawney, on the other hand, was an anti-charmer. So I started to wonder if we ever gave her story a fair shot.”

“We did.” Pete says it flatly.

“Maybe we did. Anyway, there I am, retired, with time on my hands. Too much time. And one day—just before I asked you to lunch, Pete—I say to myself, Assume she was telling the truth. If so, where was that second key? And then—this was right after our lunch—I went on the Internet and started to do some research. And do you know what I came across? A techno-fiddle called ‘stealing the peek.’”

“What’s that?” Isabelle asks.

“Oh, man,” Pete says. “You really think some computer genius stole her key-signal? Then just happened to find her spare key stowed in the glove compartment or under the seat? Her spare key that she forgot? That’s pretty far-fetched, Bill. Especially when you add in that the woman’s picture could have been next to Type A in the dictionary.”

Calmly, as if he had not used his jacket to cover the severed arm of a woman he loved not three hours before, Hodges summarizes what Jerome found out about stealing the peek, representing it as his own research. He tells them that he went to the Lake Avenue condo to interview Olivia Trelawney’s mother (“If she was still alive—I didn’t know for sure”) and found Olivia’s sister, Janelle, living there. He leaves out his visit to the mansion in Sugar Heights and his conversation with Radney Peeples, the Vigilant security guard, because that might lead to questions he’d be hard-pressed to answer. They’ll find out in time, but he’s close to Mr. Mercedes now, he knows he is. A little time is all he needs.

He hopes.

“Ms. Patterson told me her mother was in a nursing home about thirty miles from here—Sunny Acres. She offered to go up there with me and make the introduction. So I could ask a few questions.”