Mr. Mercedes (Bill Hodges Trilogy, #1)(97)

Brady looks up, frowning. That’s a special cue he programmed into his Number Three. It sounds when he’s got a message on the Blue Umbrella site, but that’s impossible. The only person he’s been communicating with via the Blue Umbrella is Kermit William Hodges, aka the fat ex-cop, aka the permanently Ret Det.

He rolls over in his office chair, paddling his feet, and stares at Number Three. The Blue Umbrella icon is now sporting a 1 in a little red circle. He clicks on it. He stares, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, at the message on his screen.


kermitfrog19 wants to chat with you!

Do you want to chat with kermitfrog19?

Y N

Brady would like to believe this message was sent last night or this morning before Hodges and the blond bimbo left his house, but he can’t. He just heard it come in.

Summoning his courage—because this is much scarier than looking into his dead mother’s eyes—he clicks Y and reads.


Missed me.



And here’s something to remember, *: I’m like your side mirror. You know, OBJECTS ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR.

I know how you got into her Mercedes, and it wasn’t the valet key. But you believed me about that, didn’t you? Sure you did. Because you’re an *.

I’ve got a list of all the other cars you burglarized between 2007 and 2009.

I’ve got other info I don’t want to share right now, but here’s something I WILL share: it’s PERP, not PERK.

Why am I telling you this? Because I’m no longer going to catch you and turn you in to the cops. Why should I? I’m not a cop anymore.

I’m going to kill you.

See you soon, mama’s boy.

Even in his shock and disbelief, it’s that last line that Brady’s eyes keep returning to.

He walks to his closet on legs that feel like stilts. Once inside with the door closed, he screams and beats his fists on the shelves. Instead of the nigger family’s dog, he managed to kill his own mother. That was bad. Now he’s managed to kill someone else instead of the cop, and that’s worse. Probably it was the blond bitch. The blond bitch wearing the Det-Ret’s hat for some weirdo reason only another blonde could understand.

One thing he is sure of: this house is no longer safe. Hodges is probably gaming him about being close, but he might not be. He knows about Thing Two. He knows about the car burglaries. He says he knows other stuff, too. And—

See you soon, mama’s boy.

He has to get out of here. Soon. Something to do first, though.

Brady goes back upstairs and into his mother’s bedroom, barely glancing at the shape under the coverlet. He goes into her bathroom and rummages in the drawers of her vanity until he finds her Lady Schick. Then he goes to work.





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.