Stephen King: End of Watch

Not any of his people. Hodges’s stomach muscles, tightened as if to absorb a blow, loosen. Although the steady ache that’s brought him to Stamos is still there. ‘Of course she is. Because she’s younger. You start to lose brain cells by the millions after you turn sixty, a phenomenon you’ll be able to experience for yourself in another couple of years. Why would you want an old carthorse like me at a murder scene?’

‘Because this is probably my last case, because it’s going to blow up big in the papers, and because – don’t swoon – I actually value your input. Gibney’s, too. And in a weird way, you’re both connected. That’s probably a coincidence, but I’m not entirely sure.’

‘Connected how?’

‘Does the name Martine Stover ring a bell?’

For a moment it doesn’t, then it clicks in. On a foggy morning in 2009, a maniac named Brady Hartsfield drove a stolen Mercedes-Benz into a crowd of job-seekers at City Center, downtown. He killed eight and seriously injured fifteen. In the course of their investigation, Detectives K. William Hodges and Peter Huntley interviewed a great many of those who had been present on that foggy morning, including all the wounded survivors. Martine Stover had been the toughest to talk to, and not only because her disfigured mouth made her all but impossible to understand for anyone except her mother. Stover was paralyzed from the chest down. Later, Hartsfield had written Hodges an anonymous letter. In it he referred to her as ‘your basic head on a stick.’ What made that especially cruel was the radioactive nugget of truth inside the ugly joke.

‘I can’t see a quadriplegic as a murderer, Pete… outside an episode of Criminal Minds , that is. So I assume—?’

‘Yeah, the mother was the doer. First she offed Stover, then herself. Coming?’

Hodges doesn’t hesitate. ‘I am. I’ll pick up Holly on the way. What’s the address?’

‘1601 Hilltop Court. In Ridgedale.’

Ridgedale is a commuter suburb north of the city, not as pricey as Sugar Heights, but still pretty nice.

‘I can be there in forty minutes, assuming Holly’s at the office.’

And she will be. She’s almost always at her desk by eight, sometimes as early as seven, and apt to be there until Hodges yells at her to go home, fix herself some supper, and watch a movie on her computer. Holly Gibney is the main reason Finders Keepers is in the black. She’s an organizational genius, she’s a computer wizard, and the job is her life. Well, along with Hodges and the Robinson family, especially Jerome and Barbara. Once, when Jerome and Barbie’s mom called Holly an honorary Robinson, she lit up like the sun on a summer afternoon. It’s a thing Holly does more often than she used to, but still not enough to suit Hodges.

‘That’s great, Kerm. Thanks.’

‘Have the bodies been transported?’

‘Off to the morgue as we speak, but Izzy’s got all the pictures on her iPad.’ He’s talking about Isabelle Jaynes, who has been Pete’s partner since Hodges retired.

‘Okay. I’ll bring you an éclair.’

‘There’s a whole bakery here already. Where are you, by the way?’

‘Nowhere important. I’ll get with you as soon as I can.’

Hodges ends the call and hurries down the hall to the elevator.

Dr Stamos’s eight-forty-five patient finally reappears from the exam area at the back. Mr Hodges’s appointment was for nine, and it’s now nine thirty. The poor guy is probably impatient to do his business here and get rolling with the rest of his day. She looks out in the hall and sees Hodges talking on his cell.

Marlee rises and peeks into Stamos’s office. He’s sitting behind his desk with a folder open in front of him. KERMIT WILLIAM HODGESis computer-printed on the tab. The doctor is studying something in the folder and rubbing his temple, as though he has a headache.

‘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.

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.’