Stephen King - End of Watch

‘They create the same pattern, over and over. Ignore the slight variations, you said, and look for the underlying sameness. Because even the smartest doers – like Turnpike Joe, who killed all those women at rest stops – seem to have a switch inside their brains that’s stuck on Repeat. Brady Hartsfield was a connoisseur of suicide—’

‘He was an architect of suicide,’ Holly says. She’s looking down at the newspaper, her brow furrowed, her face paler than ever. It’s hard for Hodges to relive the Hartsfield business (at least he’s finally managed to quit going to see the son of a bitch in his room in the Brain Injury Clinic), but it’s even harder for Holly. He hopes she won’t backslide and start smoking again, but it wouldn’t surprise him if she did.

‘Call it what you want, but the pattern was there. He goaded his own mother into suicide, for Christ’s sake.’

Hodges says nothing to this, although he has always doubted Pete’s belief that Deborah Hartsfield killed herself when she discovered – perhaps by accident – that her son was the Mercedes Killer. For one thing, they have no proof that Mrs Hartsfield ever did find out. For another, it was gopher poison the woman ingested, and that had to be a nasty way to go. It’s possible that Brady murdered his mother, but Hodges has never really believed that, either. If he loved anyone, it was her. Hodges thinks the gopher poison might have been intended for someone else… and perhaps not for a person at all. According to the autopsy, it had been mixed in with hamburger, and if there was anything dogs liked, it was a ball of raw ground meat.

The Robinsons have a dog, a loveable floppy-eared mutt. Brady would have seen him many times, because he was watching Hodges’s house and because Jerome usually brought the dog along when he cut Hodges’s lawn. The gopher poison could have been meant for Odell. This is an idea Hodges has never mentioned to any of the Robinsons. Or to Holly, for that matter. And hey, it’s probably bullshit, but in Hodges’s opinion, it’s as likely as Pete’s idea that Brady’s mom offed herself.

Izzy opens her mouth, then shuts it when Pete holds up a hand to forestall her – he is, after all, still the senior member of their partnership, and by quite a few years.

‘Izzy’s getting ready to say Martine Stover was murder, not suicide, but I think there’s a very good chance that the idea came from Martine herself, or that she and her mother talked it over and came to a mutual agreement. Which makes them both suicides in my book, even though it won’t get written up that way in the official report.’

‘I assume you’ve checked on the other City Center survivors?’ Hodges asks.

‘All alive except for Gerald Stansbury, who died just after Thanksgiving last year,’ Pete says. ‘Had a heart attack. His wife told me coronary disease runs in his family, and that he lived longer than both his father and brother. Izzy’s right, this is probably nothing, but I thought you and Holly should know.’ He looks at each of them in turn. ‘ You haven’t had any bad thoughts about pulling the pin, have you?’

‘No,’ Hodges says. ‘Not lately.’

Holly merely shakes her head, still looking down at the newspaper.

Hodges asks, ‘I don’t suppose anyone found a mysterious letter Z in young Mr Frias’s bedroom after he and Ms Countryman committed suicide?’

‘Of course not,’ Izzy says.

‘That you know of,’ Hodges corrects. ‘Isn’t that what you mean? Considering you just found this one today?’

‘Jesus please us,’ Izzy says. ‘This is silly.’ She looks pointedly at her watch and stands.

Pete gets up, too. Holly remains seated, looking down at her filched copy of Inside View . Hodges also stays put, at least for the moment. ‘You’ll go back to the Frias-Countryman photos, right, Pete? Check it out, just to be sure?’

‘Yes,’ Pete says. ‘And Izzy’s probably right, I was silly to get you two out here.’

‘I’m glad you did.’

‘And… I still feel bad about the way we handled Mrs Trelawney, okay?’ Pete is looking at Hodges, but Hodges has an idea he’s really speaking to the thin, pale woman with the junk newspaper in her lap. ‘I never once doubted that she left her key in the ignition. I closed my mind to any other possibility. I promised myself I’d never do that again.’

‘I understand,’ Hodges says.

‘One thing I believe we all can agree on,’ Izzy says, ‘is that Hartsfield’s days of running people down, blowing people up, and architecting suicides are behind him. So unless we’ve all stumbled into a movie called Son of Brady , I suggest we exit the late Ms Ellerton’s house and get on with our lives. Any objections to that idea?’

There are none.

Hodges and Holly stand in the driveway for a moment before getting into the car, letting the cold January wind rush past them. It’s out of the north, blowing straight down from Canada, so the usually present smell of the large, polluted lake to the east is refreshingly absent. There are only a few houses at this end of Hilltop Court, and the closest has a FOR SALE sign on it. Hodges notices that Tom Saubers is the agent, and he smiles. Tom was also badly hurt in the Massacre, but has come almost all the way back. Hodges is always amazed by the resilience of which some men and women are capable. It doesn’t exactly give him hope for the human race, but…

Actually, it does.

In the car, Holly puts the folded Inside View on the floor long enough to fasten her seatbelt, then picks it up again. Neither Pete nor Isabelle objected to her taking it. Hodges isn’t sure they even noticed. Why would they? To them, the Ellerton house isn’t really a crime scene, although the letter of the law may call it that. Pete was uneasy, true, but Hodges thinks that had little to do with cop intuition and was a quasi-superstitious response instead.

Hartsfield should have died when Holly hit him with my Happy Slapper, Hodges thinks. That would have been better for all of us.

‘Pete will go back and look at the pictures from the Frias-Countryman suicides,’ he tells Holly. ‘Due diligence, and all that. But if he finds a Z scratched somewhere – on a baseboard, on a mirror – I will be one surprised human being.’

She doesn’t reply. Her eyes are far away.

‘Holly? Are you there?’

She starts a little. ‘Yes. Just planning how I’ll locate Nancy Alderson in Chagrin Falls. It shouldn’t take too long with all the search programs I’ve got, but you’ll have to talk to her. I can do cold calls now if I absolutely have to, you know that—’

‘Yes. You’ve gotten good at it.’ Which is true, although she always makes such calls with her trusty box of Nicorette close at hand. Not to mention a stash of Twinkies in her desk for backup.

‘But I can’t be the one to tell her that her employers – her friends , for all we know – are dead. You’ll have to do it. You’re good at things like that.’

Hodges feels that nobody is very good at things like that, but doesn’t bother saying so. ‘Why? The Alderson woman wouldn’t have been there since last Friday.’

‘She deserves to know,’ Holly says. ‘The police will get in touch with any relatives, that’s their job, but they’re not going to call the housekeeper. At least I don’t think so.’

Hodges doesn’t, either, and Holly’s right – the Alderson woman deserves to know, if only so she doesn’t turn up to find an X of police tape on the door. But somehow he doesn’t think that’s Holly’s only interest in Nancy Alderson.

‘Your friend Pete and Miss Pretty Gray Eyes hardly did anything ,’ Holly says. ‘There was fingerprint powder in Martine Stover’s bedroom, sure, and on her wheelchair, and in the bathroom where Mrs Ellerton killed herself, but none upstairs where she slept. They probably went up long enough to make sure there wasn’t a body stashed under the bed or in the closet, and called it good.’