Stephen King - End of Watch

‘Hold on a second. You went upstairs?’

‘Of course. Somebody needed to investigate thoroughly, and those two sure weren’t doing it. As far as they’re concerned, they know exactly what happened. Pete only called you because he was spooked.’

Spooked . Yes, that was it. Exactly the word he was looking for and hadn’t been able to find.

‘I was spooked, too,’ Holly says matter-of-factly, ‘but that doesn’t mean I lost my wits. The whole thing was wrong. Wrong wrong wrong, and you need to talk to the housekeeper. I’ll tell you what to ask her, if you can’t figure it out for yourself.’

‘Is this about the Z on the bathroom counter? If you know something I don’t, I wish you’d fill me in.’

‘It’s not what I know, it’s what I saw. Didn’t you notice what was beside that Z?’

‘A Magic Marker.’

She gives him a look that says you can do better .

Hodges calls on an old cop technique that comes in especially handy when giving trial testimony: he looks at the picture again, this time in his mind. ‘There was a power cord plugged into the wall beside the basin.’

‘Yes! At first I thought it must be for an e-reader and Mrs Ellerton left it plugged in there because she spent most of her time in that part of the house. It would be a convenient charging point, because all the plugs in Martine’s bedroom were probably in use for her life-support gear. Don’t you think so?’

‘Yeah, that could be.’

‘Only I have both a Nook and a Kindle—’

Of course you do, he thinks.

‘—and neither of them has cords like that. Those cords are black. This one was gray.’

‘Maybe she lost the original charging cord and bought a replacement at Tech Village.’ Pretty much the only game in town for electronic supplies, now that Discount Electronix, Brady Hartsfield’s old employer, has declared bankruptcy.

‘No. E-readers have prong-type plug-ins. This one was wider, like for an electronic tablet. Only my iPad also has that kind, and the one in the bathroom was much smaller. That cord was for some kind of handheld device. So I went upstairs to look for it.’

‘Where you found…?’

‘Just an old PC on a desk by the window in Mrs Ellerton’s bedroom. And I mean old . It was hooked up to a modem.’

‘Oh my God, no!’ Hodges exclaims. ‘Not a modem!’

‘This is not funny, Bill. Those women are dead .’

Hodges takes a hand from the wheel and holds it up in a peace gesture. ‘Sorry. Go on. This is the part where you tell me you powered up her computer.’

Holly looks slightly discomfited. ‘Well, yes. But only in the service of an investigation the police are clearly not going to make. I wasn’t snooping .’

Hodges could argue the point, but doesn’t.

‘It wasn’t password protected, so I looked at Mrs Ellerton’s search history. She visited quite a few retail sites, and lots of medical sites having to do with paralysis. She seemed very interested in stem cells, which makes sense, considering her daughter’s condi—’

‘You did all this in ten minutes?’

‘I’m a fast reader. But you know what I didn’t find?’

‘I’m guessing anything to do with suicide.’

‘Yes. So how did she know about the helium thing? For that matter, how did she know to dissolve those pills in vodka and put them in her daughter’s feeding tube?’

‘Well,’ Hodges says, ‘there’s this ancient arcane ritual called reading books. You may have heard of it.’

‘Did you see any books in that living room?’

He replays the living room just as he did the photo of Martine Stover’s bathroom, and Holly is right. There were shelves of knickknacks, and that picture of big-eyed waifs, and the flatscreen TV. There were magazines on the coffee table, but spread in a way that spoke more to decoration than to voracious reading. Plus, none of them was exactly The Atlantic Monthly .

‘No,’ he says, ‘no books in the living room, although I saw a couple in the photo of Stover’s bedroom. One of them looked like a Bible.’ He glances at the folded Inside View in her lap. ‘What have you got in there, Holly? What are you hiding?’

When Holly flushes, she goes totally Defcon 1, the blood crashing to her face in a way that’s alarming. It happens now. ‘It wasn’t stealing,’ she says. ‘It was borrowing . I never steal, Bill. Never!’

‘Cool your jets. What is it?’

‘The thing that goes with the power cord in the bathroom.’ She unfolds the newspaper to reveal a bright pink gadget with a dark gray screen. It’s bigger than an e-reader, smaller than an electronic tablet. ‘When I came downstairs, I sat in Mrs Ellerton’s chair to think a minute. I ran my hands between the arms and the cushion. I wasn’t even hunting for something, I was just doing it.’

One of Holly’s many self-comforting techniques, Hodges assumes. He’s seen many in the years since he first met her in the company of her overprotective mother and aggressively gregarious uncle. In their company? No, not exactly. That phrase suggested equality. Charlotte Gibney and Henry Sirois had treated her more like a mentally defective child out on a day pass. Holly is a different woman now, but traces of the old Holly still remain. And that’s okay with Hodges. After all, everyone casts a shadow.

‘That’s where it was, down on the right side. It’s a Zappit.’

The name chimes a faint chord far back in his memory, although when it comes to computer chip-driven gadgetry, Hodges is far behind the curve. He’s always screwing up with his own home computer, and now that Jerome Robinson is away, Holly is the one who usually comes over to his house on Harper Road to straighten him out. ‘A whatsit?’

‘A Zappit Commander. I’ve seen advertisements online, although not lately. They come pre-loaded with over a hundred simple electronic games like Tetris, Simon, and SpellTower. Nothing complicated like Grand Theft Auto. So tell me what it was doing there, Bill. Tell me what it was doing in a house where one of the women was almost eighty and the other one couldn’t turn a light switch, let alone play video games.’

‘It seems odd, all right. Not downright bizarre, but on the odd side, for sure.’

‘And the cord was plugged in right next to that letter Z,’ she says. ‘Not Z for the end, like a suicide note, but Z for Zappit. At least that’s what I think.’

Hodges considers the idea.

‘Maybe.’ He wonders again if he has encountered that name before, or if it’s only what the French call faux souvenir – a false memory. He could swear it has some connection to Brady Hartsfield, but he can’t trust that idea, because Brady is very much on his mind today.

How long has it been since I’ve gone to visit him? Six months? Eight? No, longer than that. Quite a bit longer.

The last time was not long after the business having to do with Pete Saubers and the cache of stolen money and notebooks Pete discovered, practically buried in his backyard. On that occasion, Hodges found Brady much the same as ever – a gorked-out young man dressed in a plaid shirt and jeans that never got dirty. He was sitting in the same chair he was always sitting in when Hodges visited Room 217 in the Brain Injury Clinic, just staring out at the parking garage across the way.

The only real difference that day had been outside Room 217. Becky Helmington, the head nurse, had moved on to the surgical wing of Kiner Memorial, thereby closing Hodges’s conduit to rumors about Brady. The new head nurse was a woman with stony scruples and a face like a closed fist. Ruth Scapelli refused Hodges’s offer of fifty dollars for any little tidbits about Brady and threatened to report him if he ever offered her money for patient information again. ‘You’re not even on his visitors list,’ she said.