End of Watch (Bill Hodges Trilogy #3) - Stephen King Page 0,12

‘He wasn’t content with stealing her Mercedes and using it as a murder weapon. He got inside her head, even bugged her computer with an audio program full of screams and accusations. And then there’s you, Kermit.’

Yes. There was him.

Hodges had received an anonymous poison pen letter from Hartsfield when he was at an absolute low point, living in an empty house, sleeping badly, seeing almost no one except Jerome Robinson, the kid who cut his grass and did general repairs around the place. Suffering from a common malady in career cops: end-of-watch depression.

Retired police have an extremely high suicide rate, Brady Hartsfield had written. This was before they began communicating by the twenty-first century’s preferred method, the Internet. I wouldn’t want you to start thinking about your gun. But you are thinking about it, aren’t you? It was as if Hartsfield had sniffed out Hodges’s thoughts of suicide and tried to push him over the edge. It had worked with Olivia Trelawney, after all, and he’d gotten a taste for it.

‘When I first started working with you,’ Pete says, ‘you told me repeat criminals were sort of like Turkish rugs. Do you remember that?’

‘Yes.’ It was a theory Hodges had expounded to a great many cops. Few listened, and judging by her bored expression, he guessed Isabelle Jaynes would have been one of those who did not. Pete had.

‘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