relief. She looks at her watch. Nearly five-thirty. Time is now very tight, indeed.
She goes to the office safe and runs the combination. She takes out the late Bill Hodges’s Smith & Wesson revolver. Although she knows it’s loaded—an unloaded handgun is useless even as a club, another of her mentor’s dictums—she rolls the chamber to make sure, then snaps it closed.
Center mass, she thinks. As soon as he comes out of the elevator. Don’t worry about the box with the money; if it’s cardboard, the slug will go right through, even if he’s holding it in front of his chest. If it’s steel, I’ll have to go for a headshot. The range will be short. It could be messy, but—
She surprises herself with a little laugh.
But Al has left cleaning supplies.
Holly looks at her watch. 5:34. That leaves her twenty-six minutes before Ondowsky shows up, assuming he’s on time. She still has things to do. All are important. Deciding which is the most important is a no-brainer, because if she doesn’t survive this, someone has to know about the thing that bombed the Macready School in order to eat the pain of the survivors and the bereaved, and there is one person who will believe her.
She turns on her phone, opens the recording app, and begins to speak.
6
The Robinsons gave their daughter a nifty little Ford Focus for her eighteenth birthday, and as Holly is parking downtown on Buell Street, Barbara is three blocks from Holly’s apartment building, stopped at a red light. She takes the opportunity to glance at the WebWatcher app on her phone and murmurs “Shit.” Holly hasn’t gone home. She’s at the office, although Barbara can’t understand why she’d go there on a Saturday evening this close to Christmas.
Holly’s building is straight ahead, but when the light turns green, Barbara turns right, toward downtown. It won’t take her long to get there. The front door of the Frederick Building will be locked, but she knows the code for the side door in the service alley. She’s been at Finders Keepers with her brother many times, and sometimes they go in that way.
I’ll just surprise her, Barbara thinks. Take her out for coffee and find out what the hell’s going on. Maybe we can even grab a quick bite and hit a movie.
The thought makes her smile.
7
From Holly Gibney’s report to Detective Ralph Anderson:
I don’t know if I’ve told you everything, Ralph, and I don’t have time to go back and check, but you know the most important thing: I’ve stumbled across another outsider, not the same as the one we dealt with in Texas, but related. A new and improved model, let’s say.
I’m in the little reception area of Finders, waiting for him. My plan is to shoot him as soon as he steps out of the elevator with the blackmail money, and I think that’s how this is going to go. I think he has come to pay me off rather than kill me, because I think I convinced him that I only want money, along with his promise never to commit another mass killing. Which he probably doesn’t mean to keep.
I’ve tried to think as logically about this as I can, because my life depends on it. If I were him, I’d pay off once, then see what happens. Would I plan to leave my job at the Pittsburgh station afterwards? I might, but I might stay. To test the blackmailer’s good faith. If the woman were to come back, try double-dipping, then I’d kill her and disappear. Wait a year or two, then resume my old pattern. Maybe in San Francisco, maybe in Seattle, maybe in Honolulu. Start working at a local indie, then move up. He’ll get new ID and new references. God knows how they can stand up in this age of computers and social media, Ralph, but somehow they do. Or have so far.
Would he worry about me passing on what I know to someone else? Maybe to his TV station? No, because once I blackmail him, I become complicit in his crime. What I’m counting on most is his confidence. His arrogance. Why wouldn’t he be confident and arrogant? He’s been getting away with this for a long, long time.
But my friend Bill taught me to always have a backup plan. “Belt and suspenders, Holly,” he’d say. “Belt and suspenders.”
If he suspects I mean to kill him instead of blackmail him out of three hundred thousand dollars, he’ll