kitchen, her heart beating hard in her chest. What she’s thinking can’t be true, it’s totally stupid, but what if it is true?
She googles Macready Middle School Explosion and finds the still of the delivery guy/bomber. She uses her fingers to enlarge the picture, focusing on the guy’s mustache. She’s thinking about those cases you read about from time to time where some serial arsonist turns out to be a fireman, either from the responding department or from a volunteer crew. There was even a true crime book about that, Fire Lover, by Joseph Wambaugh. She read it when she was in high school. It’s like some fracked-up Munchausen by proxy.
Too monstrous. Can’t be.
But Holly finds herself wondering for the first time how Chet Ondowsky got to the scene of the explosion so fast, beating all the other reporters by . . . well, she doesn’t know just how long, but he was there first. She knows that.
But wait, does she? She didn’t see any other reporters doing stand-ups during that first bulletin, but can she be sure?
She rummages in her bag and finds her phone. Since the case she and Ralph Anderson shared—the one that ended in gunfire at the Marysville Hole—she and Ralph often talk, and it’s usually early in the morning. Sometimes he calls her; sometimes she’s the one who reaches out. Her finger hovers over his number but doesn’t descend. Ralph is on an unexpected (and well deserved) vacation with his wife and son, and even if he’s not still sleeping at seven in the morning, it’s his family time. Bonus family time. Does she want to bother him with this on so little?
Maybe she can use her computer and figure it out for herself. Set her mind at rest. She learned from the best, after all.
Holly goes to her desktop, calls up the picture of the delivery guy/bomber, and prints it out. Then she selects several headshots of Chet Ondowsky—he’s a news guy, so there are plenty—and prints them, as well. She takes all of them out to the kitchen, where the morning light is strongest. She arranges them in a square, the bomber’s picture in the middle, the Ondowsky shots all around it. She studies them carefully for a full minute. Then she closes her eyes, counts to thirty, and studies them again. She lets out a sigh that’s a little disappointed and exasperated, but mostly relieved.
She remembers a conversation she had with Bill once, a month or two before the pancreatic cancer finished her ex-cop partner off. She asked if he read detective novels, and Bill said only Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch stories and the 87th Precinct novels by Ed McBain. He said those books were based on actual police work. Most of the others were “Agatha Christie bullshit.”
He told her one thing about the 87th Precinct books that had stuck with her. “McBain said there are only two types of human faces, pig faces and fox faces. I’d add that sometimes you see a man or woman with a horse face, but they’re rare. Mostly yeah, it’s pigs and foxes.”
Holly finds this a useful yardstick as she studies the headshots on her kitchen table. Both men are okay looking (wouldn’t crack a mirror, her mother might have said), but in different ways. The delivery guy/bomber—Holly decides to call him George, just for the sake of convenience—has a fox face: rather narrow, the lips thin, the chin small and tight. The narrowness of the face is accentuated by the way George’s black hair starts high on the temples, and how it’s short and combed tight to the skull. Ondowsky, on the other hand, has a pig face. Not in any gross way, but it’s round rather than narrow. His hair is light brown. His nose is broader, his lips fuller. Chet Ondowsky’s eyes are round, and if he’s wearing corrective lenses, they are contacts. George’s eyes (what she can see of them behind his glasses) look like they might be tilted at the corners. The skin tones are different, too. Ondowsky is your textbook white guy, with ancestors probably hailing from Poland or Hungary or someplace like that. George the Bomber has a slight olive blush to his skin. To top it off, Ondowsky has a cleft chin, like Kirk Douglas. George does not.
They probably aren’t even the same height, Holly thinks, although of course it’s impossible to tell for sure.
Nevertheless, she grabs a Magic Marker from the mug on the kitchen counter