to a rock show. She opens her purse and doles out the candy-colored phones. For a wonder, the girls just hold them. For the time being, they’re too busy goggling around to call or text. Tanya puts a quick kiss on top of Barb’s head and then sits back, lost in the past, thinking of Bobby Wilson’s kiss. Not quite the first, but the first good one.
She hopes that when the time comes, Barb will be as lucky.
31
“Oh my happy clapping Jesus,” Holly says, and hits her forehead with the heel of her hand. She’s finished with Brady’s Number One—nothing much there—and has moved on to Number Two.
Jerome looks up from Number Five, which seems to have been exclusively dedicated to video games, most of the Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty sort. “What?”
“It’s just that every now and then I run across someone even more screwed in the head than me,” she says. “It cheers me up. That’s terrible, I know it is, but I can’t help it.”
Hodges gets up from the stairs with a grunt and comes over to look. The screen is filled with small photos. They appear to be harmless cheesecake, not much different from the kind he and his friends used to moon over in Adam and Spicy Leg Art back in the late fifties. Holly enlarges three of them and arranges them in a row. Here is Deborah Hartsfield wearing a filmy robe. And Deborah Hartsfield wearing babydoll pajamas. And Deborah Hartsfield in a frilly pink bra-and-panty set.
“My God, it’s his mother,” Jerome says. His face is a study in revulsion, amazement, and fascination. “And it looks like she posed.”
It looks that way to Hodges, too.
“Yup,” Holly says. “Paging Dr. Freud. Why do you keep rubbing your shoulder, Mr. Hodges?”
“Pulled a muscle,” he says. But he’s starting to wonder about that.
Jerome glances at the desktop screen of Number Three, starts to check out the photos of Brady Hartsfield’s mother again, then does a double-take. “Whoa,” he says. “Look at this, Bill.”
Sitting in the lower lefthand corner of Number Three’s desktop is a Blue Umbrella icon.
“Open it,” Hodges says.
He does, but the file is empty. There’s nothing unsent, and as they now know, all old correspondence on Debbie’s Blue Umbrella goes straight to data heaven.
Jerome sits down at Number Three. “This must be his go-to glowbox, Hols. Almost got to be.”
She joins him. “I think the other ones are mostly for show—so he can pretend he’s on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise or something.”
Hodges points to a file marked 2009. “Let’s look at that one.”
A mouse-click discloses a subfile titled CITY CENTER. Jerome opens it and they stare at a long list of stories about what happened there in April of 2009.
“The asshole’s press clippings,” Hodges says.
“Go through everything on this one,” Holly tells Jerome. “Start with the hard drive.”
Jerome opens it. “Oh man, look at this shit.” He points to a file titled EXPLOSIVES.
“Open it!” Holly says, shaking his shoulder. “Open it, open it, open it!”
Jerome does, and reveals another loaded subfile. Drawers within drawers, Hodges thinks. A computer’s really nothing but a Victorian rolltop desk, complete with secret compartments.
Holly says, “Hey guys, look at this.” She points. “He downloaded the whole Anarchist Cookbook from BitTorrent. That’s illegal!”
“Duh,” Jerome says, and she punches him in the arm.
The pain in Hodges’s shoulder is worse. He walks back to the stairs and sits heavily. Jerome and Holly, huddled over Number Three, don’t notice him go. He puts his hands on his thighs (My overweight thighs, he thinks, my badly overweight thighs) and begins taking long slow breaths. The only thing that can make this evening worse would be having a heart attack in a house he’s illegally entered with a minor and a woman who is at least a mile from right in the head. A house where a bullshit-crazy killer’s pinup girl is lying dead upstairs.
Please God, no heart attack. Please.
He takes more long breaths. He stifles a belch and the pain begins to ease.
With his head lowered, he finds himself looking between the stairs. Something glints there in the light of the overhead fluorescents. Hodges drops to his knees and crawls underneath to see what it is. It turns out to be a stainless steel ball bearing, bigger than the ones in the Happy Slapper, heavy in his palm. He looks at the distorted reflection of his face in its curved side, and an idea starts to grow. Only it doesn’t exactly