Hodges puts the letter down on the coffee table and says, “Holy shit.”
Janey Patterson nods. “That was pretty much my reaction.”
“He invited her to get in touch with him—”
Janey gives him an incredulous look. “Invited her? Try blackmailed her. ‘Do it or I’ll kill myself.’”
“According to you, she took him up on it. Have you seen any of their communications? Were there maybe printouts along with this letter?”
She shakes her head. “Ollie told my mother that she’d been chatting with what she called ‘a very disturbed man’ and trying to get him to seek help because he’d done a terrible thing. My mother was alarmed. She assumed Ollie was talking with the very disturbed man face-to-face, like in the park or a coffee shop or something. You have to remember she’s in her late eighties now. She knows about computers, but she’s vague on their practical uses. Ollie explained about chat-rooms—or tried to—but I’m not sure how much Mom actually understood. What she remembers is that Ollie said she talked to the very disturbed man underneath a blue umbrella.”
“Did your mother connect the man to the stolen Mercedes and the killings at City Center?”
“She never said anything that would make me believe so. Her short-term memory’s gotten very foggy. If you ask her about the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor, she can tell you exactly when she heard the news on the radio, and probably who the newscaster was. Ask her what she had for breakfast, or even where she is . . .” Janey shrugged. “She might be able to tell you, she might not.”
“And where is she, exactly?”
“A place called Sunny Acres, about thirty miles from here.” She laughs, a rueful sound with no joy in it. “Whenever I hear the name, I think of those old melodramas you see on Turner Classic Movies, where the heroine is declared insane and socked away in some awful drafty madhouse.”
She turns to look out at the lake. Her face has taken on an expression Hodges finds interesting: a bit pensive and a bit defensive. The more he looks at her, the more he likes her looks. The fine lines around her eyes suggest that she’s a woman who likes to laugh.
“I know who I’d be in one of those old movies,” she says, still looking out at the boats playing on the water. “The conniving sister who inherits the care of an elderly parent along with a pile of money. The cruel sister who keeps the money but ships the Aged P off to a creepy mansion where the old people get Alpo for dinner and are left to lie in their own urine all night. But Sunny’s not like that. It’s actually very nice. Not cheap, either. And Mom asked to go.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” she says, mocking him with a little wrinkle of her nose. “Do you happen to remember her nurse? Mrs. Greene. Althea Greene.”
Hodges catches himself reaching into his jacket to consult a case notebook that’s no longer there. But after a moment’s thought he recalls the nurse without it. A tall and stately woman in white who seemed to glide rather than walk. With a mass of marcelled gray hair that made her look a bit like Elsa Lanchester in The Bride of Frankenstein. He and Pete had asked if she’d noticed Mrs. Trelawney’s Mercedes parked at the curb when she left on that Thursday night. She had replied she was quite sure she had, which to the team of Hodges and Huntley meant she wasn’t sure at all.
“Yeah, I remember her.”
“She announced her retirement almost as soon as I moved back from Los Angeles. She said that at sixty-four she no longer felt able to deal competently with a patient suffering from such serious disabilities, and she stuck to her guns even after I offered to bring in a nurse’s aide—two, if she wanted. I think she was appalled by the publicity that resulted from the City Center Massacre, but if it had been only that, she might have stayed.”
“Your sister’s suicide was the final straw?”
“I’m pretty sure it was. I won’t say Althea and Ollie were bosom buddies or anything, but they got on, and they saw eye to eye about Mom’s care. Now Sunny’s the best thing for her, and Mom’s relieved to be there. On her good days, at least. So am I. For one thing, they manage her pain better.”