Mr. Mercedes Read online

  He says he won't, Hodges thinks, conveying another forkload of the delicious cake into his mouth. He says he has absolutely no urge. He says once was enough.

  "That or something else," Hodges says.

  "I got into a big fight with my daughter back in March," Pete says. "Monster fight. I didn't see her once in April. She skipped all her weekends."

  "Yeah?"

  "Uh-huh. She wanted to go see a cheerleading competition. Bring the Funk, I think it was called. Practically every school in the state was in it. You remember how crazy Candy always was about cheerleaders?"

  "Yeah," Hodges says. He doesn't.

  "Had a little pleated skirt when she was four or six or something, we couldn't get her out of it. Two of the moms said they'd take the girls. And I told Candy no. You know why?"

  Sure he does.

  "Because the competition was at City Center, that's why. In my mind's eye I could see about a thousand tweenyboppers and their moms milling around outside, waiting for the doors to open, dusk instead of dawn, but you know the fog comes in off the lake then, too. I could see that cocksucker running at them in another stolen Mercedes--or maybe a fucking Hummer this time--and the kids and the mommies just standing there, staring like deer in the headlights. So I said no. You should have heard her scream at me, Billy, but I still said no. She wouldn't talk to me for a month, and she still wouldn't be talking to me if Maureen hadn't taken her. I told Mo absolutely no way, don't you dare, and she said, That's why I divorced you, Pete, because I got tired of listening to no way and don't you dare. And of course nothing happened."

  He drinks the rest of the beer, then leans forward again.

  "I hope there are plenty of people with me when we catch him. If I nail him alone, I'm apt to kill him just for putting me on the outs with my daughter."

  "Then why hope for plenty of people?"

  Pete considers this, then smiles a slow smile. "You have a point there."

  "Do you ever wonder about Mrs. Trelawney?" Hodges asks the question casually, but he has been thinking about Olivia Trelawney a lot since the anonymous letter dropped through the mail slot. Even before then. On several occasions during the gray time since his retirement, he has actually dreamed about her. That long face--the face of a woeful horse. The kind of face that says nobody understands and the whole world is against me. All that money and still unable to count the blessings of her life, beginning with freedom from the paycheck. It had been years since Mrs. T. had had to balance her accounts or monitor her answering machine for calls from bill collectors, but she could only count the curses, totting up a long account of bad haircuts and rude service people. Mrs. Olivia Trelawney with her shapeless boatneck dresses, said boats always listed either to starboard or to port. The watery eyes that always seemed on the verge of tears. No one had liked her, and that included Detective First Grade Kermit William Hodges. No one had been surprised when she killed herself, including that selfsame Detective Hodges. The deaths of eight people--not to mention the injuries of many more--was a lot to carry on your conscience.

  "Wonder about her how?" Pete asks.

  "If she was telling the truth after all. About the key."

  Pete raises his eyebrows. "She thought she was telling it. You know that as well as I do. She talked herself into it so completely she could have passed a lie-detector test."

  It's true, and Olivia Trelawney hadn't been a surprise to either of them. God knows they had seen others like her. Career criminals acted guilty even when they hadn't committed the crime or crimes they had been hauled in to discuss, because they knew damned well they were guilty of something. Solid citizens just couldn't believe it, and when one of them wound up being questioned prior to charging, Hodges knows, it was hardly ever because a gun was involved. No, it was usually a car. I thought it was a dog I ran over, they'd say, and no matter what they might have seen in the rearview mirror after the awful double thump, they'd believe it.

  Just a dog.

  "I wonder, though," Hodges says. Hoping he seems thoughtful rather than pushy.

  "Come on, Bill. You saw what I saw, and any time you need a refresher course, you can come down to the station and look at the photos."

  "I suppose."

  The opening bars of "Night on Bald Mountain" sound from the pocket of Pete's Men's Wearhouse sportcoat. He digs out his phone, looks at it, and says, "I gotta take this."

  Hodges makes a be-my-guest gesture.

  "Hello?" Pete listens. His eyes grow wide, and he stands up so fast his chair almost falls over. "What?"

  Other diners stop eating and look around. Hodges watches with interest.

  "Yeah . . . yeah! I'll be right there. What? Yeah, yeah, okay. Don't wait, just go."

  He snaps the phone closed and sits down again. All his lights are suddenly on, and in that moment Hodges envies him bitterly.

  "I should eat with you more often, Billy. You're my lucky charm, always were. We talk about it, and it happens."

  "What?" Thinking, It's Mr. Mercedes. The thought that follows is both ridiculous and forlorn: He was supposed to be mine.

  "That was Izzy. She just got a call from a State Police colonel out in Victory County. A game warden spotted some bones in an old gravel pit about an hour ago. The pit's less than two miles from Donnie Davis's summer place on the lake, and guess what? The bones appear to be wearing the remains of a dress."

  He raises his hand over the table. Hodges high-fives it.

  Pete returns the phone to its sagging pocket and brings out his wallet. Hodges shakes his head, not even kidding himself about what he feels: relief. Enormous relief. "No, this is my treat. You're meeting Isabelle out there, right?"

  "Right."

  "Then roll."

  "Okay. Thanks for lunch."

  "One other thing--hear anything about Turnpike Joe?"

  "That's State," Pete says. "And the Feebles now. They're welcome to it. What I hear is they've got nothing. Just waiting for him to do it again and hoping to get lucky." He glances at his watch.

  "Go, go."

  Pete starts out, stops, returns to the table, and puts a big kiss on Hodges's forehead. "Great to see you, sweetheart."

  "Get lost," Hodges tells him. "People will say we're in love."

  Pete scrams with a big grin on his face, and Hodges thinks of what they sometimes used to call themselves: the Hounds of Heaven.

  He wonders how sharp his own nose is these days.

  13

  The waiter returns to ask if there will be anything else. Hodges starts to say no, then orders another cup of coffee. He just wants to sit here awhile, savoring double happiness: it wasn't Mr. Mercedes and it was Donnie Davis, the sanctimonious cocksucker who killed his wife and then had his lawyer set up a reward fund for information leading to her whereabouts. Because, oh Jesus, he loved her so much and all he wanted was for her to come home so they could start over.

  He also wants to think about Olivia Trelawney, and Olivia Trelawney's stolen Mercedes. That it was stolen no one doubts. But in spite of all her protests to the contrary, no one doubts that she enabled the thief.

  Hodges remembers a case that Isabelle Jaynes, then freshly arrived from San Diego, told them about after they brought her up to speed on Mrs. Trelawney's inadvertent part in the City Center Massacre. In Isabelle's story it was a gun. She said she and her partner had been called to a home where a nine-year-old boy had shot and killed his four-year-old sister. They had been playing with an automatic pistol their father had left on his bureau.

  "The father wasn't charged, but he'll carry that for the rest of his life," she said. "This will turn out to be the same kind of thing, wait and see."

  That was a month before the Trelawney woman swallowed the pills, maybe less, and nobody on the Mercedes Killer case had given much of a shit. To them--and him--Mrs. T. had just been a self-pitying rich lady who refused to accept her part in what had happened.

  The Mercedes SL was downtown when it was stolen, but Mrs. Trelawney, a widow
who lost her wealthy husband to a heart attack, lived in Sugar Heights, a suburb as rich as its name where lots of gated drives led up to fourteen-and twenty-room McMansions. Hodges grew up in Atlanta, and whenever he drives through Sugar Heights he thinks of a ritzy Atlanta neighborhood called Buckhead.

  Mrs. T.'s elderly mother, Elizabeth Wharton, lived in an apartment--a very nice one, with rooms as big as a political candidate's promises--in an upscale condo cluster on Lake Avenue. The crib had space enough for a live-in housekeeper, and a private nurse came three days a week. Mrs. Wharton had advanced scoliosis, and it was her Oxycontin that her daughter had filched from the apartment's medicine cabinet when she decided to step out.

  Suicide proves guilt. He remembers Lieutenant Morrissey saying that, but Hodges himself has always had his doubts, and lately those doubts have been stronger than ever. What he knows now is that guilt isn't the only reason people commit suicide.

  Sometimes you can just get bored with afternoon TV.

  14

  Two motor patrol cops found the Mercedes an hour after the killings. It was behind one of the warehouses that cluttered the lakeshore.

  The huge paved yard was filled with rusty container boxes that stood around like Easter Island monoliths. The gray Mercedes was parked carelessly askew between two of them. By the time Hodges and Huntley arrived, five police cars were parked in the yard, two drawn up nose-to-nose behind the car's back bumper, as if the cops expected the big gray sedan to start up by itself, like that old Plymouth in the horror movie, and make a run for it. The fog had thickened into a light rain. The patrol car roofracks lit the droplets in conflicting pulses of blue light.

  Hodges and Huntley approached the cluster of motor patrolmen. Pete Huntley spoke with the two who had discovered the car while Hodges did a walk-around. The front end of the SL500 was only slightly crumpled--that famous German engineering--but the hood and the windshield were spattered with gore. A shirtsleeve, now stiffening with blood, was snagged in the grille. This would later be traced to August Odenkirk, one of the victims. There was something else, too. Something that gleamed even in that morning's pale light. Hodges dropped to one knee for a closer look. He was still in that position when Huntley joined him.

  "What the hell is that?" Pete asked.

  "I think a wedding ring," Hodges said.

  So it proved. The plain gold band belonged to Francine Reis, thirty-nine, of Squirrel Ridge Road, and was eventually returned to her family. She had to be buried with it on the third finger of her right hand, because the first three fingers of the left had been torn off. The ME guessed this was because she raised it in an instinctive warding-off gesture as the Mercedes came down on her. Two of those fingers were found at the scene of the crime shortly before noon on April tenth. The index finger was never found. Hodges thought that a seagull--one of the big boys that patrolled the lakeshore--might have seized it and carried it away. He preferred that idea to the grisly alternative: that an unhurt City Center survivor had taken it as a souvenir.

  Hodges stood up and motioned one of the motor patrolmen over. "We've got to get a tarp over this before the rain washes away any--"

  "Already on its way," the cop said, and cocked a thumb at Pete. "First thing he told us."

  "Well aren't you special," Hodges said in a not-too-bad Church Lady voice, but his partner's answering smile was as pale as the day. Pete was looking at the blunt, blood-spattered snout of the Mercedes, and at the ring caught in the chrome.

  Another cop came over, notebook in hand, open to a page already curling with moisture. His name-tag ID'd him as F. SHAMMINGTON. "Car's registered to a Mrs. Olivia Ann Trelawney, 729 Lilac Drive. That's Sugar Heights."

  "Where most good Mercedeses go to sleep when their long day's work is done," Hodges said. "Find out if she's at home, Officer Shammington. If she's not, see if you can track her down. Can you do that?"

  "Yes, sir, absolutely."

  "Just routine, right? A stolen-car inquiry."

  "You got it."

  Hodges turned to Pete. "Front of the cabin. Notice anything?"

  "No airbag deployment. He disabled them. Speaks to premeditation."

  "Also speaks to him knowing how to do it. What do you make of the mask?"

  Pete peered through the droplets of rain on the driver's side window, not touching the glass. Lying on the leather driver's seat was a rubber mask, the kind you pulled over your head. Tufts of orange Bozo-ish hair stuck up above the temples like horns. The nose was a red rubber bulb. Without a head to stretch it, the red-lipped smile had become a sneer.

  "Creepy as hell. You ever see that TV movie about the clown in the sewer?"

  Hodges shook his head. Later--only weeks before his retirement--he bought a DVD copy of the film, and Pete was right. The mask-face was very close to the face of Pennywise, the clown in the movie.

  The two of them walked around the car again, this time noting blood on the tires and rocker panels. A lot of it was going to wash off before the tarp and the techs arrived; it was still forty minutes shy of seven A.M.

  "Officers!" Hodges called, and when they gathered: "Who's got a cell phone with a camera?"

  They all did. Hodges directed them into a circle around what he was already thinking of as the deathcar--one word, deathcar, just like that--and they began snapping pictures.

  Officer Shammington was standing a little apart, talking on his cell phone. Pete beckoned him over. "Do you have an age on the Trelawney woman?"

  Shammington consulted his notebook. "DOB on her driver's license is February third, 1957. Which makes her . . . uh . . ."

  "Fifty-two," Hodges said. He and Pete Huntley had been working together for a dozen years, and by now a lot of things didn't have to be spoken aloud. Olivia Trelawney was the right sex and age for the Park Rapist, but totally wrong for the role of spree killer. They knew there had been cases of people losing control of their vehicles and accidentally driving into groups of people--only five years ago, in this very city, a man in his eighties, borderline senile, had plowed his Buick Electra into a sidewalk cafe, killing one and injuring half a dozen others--but Olivia Trelawney didn't fit that profile, either. Too young.

  Plus, there was the mask.

  But . . .

  But.

  15

  The bill comes on a silver tray. Hodges lays his plastic on top of it and sips his coffee while he waits for it to come back. He's comfortably full, and in the middle of the day that condition usually leaves him ready for a two-hour nap. Not this afternoon. This afternoon he has never felt more awake.

  The but had been so apparent that neither of them had to say it out loud--not to the motor patrolmen (more arriving all the time, although the goddam tarp never got there until quarter past seven) and not to each other. The doors of the SL500 were locked and the ignition slot was empty. There was no sign of tampering that either detective could see, and later that day the head mechanic from the city's Mercedes dealership confirmed that.

  "How hard would it be for someone to slim-jim a window?" Hodges had asked the mechanic. "Pop the lock that way?"

  "All but impossible," the mechanic had said. "These Mercs are built. If someone did manage to do it, it would leave signs." He had tilted his cap back on his head. "What happened is plain and simple, Officers. She left the key in the ignition and ignored the reminder chime when she got out. Her mind was probably on something else. The thief saw the key and took the car. I mean, he must have had the key. How else could he lock the car when he left it?"

  "You keep saying she," Pete said. They hadn't mentioned the owner's name.

  "Hey, come on." The mechanic smiling a little now. "This is Mrs. Trelawney's Mercedes. Olivia Trelawney. She bought it at our dealership and we service it every four months, like clockwork. We only service a few twelve-cylinders, and I know them all." And then, speaking nothing but the utter grisly truth: "This baby's a tank."

  The killer drove the Benz in between the two container boxes, killed the engine, pu
lled off his mask, doused it with bleach, and exited the car (the gloves and hairnet probably tucked inside his jacket). Then a final fuck-you as he walked away into the fog: he locked the car with Olivia Ann Trelawney's smart key.

  There was your but.

  16

  She warned us to be quiet because her mother was sleeping, Hodges remembers. Then she gave us coffee and cookies. Sitting in DeMasio's, he sips the last of his current cup while he waits for his credit card to be returned. He thinks about the living room in that whopper of a condo apartment, with its kick-ass view of the lake.

  Along with coffee and cookies, she had given them the wide-eyed of-course-I-didn't look, the one that is the exclusive property of solid citizens who have never been in trouble with the police. Who can't imagine such a thing. She even said it out loud, when Pete asked if it was possible she had left her ignition key in her car when she parked it on Lake Avenue just a few doors down from her mother's building.

  "Of course I didn't." The words had come through a cramped little smile that said I find your idea silly and more than a bit insulting.

  The waiter returns at last. He puts down the little silver tray, and Hodges slips a ten and a five into his hand before he can straighten up. At DeMasio's the waiters split tips, a practice of which Hodges strongly disapproves. If that makes him old school, so be it.

  "Thank you, sir, and buon pomeriggio."

  "Back atcha," Hodges says. He tucks away his receipt and his Amex, but doesn't rise immediately. There are some crumbs left on his dessert plate, and he uses his fork to snare them, just as he used to do with his mother's cakes when he was a little boy. To him those last few crumbs, sucked slowly onto the tongue from between the tines of the fork, always seemed like the sweetest part of the slice.

  17

  That crucial first interview, only hours after the crime. Coffee and cookies while the mangled bodies of the dead were still being identified. Somewhere relatives were weeping and rending their garments.

  Mrs. Trelawney walking into the condo's front hall, where her handbag sat on an occasional table. She brought the bag back, rummaging, starting to frown, still rummaging, starting to be a little worried. Then smiling. "Here it is," she said, and handed it over.