The afternoon passes. In Olivia Kingsbury’s living room, Barbara’s phone sits on the coffee table, forgotten.
At three o’clock that afternoon Holly sits in her office, looking at her framed photo of Bill Hodges. She wishes he were here now. With no backup she can count on—unless she wants to call Izzy Jaynes, which she most assuredly does not want to do—Holly is on her own.
She goes to the window and looks out on Frederick Street. It always helps to speak her thoughts aloud, so that’s what she does.
“I’m not surprised that the police didn’t realize what was happening. This guy has been extremely smart as he goes about his business.”
And why wouldn’t he be? she thinks.
“And why wouldn’t he be? If I’m right, an extremely smart professor of biology has been helping him, getting background information before and planting false trails—at least in some cases—after. His wife is probably also helping him and she’s smart, too. There are no bodies, they’ve been disposed of somehow, and the victims have absolutely nothing in common. I have no idea what the Predator’s motive might be, or why the Harrises are aiding and abetting, but the very fact…”
She stops, frowning, thinking how she wants to say this (sometimes thinking is knowing, Bill used to say). Then she goes on, speaking to the window. Speaking to herself.
“The very fact that the victims are so different actually spotlights the method. Because in every case… except the Steinman boy, and I tend to think more and more that he was a victim of opportunity… in every case the Harrises are there in the background. Rodney bowled with Dressler. Craslow worked in the building where I’m sure Rodney has or had an office. Bonnie was one of their Christmas elves. And now this guy Jorge Castro. Emily Harris was his colleague in the Bell English Department. I think the Harrises are in this up to their necks. Are they using a disability van? Is one of them playing crippled quail?”
There’s nothing she can prove, not one single fracking thing, but there may be one thing she can do. It would be the equivalent of giving a potential witness a sixpack of photographs to see if the wit can pick out the doer.
She searches her iPad, locates what she wants, then finds Imani McGuire’s number in her notes and gives her a call. After re-introducing herself, Holly asks if she has Internet on her phone.
“Of course I do,” Immi says, sounding amused. “Doesn’t everybody?”
“Okay, go to the Bell College site. Can you do that?”
“Wait… gotta put you on speaker… okay, got it.”
“Select YEAR. It’s on the pull-down menu.”
“Yup. Which year? They go all the way back to 1965.”
Holly has already picked one out and is looking at it on her tablet. “2010.”
“All right.” Immi sounds interested. “What next?”
“Go to English Department Faculty. You should see pictures, some men and some women.”
“Yes, okay, I’m there.”
Holly is biting her lips. Here comes the big one. “Do you see the woman who cleaned out Ellen’s trailer?”
Imani doesn’t keep her in suspense. “Goddam! It’s her. Younger, but I’m almost positive.”
A defense lawyer would tear a big hole in that almost in court, but they’re not in court now.
“It says her name is Emily Harris.”
“Yes,” Holly says, and does a little dance in front of the window looking out on Frederick Street. “Thank you.”
“What was a college professor doing cleaning out El’s trailer?”
“That’s a good question, isn’t it?”
Holly writes a preliminary report, setting out everything that she’s discovered, partly through her own investigations and partly because the universe threw her a couple of ropes. She likes to think (but doesn’t quite believe) there’s a kind of providence at work in matters of right and wrong, blind but powerful, like that statue of Lady Justice holding out her scales. That there’s a force in the affairs of men and women standing on the side of the weak and unsuspecting, and against evil. It may be too late for Bonnie and the others, but if there are no future victims, that’s a win.
She likes to think of herself as one of the good guys. Smoking aside, of course.
The report is slow work, full of suppositions, and it’s late afternoon by the time it’s done. She considers who she should send it to. Not Penny; that needs to be an in-person debriefing, not bad news—terrible news—that comes in an email filled with stilted phrases like Investigator Gibney ascertained and According to Jet Mart store clerk Herrera. Ordinarily she would send a copy to her partner’s agency address, but Pete is in the hospital and she doesn’t want to trouble him with her current case… which he advised her against taking in the first place.
Except that’s bullshit.
She doesn’t want to send it to him or anyone, at least not yet. Holly has come a long way from the shy introvert Bill Hodges met lurking outside a funeral home all those years ago, but that woman still lives inside her and always will. That woman is terrified of being wrong and still believes she is wrong as often as she’s right. It’s a quantum advance from the woman who thought she was always wrong, but the insecurity remains. At sixty and seventy—at eighty, if she lives that long, which she probably won’t if she keeps smoking—she will still be getting up from her bed three or four nights a week to make sure she turned off the stove burners and locked the doors, even though she knows very well that she’s done those things. If a case is like an egg, she is, too. One with a fragile shell. She is still afraid of being laughed at. Still afraid of being called Jibba-Jibba. This is what she carries.
I need to see the van, if it’s there. Then I can be sure.
Yes. Getting a look at the van, plus Immi McGuire’s identification of Emily Harris as the woman who cleaned out Ellen Craslow’s trailer, will be enough to satisfy her. Then she can tell Bonnie’s mother everything tonight at nine. She can give Penny the choice of having her continue the investigation, or the two of them going to Isabelle Jaynes of the city police. Holly will recommend the latter, because Izzy can have the Harrises brought in for questioning. According to their Wikipedia entries they are childless, but you can’t trust everything you read on Wiki. What she believes—no, what she knows—is that these two old people are protecting somebody.
She doesn’t try to fool herself into believing that the Harrises are harmless just because they’re in their eighties; almost any human or animal will fight when cornered, old or not. But Rodney Harris no longer bowls because of his bad hips, and according to Imani, his wife suffers from sciatica. Holly thinks she’s a match for them. Assuming she takes care. Of course if they catch her snooping around their garage they could report her to the police… but if the disability van is in their garage, and a potential mine of DNA evidence, would they?