“Good. Now refresh me on the name of the bankruptcy trustee guy.”

“Todd Schneider. You should call him at eight thirty. If I’m with the Robinsons, I won’t be in until later. I’ll bring Jerome with me.”

“Yeah, good. Have you got Schneider’s number?”

“I emailed it to you. You remember how to access your email, don’t you?”

“It’s cancer, Holly, not Alzheimer’s.”

“Today is your last day. Remember that, too.”

How can he forget? They’ll put him in the hospital where Brady died, and that will be that, Hodges’s last case left hanging fire. He hates the idea, but there’s no way around it. This is going fast.

“Eat some breakfast.”

“I will.”

He ends the call, and looks longingly at the fresh pot of coffee. The smell is wonderful. He turns it down the sink and gets dressed. He does not eat breakfast.

13

Finders Keepers seems very empty without Holly at her desk in the reception area, but at least the seventh floor of the Turner Building is quiet; the noisy crew from the travel agency down the hall won’t start to arrive for at least another hour.

Hodges thinks best with a yellow pad in front of him, jotting down ideas as they come, trying to tease out the connections and form a coherent picture. It’s the way he worked when he was on the cops, and he was capable of making those connections more often than not. He won a lot of citations over the years, but they’re piled helter-skelter on a shelf in his closet instead of hanging on a wall. The citations never mattered to him. The reward was the flash of light that came with the connections. He found himself unable to give it up. Hence Finders Keepers instead of retirement.

This morning there are no notes, only doodles of stick men climbing a hill, and cyclones, and flying saucers. He’s pretty sure most of the pieces to this puzzle are now on the table and all he has to do is figure out how to put them together, but Brady Hartsfield’s death is like a pileup on his personal information highway, blocking all traffic. Every time he glances at his watch, another five minutes have gone by. Soon enough he’ll have to call Schneider. By the time he gets off the phone with him, the noisy travel agency crew will be arriving. After them, Barbara and Jerome. Any chance of quiet thought will be gone.

Think of the connections, Holly said. They all go back to him. And the concert he tried to blow up.

Yes; yes they do. Because the only ones eligible to receive free Zappits from that website were people—young girls then, for the most part, teenagers now—who could prove they were at the ’Round Here show, and the website is now defunct. Like Brady, badconcert.com is a gone goose, a toasty turkey, a baked buzzard, and we all say hooray.