“We had a blow-up. Me and Izzy. Big one. I tried to tell her what you told me when we started working together—how the case is the boss, and you go where it leads you. No ducking, no handing it off, just pick it up and follow the red thread all the way home. She stood there listening with her arms folded, nodding her head every now and then. I actually thought I was getting through to her. Then you know what she asked me? If I knew the last time there was a woman in the top echelon of the city police. I said I didn’t, and she said that was because the answer was never. She said the first one was going to be her. Man, I thought I knew her.” Pete utters what may be the most humorless laugh Hodges has ever heard. “I thought she was police.”

Hodges will commiserate later, if he gets a chance. Right now there’s no time. He asks about the computer gear.

“We found nothing except an iPad with a dead battery,” Pete says. “Everly, the housekeeper, says he had a laptop in his study, almost brand new, but it’s gone.”

“Like Babineau,” Hodges says. “Maybe it’s with him.”

“Maybe. Remember, if I can help, Kermit—”

“I’ll call, believe me.”

Right now he’ll take all the help he can get.

21

The result with the girl named Ellen is infuriating—like the Robinson bitch all over again—but at last Brady calms down. It worked, that’s what he needs to focus on. The shortness of the drop combined with the snowbank was just bad luck. There will be plenty of others. He has a lot of work ahead of him, a lot of matches to light, but once the fire is burning, he can sit back and watch.

It will burn until it burns itself out.

He starts Z-Boy’s car and pulls out of the rest area. As he merges with the scant traffic headed north on I-47, the first flakes spin out of the white sky and hit the Malibu’s windshield. Brady drives faster. Z-Boy’s piece of crap isn’t equipped for a snowstorm, and once he leaves the turnpike, the roads will grow progressively worse. He needs to beat the weather.

Oh, I’ll beat it, all right, Brady thinks, and grins as a wonderful idea hits him. Maybe Ellen is paralyzed from the neck down, a head on a stick, like the Stover bitch. It’s not likely, but it’s possible, a pleasant daydream with which to while away the miles.

He turns on the radio, finds some Judas Priest, and lets it blast. Like Hodges, he enjoys the hard stuff.

The Suicide Prince

THE SUICIDE PRINCE