“I assume you’ve checked on the other City Center survivors?” Hodges asks.

“All alive except for Gerald Stansbury, who died just after Thanksgiving last year,” Pete says. “Had a heart attack. His wife told me coronary disease runs in his family, and that he lived longer than both his father and brother. Izzy’s right, this is probably nothing, but I thought you and Holly should know.” He looks at each of them in turn. “You haven’t had any bad thoughts about pulling the pin, have you?”

“No,” Hodges says. “Not lately.”

Holly merely shakes her head, still looking down at the newspaper.

Hodges asks, “I don’t suppose anyone found a mysterious letter Z in young Mr. Frias’s bedroom after he and Ms. Countryman committed suicide?”

“Of course not,” Izzy says.

“That you know of,” Hodges corrects. “Isn’t that what you mean? Considering you just found this one today?”

“Jesus please us,” Izzy says. “This is silly.” She looks pointedly at her watch and stands.

Pete gets up, too. Holly remains seated, looking down at her filched copy of Inside View. Hodges also stays put, at least for the moment. “You’ll go back to the Frias-Countryman photos, right, Pete? Check it out, just to be sure?”

“Yes,” Pete says. “And Izzy’s probably right, I was silly to get you two out here.”

“I’m glad you did.”

“And . . . I still feel bad about the way we handled Mrs. Trelawney, okay?” Pete is looking at Hodges, but Hodges has an idea he’s really speaking to the thin, pale woman with the junk newspaper in her lap. “I never once doubted that she left her key in the ignition. I closed my mind to any other possibility. I promised myself I’d never do that again.”

“I understand,” Hodges says.

“One thing I believe we all can agree on,” Izzy says, “is that Hartsfield’s days of running people down, blowing people up, and architecting suicides are behind him. So unless we’ve all stumbled into a movie called Son of Brady, I suggest we exit the late Ms. Ellerton’s house and get on with our lives. Any objections to that idea?”

There are none.

7

Hodges and Holly stand in the driveway for a moment before getting into the car, letting the cold January wind rush past them. It’s out of the north, blowing straight down from Canada, so the usually present smell of the large, polluted lake to the east is refreshingly absent. There are only a few houses at this end of Hilltop Court, and the closest has a FOR SALE sign on it. Hodges notices that Tom Saubers is the agent, and he smiles. Tom was also badly hurt in the Massacre, but has come almost all the way back. Hodges is always amazed by the resilience of which some men and women are capable. It doesn’t exactly give him hope for the human race, but . . .

Actually, it does.

In the car, Holly puts the folded Inside View on the floor long enough to fasten her seatbelt, then picks it up again. Neither Pete nor Isabelle objected to her taking it. Hodges isn’t sure they even noticed. Why would they? To them, the Ellerton house isn’t really a crime scene, although the letter of the law may call it that. Pete was uneasy, true, but Hodges thinks that had little to do with cop intuition and was a quasi-superstitious response instead.