“Holly, we’re not done with this. In fact I think we might just be getting started.”

She looks him squarely in the face, another thing she will do with no one else. “What do you mean?”

“Something new has come up, something I didn’t want to tell Pete and Izzy. I don’t know what the hell to make of it. There’s no time to tell you now, but when I get back from the doctor’s, I’ll tell you everything.”

“All right, that’s fine. Go on, now. And although I don’t believe in God, I’ll say a prayer for your test results. Because a little prayer can’t hurt, can it?”

“No.”

He gives her a quick hug—long hugs don’t work with Holly—and starts back to his car, once more thinking of that thing she said yesterday, about Brady Hartsfield being an architect of suicide. A pretty turn of phrase from a woman who writes poetry in her spare time (not that Hodges has ever seen any, or is likely to), but Brady would probably sneer at it, consider it a mile short of the mark. Brady would consider himself a prince of suicide.

Hodges climbs into the Prius Holly nagged him into buying and heads for Dr. Stamos’s office. He’s doing a little praying himself: Let it be an ulcer. Even the bleeding kind that needs surgery to sew it up.

Just an ulcer.

Please nothing worse than that.

21

He doesn’t have to spend time cooling his heels in the waiting room today. Although he’s five minutes early and the room is as full as it was on Monday, Marlee the cheerleader receptionist sends him in before he even has a chance to sit down.

Belinda Jensen, Stamos’s nurse, usually greets him at his yearly physicals with smiling good cheer, but she’s not smiling this morning, and as Hodges steps on the scale, he remembers his yearly physical is a bit overdue. By four months. Actually closer to five.

The armature on the old-fashioned scale balances at 165. When he retired from the cops in ’09, he weighed 230 at the mandatory exit physical. Belinda takes his blood pressure, pokes something in his ear to get his current temperature, then leads him past the exam rooms and directly to Dr. Stamos’s office at the end of the corridor. She knocks a knuckle on the door, and when Stamos says “Please come in,” she leaves Hodges at once. Usually voluble, full of tales about her fractious children and bumptious husband, she has today spoken hardly a word.

Can’t be good, Hodges thinks, but maybe it’s not too bad. Please God, not too bad. Another ten years wouldn’t be a lot to ask for, would it? Or if You can’t do that, how about five?

Wendell Stamos is a fiftysomething with a fast-receding hairline and the broad-shouldered, trim-waisted build of a pro jock who’s stayed in shape after retirement. He looks at Hodges gravely and invites him to sit down. Hodges does so.