Officer Shammington was standing a little apart, talking on his cell phone. Pete beckoned him over. ‘Do you have an age on the Trelawney woman?’

Shammington consulted his notebook. ‘DOB on her driver’s license is February third, 1957. Which makes her … uh …’

‘Fifty-two,’ Hodges said. He and Pete Huntley had been working together for a dozen years, and by now a lot of things didn’t have to be spoken aloud. Olivia Trelawney was the right sex and age for the Park Rapist, but totally wrong for the role of spree killer. They knew there had been cases of people losing control of their vehicles and accidentally driving into groups of people – only five years ago, in this very city, a man in his eighties, borderline senile, had plowed his Buick Electra into a sidewalk café, killing one and injuring half a dozen others – but Olivia Trelawney didn’t fit that profile, either. Too young.

Plus, there was the mask.

But …

But.

15

The bill comes on a silver tray. Hodges lays his plastic on top of it and sips his coffee while he waits for it to come back. He’s comfortably full, and in the middle of the day that condition usually leaves him ready for a two-hour nap. Not this afternoon. This afternoon he has never felt more awake.

The but had been so apparent that neither of them had to say it out loud – not to the motor patrolmen (more arriving all the time, although the goddam tarp never got there until quarter past seven) and not to each other. The doors of the SL500 were locked and the ignition slot was empty. There was no sign of tampering that either detective could see, and later that day the head mechanic from the city’s Mercedes dealership confirmed that.

‘How hard would it be for someone to slim-jim a window?’ Hodges had asked the mechanic. ‘Pop the lock that way?’

‘All but impossible,’ the mechanic had said. ‘These Mercs are built. If someone did manage to do it, it would leave signs.’ He had tilted his cap back on his head. ‘What happened is plain and simple, Officers. She left the key in the ignition and ignored the reminder chime when she got out. Her mind was probably on something else. The thief saw the key and took the car. I mean, he must have had the key. How else could he lock the car when he left it?’

‘You keep saying she,’ Pete said. They hadn’t mentioned the owner’s name.

‘Hey, come on.’ The mechanic smiling a little now. ‘This is Mrs Trelawney’s Mercedes. Olivia Trelawney. She bought it at our dealership and we service it every four months, like clockwork. We only service a few twelve-cylinders, and I know them all.’ And then, speaking nothing but the utter grisly truth: ‘This baby’s a tank.’

The killer drove the Benz in between the two container boxes, killed the engine, pulled off his mask, doused it with bleach, and exited the car (the gloves and hairnet probably tucked inside his jacket). Then a final fuck-you as he walked away into the fog: he locked the car with Olivia Ann Trelawney’s smart key.

There was your but.

16

She warned us to be quiet because her mother was sleeping, Hodges remembers. Then she gave us coffee and cookies. Sitting in DeMasio’s, he sips the last of his current cup while he waits for his credit card to be returned. He thinks about the living room in that whopper of a condo apartment, with its kick-ass view of the lake.

Along with coffee and cookies, she had given them the wide-eyed of-course-I-didn’t look, the one that is the exclusive property of solid citizens who have never been in trouble with the police. Who can’t imagine such a thing. She even said it out loud, when Pete asked if it was possible she had left her ignition key in her car when she parked it on Lake Avenue just a few doors down from her mother’s building.

‘Of course I didn’t.’ The words had come through a cramped little smile that said I find your idea silly and more than a bit insulting.

The waiter returns at last. He puts down the little silver tray, and Hodges slips a ten and a five into his hand before he can straighten up. At DeMasio’s the waiters split tips, a practice of which Hodges strongly disapproves. If that makes him old school, so be it.

‘Thank you, sir, and boun pomeriggio.’

‘Back atcha,’ Hodges says. He tucks away his receipt and his Amex, but doesn’t rise immediately. There are some crumbs left on his dessert plate, and he uses his fork to snare them, just as he used to do with his mother’s cakes when he was a little boy. To him those last few crumbs, sucked slowly onto the tongue from between the tines of the fork, always seemed like the sweetest part of the slice.

17

That crucial first interview, only hours after the crime. Coffee and cookies while the mangled bodies of the dead were still being identified. Somewhere relatives were weeping and rending their garments.

Mrs Trelawney walking into the condo’s front hall, where her handbag sat on an occasional table. She brought the bag back, rummaging, starting to frown, still rummaging, starting to be a little worried. Then smiling. ‘Here it is,’ she said, and handed it over.

The detectives looked at the smart key, Hodges thinking how ordinary it was for something that went with such an expensive car. It was basically a black plastic stick with a lump on the end of it. The lump was stamped with the Mercedes logo on one side. On the other were three buttons. One showed a padlock with its shackle down. On the button beside it, the padlock’s shackle was up. The third button was labeled PANIC. Presumably if a mugger attacked you as you were unlocking your car, you could push that one and the car would start screaming for help.

‘I can see why you had a little trouble locating it in your purse,’ Pete remarked in his best just-passing-the-time-of-day voice. ‘Most people put a fob on their keys. My wife has hers on a big plastic daisy.’ He smiled fondly as if Maureen were still his wife, and as if that perfectly turned-out fashion plate would ever have been caught dead hauling a plastic daisy out of her purse.

‘How nice for her,’ Mrs Trelawney said. ‘When may I have my car back?’

‘That’s not up to us, ma’am,’ Hodges said.

She sighed and straightened the boatneck top of her dress. It was the first of dozens of times they saw her do it. ‘I’ll have to sell it, of course. I’d never be able to drive it after this. It’s so upsetting. To think my car …’ Now that she had her purse in hand, she prospected again and brought out a wad of pastel Kleenex. She dabbed at her eyes with them. ‘It’s very upsetting.’

‘I’d like you to take us through it one more time,’ Pete said.

She rolled her eyes, which were red-rimmed and bloodshot. ‘Is that really necessary? I’m exhausted. I was up most of the night with my mother. She couldn’t go to sleep until four. She’s in such pain. I’d like a nap before Mrs Greene comes in. She’s the nurse.’

Hodges thought, Your car was just used to kill eight people, and only eight if all the others live, and you want a nap. Later he would not be sure if that was when he started to dislike Mrs Trelawney, but it probably was. When some people were in distress, you wanted to enfold them and say there-there as you patted them on the back. With others you wanted to slap them a hard one across the chops and tell them to man up. Or, in Mrs T.’s case, to woman up.

‘We’ll be as quick as we can,’ Pete promised. He didn’t tell her that this would be the first of many interviews. By the time they were done with her, she would hear herself telling her story in her sleep.

‘Oh, very well, then. I arrived here at my mother’s shortly after seven o’clock on Thursday evening …’

She visited at least four times a week, she said, but Thursdays were her night to stay over. She always stopped at B’hai, a very nice vegetarian restaurant located in Birch Hill Mall, and got their dinners, which she warmed up in the oven. (‘Although Mother eats very little now, of course. Because of the pain.’) She told them she always scheduled her Thursday trips so she arrived after seven, because that was when the all-night parking began, and most of the streetside spaces were empty. ‘I won’t parallel park. I simply can’t do it.’