At last he puts the letters in a folder with MERCEDES KILLER printed on the tab. There’s nothing else in it, which means it’s mighty thin, but if he’s still any good at his job, it will thicken with page after page of his own notes.

He sits for fifteen minutes, hands folded on his too-large middle like a meditating Buddha. Then he draws the pad to him and begins writing.

I think I was right about most of the stylistic red herrings. In Mrs T.’s letter he doesn’t use exclamation points, capitalized phrases, or many one-sentence paragraphs (the ones at the end are for dramatic effect). I was wrong about the quotation marks, he likes those. Also fond of underlining things. He may not be young after all, I could have been wrong about that …

But he thinks of Jerome, who has already forgotten more about computers and the Internet than Hodges himself will ever learn. And of Janey Patterson, who knew how to make a copy of her sister’s letter by scanning, and who uses Skype. Janey Patterson, who’s got to be almost twenty years younger than he is.

He picks up his pen again.

… but I don’t think I am. Probably not a teenager (altho can’t rule it out) but let’s say in the range 20–35. He’s smart. Good vocabulary, able to turn a phrase.

He goes through the letters yet again and jots down some of those turned phrases: scurrying little mouse of a kid, strawberry jam in a sleeping bag, most people are sheep and sheep don’t eat meat.

Nothing that would make people forget Philip Roth, but Hodges thinks such lines show a degree of talent. He finds one more and prints it below the others: What have they done for you except hound you and cause you sleepless nights?

He taps the tip of his pen above this, creating a constellation of tiny dark blue dots. He thinks most people would write give you sleepless nights or bring you sleepless nights, but those weren’t good enough for Mr Mercedes, because he is a gardener planting seeds of doubt and paranoia. They are out to get you, Mrs T., and they have a point, don’t they? Because you did leave your key. The cops say so; I say so too, and I was there. How can we both be wrong?

He writes these ideas down, boxes them, then turns to a fresh sheet.

Best point of identification is still PERK for PERP, he uses it in both letters, but also note HYPHENS in the Trelawney letter. Bee-hive instead of beehive. Week-days instead of weekdays. If I am able to ID this guy and get a writing sample, I can nail him.

Such stylistic fingerprints wouldn’t be enough to convince a jury, but Hodges himself? Absolutely.

He sits back again, head tilted, eyes fixed on nothing. He isn’t aware of time passing; for Hodges, time, which has hung so heavy since his retirement, has been canceled. Then he lurches forward, office chair squalling an unheard protest, and writes in large capital letters: HAS MR MERCEDES BEEN WATCHING?

Hodges feels all but positive he has been. That it’s his MO.

He followed Mrs Trelawney’s vilification in the newspapers, he watched her two or three appearances on the TV news (curt and unflattering, those appearances drove her already low approval ratings into the basement). He may have done drive-bys on her house as well. Hodges should talk to Radney Peeples again and find out if Peeples or any other Vigilant employees noted certain cars cruising Mrs Trelawney’s Sugar Heights neighborhood in the weeks before she caught the bus. And someone sprayed KILLER CUNT on one of her gateposts. How long before her suicide was that? Maybe Mr Mercedes did it himself. And of course, he could have gotten to know her better, lots better, if she took him up on his invitation to meet under the Blue Umbrella.

Then there’s me, he thinks, and looks at the way his own letter ends: I wouldn’t want you to start thinking about your gun followed by But you are thinking of it, aren’t you? Is Mr Mercedes talking about his theoretical service weapon, or has he seen the .38 Hodges sometimes plays with? No way of telling, but …

But I think he has. He knows where I live, you can look right into my living room from the street, and I think he’s seen it.

The idea that he’s been watched fills Hodges with excitement rather than dread or embarrassment. If he could match some vehicle the Vigilant people have noticed with a vehicle spending an inordinate amount of time on Harper Road—

That’s when the telephone rings.

16

‘Hi, Mr H.’

‘S’up, Jerome?’

‘I’m under the Umbrella.’

Hodges puts his legal pad aside. The first four pages are now full of disjointed notes, the next three with a close-written case summary, just like in the old days. He rocks back in his chair.

‘It didn’t eat your computer, I take it?’

‘Nope. No worms, no viruses. And I’ve already got four offers to talk with new friends. One’s from Abilene, Texas. She says her name is Bernice, but I can call her Berni. With an i. She sounds cute as hell, and I won’t say I’m not tempted, but she’s probably a cross-dressing shoe salesman from Boston who lives with his mother. The Internet, dude – it’s a wonderbox.’

Hodges grins.

‘First the background, which I partly got from poking around that selfsame Internet and mostly from a couple of Computer Science geeks at the university. You ready?’

Hodges grabs his legal pad again and turns to a fresh page. ‘Hit me.’ Which is exactly what he used to say to Pete Huntley when Pete came in with fresh information on a case.

‘Okay, but first … do you know what the most precious Internet commodity is?’

‘Nope.’ And, thinking of Janey Patterson: ‘I’m old school.’

Jerome laughs. ‘That you are, Mr Hodges. It’s part of your charm.’

Dryly: ‘Thank you, Jerome.’

‘The most precious commodity is privacy, and that’s what Debbie’s Blue Umbrella and sites like it deliver. They make Facebook look like a partyline back in the nineteen-fifties. Hundreds of privacy sites have sprung up since 9/11. That’s when the various first-world governments really started to get snoopy. The powers that be fear the Net, dude, and they’re right to fear it. Anyway, most of these EP sites – stands for extreme privacy – operate out of Central Europe. They are to Internet chat what Switzerland is to bank accounts. You with me?’

‘Yeah.’

‘The Blue Umbrella servers are in Olovo, a Bosnian ville that was mostly known for bullfights until 2005 or so. Encrypted servers. We’re talking NASA quality, okay? Traceback’s impossible, unless NSA or the Kang Sheng – that’s the Chinese version of the NSA – have got some super-secret software nobody knows about.’

And even if they do, Hodges thinks, they’d never put it to use in a case like the Mercedes Killer.

‘Here’s another feature, especially handy in the age of sexting scandals. Mr H., have you ever found something on the Net – like a picture or an article in a newspaper – that you wanted to print, and you couldn’t?’

‘A few times, yeah. You hit print, and the Print Preview shows nothing but a blank page. It’s annoying.’

‘Same thing on Debbie’s Blue Umbrella.’ Jerome doesn’t sound annoyed; he sounds admiring. ‘I had a little back-and-forth with my new friend Berni – you know, how’s the weather there, what’re your favorite groups, that kind of thing – and when I tried to print our conversation, I got a pair of lips with a finger across them and a message that says SHHH.’ Jerome spells this out, just to be sure Hodges gets it. ‘You can make a record of the conversation …’

You bet, Hodges thinks, looking fondly down at the jotted notes on his legal pad.

‘… but you’d have to take screen-shots or something, which is a pain in the ass. You see what I mean about the privacy, right? These guys are serious about it.’