Maybe she can use her computer and figure it out for herself. Set her mind at rest. She learned from the best, after all.

Holly goes to her desktop, calls up the picture of the delivery guy/bomber, and prints it out. Then she selects several headshots of Chet Ondowsky—he’s a news guy, so there are plenty—and prints them, as well. She takes all of them out to the kitchen, where the morning light is strongest. She arranges them in a square, the bomber’s picture in the middle, the Ondowsky shots all around it. She studies them carefully for a full minute. Then she closes her eyes, counts to thirty, and studies them again. She lets out a sigh that’s a little disappointed and exasperated, but mostly relieved.

She remembers a conversation she had with Bill once, a month or two before the pancreatic cancer finished her ex-cop partner off. She asked if he read detective novels, and Bill said only Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch stories and the 87th Precinct novels by Ed McBain. He said those books were based on actual police work. Most of the others were “Agatha Christie bullshit.”

He told her one thing about the 87th Precinct books that had stuck with her. “McBain said there are only two types of human faces, pig faces and fox faces. I’d add that sometimes you see a man or woman with a horse face, but they’re rare. Mostly yeah, it’s pigs and foxes.”

Holly finds this a useful yardstick as she studies the headshots on her kitchen table. Both men are okay looking (wouldn’t crack a mirror, her mother might have said), but in different ways. The delivery guy/bomber—Holly decides to call him George, just for the sake of convenience—has a fox face: rather narrow, the lips thin, the chin small and tight. The narrowness of the face is accentuated by the way George’s black hair starts high on the temples, and how it’s short and combed tight to the skull. Ondowsky, on the other hand, has a pig face. Not in any gross way, but it’s round rather than narrow. His hair is light brown. His nose is broader, his lips fuller. Chet Ondowsky’s eyes are round, and if he’s wearing corrective lenses, they are contacts. George’s eyes (what she can see of them behind his glasses) look like they might be tilted at the corners. The skin tones are different, too. Ondowsky is your textbook white guy, with ancestors probably hailing from Poland or Hungary or someplace like that. George the Bomber has a slight olive blush to his skin. To top it off, Ondowsky has a cleft chin, like Kirk Douglas. George does not.

They probably aren’t even the same height, Holly thinks, although of course it’s impossible to tell for sure.

Nevertheless, she grabs a Magic Marker from the mug on the kitchen counter and doodles a mustache on one of the Ondowsky headshots. She puts this one next to the security camera still of George. It doesn’t change anything. These two can’t possibly be the same guy.

Still . . . as long as she’s here . . .

She returns again to her office computer (still in her pajamas) and begins searching for other early coverage that would have been fed from the affiliates to the networks—ABC, FOX, CBS. In two of them she can see the WPEN newsvan in the background. In the third, she sees Ondowsky’s cameraman winding up electrical cable, getting ready to move to a new location. His head is bent but Holly recognizes him anyway, by the baggy khakis with the side pockets. It’s Fred from the welcome home video. Ondowsky isn’t in that one, so he’s probably already helping in the rescue efforts.

She goes back to Google and finds another station, an independent, that was probably on the scene. She plugs WPIT Breaking News Macready School into her search engine and finds a video of a young woman who looks barely old enough to be out of high school. She’s doing her stand-up beside the giant metal pine cone with its blinking Christmas lights. Her station’s newsvan is there, parked in the turnout behind a Subaru sedan.

The young reporter is clearly horrified, stumbling over her words, doing a clumsy job of reporting that will never get her hired (or even noticed) by one of the bigger stations. Holly doesn’t care. When the young woman’s cameraman zooms in on the school’s broken-out side, focusing on EMTs, police, and plain old civilians digging in the wreckage and carrying stretchers, she gleeps (Bill’s word) Chet Ondowsky. He’s digging like a dog, bent over and tossing bricks and broken boards between his spread legs. He came by those cuts on his hands honestly.

“He was there first,” Holly says. “Maybe not before the first first responders, but before any of the other TV—”

Her phone rings. It’s still in the bedroom, so she answers on her desktop, a little fillip Jerome added on one of his visits.

“Are you on your way?” Pete asks.

“To where?” Holly is honestly bewildered. She feels like she’s been yanked out of a dream.

“Toomey Ford,” he says. “Did you really forget? That’s not like you, Holly.”

It’s not, but she has. Tom Toomey, who owns the dealership, is pretty sure one of his salesmen—Dick Ellis, a star performer—has been under-reporting his accounts, possibly to provide for a little dolly he’s seeing on the side, possibly to support a drug habit. (“He sniffs a lot,” Toomey said. “Claims it’s the air conditioning. In December? Give me a break.”) This is Ellis’s day off, which means it’s a perfect opportunity for Holly to run some numbers, do some comparisons, and see if something’s wrong.

She could make an excuse to Pete, but the excuse would be a lie, and she doesn’t do that. Unless she absolutely has to, anyway. “I did forget. I’m sorry.”

“Want me to go out there?”

“No.” If the numbers support Toomey’s suspicions, Pete will have to go out later and confront Ellis. Being ex-police himself, he’s good at that. Holly, not so much. “Tell Mr. Toomey I’ll meet him for lunch, wherever he wants, and Finders will pick up the tab.”

“Okay, but he’ll pick someplace expensive.” A pause. “Holly, are you chasing something?”

Is she? And why did she think of Ralph Anderson so quickly? Is there something she’s not telling herself?

“Holly? Still there?”

“Yes,” she says, “I’m here. I just overslept.”

So. Lying after all.

2

Holly takes a quick shower, then dresses in one of her fade-into-the-woodwork business suits. Chet Ondowsky stays on her mind all the while. It occurs to her that she might know a way to answer the major question that’s nagging at her, so she goes back to her computer and opens Facebook. No sign that Chet Ondowsky does that one, or Instagram, either. Unusual for a TV personality. They usually love social media.

Holly tries Twitter, and bingo, there he is: Chet Ondowsky @condowsky1.

The school explosion happened at 2:19. Ondowsky’s first tweet from the scene came over an hour later, and this doesn’t surprise Holly: busy-busy-busy was condowsky1. The tweet reads, Macready School. Horrible tragedy. 15 dead so far, maybe many more. Pray, Pittsburgh, pray. It’s heartrending, but Holly’s heart isn’t rent. She’s gotten very tired of all the “thoughts and prayers” bullpoop, maybe because it seems too pat, somehow, probably because she’s not interested in Ondowsky’s aftermath tweets. They are not what she’s looking for.