“Could what?” he asks.

“I was going to say that if you wanted to go bar-hopping down by the lake, you could look for—”

“Love bar-hopping,” Jerome says. “Love it.”

“I’m sure you do, but you’d be looking for Pete, not drinking beer. See if he needs any help with a bail-jumper named Herbert Rattner. Rattner’s white, about fifty . . .”

“Neck tattoo of a hawk or something,” Jerome says. “Saw the photo on the bulletin board, Hollyberry.”

“He’s a non-violent offender, but be careful, just the same. If you see him, don’t approach him without Pete.”

“Got it, got it.” Jerome sounds excited. His first real crook.

“Be careful, Jerome.” She can’t help reiterating this. If anything happened to Jerome, it would wreck her. “And please don’t call me Hollyberry. It’s worn very thin.”

He promises, but she doubts if he means it.

Holly returns her attention to her computer, eyes ticking back and forth between the two forest green Subarus. It means nothing, she tells herself. You’re only thinking what you’re thinking because of what happened in Texas. Bill would call it Blue Ford Syndrome. If you bought a blue Ford, he said, you suddenly saw blue Fords everywhere. But this wasn’t a blue Ford, it was a green Subaru. And she can’t help what she is thinking.

There is no John Law for Holly that afternoon. By the time she leaves the office, she has more information, and she’s troubled.

5

At home, Holly makes herself a little meal and fifteen minutes later has forgotten what it was. She calls her mother to ask if she’s been to see Uncle Henry. Yes, Charlotte says. Holly asks how he’s doing. He’s confused, Charlotte says, but he seems to be adjusting. Holly has no idea if this is true, because her mother has a way of jiggering her view of the world until she’s seeing it the way she wants to see it.

“He’d like to see you,” Charlotte says, and Holly promises she’ll go as soon as she can—maybe this weekend. Knowing he’ll call her Janey, because Janey is the one he wants. The one he loves best and always will, even though Janey has been dead for six years. This isn’t self-pity, just the truth. You have to accept the truth.

“Have to accept the truth,” she says. “Have to, like it or not.”

With this in mind she picks up her phone, almost calls Ralph, and again keeps herself from doing it. Why spoil his time off just because the two of them bought a blue Ford down in Texas and now she’s seeing them everywhere?

Then she realizes she doesn’t have to talk to him, at least not in person. She gets her phone and a bottle of ginger ale and goes into the TV room. Here the walls are lined with books on one side and DVDs on the other, everything arranged in alphabetical order. She sits in her comfortable viewing chair, but instead of powering up the big-screen Samsung, she opens her phone’s recording app. She just looks at it for a few moments, then pushes the big red button.

“Hello, Ralph, it’s me. I’m recording this on December fourteenth. I don’t know if you’ll ever hear it, because if what I’m thinking turns out to be nothing, and it probably will, I’ll just delete it, but saying it out loud might, um, clarify my thoughts.”

She pauses the recording, thinking about how she should start.

“I know you remember what happened in that cave when we finally met the outsider face to face. He wasn’t used to being found out, was he? He asked what made me able to believe. It was Brady that made me able to do that, Brady Hartsfield, but the outsider didn’t know about Brady. He asked if it was because I’d seen another like him somewhere. Do you remember how he looked and sounded when he asked that? I do. Not just eager, greedy. He thought he was the only one. I thought so, too, I think we both did. But Ralph, I’m starting to wonder if there might be another one, after all. Not quite the same, but similar—the way dogs and wolves are similar, say. It might only be what my old friend Bill Hodges used to call Blue Ford Syndrome, but if I’m right, I need to do something about it. Don’t I?”

The question sounds plaintive, lost. She pauses the recording again, thinks about deleting that last, and decides not to. Plaintive and lost is exactly how she feels right now, and besides—Ralph will probably never hear this.

She goes again.

“Our outsider needed time to transform. There was a period of hibernation, weeks or months, while he changed from looking like one person to looking like another. He wore a chain of faces going back years, maybe even centuries. This guy, though . . . if what I’m thinking is true, he can change much faster, and I’m having trouble believing that. Which is kind of ironic. Do you remember what I said to you the night before we went after our perp? That you had to set your lifelong concept of reality aside? It was okay for the others not to believe, but you had to. I said if you didn’t believe we were probably going to die, and that would allow the outsider to keep moving along, wearing the faces of other men and leaving them to take the blame when more children died.”

She shakes her head, even laughs a little.

“I was like one of those revival preachers exhorting unbelievers to come to Jesus, wasn’t I? Only now I’m the one trying not to believe. Trying to tell myself it’s just paranoid Holly Gibney, jumping at shadows the way I used to before Bill came along and taught me to be brave.”

Holly takes a deep breath.

“The man I’m worried about is named Charles Ondowsky, although he goes by Chet. He’s a TV reporter, and his beat is what he calls the three Cs: crime, community, and consumer fraud. He does cover community affairs, stuff like groundbreaking ceremonies and the World’s Largest Garage Sale, and he covers consumer fraud—there’s even a segment on his station’s nightly news called Chet on Guard—but what he covers mostly is crime and disaster. Tragedy. Death. Pain. And if all that doesn’t remind you of the outsider who killed the boy in Flint City and the two little girls in Ohio, I’d be very surprised. Shocked, in fact.”

She pauses the recording long enough to take a big drink of her ginger ale—her throat is as dry as the desert—and lets out a resounding belch that makes her giggle. Feeling a little better, Holly pushes the record button and makes her report, just as she would when investigating any case—repo, lost dog, car salesman chipping six hundred dollars here, eight hundred there. Doing that is good. It’s like disinfecting a wound that has begun to show some minor but still troubling redness.

December 15, 2020

When she wakes up the next morning, Holly feels brand new, ready to work and also ready to put Chet Ondowsky and her paranoid suspicions about him behind her. Was it Freud or Dorothy Parker who once said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar? Whichever one it was, sometimes a dark spot beside a reporter’s mouth is just hair or dirt that looks like hair. Ralph would tell her that if he ever heard her audio recording, which he almost certainly won’t. But it did the job; talking it out cleared her head. In that way it was like her therapy sessions with Allie. Because if Ondowsky could somehow morph into George the Bomber, then morph back into himself again, why would he leave a little piece of George’s mustache behind? The idea is ridiculous.