July 22–24

July 22–24 is the period in which Holly Gibney takes Alec Pelley’s assignment into Dayton and begins to test whether the Maitland family’s visit there intersects with the history of the stolen van and another pair of murdered girls. Her inquiry moves from a dated leaflet campaign to newspaper records and the Heisman Memory Unit, converting scattered chronology into a possible connection between cases. The investigation is also personal: it restores a sense of engagement that Holly recognizes she has missed since Bill Hodges died.

Assignment and return to investigative work

After putting the office phone back beside her home phone, Holly sits silently at her computer and checks her pulse with her Fitbit. It reads seventy-five, eight to ten beats above her normal rate. Alec Pelley’s account of the Maitland affair has stirred her more than any case since her work on Brady Hartsfield. Holly corrects her first impression: she has not felt genuinely excited about much since Bill’s death. Her regular work with Pete Huntley has been steady but comparatively routine, involving deadbeats, bail-jumpers, stolen cars, lost pets, and delinquent child support. She abhors violence, she has told Pelley, but the pursuit of Hartsfield—and, earlier, the case of Morris Bellamy—made her feel alive in a way ordinary assignments have not.

The contrast gives the Dayton assignment an emotional weight beyond its practical objective. Holly is not seeking danger for its own sake, and she knows that neither Hartsfield nor Bellamy is waiting for her there. Pete is away on vacation in Minnesota, and Jerome is in Ireland with his family. She therefore undertakes the trip without those familiar colleagues, carrying the responsibility for the inquiry herself while recognizing how much the work has reawakened her attention.

Reconstructing the Dayton timeline

Holly’s first written update to Pelley, titled “GIBNEY REPORT #1,” sets out a specific chronological lead. Tommy and Tuppence menus were distributed across a nine-block area on Thursday, April 19. Based on her interview with co-owner Mary Hollister, Holly considers the date reliable. She reasons that Merlin Cassidy abandoned the van in a nearby parking lot that same day and that it was almost certainly gone by the time the Maitland family arrived in Dayton around noon on Saturday, April 21. She plans to check with local police to eliminate another possibility before visiting the Heisman Memory Unit.

The report shows Holly separating what she considers established from what remains to be checked. The leaflet date rests on an interview; the van’s disappearance is a strong inference, not yet a confirmed police finding. Her next proposed steps—contacting local police and speaking with Terry Maitland’s father, if he is having a good day—are aimed at narrowing the gap between the family’s Dayton itinerary and the case’s other movements. Even if Terry’s father cannot provide useful information, she considers the care-center staff potential sources.

The Howard sisters and Heath Holmes

Holly searches the local paper’s archives beginning with April 19, the date Cassidy abandoned the van and, she suspects, the day it was re-stolen. She finds no report concerning the Heisman Memory Unit in the following days, despite a busy run of unrelated local news. The silence matters as part of her chronology: the available record does not immediately supply a link between the care center and the developing investigation.

On April 25, however, the front page reports that Amber and Jolene Howard, two sisters missing from nearby Trotwood, have been found dead and mutilated in a ravine near their home. An unnamed police source describes the violence as extreme, and the article reports that both girls were sexually molested. Terry Maitland was in Dayton that day with his family. Holly’s discovery does not establish his involvement; instead, the overlap intensifies the contradiction she is investigating, because his family presence and the dates of the crimes now sit within the same narrow local timeline.

The archives report no new development on April 26, the day Terry visited his father for the last time, or April 27, when the Maitland family flew home to Flint City. On April 28, police announce that they are questioning a person of interest; two days later, they arrest Heath Holmes, a thirty-four-year-old Dayton resident employed as an orderly at the Heisman Memory Unit. That occupation makes the care center more than a possible source of background information: it connects the setting Holly intends to visit with the investigation that followed the sisters’ murders.

The inquiry meets the Flint City investigation

The planned visit to the Heisman Memory Unit has two purposes. Holly hopes to speak with Terry’s father if his condition permits, while remaining prepared to interview staff if he is not able to help. The records she has found give that visit new context: Holmes worked there, and the local paper’s timeline places the Howard sisters’ murders during the Maitland family’s stay in Dayton. The inquiry thus begins to bridge a family visit, a care facility, a missing van, and a separate murder investigation without treating chronology alone as proof.

After returning to her room, Holly receives a call from Ralph Anderson, who says that Pelley has given him her number and explained what she is doing. He challenges whether she knows what she is doing. Holly answers that she does. Her certainty is limited rather than uncomplicated: she remains a doubtful person, even after years of therapy, but she is sure of her capacity to pursue this assignment. Anderson’s call marks the point at which her privately assembled Dayton timeline meets the police investigation in Flint City, setting up a working connection between Holly’s independent inquiry and the case’s central investigators.