Fear itself: a novel (5 page)

“Wayne, listen to me—this is important.”

“Fuck you,” repeated Wayne, closing his eye and returning to the Bach. In many ways the sixth suite was the least satisfying to play, perhaps because it had originally been written for some unknown five-stringed instru—

Whap!
A hard blow to the temple. Wayne toppled sideways onto the mattress, but made no effort to get up again. Fuck it, he thought as he tuned the imaginary top string back up to A. When you’re practicing an imaginary cello with your hands cuffed behind you, it doesn’t make all that much difference whether you’re sitting up or lying down.

At-teck the gigue, Mr. Summers, don’t snyeak up on it.
If Wayne concentrated hard enough, he could almost
hear
old Brotsky’s Russian-Jewish accent.
It’s a dence, Mr. Summers, make it dence!

And so Wayne attacked it, and he made it dance—in his mind his bowing action had never been freer, or more joyous, or, paradoxically enough, more under control. But there was a limit to his ability to maintain his concentration: he lost his place when Simon started kicking him.

“Wayne! Listen up, Wayne—you have to do something for me.”

That got his attention. The
chutzpah,
as Brotsky would have said. The sheer
chutzpah.
“What?”

“I need you to write something.”

“Then you’ll leave me alone?” For some reason, finishing the entire cycle of suites had taken on urgency for Wayne.

“Yes.”

“You’re lying.”

“Well, yes. But I’ll make you a deal—if you do as I ask, I promise I’ll make it quick and painless.”

*   *   *

In the end, it was neither quick nor painless, though when Simon originally made his promise, he sincerely believed he was telling the truth. In the fear game, the payoff was fear, not pain—there was no advantage to prolonging Wayne’s suffering.

But while Wayne was writing the note Simon required of him, Simon had a little too much time to think about what a disappointment Wayne had been and to convince himself that he would be entirely justified in making one last attempt to recoup his not inconsiderable investment of time, trouble, and cold, hard cash.

It was all to no avail, however—the smaller birds might as well have been origami sculptures for all the effect they had on the so-called ornithophobe. Simon went so far as to try stuffing one of the canaries into Wayne’s mouth—no response other than that frenzied twitching of the fingers behind the back. Nor would the owl attack a third time, even after the blood started flowing again.

How long the beating lasted, Simon couldn’t have said—when he lost his temper, he lost all sense of time. But for several minutes after Simon collapsed on the bloody mattress, sobbing for breath, Wayne’s fingers continued to twitch. It was like a nightmare, something out of an Edgar Allan Poe story—Simon, who thought of himself as fearless, even managed to generate a little pretend terror by playing around with the notion that those blessèd fingers would continue to twitch long after he cut the hands off.

But to Simon’s mixed relief, the twitching stopped of its own accord after a few more minutes. Then it was over, except for the cleanup, which would have to wait until morning. For one thing, Simon was physically exhausted and emotionally drained; for another, despite all the soundproofing he’d installed in the basement, the noise and vibration from the jackhammer still might leak up through the vents and awaken Missy.

Tuesday dawned clear and bright in Georgetown, where Linda Abruzzi was staying with her old college roommate Gloria Gee and Gloria’s husband, Jim, until she found her own place. It was the sort of fall morning that made you forget winter was just around the corner. And the commute wasn’t as bad as it had been on Monday—Linda was at her desk by eight, after another thorough vetting at the gate. The first thing she did was go over Dorie Bell’s letter again.

And there it was. Didn’t look like much in the cold, hard light of the morning, without Pender around to encourage her. But it wasn’t as if Linda had anything else going on, so she spent the rest of the morning contacting the Vegas, Fresno, and Chicago PDs in order to verify the facts, then logging on to phobia.com, the PWSPD Association web site, in order to bone up on specific phobia disorders, and just before noon—nine
A
.
M
., California time—Linda, as she noted in her log, “initiated telephone contact with correspondent.”

“Hello?”

“Dorie Bell?”

“This is Dorie.”

“I hope I didn’t wake you, Ms. Bell.”

“Not at all. Is this about Wayne?”

“No, this is Linda Abruzzi with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I’m calling in response to your letter to Special Agent Pender.”

“Oh, thank God.”

Not exactly the kind of response Linda was accustomed to getting when she called somebody at nine in the morning, their time, and identified herself as FBI. Still she stuck to Bureau-cratese: “Special Agent Pender has passed your letter on to me for disposition, and I need to ask you a few—”

The other woman cut her off in midsentence. “It’s happened again.”

“What’s happened again, Ms. Bell?”

“My friend Wayne hasn’t been seen since Sunday night. He was supposed to be
here
last night, only he never—”

“Wait a minute, slow down there, Ms. Bell—let’s take it from the top.”

So they did, they took it from the top, and by the time they reached the bottom, Linda was a believer. After promising to call Dorie back as soon as she had any information and deflecting her effusive and prayerful thanks, Linda clicked off the receiver, then called her old friend Bobby Emmett, who was still with the San Francisco field office.

Linda and Bobby had worked the Polly Klaas kidnapping together back in ’93—what a cluster-fuck that had been. Old FBI truism: the more agents assigned to a kidnapping investigation, the worse the chances for a successful resolution—if by successful you mean finding the victim alive. The FBI’s failures were loud and public, its triumphs often quiet and private—which was the way it had to be, of course.

And being a low-seniority agent in a high-visibility manpower rollout was no picnic. But if you had to spend eighteen-hour days canvassing neighborhoods, knocking on doors, fielding hot-line calls from wackos and publicity hounds, or, toward the end, cruising up and down Highway 101 looking for unmarked graves, there wasn’t a nicer guy to do it with than Bobby Emmett.

True to form, Bobby agreed to get in touch with one of his contacts in the SFPD, then get back to Linda. But when he did, not long afterward, the news wasn’t good—not for Wayne Summers, and certainly not for Linda’s first Liaison Support investigation.

“Turns out Mr. Summers has an uncle pretty high up in the SFPD,” Bobby explained. “They’ve been all over this one, and according to them, it looks like your boy drowned himself. They found his cello case out on Ocean Beach this morning, along with his clothes and a suicide note. Haven’t found the body yet, but you know the riptide out there.”

“The note—does it look legitimate?”

“His mother verified the handwriting.”

“Can you get hold of it for me?”

“No can do. You’re lucky you even caught me here—I’m off to Seattle in a few hours. Been loaned to Antiterrorism—they’re beefing up for this Y2K deal.”

“How about this afternoon, then? The fact that it looks like a suicide makes it a better fit for the profile.”

“Linda, I have to go. If I were you, I wouldn’t put a lot more effort into this one. Coincidences happen, you know? And suicides come in clusters.”

“You’re probably right,” said Linda distractedly—she was trying to remember Ocean Beach from her San Francisco days. Dog shit, broken glass, murderous riptide, seals by the dozens on the rocks below Cliff House, and seagulls by the hundreds, wheeling and screaming and fighting for garbage and picnic scraps. Western gulls, California gulls, herring gulls, Heermann’s gulls: you could throw a french fry in the air and nine times out of ten it would never hit the ground. “Thanks for the help.”

But as she prepared herself mentally for the unpleasant task of calling Dorie Bell back and giving her the bad news about her friend Wayne, Linda was still far from convinced. Sure, suicides did sometimes come in clusters, and sure, coincidences did happen. But so did murder. And Ocean Beach was no place for an ornithophobe, thought Linda—especially a suicidal one.

“Watch out!” called Missy. She knew the man with the hook was hiding behind the door, and that as soon as Audrey Hepburn opened it, he would…

Ring ring ring ring, Simon, it’s me, call me.

Missy rarely answered the telephone, partly because Simon didn’t like her to, and partly because it was generally a frustrating experience. But all morning it had been
ring ring ring ring Simon it’s Dorie, ring ring ring ring, call me I have news,
and finally she couldn’t stand it anymore. She paused
Charade
and picked up the extension.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Missy. It’s Dorie. Remember me?”

Of course she did—Dorie gave absolutely the
best
hugs. “Oh, hi.”

“Hi. Is Simon there?”

“In the basement.”

“What? I’m sorry, honey, he’s what?”

“Basement. He is in the basement.” But she could have repeated herself all day and not been understood. Stupid tongue. Stupid mouth. “Wait.”

Even though the basement door was securely locked and bolted, you couldn’t have dragged Missy near it with a team of horses. She beeped Simon with their two-way, then went back to her movie, leaving the receiver off the hook. A few minutes later, a frowning Simon showed up in the doorway wearing his kneepads and his rubber boots, smelling of wet cement. Missy waved the pager in the direction of the phone.