Fear itself: a novel (7 page)

“Well, if Pool said it, it must be so. What can I do you for?”

“It’s about Dorie Bell’s letter.” Linda told him about Wayne Summers’s disappearance and ostensible suicide.

“Oh, man,” was Pender’s only response—but it was an eloquent
oh, man.

“The thing is,” Linda continued, “I’m just not buying the suicide. Everybody else is—everybody but Dorie Bell. SFPD says drop it, Bobby says drop it, and the ASAC in San Francisco won’t even talk to me—he hung up when he found out I was with Liaison Support.”

“That ASAC—his name wouldn’t be Pastor by any chance?”

“Thomas Pastor—why, do you know him?”

“Ran into him a couple times during the Maxwell case. Empty suit—couldn’t track down an elephant with diarrhea, but he’ll look terrific at the press conference afterwards.”

“So where do I go from here?” There weren’t any courses at the Academy on liaising an investigation nobody seemed to want to conduct in the first place—but if there had been, Pender would have been the instructor.

“You have any more contacts in the field office?”

“Bobby was the last of my old gang.”

“How about SFPD?”

“Nope.”

“Then you’re screwed,” said Pender. “Unless…” And he leaned back casually against the precarious-looking railing, arms behind him, weight on his elbows—for some reason he seemed to be enjoying himself immensely.

“What? Unless what?”

“Unless you just happen to know two old farts named Pender and Dolitz, who just happen to be flying out to Pebble Beach tomorrow. We’ll be five minutes from Carmel—no reason I couldn’t drop by, have a little chat with Ms. Bell, at least find out whether she’s with the MDF.”

Linda gave him a never-heard-of-it shrug.

“When I first got to Washington, there was a huge flap about a plot to blow up the Washington Monument,” Pender explained. “Metro had a tip on a new group called the MDF. Antiterrorism shuts down the monument, plants snipers all around the mall, the whole nine yards. Then somebody actually goes out to interview the informant—turns out
MDF
stands for
Martian Defense Force
—the guy was intercepting messages from Mars through his fillings.”

Linda forced a laugh. “I don’t think Dorie Bell’s with the MDF. In any case, I couldn’t ask you to—”

“You didn’t—I volunteered.”

“But you’re retired now.”

“Not exactly,” said Pender. “I still have two weeks before I’m officially a civilian.”

“I don’t want to get you in any trouble.”

Pender shrugged. “What’s the worst they can do, fire me?”

As a boy, Simon Childs had often been beaten by his grandfather for laziness—among other things. But he wasn’t lazy, just subject to spells of paralyzing, unbearable, skin-crawling lethargy.

When not in the grip of one of his spells, however, Simon possessed a capacity for almost inhuman exertion; there were reserves of strength in that slender frame and surprising leverage in those long arms and legs. He worked all day and into the evening, and by the time he’d finished, the basement was so clean you could have held a prayer meeting down there.

Except for the God…blessèd…birds. Try as he might, he just couldn’t bring himself to harm any of them. He tried to, starting with a mercy killing of the canary with the injured wing—the one he’d tried to stuff into Wayne’s mouth—but holding it in his cupped hands, feeling the warmth, the softness, smoothing down the trembling yellow feathers with his long thumbs, he felt the same fullness in his chest and throat, the same bittersweet, painful yet pleasurable feeling that sometimes overcame him when he ran hot water into Missy’s bath, or tucked her into bed at night.

Therefore, despite the fact that it was far more dangerous than simply doing away with the birds—or perhaps
because
it was more dangerous, and therefore less boring—he decided to set them free.

The first step was to consolidate the birds, by species—the parakeets, the pigeons, and all the canaries but one—into three cages, which he then loaded, along with the alarmingly apathetic owl in its burlap sack, into the Mercedes parked in the garage abutting the soundproofed basement of the Julia Morgan– designed Childs mansion. There was barely room in the trunk for the canary and parakeet cages; he stowed the pigeons on the backseat of the convertible, covered the cage with a blanket, tossed the sack with the owl into the front seat, and put the top up.

Simon went back upstairs a little before nine-thirty. Missy was still in the bath. He helped her out, rubbed her down with a fluffy towel to get that blue-tinged skin nice and rosy, powdered her thighs so they wouldn’t chafe, and got her into her footed flannel jammies in time for
The Original Ten O’clock News.

“Now, Simon has to go out for an hour or so, but if you’re good, and you don’t get into any mischief, I have a very special present for you.”

There weren’t many words that could induce Missy to tear her eyes away from the screen when Dennis Richmond was on, but
present
was one of them. “What, what?”

“You’ll never guess in a million years.”

“Will too.”

“Hmmmmm.
Lemmee see now. What’s little…and yellow…and has feathers…” Over the years, Simon had learned how to string the hints out so that Missy had the thrill of interrupting him in midquestion, which always made her feel smart. “…and wings…and Sylvester the Cat’s always trying to—”

“Tweety Bird! A Tweety Bird!”

“If
you’re very good and don’t get into any what?”

“Mischief.”

“Exactly.”

“I promise.”

Missy was as good as her word, and so was Simon. He drove all the way out to Walnut Creek, surreptitiously dropped off the feathered menagerie outside the Lindsay Wildlife Museum, which specialized in rescuing injured birds, and got back to Berkeley in time to give Missy her present—the healthiest and singingest canary in the whole batch—before tucking her in.

“I love her,” said Missy. Simon had put the cage right next to her bed.

“What are you going to call her?”

“Tweety, silly.”

“Tweety Silly?” teased Simon. “That’s a funny name.”

“Brat,” said Missy.

“Brat,” replied Simon. As he bent over the bed to kiss her on the forehead, the canary began to sing. Simon turned out the light, but left the hall light on and the door ajar.

“Good night, sis.”

“Good night,” Missy called. “Sweet dreams.”

“Let’s hope so,” muttered Simon, as the canary fell silent. “God, let’s hope so.”

The morning after Pender’s retirement party, the spookily efficient Miss Pool made a single phone call, and in nothing less than a Bureau-cratic miracle, twenty minutes later two burly men in white coveralls showed up to haul away Pender’s files.

Linda then tackled the task of cleaning out Pender’s desk and discovered the bottle of Jim Beam he’d left behind for her. She thought about throwing it into the wastebasket, but reconsidered: according to rumor, Counterintelligence was going through FBI trash now on a regular basis, trying to find the mole who had tipped off a major operation—the tunnel under the Russian Embassy, again according to rumor.

Two hours later, while Linda was on-line, scrolling through the phobia.com chat room archives, the same two men in coveralls, accompanied by Special Agent Steve Maheu, returned with dolly-load upon dolly-load of white cardboard file boxes. Maheu, a crewcut member of the FBI’s Mormon Mafia, wearing a gray suit especially tailored to hide the umbrella up his ass (according to Pender), informed Linda that she’d been loaned to Counterintelligence.

“Actually, I’m working on something kind of promising at—”

He cut her off in midsentence.
“Actually,
you’re working on whatever I say you’re working on, Abruzzi. Unless you are physically unable to perform the duties to which you are assigned, in which case I suggest you hand in your badge and let’s get this charade over with before you embarrass the Bureau any further.”

Lucky for you they took my gun away,
Linda felt like saying. But what she did say, quietly, after counting to ten in Italian (a trick her mother, from the Sicilian side of the family, the side with the temper, had learned from
her
mother when she was a little girl), was, “Good lord, you really believe that, don’t you? That I’m embarrassing the Bureau.”

“These boxes,” he continued, as if she hadn’t spoken, “contain computer printouts of every transaction in every known bank account keyed to the social security number of any agent, clerk, or charwoman with knowledge of a recent operation which may have been compromised from the inside.”

“You mean the tun—”

Maheu cut her off again. “Excuse me? I didn’t hear that,” he said pointedly.

“I said, what fun.”

“That’s better. I don’t know how you did things in San Antonio, Abruzzi, but here in Washington we don’t deal in gossip, especially in matters of security.”

“Sorry.” Linda, a born wiseass, refrained with difficulty from pointing out that technically they weren’t in Washington, they were in Virginia.

“Your job is to go through these transaction records one account at a time. The names have been redacted and code numbers substituted. If you find any unusual deposits, or pattern of deposits, write the code number down on a sheet of paper.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Do you really think somebody who’s spying for the Russians is going to deposit the payoffs into his
checking
account, for crying out loud?”

“No. If I thought there was a chance in Hades of that, I’d assign a real agent to the job. And who said anything about Russians?”

Uno, due, tre, quattro…

Eight miles high, somewhere over Kansas, Pender turned to Sid Dolitz. “Well?”

Sid polished off the last of his crab cocktail, took another sip of complimentary champagne, and patted his lips with a linen napkin—he always flew first class. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Why would I be kidding? I’m sitting next to the man who
invented
profiling.”

“I think Brussel, Teten, and Mullany, among others, might have something to say about that.”

“But they’re not here,” Pender pointed out.

“If they were, they’d tell you only an idiot would try to come up with a psychological profile based on such flimsy data.”

“Give me a flimsy profile, then.”

“I don’t
do
flimsy,” said Sid.

Pender waited him out.

“Okay, okay. Assuming it’s the same perp, assuming all the alleged suicides are really homicides, and with a caveat the size of your enormous ass, here’s a shot in the dark: antisocial personality disorder, more commonly known as psychopathy, but
compounded
by a phobia disorder, manifesting counterphobically.”

“And now for the English translation…?”

“Here’s my theory: As a psychopath, our man’s biggest problem is boredom.” They were taking the killer’s gender for granted: serial poisoners aside, at a conservative estimate, ninety-seven out of a hundred serial killers are male. “Psychopaths characteristically demonstrate abnormally low cortical arousal levels, so they’re constantly in search of stimulation. Extreme stimulation: in order to reach the same level of satisfaction and enjoyment you or I might achieve from watching a good movie, your average psychopath has to torture a cat or get into a fistfight. And as for reaching the levels of cortical arousal the normal person gets from any activity they’re passionate about, like sex, or at our age, golf—”

“Speak for yourself,” said Pender.

“—the psychopath might have to actually murder somebody. But here’s where it gets interesting: given that the victims all had different specific phobia disorders, and taking into account the manner of their respective deaths, I think it’s highly probable that our man is a phobophobe.”

“What’s that?”

“Fear of fear: a phobophobe is afraid of fear itself. But this subject’s phobia would seem to be manifesting counterphobically—in other words, he seeks out that which he’s afraid of—which in turn fits hand in glove with the psychopathy: he fights his boredom by feeding on fear.”

“Sounds like one scary sonofabitch,” said Pender.

“He’d probably be very gratified to hear you say that.”

“I don’t want to gratify him, I want to catch him.”

“You’re retired.”

“Not technically.”

“You’re not on active duty.”

“A mere technicality.”

“You’re really going to go through with this?”

“Bet your ass.”

“A word of advice, then: Don’t underestimate this man. The original name for psychopathy was
manie sans délire,
which means ‘mania without delusion.’ He may be crazy as a shithouse rat, to use the technical term, but his mind is at least as clear and focused as yours. Probably more so, considering the amount of booze you’ve been putting away lately.”

“You think I’m drinking too much?” Pender was genuinely surprised.

“For a small county in Ireland, no. For one man, yes.”

On Wednesday morning, Simon Childs attempted to soften the blow by taking his sister to the Denny’s in Emeryville for a breakfast that would have felled a lumberjack, before breaking the news that he had to go away again for a little while.

“How long?” she asked, as morosely as she could with a mouth full of hash browns.

Simon leaned across the table and wiped the corner of her mouth—she hated for him to do that in public, but was too depressed to protest. “It’s just for a day or two—tops. And here’s the good news: I talked to Ganny Wilson this morning—if you want, you can stay with her until I get back.”