Fear itself: a novel (21 page)

Nelson’s ciliary radar—the tiny hairs on the back of his arms and neck—whispered a warning just before his bound hands bumped against the back of the bedroom door. It was already closed, he realized, hope surging again—-and again, the sensation was nearly indistinguishable from panic. He slid his hands up and down along the crack of the door; at the apex of his reach his fingers brushed the cold iron of the dead-bolt fixture, but the bolt itself was too high for him to grasp. He hunched forward, wrenching his arms higher and higher up his back until his shoulders felt as if they were about to dislocate, until at last he was holding the little round knurl of the bolt between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand.

Working backward with his hands crossed behind him at the wrists was doubly disorienting; with his arms torqued painfully and his shoulders wrenched in their sockets until the shoulder blades felt as if they were sticking out like angel wings, Nelson finally managed to rotate the bolt upward, slide it into its socket, and rotate it down again, then collapsed on the floor, simultaneously exhausted and exhilarated. You did it, he started to tell himself, you—

Then he knew. Nothing had moved in the bedroom, not a scrape, not a rustle, but all the same, he knew. “You’re in here, aren’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” said a voice in the darkness.

Drought be damned, conservation be damned—Dorie wanted a shower, she wanted it hot, hot, hot, and she wanted it to last forever. She stripped off the pink scrubs one of the ER nurses had filched for her, stepped into the shower, and let ’er rip.

It took ten minutes and several relatherings to rid herself of the stink, which was compounded by the reek of Missy’s cheap strawberry-scented bubble bath. Poor Missy, thought Dorie. The nurse had still been performing CPR on her when Dorie and Pender emerged from the basement; by the time the paramedics arrived to take over, Nurse Apple had nearly passed out from hyperventilation, and although the ambulance docs had kept the CPR going all the way to Alta Bates, nobody seemed surprised when she was declared DOA.

It was just as well, though, Dorie decided—from what she had gathered about their relationship, Missy would probably have preferred death to being separated from her big brother for any length of time.

The hot water ran out as Dorie finished rinsing the conditioner out of her hair. She stepped out of the shower, wrapped her hair in a bath-towel turban, dried herself off, dusted herself liberally with L’Air du Temps scented talcum powder—one of her few personal extravagances—and returned to the bedroom to begin a round of musical clothes. Dear
Cosmo:
What does a gal wear for an informal tête-à-tête with the man who saved her life, whom she might want to get involved with someday, but definitely not tonight, thank you very much, even though she’s already invited him to sleep over?

Then she reminded herself that Pender had already seen her in the buff, under the least flattering conditions imaginable; after those hideous pink scrubs, could it really make any difference what she chose to wear now? She threw on some comfort clothes—roomy fleece sweatpants and an oversize Carmel Padres sweatshirt—and went down to the kitchen, where Pender was on his knees, scrubbing one-handed at the parquet.

“What’d I tell you,” he said, climbing to his feet. His outfit—beret, rumpled polo, and plaid slacks that made his rear end look like a slip-covered sofa—reminded her that clothes really didn’t make the man—or the woman. “Good as new. Didn’t even strip the wax.”

“Pender, you’re a prince.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“Are you hungry?”

“To put it mildly.”

“How do you like your eggs?”

“Sunny side up—like my personality.”

“How ’bout a beer?”

“They say it’s the perfect food.”

“Glass?”

“Naah.”

“Man after my own heart.”

The beer was Tree Frog dark ale, not a brand with which Pender was familiar. The food was perfect, the eggs neither dry nor runny, the bacon neither crisp nor burned. Pender told Dorie she could make breakfast for him whenever she’d a mind to.

“And you can clean my kitchen floor whenever you want.” Dorie took a swig of Tree Frog—out of the bottle, of course. “Where do you think Simon is?”

“Ain’t that the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question?” Pender sopped up yolk with a corner of toast. “You’ve known him for a while. Did he ever mention the names of any close friends, relatives, anybody who might hide him out? My guess is it’ll be someplace in the Bay Area—he’d have to have gotten that car off the road pretty quick.”

“Nothing comes to mind. But they’re gonna catch him, right?”

“What? Oh, sure. You bet.”

“You don’t sound very convinced.”

Pender looked up from his plate. “Scout, I’ve been chasing monsters for a long time.” There was a seen-it-all sadness in his soft brown eyes. “You tell me how much you want to hear.”

“I’ve been hiding from monsters for a long time,” replied Dorie. “You tell me what you think I ought to know.”

While Nelson had been in the bedroom closet facing his demons, Simon had been in Nelson’s bathroom preparing to face his demon—singular. With every pass of Nelson’s electric clippers another piece of it had appeared in the mirror.
Bzzz,
there went the widow’s peak and the rest of the wavy silver hair. That much had been part of Plan B all along—Simon had come to identify so strongly with his handsome head of silver hair that cutting it off was the first thing that came to mind when he thought about disguising himself.

But then,
bzzz,
there went the two-day stubble and
bzzz,
there went the mustache, and Simon was reminded that it had been in order to disguise the long, cruel upper lip he’d inherited from the Childs side of the family that he’d grown the stash in the first place.

But a shaven head and face did not a demon make. It wasn’t until the eyebrows were gone that it really started to take shape. Even then the transformation into Grandfather Childs, who as a boy had suffered from an attack of scarlet fever so virulent it left him without a hair on his body, wasn’t complete until he’d finished the difficult task of clipping back the lashes.

Luckily Nelson had a pair of safety-tipped (what else?) nail scissors. Leaning over the sink until his face was within inches of the mirror, his eyes tearing like a soap opera queen, Simon clipped the lashes as close to the lids as possible, then leaned back, and voilà, the pièce de résistance. While he’d never thought of his pale blue eyes as cold, once the lashes were gone, they were positively reptilian.

Which would come in handy even after he finally left the shelter of Nelson’s house, Simon knew: not only wouldn’t the authorities be looking for a bald scalp, but no one would ever peer too long or too hard at the face under this chrome dome, not with eyes like these staring back at them.

They even made Simon uncomfortable. He turned away from the mirror, bending down to rummage through the catchall storage space under the sink until he found some witch hazel to use as aftershave—he didn’t want to spoil the effect by dousing himself with Nelson’s Old Spice.

He wasn’t surprised when Nelson refused to come out of the closet at first. Hey, the longer the better, thought Simon. Delayed gratification and all that. And once he saw that Nelson had fallen for the heavy-footsteps-down-the-hall-then-tiptoe-back-to-the-room ploy, he waited, still as a spider, to see if Nellie would actually try to lock the door.

What did surprise him was that Nelson had figured it out so quickly, before Simon could spring his own surprise. But Simon was nothing if not resourceful when it came to the game. He helped Nelson up, led him over to the bed, and let him weep for a few minutes, until Nelson had a few endorphins pumping.

Then, when he judged the time was right, he arranged the lighting and removed Nelson’s blindfold.

“I’m afraid that in this case, identifying Simon as our suspect was the easy part,” explained Pender, over another round of Tree Frogs. “His mistake was making your PWSPD Association disappear. As long as we thought it was legit, he’d have been just another member of the potential victim pool—at least until he’d been interviewed and his alibis checked out.”

“Which wouldn’t have been nearly in time to save me,” said Dorie, who was at the sink washing the dishes. Couple of beers and another Vicodin, she was feeling no pain. “You know I owe you my life. Have I thanked you yet?”

“Don’t get sentimental,” said the secret sentimentalist. “Like I said, that was the easy part. Now that he’s on the run, this thing could go flying off in any one of a dozen different directions, and I don’t just mean geographically. Personality like that, no telling what’s going to happen. Especially with his sister gone—God, I felt terrible about that.”

“Her doctor said it could have happened any time.”

“Yes, well,
she
saved
my
life—and she’s not even around for me to thank. Were they as close as they seemed?”

“Closer.”

“Think there was anything…” Pender put down his bottle and waggled his good hand iffily.

Dorie shuddered. “I don’t know and I don’t want to know.”

“Doesn’t matter—we can assume news of her death will come as quite a blow to a man who’s already stressed-out to the max just from the strain of being a fugitive, and probably wasn’t that stable to begin with. So on the one hand, we might be dealing with a disorganized psychotic serial killer on the edge of snapping. Most likely outcome there is either suicide or suicide by cop. Soon, if it hasn’t happened already.

“On the other hand, we might be dealing with a cunning, organized psychotic serial killer, now in a white-hot rage, with considerable resources, who has a plan, a false identity, some money stashed away, maybe a hideout someplace where they don’t ask too many questions. If that’s the case, there are so many ways this can go, I couldn’t handicap it if I tried. I
can
tell you that very few serial killers ever quit voluntarily. So if they haven’t caught him or found his body by the time we wake up tomorrow morning, we could be in for a long, bumpy ride.”

“Do you think he might come after either of us?” asked Dorie, sitting across from Pender again.

“Probably not. I can’t remember a case where an organized serial killer came after a victim a second time, unless they were related. As for him coming after me, that’s even less likely. Serial killers choose victims they can dominate and control. Cop killers are different. They have the assassin mentality, and as a rule of thumb, they generally don’t care which cop they kill. It’s rarely personal.”

The plates were clean by now, the bottles empty. Dorie stifled a yawn. “Getting to be that time,” she said.

“Definitely getting to be that time,” Pender agreed.

“I aired out the guest bedroom. Nobody’s used it since…Good lord, since Simon and Missy stayed here.”

“In June, right?”

“In June. He was taking Missy on vacation to make up for having been away on some kind of…of…”She finished the sentence with a moan.

“What?”

“Some kind of business trip. It must have been Chicago—he must have just come back from killing the Rosen girl.” She shuddered. “I hope you don’t mind sleeping up there—I changed the linen.”

“The guest bedroom’ll be fine,” said Pender. He had, of course, been entertaining fantasies about sleeping with Dorie tonight, but he didn’t think there was much of a chance Dorie would want to sleep with him, banged up, exhausted, and traumatized as she was. For that matter, he wasn’t entirely sure
he
really wanted sex tonight either, banged up, exhausted, and traumatized as he was. Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained—and what a tragedy it would have been if it turned out that she was willin’ and only waiting for him to make the first move. “In the absence of any other offers, of course,” he added.

Dorie, mildly flustered, ignored the tender. Men, she thought. As far as she knew, and despite the warm, golden, pain-free glow from the Vicodin and beer, she had most definitely
not
been waiting for Pender to make the first move, not with her face looking like Rocky Balboa’s after the Apollo Creed fight. Although she had to admit that tonight of all nights, it would have been nice to have somebody bigger and stronger than her to cuddle with—bigger and stronger and with a badge. But she was too wise in the ways of men, and too considerate to expect a grown man to settle for cuddling—a grown
straight
man, anyway.

“There are clean towels in the bathroom,” she told him on the way up the stairs. “If you get hungry in the middle of the night, help yourself to anything in the kitchen. I don’t usually turn the furnace on until November, but if you get cold, there are extra blankets in the—Oh, the hell with it. Do you snore?”

“Like a freight train.”

“Me too—my room’s this way.”

“Is this the offer I was hoping for?”

“I’m not promising anything,” Dorie replied. “Let’s just put the bodies together and see what happens.”

“Maybe we oughtta try a kiss first,” Pender suggested.

“Careful of the nose,” said Dorie.

“Careful of the arm,” said Pender.

Nelson wept. Someone with strong hands, someone smelling of witch hazel, helped him to his feet and led him over to the bed, where he sat with his legs outstretched, his arms still tied behind his back, resting his sore shoulders against the walnut headboard.

The blindfold was removed. Nelson opened his eyes and was blinded by a fierce white light; as he looked away, he caught a silhouetted glimpse of a hooded figure seated on the edge of the bed, training the beam from a six-volt lantern directly into his eyes.

Courage, Nelson resolved; for once in your life, courage. “Simon? Is that you?”

“Yes and no.”

“What’s
that
supposed to mean?” As Nelson’s eyes grew accustomed to the penumbra effect, he realized that Simon had borrowed one of his sweatshirts and pulled the hood up, covering his head and throwing his face into shadow.