Fear itself: a novel (29 page)

The wooded hillside below Pender’s house sloped down to a narrow strip of lawn abutting the eastern bank of the C&O; a tall windbreak of mixed white ash, box elder, hawthorne, sycamore, and sugar maple lined the towpath along the western bank. From the porch, Linda saw the broad silver ribbon of the Potomac winding lazily in the distance through the Froot-Loopy autumn countryside.

She also saw her breath. Enjoy the view while you can, Linda told herself—in a few weeks those trees will all be bare.

Linda glanced at her watch—6:30—washed down a handful of vitamins with the dregs of her breakfast smoothie, grabbed her cane, and pushed herself up from her chair. Then it was heigh-ho, heigh-ho, down the River Road we go, to the DOJ-AOB in suburban Virginia, where she received a familiar howdy from the gate guard, who examined the backseat, trunk, and undercarriage of the Geo anyway. The daily security code for the underground garage was 1220, which also happened to be her mom’s birthday; Linda told herself that meant it would be a lucky day for her.

It was a busy one, at any rate. Two more corpses—well, skeletons—had been unearthed in Simon Childs’s basement, so Linda spent the entire morning reviewing the missing persons printouts for the western states that Thom Davies had culled from the NCIC database over the weekend. Some went back as far as 1968. Where there seemed to be at least a possibility of a match, Linda would fax the preliminary forensic data to the appropriate local authorities.

Around one o’clock, the eleven cartons of records arrived from Bobbeck, Pflueger, and Morrison—Mr. Pflueger had been as good as his word. She enlisted Pool’s help in cataloguing the contents, which took most of the afternoon.
What’d you do in the FBI, Mommy?
she imagined her kids asking her someday in the distant future.
Darlings, I shuffled paper like nobody’s business.

Then she remembered that she wasn’t going to be having any kids—or, most likely, any distant future. And although the realization wasn’t exactly news, it did rattle her a little, sucker punching her like that. Too bad, so sad, get over it, she ordered herself, and went back to her paper shuffling.

With amphetamines, there comes a point where a dosage sufficient to keep you awake is also large enough to cause optical field disturbances similar to hallucinations. Flashing lights in the periphery of your vision, trails and prismatic distortions—you don’t see things that aren’t there, but you
almost
see things that weren’t there a second ago, and aren’t there when you look again.

Simon reached that point late Tuesday afternoon. He’d fled La Farge profoundly shaken by how deeply the old woman had gotten under his skin, and though he’d driven blindly through the night and into the dawn, he couldn’t seem to drive fast enough or far enough to get her out of his mind—the fond look in her eyes when she told him about her Down child, her Stanley; the sincere anger in her voice when she recounted how the doctors had told her the best thing she could do for all of them, Stanley, her husband, and herself, was put the child away in an institution before they all got too used to each other; the shame when she told him how close she’d come to listening to them.

“They wouldn’t let me breast-feed him—they told me I’d get too attached. When he was three weeks old, we put him in his little basket and drove him to the state home down by Madison. The papers were signed—all I had to do was turn around and walk away, but do you know what, Mr. Bellcock? It was as if my legs had turned to stone. To this day—to this
day,
Mr. Bellcock, I still can’t understand how any mother could do it,
physically
do it, is what I mean, walk away and leave her baby behind.”

There’s an old woman in Atlantic City I’d like to ask that same question, thought Simon. And suddenly, although he couldn’t have put a name to the disquieting sensation welling up inside him—it was a strange amalgam of self-pity and empathy—he realized he couldn’t stand to hear much more about how it felt to be Ida Day in particular, or a mother in general, or how it felt to be anybody else at all other than Simon Childs. All
he’d
ever asked her about, he told himself, all
he’d
ever wanted to know was what she was afraid of, so they could get on with the game.

The irony of the situation was that when she finally got around to telling him, it only made things worse. Simon had known, of course, that there were other Down children in the world, tens of thousands of them, and if he’d bothered to think about it, he’d have understood that their parents had some of the same problems that he’d had, loco-parenting Missy—and probably with a lot fewer resources. But it wasn’t until Ida turned from the mantelpiece holding a photograph of Stanley in a filigreed silver frame, and told him how every night for the three years between Walt’s death and Stanley’s, she had lain awake in terror at the thought of dying first, of leaving Stanley behind, helpless, alone, afraid, that she really started getting under his skin.

Because every time she said “Stanley,” he heard
Missy,
and the nameless, unfamiliar, disquieting sensation worsened; when she told him how sometimes she even thought about using the revolver in her dresser drawer on both of them if her health started to fail, Simon could scarcely bear it. He fled La Farge at midnight, needing a game more desperately than he had when he’d arrived; by the time he finally pulled off the interstate somewhere in the middle of Pennsylvania on Tuesday afternoon, to look for a motel before he drove the Volvo off the road while swerving to avoid something that wasn’t there, the need had turned to a craving.

Yes, and people in hell crave ice water, as Grandfather Childs was fond of saying. Simon should have remembered that when he saw the sign for
Graham Graham’s Reptilarium, Route 15, Allenwood
at the bottom of the off-ramp and was immediately reminded of the ophidiophobe who called herself (or himself, though the majority of ophidiophobes were female) Skairdykat, the last fruit of the PWSPD tree. According to Zap Strum’s information, Skairdy lived in Georgetown, which was not far from Pender’s home in Maryland. He should also have remembered what Grandfather sometimes used to add: if those folks in hell ever get their ice water, they usually find the devil has salted it first.

Graham Graham’s Reptilarium! Simon, whose interest in snakes went back to his boyhood pet Skinny and whose subsequent hobby had involved him with ophidiophobes more than once (it was one of the most common specific phobias), had often seen Graham on television and had wanted to visit the place for years, but it wasn’t until this afternoon that fate had brought him anywhere near Allenwood, Pennsylvania.

The reptilarium looked fairly crummy from the outside—it shared a strip mall with a hoagie shop—but once inside, Simon was not disappointed. Mambas, cobras, pythons, vipers, a twelve-foot gator, giant tortoises, exotic frogs and lizards—Simon even saw Graham Graham himself, in safari khakis, leading a group of schoolchildren on a tour. In other circumstances, he told himself, he’d have liked to shake the man’s hand, buy him a drink, talk reptiles. But it would have been indiscreet—after all, Simon
was
planning to rip the place off right after closing.

“Who was it said, beware of any venture that requires new clothes?” Pender wanted to know. Dorie had half-dragged him to Khaki’s, an upscale men’s clothier in Carmel’s Barnyard shopping center.

“It wasn’t a woman, I’ll tell you that,” she replied. The only clothes he had were the ones he’d packed in his carry-on for what was supposed to have been a two-day trip. If she saw that yellow Ban Lon shirt one more time, she’d announced Tuesday morning, she was going to upchuck.

Her choice of emporiums backfired on her, though. Khaki’s advertised itself as a classy, post-preppy kind of store, but Pender had made a beeline for a rack of Hawaiian shirts and picked out a couple of doozies; he was trying on Panama hats when his cell phone began chirping.

Weird, thought Dorie, watching Pender as he wandered over to the doorway of the shop for better reception. She’d never fallen for a homely man before—it took some getting used to. Not in bed, oddly enough—she was surprised to learn how little looks seemed to matter when you were making love—but in broad daylight those eyes, under that scarred expanse of scalp, seemed much too small, and that putty nose and those LBJ ears much too big; only the full-lipped mouth was just about right, but somehow when it broke into that easy grin, it made the rest of the face seem just about right, too.

Still, she couldn’t help comparing him to Rafael, her Big Sur carpenter. Walk into a joint on Rafe’s arm, and you could sense every other woman in the place curling up with jealousy like the wicked witch’s toes after the ruby slippers were removed. And when Rafe was working, with his muscles rippling beneath his sweat-stained T-shirt like Brando’s in
Streetcar
and the heavy suede carpenter’s toolbelt slung diagonally athwart his narrow hips—

“Hey, Dorie!” Pender waved her over, his hand covering the mouthpiece of the phone. “Have you ever heard of a shrink named Luka—Janos Luka?”

“Janos Luka? Sure, who hasn’t?”

“Me and Abruzzi, for two.”

“He’s a famous gestalt therapist—he worked with Perls and Maslow, all those guys. He must be about a million years old by now—he still runs the Lethe Institute, down in Big Sur. Why?”

“Apparently he was Simon Childs’s psychiatrist at one time.” Then, into the phone again: “Linda? Yes, Dorie knows him.”

“Hey! I didn’t say I—”

Pender put a forefinger to his lips, gave Dorie a wink. “Yeah, he’s an old friend of hers. She says he’s pretty reclusive, though—maybe you ought to let us make the first contact…. Right, right, somebody from the resident agency should definitely do the interview itself…. Of course I will.…Okay, talk to you later.”

“What was that all about?” asked Dorie.

“Just a little Bureau-cratic gamesmanship. How long a drive is it?”

“How long a drive is what?”

“From here to Big Sur,” said Pender—and here came that grin again, lighting up his whole face, chasing away all the ugly.

Linda Abruzzi was no fool—she understood that Pender’s promise to have somebody from the FBI’s resident agency in Monterey conduct the formal interview with Dr. Luka was probably bogus. But if the priority here was catching Childs, then having a Bureau legend like E. L. Pender doing your background interviews was like having Derek Jeter for a pinch hitter: you’d be a fool if you
didn’t
bring him off the bench. And as a law school graduate, Linda was quite familiar with the concept of plausible deniability—as was Deputy Director Steven P. McDougal, she was reasonably certain.

Besides, Linda had other fish to fry. In the same carton as the medical records—actually just the bills—she had found both Simon’s and Melissa’s birth certificates, so as soon as she got off the phone with Pender, she called Thom Davies and asked him to perform a little of his database wizardry.

A few minutes later, as she was lifting the latest forensic report from Berkeley off the fax tray—middle-aged female with a titanium screw in the left femur, a type of screw that had only been in use since 1992, the medical examiner had assured Linda—Davies called back to report that Simon Childs’s long lost mother was lost no longer.

“Good work,” Linda told him.

“Piece of piss,” said the expat Brit. “According to social security records, she’s been living at the same address in Atlantic City for over fifteen years. If you consider four hundred and fifty dollars a month living, that is.”

“Kimberly Rosen would,” said Linda grimly, glancing up to the two photographs from the Chicago PD she’d posted on her victims’ bulletin board. The first was a perky three-quarter head shot of Kim from the New Trier yearbook, class of ’95; the second was a full-face shot from the Cook County morgue, class of ’99.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Miss Delamour?”

“Not
Dela
more, it’s Dela-
moor, comme le français.”

“Sorry, Miss Dela-
moor.”

“Aah,
call me Rosie, ever’body else does.”

Plastered, Linda told herself—four o’clock in the afternoon and she’s plastered. Interviewing drunks was like fishing—you let them ramble a bit, then you reel them in, let them ramble, reel them in. “Rosie, I’m calling about your son.”

“Got no son.” The way she said it, though, it was less a denial than it was a renunciation. “Tried to explain, he didn’t wanna hear.”

“Explain what, Rosie?”

“Why.”

“Because I’m trying to get in touch with him.”

“No, why—explain why. Why I left.”

Oh, swell, thought Linda: it’s turning into an Abbott and Costello routine. “When was this, Rosie?”

“Too late. It was too late. Guess I waited too long. To call.”

Linda tried again—this could be the break they were looking for. “Rosie, I need to know when you last spoke to Simon.” Elementary psycholinguistics: “I” statements often elicited responses where questions failed.

“I dunno, this year, last year—no, wait, I remember. It was February—February fourth. Missy’s birthday. He wouldn’t lemme…said it would only…wouldn’t lemme…”

Not recent, then, thought Linda, as Rosie began sobbing on the other end of the line—so much for our big break. “February fourth of this year?”

A drawn-out, drunken wail that under other circumstances might have been almost farcical, followed by an extended silence broken by the clink of ice in a thin-walled glass. “Rosie?”

“Who is this?”

“Linda Abruzzi.” Linda decided not to identify herself as an FBI agent just yet—she didn’t want to arouse any maternal protective instincts. “I’m trying to get hold of Simon—it’s very important.”