Fear itself

encountering the principal in the grocery store. When do I get to be the grown-up? she wondered. And now Pender had disappeared. She glanced around, saw him out on the back porch, engaged in earnest conversation with a dapper old guy wearing what looked like one of Sinatra’s old toupees. She caught Pender’s eye; he waved to her to join them.

“Linda Abruzzi, this is Sid Dolitz. Best forensic shrink who ever wore a badge. Never treated a patient a day in his life, though.”

“Didn’t care much for crazy people,” Dolitz explained. “Bit of a handicap for a psychiatrist, but a plus as far as the Bureau was concerned.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you, too.” Dolitz had a neat little hand, not much bigger than Linda’s, and much better manicured. “I understand you have MS.”

“Yes?” As in what of it? In the few short months since her diagnosis, Linda had already met too many people who saw her disability before they saw her.

“So did my late wife. Would you mind terribly if I offered a suggestion?”

“I guess,” said Linda dubiously.

“Get yourself a cane before you throw your back out.”

“I’ll take it under consideration.”

“I’m sorry, I’ve offended you.”

“It’s okay.”

“Friends?”

“Friends.”

“In that case, can I offer you a glass of wine? I was just on my way into the kitchen to pop the top on a lovely looking Bordeaux-if you want good vino at Pender’s, you have to bring it yourself.”

“I’m on the wagon. But thanks anyway.”

Dolitz left. Linda leaned out over the wooden railing; below her, the dark hillside and the shiny black ribbon of the canal.

“Listen, Ed, I’m sorry to crash your party, but I needed to ask you a few questions, and Miss Pool said you were leaving town early tomorrow and that it would be okay to drop by.”

“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?”

6

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…blessed…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