she’d already
Something else Nurse Apple was mean about: she wanted to get rid of poor Tweety’s empty cage-she said it was full of germs. And because of Missy’s speech problems it would have been impossible for Missy to explain to her why she wanted the cage nearby for a while, even if she’d fully understood it herself. As it was, all she knew was that when things die, you have to have something to remember them by, something to touch and smell, or else they disappear and you can’t remember what they were like even if you have a picture-you can only remember the picture.
Like with her mother: all Missy had of her was her hairbrush. It was slender and dainty and had a few silky- soft hairs caught in the bristles, and when Missy held it next to her cheek, even though Simon said it was impossible because she was too little when their mother went away, she remembered not just that Mommy looked like Audrey Hepburn, but that she smelled like powder and her hair was soft and her touch so gentle that when she held Missy in her arms, Missy felt as if she were floating.
And all Missy had left of Tweety was the cage. Even though its emptiness made her a little sad, it helped Missy remember how yellow Tweety had been, and how prettily she sang, and the way she crooked her head sometimes as though she were asking Missy if she still loved her. Which was why, when Nurse Apple tried to take it away, Missy had to throw a royal until they came to what Nurse Apple called an arrangement: Missy could keep the cage by her bed if she let Nurse Apple wash it down real good first.
A few minutes after Nurse Apple took the cage into the downstairs bathroom, the doorbell rang. Missy knew she wasn’t supposed to get out of bed, but she didn’t get to answer the door very often and wasn’t about to let an opportunity like this pass her by. She slipped on her pink chenille robe; the bell rang again as she padded barefoot into the foyer.
“Hold your horses,” she called, fumbling with the lock. “Just hold your horses.”
7
After Pender’s last physical, his doctor had suggested he take up smoking. Why would I want to do that? Pender asked. You’re a dangerously obese, hypertensive, fifty-five year old man with a drinking problem, the doctor had replied-I just thought you might want to go for the perfecta.
Six weeks later, trudging up a steep blacktop driveway on a warm autumn day, Pender had occasion to remember those words. By the time he reached the top, his yellow Ban Lon polo shirt was clinging like a damp second skin, he could feel his heart pounding, and if a genie had popped out of the azalea bushes lining the driveway and offered him three wishes, the first one would have been for an oxygen mask.
Not that he regretted his decision to ditch Sid at the airport, impulsive though it may have seemed. The trigger had been the telephone call from Linda Abruzzi. Without access to the PWSPD Association, Pender knew, the investigation was back to square one. He’d had a few suggestions for Linda-surely the hotel where the convention had been held would have, if not a list of attendees, then at least a roster of hotel guests for the weekend in question. And with the phobia.com address currently unoccupied, perhaps she could get Thom to arrange some sort of pop-up that would alert visitors or redirect them to an FBI site, while she herself worked the Las Vegas, Fresno, and Chicago police departments to get them to reopen their investigations in light of recent events.
But that was about all Pender could come up with-nothing case-breaking, nothing she wouldn’t have figured out on her own eventually. No, at this point, if the case was going to be broken, it was going to be broken by good old-fashioned police work. The Bureau already had an Evidence Response Team with a good criminalist going over Dorie’s house in Carmel-so the question Pender had asked himself, as he and Sid were waiting in the bar for their flight to be called, was what, if anything, could he bring to the party?
The answer wasn’t long in coming. He’d interviewed Dorie Bell-he had the name of at least one living PWSPD convention attendee. And according to Dorie, that same attendee who lived in nearby Berkeley had helped finance the convention-he had to know more about the PWSPD Association than Dorie had.
Unless of course the association was nothing but an Internet dummy, something the killer had set up in order to provide himself with a pool of victims. Which, Pender realized, would make the man who was financing the operation either a complete sucker, an accomplice, or the killer himself. Which meant in turn that it was high time somebody interviewed Mr. Simon Childs, of Berkeley. Somebody cautious enough to show up on Mr. Childs’s doorstep without advance notice, somebody experienced enough to ascertain what Mr. Childs knew without alerting him to the fact that he was under suspicion.
Pender had nominated himself, of course-and there were no other candidates.
The address had been in the phone book: 2500 Grizzly Rock Road, Berkeley. The house was built of weathered stone and dark timbers. The front door, rough-planed black oak, was opened by a short, fat, balding woman wearing footed pink pajamas under a pink robe. Her complexion was mottled, white as a chronic shut-in around the eyes, brick-red, ointment-smeared patches of sunburn on her cheeks and brow, and she appeared to be almost as out of breath as Pender.
“Heyyo.” Deep voice, unmodulated. Down Syndromer-this would be the sister Dorie had mentioned. Older than Pender had pictured-but then, DSers tended to live a lot longer nowadays. “Hi. Is Simon home?”
And although he couldn’t comprehend all that she said next, thanks to the time he’d spent with his sister Ida’s son, Stan, who’d also survived to middle age but had passed away a few years ago, Pender understood enough of it that when she concluded by pointing downward, he understood. “Simon’s in the basement?”
An enthusiastic nod, a delighted grin-she was clearly tickled to have made herself understood.
“Could you get him for me?”
“Ohhh no.” The nod turned to a shake. There was a wary quality to her grin now; it no longer lit up her eyes. Pender, who read nonverbal responses the way poetry lovers read verse, was immediately intrigued.
“Why not?” After spending his entire adult life in law enforcement, although Pender still couldn’t have said for sure whether cop radar was something old FBI agents developed or whether they just didn’t get to be old FBI agents without it, he had definitely learned to trust it.
“Gary,” said the woman.
“Somebody named Gary’s down there?”
Her shoulders slumped. A lifetime of not being understood, thought Pender. He slapped himself on the forehead comically. “I’m such a stupidhead. Give me one more chance?”
“Gary, gary.” She hugged herself and pantomimed a mock shudder.
“Scary-it’s scary down there.”
“Yeah.”
“I know what you mean-basements can be scary places. If you’d like, I could go down there with you.”
The shudder was genuine this time.
“Or I could go down by myself-you wouldn’t even have to go.”
She said something he couldn’t quite make out-I hate him? I’ll get him? — and turned away, leaving the door ajar. Pender thought about it for a good two, two and half seconds (since she lacked the mental capacity to give informed consent, it wouldn’t exactly have been a kosher entry even if she’d invited him in, which she hadn’t), then followed her inside.
8
Warm water, no pain. Strawberry bubble bath-Missy’s favorite, as Dorie recalled. She leaned back, rounding her shoulders to fit the curving metal sides of the tub.
“Feeling better?” asked the now unmasked Simon. He was sitting on an overturned milk carton next to the
