Fear itself

heater inside its cozy blanket of insulation and the distant, homey gurgle of water through overhead pipes, which reminded Simon of Missy and her endless bath. A little catch of a sob caught in his throat, even as the memory brought a smile: the bittersweet feeling was back.

Not for long, though. As he let himself into the house, it suddenly dawned on Simon that there shouldn’t have been any water-heater hum or homey gurgle in the pipes-there shouldn’t have been any water running anywhere in that house, unless a pipe had burst or Nelson had somehow-

But no, that was impossible. Had to be a pipe, he thought, stepping back as a drop of water fell past him and hit the already saturated hall carpet with a fat plop, then looking up to see the dark, continent-shaped water stain spreading across the underside of the ceiling, a nipple-shaped drop gathering at its center. Simon hurried down the hall into the living room, saw that the flood in the hallway was relatively minor compared to the cataract sluicing down the narrow enclosed stairway from the second-floor landing, as if the staircase were a salmon ladder cut into the side of a dam. He splashed up the stairs two at a time, careened around the corner, raced through Nelson’s bedroom, and skidded to a halt at the bathroom door, the heels of the hard-soled black loafers he’d borrowed from Nelson that morning kicking up tiny rooster tails in his wake.

And although Simon had not knowingly been afraid of water since Grandfather Childs had cured him of his fear of drowning nearly half a century ago, he found himself frozen in the doorway, unable to move, watching helplessly as the torrent poured full-throated from the tap, noisily churning the surface of the bath and overflowing the side of the tub like a miniature Niagara. All he could see of Nelson were a few strands of blond hair waving like tendrils of seaweed in the roiling water.

“Coward,” he screamed, as much at himself as at Nelson; Simon could forgive himself anything except cowardice. “You yellow coward.” The shoes were soaked, his feet wet to the ankle, but the phobia had him in its grip, and he knew that until he had mastered it again, he would be unable to either retreat or advance.

You can do it, he told himself. You’ve done harder things than this in your lifetime; you’ve overcome more than this. You can do it, you can do it, you can do it. And if he concentrated, if he listened hard, in the human- voiced burble of the running water he could hear Missy singing to encourage him, singing that song she sometimes sang to encourage herself: “Cinderelly, Cinderelly, you can do it, Cinderelly.”

And call it foolish, even infantile, but slowly his feet began to move, shuffling through the water, one step at a time, but one foot following the other, until he’d reached the tub.

Afterward Simon couldn’t remember turning off the water; all he knew was that it was quiet again, except for the sound of the water still dripping down the staircase, and he was leaning over the tub looking down at poor drowned Nelson.

My last surviving friend on earth, he thought sadly-then it was time to go.

8

The next time Pender’s cell phone rang, Dorie rolled over sleepily and patted his cast. “It’s okay, I’m up.”

More or less-she dozed, drifting in and out of a pleasant Vicodin haze, comforted by the sound of Pender’s voice and the solid, grounding presence of his big body beside her in the bed. They hadn’t made love yet. Once they were actually in bed together last night, broken-boned, drugged, and exhausted, common sense had kicked in-or was it maturity? It was going to happen, though, maybe soon-Dorie was as sure of that as she’d ever been about anything.

“Who was that on the phone?”

“First call was McDougal, my boss. He’s putting Linda Abruzzi in charge of coordinating the investigation. Second call was Pool.”

“Who’s Pool?”

“She runs the FBI. I figured Abruzzi could probably use a few pointers getting this thing off the ground. But to get McDougal to put her in charge, I had to promise to stay out of it.”

“But what if you’d stayed out of it before? Where would…Where would that…”Where would that leave me? Dorie couldn’t bring herself to finish the question, probably because she knew the answer: in Simon’s basement.

“Sid Dolitz says there’s an old Yiddish expression that translates: ‘In the land of What-If, all travelers are unhappy.’ Of course, being Sid, he might have made it up. How’s your nose?”

“I think it probably hurts something awful, but I took a Vicodin when I woke up and another one when I woke up the second time, so the pain ain’t reaching the brain. How’s your arm feeling?”

“Like it got whacked with a frying pan.”

“May I recommend a Vicodin?”

“I already took one.”

“Take another.”

“You think?”

“Hey, it worked for me.”

9

Excited as Linda was about finally having something useful to do, she also wondered whether she might be in over her head. After all, she asked herself as the afternoon wore on, what did she know about coordinating an investigation of this size and complexity, involving five separate investigations in five separate jurisdictions and almost certainly more to come, in addition to an interstate manhunt and a growing media interest that was rapidly threatening to turn into a feeding frenzy?

Precious little, came the answer. And she didn’t feel right asking Pender for advice on how to conduct the rest of the investigation, not after McDougal had specifically informed her that part of her assignment was to keep him as far away from it as possible.

Once again, it was Pool to the rescue. She showed up out of nowhere around three-thirty-Linda certainly hadn’t called her-dressed, not for success, but for raking leaves on a Saturday afternoon, hit the phones, called in a few favors or engaged in a little blackmail, and by six o’clock (miraculous as Pool’s earlier Bureaucratic machinations had been, this one was on the order of parting the Red Sea), the bogus bank records were gone, and Linda’s little office in the DOJ-AOB had been turned into a mini-SIOC (Strategic Information and Operations Center) command post, complete with additional phone and data lines and a cork-backed map of the U.S. that took up the entire wall behind Linda’s desk, along with tiny color-coded flag pins with which to track Childs sightings-white for reported, red for confirmed.

And while the map was going up, Pool, as per Pender’s suggestion, transferred a copy of the database program Thom Davies had devised for Pender a few years ago-a cascading boilerplate calendar, year tiles opening up into months, months into days, days into hours-onto Linda’s computer and, under the pretext of showing Linda how to use the program, gently reminded her of the importance of establishing a time line for her suspect: If you want to know where somebody’s going, first you have to know where they’ve been.

Linda didn’t need a second hint. She set to work, culling data on Simon Childs from every available source, starting with Dorie Bell’s letter and ending with the preliminary findings of the Evidence Response Team still combing through the house on Grizzly Rock Road, and entering it into the database herself. Three hours later, not only did she have a preliminary time line, admittedly with more gaps than entries, tracking Simon Childs from birth through yesterday, but through a sort of immersion therapy, she had begun the unpleasant but necessary process of trying to get into the killer’s mind by first letting him into her mind.

The way it worked, you absorbed and memorized every shred of information about your suspect, until you were as conscious of his tendencies, his likes and dislikes, as you were of your own; when things were really cooking, a stimulus would be almost as likely to bring up one of the suspect’s mnemonic associations as it would one of your own. That way (at least theoretically; Linda had never done this sort of thing before), when the time