Fear itself

question?”

“Can you do a better job apprehending Childs as quickly as possible with or without the benefit of my twenty years of experience?”

“Well, with it. But McDougal told me-”

“Linda, I don’t care what McDougal told you-his priorities are exactly the same as yours. And mine. And anybody else in law enforcement who hasn’t got his head so far up his ass he can count his own fillings. Agreed?” Then, without waiting for an answer: “Attagirl. Now, the first thing you have to understand…”

So much for McDougal and the hierarchy; so much for going home early. According to the Book of Pender, the first thing Linda had to understand was that the cops on the street, both local and federal, weren’t going to need any help from her when it came to the usual avenues of investigation. With or without Liaison Support, the evidence response techs would hoover up every shred of gross or trace evidence; the Berkeley cops would comb all of Childs’s reported haunts; the so-called suicides in Vegas, Fresno, and Chicago would be reopened as homicide investigations; and every friend, neighbor, or casual acquaintance Childs had ever called or been seen with in public or visited or written a check to in the last year or so would receive at least cursory attention from law enforcement.

Now, the time line Linda was working on would be lots of help there, Pender assured her (as soon as he mentioned the time line, Linda realized how it had happened that Pool had just sort of magically turned up at the office Saturday afternoon), and sooner or later events would start dictating her course of action. For instance, he could almost promise her more work than she could handle as the ERT in Berkeley continued to unearth the corpses in Childs’s basement.

But until then, he explained, Linda could basically expect law enforcement to be all over Simon Childs’s recent past and foreseeable future like Yogi Bear on a picnic basket. So what Pender suggested was that as soon as the time line was done, Linda turn her efforts to probing a little deeper into Childs’s past. Were there any childhood friends whom he hadn’t seen in a long time, whom he might be desperate enough to seek out as a fugitive? How about medical records? Not just his current physicians-investigators would be lined up five deep at their doors-but his former doctors, all the way back to his pediatrician. If in addition to being a psychopath, Childs was also a counterphobic phobic, as Sid had suggested, perhaps he’d seen a shrink as a child. That’d really give the profilers something to work with.

Encouraged and energized, even inspired by Pender’s call, Linda worked what was left of her ass off for the rest of the afternoon (of the twenty pounds she’d lost this year, at least ten had to have come off her rear end), but by eight o’clock, five on the West Coast, everything was done that was going to get done on a Sunday evening, so an exhausted Linda packed it in.

Basta, as her mother used to say to her father when he worked on Sunday-enough is enough, even God rested on the seventh day. Then, of course, Mom Abruzzi would do a load of ironing, maybe vacuum the curtains, cook a five-course Italian dinner, and mend clothes all through 60 Minutes. After all these years, Mom still had no idea what Mike Wallace looked like, went the family joke, because she never looked up from her sewing basket.

Thinking about home always made Linda hungry. When she got back to Pender’s, she went straight to the kitchen and opened the fridge before she even took off her coat. The freezer compartment was well stocked-sort of: if somebody had gone through the frozen food section of the supermarket and selected TV dinners solely on the basis of fat grams, the higher the better, they’d have ended up with something very like the contents of Pender’s freezer.

Linda opted for the Marie Callender’s spaghetti carbonara (what a concept, she thought: some twisted guinea genius had actually looked at a bowl of pasta and said to himself, you know what this needs? — white gravy and bacon), and while it was heating, she made her traditional, not to say mandatory, Sunday night phone call. It went well-Mom didn’t nag her about moving back home. She mentioned it three or four times, but by Italian-mother standards that didn’t count as nagging. Then she’d handed the phone to Dad, who told Linda he couldn’t talk long because The Sopranos was coming on.

Oh, Dad, she wanted to moan, not you, too. Linda had tried to watch the show once-it was the episode where the bumbling FBI agents tried to plant a bug in Tony’s basement; she’d felt like throwing her shoe through the screen. And Charlie Abruzzi, of all people, should have known better-you didn’t run an Italian butcher shop in the Bronx for forty years without learning what the mob was really like; Big Pussy my ass!

But at least the Sunday call helped clear the nostalgia out of Linda’s system. After all, she told herself as she climbed into bed that night, home is where you make it. And life is what you make of it. She understood how blessed she was to have a job where she could make a difference.

It was like her dad said when she told him she wanted to change careers and apply to the FBI. The secret to happiness, he told her, was to be able to go to bed Sunday night looking forward to getting up and going to work Monday morning.

“Do you?” she’d asked.

“Hell no,” he replied. “By the time I figured that out, I already had a wife and three kids to feed.”

5

“And how would you like to pay for this tonight, Dr. Keene?” asked the desk clerk at the Holiday Inn Express in Ogallala on Sunday night. (Several of his false identities were doctors-if things had turned out differently, Simon had often thought, he’d have liked to have been a doctor. Of course, he’d have had to finish high school first, but if he had, he could have gone on to specialize in treating Down syndromers-then Missy would have received that heart transplant.)

Simon was ready for the question-the clerk at the Holiday Inn Express in Winnemucca had phrased it in exactly the same words the night before. “I’d like to pay in peanut shells,” he replied drolly, “but I suppose you had something more like this in mind.” And he slid Andrew Keene’s Visa across the counter.

The clerk glanced at the card before running it through the machine. Simon experienced a moment of delicious suspense-not quite fear, but definitely a sense of heightened alert until the card was approved. Which it always was-Dr. Keene was Simon’s most reliable alter ego. The condo in Puerto Vallarta was in his name; the bills were paid electronically through a double-blind offshore account in the Caymans that Zap had helped Simon set up years earlier.

“Thank you, Dr. Keene. This is your room number-” The clerk jotted down 318 on the cardboard envelope containing the room key, then turned the envelope around for Simon to read. Desk clerks never spoke room numbers aloud nowadays, even if there was nobody else within thirty feet of the desk; Simon wondered if at some point in the past there’d been a crime wave involving eavesdropping burglars with supernatural hearing. “-and the elevator’s right around the corner. Enjoy your stay.”

Enjoy your stay. Not bloody likely: after sixteen hours in the womblike Volvo with nothing but the scenery and Zap’s weed for entertainment (reception was sketchy in the mountains-for some reason only country music stations were able to overcome the topography), Simon now found himself looking at essentially the same motel room he’d checked out of that morning.

So now what? Sleep would be nice, sleep would be delightful, but Simon had been drinking road coffee all day, plus he’d ingested a few Mexican crosstops-ten milligrams of dexedrine apiece-when he’d started nodding out somewhere east of Salt Lake City, so he wasn’t sure he’d be able to knock himself out even with a Halwane.

Still, he had to do something-he could sense the blind rat lurking. It seemed as though the rat was always lurking lately. Once, Simon had been able to go a year or two between rounds of the fear game; more recently the cycle had shortened to a month or two; and now it seemed to be spiraling in on itself even more drastically. Three games so far this month (Wayne, Dorie, and Nelson; Zap didn’t count, but Dorie did: the game wasn’t about murder, Simon always told himself-that was just something you had to do afterward if you didn’t want to end up in jail), and October wasn’t even over, yet here he was again, twitchy as a weekend tweaker on a Friday morning,