reduced to making a tent of the bedclothes, firing up a joint as thick as his pinky under the covers, and like a baseball fan in January, replaying the glory days in his head. Thinking about the game was better than no game at all.
Tonight, probably because of the time of year, Simon found himself remembering that scrawny little coke whore from La Honda. For the life of him he couldn’t recall her name at the moment, yet without her, there might not have been any game at all.
The year was 1969, the month was October, the drug of choice was Peruvian marching powder, and Simon had recently come into his majority-if it weren’t for bad companions, he wouldn’t have had any companions at all. Except of course for the blind rat, which had been gnawing at him since Nellie had gone back into the loony bin. There didn’t seem to be enough coke in the world to keep the rat at bay and he couldn’t work up much interest in sex, plentiful as opportunities were in the circles he frequented. Compared to the ecstasy of the fear game with Nellie, there just wasn’t any point, especially in light of his ejaculatio praecox problem.
And although in retrospect the solution to Simon’s anhedonia seems obvious, even inevitable, it wasn’t until the incident with-Corky! that was it, her name was Corky-that he’d begun to put two and two together.
Corky What’s-her-name. White girl, rib-counting skinny. Used to hang around Ugly George’s Harley ranch in La Honda trading blow jobs for blow, when she could get any takers, and being used as a pinata by the bikers the rest of the time.
Talk was going around, though, that Corky was about to be upgraded from pinata to feature player in an eight-millimeter snuff film, so when she popped up from the rear floorboards of Simon’s first Mercedes saloon somewhere around Daly City (Simon had recently dumped his Hog, which was being repaired out at the ranch), Simon resisted his first impulse, which was to take her back to La Honda to be there in person and watch movie magic being made.
Who knows, perhaps Simon had a touch of the white knight syndrome himself-he certainly hadn’t done it for the free head. But although she may have been in distress, Corky was no fair damsel. She hoovered up vast quantities of Simon’s newly purchased flake, proved to be horny as a she-goat and mean as a snake once she’d finally had an elegant sufficiency, and was foulmouthed to boot, making the next-to-last mistake of her sorry life by teasing him for his lack of interest in sex, calling him a faggot, then telling him even a queer ought to be able to enjoy a good blow job.
But she’d changed her tune pretty quickly when Simon told her that he’d had enough, that he’d just as soon stick it into a cesspool as into that sewer of a mouth, and that as soon as he was able to drive, he would be taking her back to the ranch to make her film debut. That was when things got interesting. First she cajoled, then she begged, and then, after he’d tied her up and stuffed his handkerchief into her mouth, she made her last mistake-she let the terror show in her eyes.
The effect on Simon was as immediate, electric, and profound as that of the fear game at its most intense. Thirty years later, almost to the day, huddled under the smoke-filled covers in room 318 of the Holiday Inn Express in Ogallala, Nebraska, he could still remember the shock of recognition: he wasn’t a queer, it wasn’t Nellie, or men, or even sex in general that turned him on, it was
Simon was so moved by the experience that he even thought about letting her go, really he did. And although it hadn’t worked out that way in the end, by the time Ugly George’s snuff film was in the can, Simon had learned another important lesson, the one about pain being anodyne to fear.
Over time, Simon would further define his needs and desires; by specializing only in true phobics he would, in effect, transform himself from a gourmand to a gourmet, an aficionado of fear. But as much as he’d refined the game over the years, from crude targets-of-opportunity abductions to the apotheosis of the fear game, the late lamented PWSPD Association, it all had its roots in just two people, Nelson Carpenter and Corky What’s-her-name, and to those two, both gone now, Simon Childs knew that he would be forever grateful.
6
On her fourth night in the country, Linda managed to sleep through the worst of the quiet, awakening Monday morning to the racket of songbirds. And although she still found herself looking forward to going to work, after her Betaseron injection she brought her soy-protein smoothie out onto the porch and took her time drinking it-she had figured out by now that until Simon Childs was in custody, these early breakfasts were probably going to be her only chance to enjoy the fabulous autumn foliage in the daylight.
And she was right-things did start heating up Monday. At six in the morning, Pacific time, federal agents, armed with search warrants obtained on the basis of Simon Childs’s bank records, raided Kenneth “Zap” Strum’s SoMa loft. The discovery of Zap’s body, the medical examiner’s estimation of the time of death, and the fact that Childs’s fingerprints were not only all over the loft, but on the murder weapon as well, put Childs in San Francisco no later than Saturday.
Meanwhile, the evidence response techs were hard at work digging up the cellar of the Childs mansion. The corpses, in varying states of decay, were all buried at the same depth, four to six feet, not stacked vertically, but evidently Childs had laid a thin layer of cement over the entire floor of the chamber every time he buried one, either to minimize the odor or disguise the fresh patch. Only four corpses had been uncovered so far, three female, one male, but there were a dozen thin strata of cement. As per Pender’s suggestion, Linda asked Thom Davies at the CJIS in Clarksburg to massage the appropriate databases for possible matches between missing persons and found bodies.
She also asked Thom to have copies of all reports of new so-called “stranger” homicides (assailant believed to have been unknown to the victim) received by the NCIC (National Crime Information Center) forwarded to her as they came in. Any patterns, or any correspondence of victims to names or locations that had or would come up in the Childs investigation, would not go unnoticed for long.
Something else hadn’t gone unnoticed by Linda: all this, all she had done, all she was doing, she could do from her office chair. And all across the country, she knew, there were FBI agents performing jobs no more physically demanding than this. The only difference was that they were special agents and she was an investigative specialist. It shouldn’t have mattered to her, of course, but somehow it did. The proudest day of her life had been the day she earned the right to call herself Special Agent Abruzzi. You shouldn’t take something like that away from somebody without an awful good reason, thought Linda.
She didn’t have much time to brood, though. At the crack of noon-opening of business on the West Coast- Linda initiated contact with the venerable San Francisco law firm of Bobbeck, Pflueger, and Morrison, which had been administering the Childs Trust since the death of Marcus Childs, Simon’s grandfather, in1963. One switchboard operator, two secretaries, and a paralegal later, she found herself speaking with an actual Pflueger, Hearst Pflueger IV, Esq., who was, he told her during a surprisingly pleasant conversation, the third of his line to grace the firm’s letterhead. She had been prepared for a lot more resistance, but when she told him why she was calling, and what she was looking for, Pflueger was unexpectedly forthcoming, for a big-shot attorney.
He’d been expecting a call ever since he’d read the newspaper Saturday morning, he told her. “I wish I could say I was more surprised, but my father, who was Marcus Childs’s personal attorney, always said there was more to the old man’s death than met the eye.”
“That would have been Hearst Pflueger the third?”
“Trey-everybody called him Trey. He thought there was something
“Have you ever met Simon personally?”
“I did. I was fresh out of law school-”
“Which one?”
“Boalt, of course.”
“I went to Fordham.” Might as well establish a little common ground, let him know she was a lawyer,
