Fear itself

too.

“Yes, I thought I detected a New York accent in there somewhere. As I was saying, I was fresh out of Boalt, just passed the bar, Trey put me in charge of the trust. Basically, I controlled Simon’s money from 1967 until 1969, when he turned twenty-one, and during that period he must have called me at least every six weeks asking me to release funds above and beyond his monthly allowance, which was considerable.

“He even showed up at the office a few times, obviously under the influence of drugs-our interactions were not at all pleasant, Agent Abruzzi. He used to refer to me as-forgive me-fuckface. Whenever somebody called the switchboard and asked for Mr. Fuckface, the switchboard operator always put him straight through.”

“The fact that you’re alive and talking to me now, Mr. Fuh-Oh, God.”

“Quite all right.”

“I’ll try that again. The fact that you’re alive and talking to me now, Mr. Pflueger, tells me they could have been a whole lot more unpleasant. How long will it take you to get those records to me?”

“I’ll make you a deal. As an attorney yourself, you understand I can’t just release a client’s confidential documents. What I can do, though, is have my people dig out the old files and start Xeroxing them while your people obtain a subpoena for them. We won’t contest it-as soon as the subpoena arrives, I’ll have the files overnighted to you.”

“Thank you so much, Mr. Pflueger.”

“I’m on the board of the San Francisco Symphony, Agent Abruzzi. You can thank me by catching that monster before he kills any more promising young cellists.”

“We’re doing our best, sir.”

“I know you are.”

The mail arrived while Linda was on the phone asking Eddie Erickson, the case agent in San Francisco, to obtain the subpoena for the Childs Trust files. Along with a manila envelope from the Fresno Police Department, there was a box containing a videotape from the Las Vegas PD.

Instead of going down to the DOJ-AOB cafeteria for lunch, Linda ate at her desk while running, reversing, rerunning, and rereversing an edited dub of a grainy, jerky, stop-motion security video showing two men getting into an elevator at 23:57 hours on 04/11/99.

Simon Childs and Carl Polander, of course, in the lobby of the Olde Chicago Hotel and Casino, where the PWSPD convention had taken place. Sunday night-the convention was over, most of the attendees had checked out and gone home. Linda, who’d only seen Childs’s DMV photo, couldn’t take her eyes off him. Sitting at her desk, using the remote to operate the VCR in the corner of the room, she watched the loop over and over, until his slouching posture, his air of calm self-assurance, the way he smoothed his palm across his widow’s peak as he stepped into the elevator (probably caught a glimpse of himself in one of those convex elevator mirrors), was part of her, as familiar as her dad’s sore-footed butcher’s walk or the little moue her mom made into the mirror when she was putting on her lipstick.

“That’s him, eh?”

Linda looked up, startled-Pool was in the doorway. “That’s him.” She stopped the tape, rewound it, switched off the VCR. “Something occurred to me while I was watching: I’ll probably never see him.”

“In the flesh, you mean?”

“Yeah. By the time this is over, I’ll know more about that man than I knew about my first boyfriend, but I’ll never actually see him in person,” mused Linda, opening the envelope from the Fresno PD and placing a stack of color photographs on her desk.

“Unlike that poor gal,” said Pool, pointing to the print on the top of the stack. Taken from a bathroom doorway, it showed a nude woman sitting up in a bathtub, her heavy breasts lolling to the sides, her head thrown back so far that her long dark hair cascaded over the back of the tub; her eyes were closed and her lips parted in what might have been ecstasy.

Mara Agajanian, of course-and despite appearances, the picture was not soft-core porn, but evidence, as the rest of the photos (the pink-tinged water, the close-ups of the slashed wrists) made clear. But as she shuffled through them, Linda kept coming back to that first one. It was the old what’s-wrong-with-this- picture? game-she got it on the third pass.

“Look at that,” she said to Pool, pointing to the long dark spill of hair draped over the back of the tub. “Wouldja look at that.”

Pool, to her credit, got it right away. “He brushed her hair,” she said. “The s.o.b. brushed her hair.”

7

Say this about the upper Midwest: they had some terrific classical music stations. Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota-as one station faded out, another would kick in down at the bottom of the dial where public radio lived. And not just the usual suspects either, Vivaldi, Mozart, the three Bs, but a smorgasbord of off-brand baroque composers, the Albinonis and Stradellas and Guerrieris of the world. It was a musical education for Simon-as he drove, he kept making mental notes of CDs he’d be wanting to order for his collection, next time he was on- line.

Except, of course, that he didn’t have a computer any longer-or a CD collection, or an address. It was a strange dual state of mind Simon found himself in, as the Volvo rolled across the great iron bridge spanning the Mississippi above La Crosse. He was an intelligent man, and as Sid Dolitz had pointed out to Pender only five days earlier, his manie was decidedly sans delire: on one level, he understood that life as he’d known it was over. He was a fugitive now, condemned to a short, harried existence and a violent end, either at his own hands or those of law enforcement.

But on another, deeper level, down where the personality takes root, Simon’s grandiose sense of himself, the preternatural confidence of the psychopath, and the inability to empathize with others (Missy didn’t count, Sid would have said; psychologically, pathologically, to Simon she was not an other, but an extension of his self) or to appreciate that others lived on the same plane of consciousness as himself, with the same interior life, all combined to render Simon constitutionally incapable of imagining the universe continuing after his death. In this regard, for all his intelligence and awareness, Simon was like an infant, unable to establish any boundaries between itself and the outside world, to say this is where I end and the world begins. Simon was the universe and the universe was Simon, unable to comprehend the inevitability of its own nonexistence.

And yet here he was, hurtling toward a certain bloody death.

Instinctively, without being consciously aware of the problem, Simon knew the solution: purpose, focus, concentration. Whenever he found his thoughts drifting as he drove (and he’d been driving since 6 A.M.), whenever the riotous autumn colors, the lush music, or the elemental joy of highway speed failed to hold his interest, he turned his thoughts to Pender.

Pender, who was responsible for Missy’s death. Pender, who was responsible for Simon’s own exile. Pender, Pender, Pender: Simon kept the image of that bald, scarred melon of a head, those ridiculous clothes, that fatuous grin, in front of him always as a lodestar. Every mile he put behind him, he told himself, brought him another five thousand two hundred and eighty feet closer to wiping the smirk right off that fat face, and replacing the dull, self- satisfied expression with one of pure, sweet fear.

8

“Don’t move,” called Dorie when Pender opened his eyes.

“Why not?” He’d been dozing on a picnic blanket spread out under a wind-sculpted cypress tree at Lovers Point while Dorie painted; now he opened the other eye and saw that she’d moved back another fifteen yards or so