Fear itself

“Never,” muttered Simon. “We’d have made it somehow.”

“That’s easy for you to say. Have you ever been poor, Simon? Have you ever gone to bed hungry? Have you ever wanted for anything? Anything at all? I don’t know who this Ida was, but she was right about one thing: there’s nothing harder in this world than for a mother to give up her children. Even if the choice is to watch them starve. Every day of my life I’ve had to wonder whether I made the right decision.”

Again, that unfamiliar feeling-the tug of empathy. Simon fought against it. “But you must have known-you had to have known what kind of a monster he was.”

“No, I-”

“He beat me, Mom, he whipped me every night.”

“Please, Simon.” Rosie covered her ears.

“He locked me in the cellar, Mom.” Simon leaned forward, pulled her hands away, put his face against hers, brow to brow. “He held my head under water, Mom. He made me sleep with the dogs, Mom. He-”

“No, Simon. Please.”

But Simon was not about to stop now. This was more like it, he told himself, this was more like what he’d had in mind, coming here in the first place. She was a clever old gal, he had to give her that-she’d nearly gotten to him with her fairy tale, her sob story. But in the end she was no better than Grandfather Childs had painted her. Worse, in a way: she hadn’t just abandoned baby Missy and little Simon, she’d sold them.

Grownup Simon snatched the vodka bottle from between his mother’s legs, thrust it toward her. “Here you go, Mom, have another drink. Then you won’t have to think about how Missy used to cry herself to sleep every night, holding your hairbrush in her little hand. It was the only thing she had to remember her mother by; it was-”

“That’s enough,” Cappy said quietly, as a sobbing Rosie buried her face in her hands. It was the first time he’d opened his mouth since Simon had pulled the gun on him. “Can’t you see she’s suffered enough?”

Who hasn’t? thought Simon, raising the Colt, leveling it directly at the old man’s face, and drawing back the heavy hammer. With his new clarity of mind, he could see the next few seconds as if they’d already happened, only in slow motion. The bullet spinning out of the rifled barrel, the impact, dead center, between the eyes, the spray, the sitting body lifting from the bed with the impact, slamming into the wall behind it, sliding down, trailing a smear of blood.

Or was that only something he’d seen in a movie? Of course-how very cheesy of me, Simon thought. In real life, it would be nothing like that. There would be nothing balletic about a forty-five-caliber bullet hitting a face at point-blank range.

On the other hand, there would be nothing left of the face, either.

Rosie continued to sob. Simon tuned her out, but kept the gun trained on Cappy. This wasn’t about her, anymore. The question had been asked and answered-she’d had her say. This was about Simon, this was about survival. His plan, insofar as he’d had one when he’d left the Gees, was to finish his unfinished business with Rosie (although just how that would play out was something he had not allowed himself to think about), then double back to Maryland for the doubleheader, the game to end all games.

Now, however, with his newfound clarity of mind, Simon realized what a sorry, drug-addled excuse for a plan that was. Pender, Skairdykat-these weren’t feeble, neurotic PWSPDs; they were trained FBI agents, even if Skairdykat did have MS, according to Gloria. If Nelson’s body had been discovered, if the Volvo had been spotted or the Gees missed at work this morning-if any one of a dozen likely possibilities had occurred, at best Pender and Skairdy would already be on the alert; at worst, they’d have an ambush set up.

But that image, the image of a faceless corpse, was beginning to resonate for Simon. A real plan began to form itself. Vague at first-just a series of short takes, quickly rejected. A faceless corpse and a suicide note-he and Cappy were about the same size. But the body of an old man wouldn’t fool the FBI for long. How about a faceless corpse and a fire? Ludicrous: how could a man shoot himself, then set himself on fire? Just a fire, then-but where would he put the note. In the bath? Along with Rosie’s body? Yes!

No. The stand-in corpse would still have to be charred beyond recognition. In which case it wouldn’t take an FBI agent to smell a setup-who but a Buddhist monk would commit suicide by self-immolation?

So much for Plan A. Cappy and Rosie were still frozen in place. Either they hadn’t blinked yet, or time had stopped, or Simon’s thoughts were moving at the speed of light as he began working on Plan B. As of this moment, Cappy and Rosie were both still unaware of…well, of the nature of Simon’s little problem with the police. Could Simon convert them into allies? You didn’t play the fear game for thirty years without having learned a thing or two about acting.

Okay, then, say you win them over. Rosie’d be a piece of cake, and also the key to Cappy. But then what? Was there some way to persuade them to cover for him? Mislead his pursuers, stall them somehow, send them off on a wild-goose chase? But once they were in contact with the authorities, they wouldn’t be likely to remain unaware of the…nature of Simon’s problem. Not long enough for Simon’s purposes.

Then it came to him: Plan C. C for Combination. A little of Plan A, a little of Plan B-but not in that order. Slowly Simon lowered the Colt’s hammer, then the gun, then his head.

“You’re right,” he said. “I’m so sorry-and I’m so ashamed. Maybe you should turn me in. It doesn’t matter to me anymore. Nothing matters to me anymore-not since Missy died.”

3

Is there someplace I can sit down? It was not a rhetorical question-you couldn’t just plop down in the middle of a crime scene. Buchanan led Linda to the kitchen, which the evidence response techs had vacated after picking up a good set of latents from a dirty glass and sending the thumbprint to IAFIS, the CJIS Division’s high-speed Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System.

He brought her a glass of water, sat down next to her at the glass-topped tubed-steel kitchen table-not across from her, so it wouldn’t seem like an interrogation. Linda appreciated the courtesy. She wasn’t sure what to expect when she finished telling him about Skairdykat. Would he turn away from her in disgust? Notify OPR? Ask for her badge?

None of the above. Buchanan was a field agent, and as such, a practical man. He waited, he listened, he nodded, and when she was done, he asked the only question of immediate practical interest: “How much does Childs know?”

For the next twenty minutes, they spitballed all the possible scenarios. Had Childs simply assumed Gloria was Skairdykat and acted accordingly? Both the manner of her death and the fact that Childs had left the coral behind (they were still assuming it was the coral the HRT had spotted on the way in) certainly argued for that scenario, suggested Buchanan.

“I wish I could buy it,” Linda said, almost wistfully. “But he could have more than one snake. And it just doesn’t make sense that Childs would never have told them what he was doing there, why he’d broken into their house, or that Jim and Gloria, who are both very intelligent people-” She interrupted herself. “- were very intelligent people, that neither of them would have figured out how it was that somebody named Skairdykat ended up contacting the PWSPD through their computer.”

“Let’s take Jim out of the equation,” said Buchanan. “He has a skull fracture you can see gray matter through-let’s say he got it in the initial attack. That leaves Gloria. She was your friend-she might have covered for you.”

“You think? When did they first tag the Volvo?”

“Ten-thirty.”

“And what’s her estimated time of death?”

“Reilly says sometime between midnight last night and dawn this morning. What with her in the water and all, they won’t be able to narrow it down any further until they get her on the slab.”

The slab. Runnels for the blood. They’ll open her up right down the middle like a-