Fear itself

Or maybe not. The next call came in at nine-fifteen.

“Buchanan…No shit?…Sounds about right…. Let me know.” Again the disconnect, followed by the infuriating stage pause.

“C’mon, spit it out.” Linda wasn’t sure how much more suspense she could take.

“He’s there, all right. They have the mother on the phone-she called them while the tac squad was moving into place. She told the negotiator he’s holding a gun on her. She says he says he doesn’t want to shoot her, but he will if they try to come in. But the situation is currently stable, so as long as they have Childs contained, they want to wait him out, see what develops.”

“If they have Childs contained. Rosie’s his mother, Joe. She could be covering for him. He could be miles away by now.”

“I’m sure they thought of that,” said Buchanan. He called LaFeo back, though. “Larry, Abruzzi wants to know how you know he’s really in there…. Check, got it.…I’ll let her know.” He gave Linda the thumbs-up. “Negotiator says you can hear him talking in the background.”

“Guess I’m getting paranoid.” So much for all our scenarios, thought Linda. You can spitball until you’re out of paper and spit, and in the end it plays out the way it plays out. His mother-he wanted to see his mother.

Special Agent Lawrence LaFeo’s last call came in at nine-thirty-seven. ACPD officers were in the process of clearing the building floor by floor, and LaFeo himself was on his way up to the fifth floor with Mark Scott, one of the FBI’s best hostage negotiators, who’d just arrived from Philadelphia, the field office with jurisdiction over Atlantic City.

Special Agent LaFeo’s last words, to Buchanan anyway, were, “I’m getting too old for this shit,” apparently in reference to the long climb. He promised, as he’d been promising all night, to call Buchanan back, keep them in the loop, so when ten o’clock had come and gone with no word, Buchanan called him and got a “not-responding” message on his cell screen.

“It must be going down,” he told Linda. “God-damn I wish I was there.”

So did Linda-until the call came in at ten-fifteen from LaFeo’s partner, Special Agent Lisa Kingmore, out on the street outside Rosie’s apartment building. Buchanan could barely hear her over the roar of the flames and the screaming sirens-not that there was much to tell at that point, other than that there’d been one hell of an explosion, and that the top two floors of the building were fully involved.

Eventually, with both Linda and Buchanan working their phones, they managed to piece an outline of the story together. At nine-forty-six, just around the time LaFeo and Scott would have been reaching the fifth floor, Rosie had mentioned something to the ACPD negotiator about smelling gas. The explosion had followed within seconds (the negotiator was still deaf in one ear from percussion tinnitus), blowing a hole clean through to the kitchen of the adjoining apartment (or so it was believed).

Casualties, in addition to the partially deafened negotiator and a few Atlantic City cops down in the street who’d been slightly injured by falling masonry, included both Childs and Rosie, probably killed in the explosion, as well as LaFeo, Scott, a sergeant from the tac squad, and Mrs. Schantz, Rosie’s eighty-year-old next-door neighbor, who had all perished in the fire.

It would take another hour before the fire was brought under control, and yet another forty-five minutes until it was extinguished, and the arson investigators could begin the grisly work of sorting out the bodies. Exhausted as she was, Linda wouldn’t allow herself to relax, much less head home, until Agent Kingmore, who had attached herself to the arson boys (always the first ones in after-and sometimes before-the all clear), was standing in what was left of Rosie’s kitchen, looking down at two charred corpses, one female, one male.

And yes, the male, though curled up now, had probably been a six-footer in life, according to the arson investigator, who ought to have known, having seen quite a few of what he referred to as the crispy critters.

As for a more definitive identification, Linda was told that would have to wait at least until Simon Childs’s dental records were obtained from his dentist, presumably in the Bay Area, for comparison with the corpse’s dentition. But at this point nobody doubted it was Childs-certainly not Linda. Why, then, was she so reluctant to give it up and go home that Joe Buchanan practically had to drag her out to her car? Maybe it was because she already knew that this would be her last case.

And not just because of the Lhermitte’s sign, or the numbness and tingling spreading up her left arm, but because Joe was right-when you screwed up in this job, people died. First the Gees, then Rosie and all the others. Linda thought back to her conversation with the poor old drunk only yesterday afternoon.

Let somebody else tell her her daughter’s dead and her son’s a monster-there must be people who get paid for that.

Good call, Abrootz, she told herself, as she climbed into the Geo. Then something else occurred to her: her grand gesture this evening, unburdening herself to Joe Buchanan, had been unnecessary. She’d gotten her wish-no, not wish, never that. What she’d wished for on the ride down was a false alarm. Instead, the second scenario: Gloria, Jim, Childs all dead. But as far as she was concerned, the results would have been even better this way-no one would ever have had to know who Skairdykat really was.

But maybe it wasn’t too late. She could go back inside, throw herself on Joe’s mercy, beg him to keep silent. He was a field agent, he’d understand. And he wouldn’t even have to lie-just forget something a fellow agent had told him.

Sure, she would still have to resign, for all the reasons she’d already laid out for herself. But not in disgrace. And she would have spared herself the OPR grilling and all that other unpleasantness.

It all sounded good-so good that even thinking about it helped lift some of the crushing weight from Linda’s bony shoulders, as she buckled her seat belt, turned the key in the ignition, and drove off, leaving Conroy Circle, her career, and her professional reputation behind, but bringing away with her the last few tattered shreds of her self- respect.

6

Pyromania, enuresis, cruelty to animals-the homicidal trinity of forensic psychiatry. Sid Dolitz used to have a standing bet with Pender: if Pender ever caught a serial killer who didn’t have a childhood history of starting fires and/or wetting his bed and/or torturing small animals, Sid would buy him dinner.

Simon Childs had never wet his bed as a boy, and cruelty to small animals per se was anathema to him, although he did get a kick out of feeding white mice to Crusher, the boa constrictor who’d succeeded Skinny as his boyhood pet. But Simon had certainly started a few fires in his day, and while the thrill wasn’t as intensely orgasmic for him as it was for your true pyromaniac, there was a definite erotic charge that accompanied watching the flames and hearing the sirens.

So it was something of a disappointment to him, to have to miss the fire. But otherwise, Plan C had gone so smoothly that by the time he left Atlantic City on Cappy’s classy old Harley, he was not only reasonably certain that the explosion and fire would take place as scheduled, but that the fates had given their seal of approval to the entire venture.

The key to the first part of the plan, as Simon had foreseen, was Rosie. The news about Missy had devastated her-but it gave Simon a chance to comfort her, to play the heartbroken, but loving son, which had not only endeared him to Rosie, but to Cappy as well.

With the ground prepared, Simon had then spun the same yarn he’d spun for Zap Strum after learning of Missy’s death, once again imbuing the embellishments with the authority of his own emotional investment, as well as making sure that both Rosie and Cappy were kept well-lubricated with Select Choice vodka. And by the time he’d finished telling his rapt audience of two how a crooked FBI agent named Pender had tricked Missy into letting him into the house, then attacked Simon, how Missy tried to stop him and there was a scuffle, how the struggle had overtaxed her heart, and how Pender had then shifted the blame to Simon to cover his own rear end, Rosie didn’t need any more convincing-maternal guilt alone would have been sufficient motivation for her.

But just to be on the safe side, Simon added a spoonful of sugar to make sure Cappy’s medicine went down smoothly. He took the old CPO aside and showed him the satchel filled with cash, then explained how once he, Simon, had confronted Pender while wearing a hidden tape recorder and fooled him into confessing, he wouldn’t be