But to Simon’s mixed relief, the twitching stopped of its own accord after a few more minutes. Then it was over, except for the cleanup, which would have to wait until morning. For one thing, Simon was physically exhausted and emotionally drained; for another, despite all the soundproofing he’d installed in the basement, the noise and vibration from the jackhammer still might leak up through the vents and awaken Missy.
The Blind Rat
1
Tuesday dawned clear and bright in Georgetown, where Linda Abruzzi was staying with her old college roommate Gloria Gee and Gloria’s husband, Jim, until she found her own place. It was the sort of fall morning that made you forget winter was just around the corner. And the commute wasn’t as bad as it had been on Monday- Linda was at her desk by eight, after another thorough vetting at the gate. The first thing she did was go over Dorie Bell’s letter again.
Oct. 1, 1999
Dear Agent Pender,
I don’t know if this letter will even reach you, or if you will pay any attention to it even if it does, but in the article in the
To begin with, I am not a nut. I know every nut who ever writes you starts out that way, but I can’t help that. And just so you don’t think I’m trying to hide anything I’ll tell you right off the bat that I suffer from a psychiatric condition known as SPD, specific phobia disorder, which means an unreasonable fear of a particular situation or object, severe enough to detrimentally affect your everyday life.
I know it’s probably hard for someone like you to understand how somebody can
In my case, I suffer from prosoponophobia, which means I am afraid of (I have to force myself to even write the word) masks. This probably sounds pretty lame to you, and as phobias go, it’s surely not the worst, but believe me it’s no walk in the park, especially around Halloween.
But that’s not why I’m writing you. The reason I am writing is that this past spring I attended the PWSPD (Persons with Specific Phobia Disorder) convention in Las Vegas. On the whole, it was one of the most positive experiences in my life. Not only did I pick up many new coping techniques, it was also very empowering to learn how many phobics there are. One speaker said 11 percent of the population.
And now I’ll get to the point. Over the last six months, at least three people who attended the PWSPD convention have allegedly committed suicide. I say at least, because there may be others I don’t know about, and I say allegedly because I don’t think they committed suicide at all. I think they were murdered-but I’ll just tell you the facts I know and let you decide for yourself. Which I’m sure you would do anyway.
One: Carl Polander. Las Vegas. Acrophobia. Fear of heights. Jumped or fell or was thrown to his death from a twelfth-story window on April 12th, the last night of the convention. The police say jumped, but those of us who knew him think differently. What would Carl have been doing on the roof of any building, when he couldn’t even bring himself to enter an elevator or climb higher than the second floor?
Two: Kimberly Rosen. Chicago. Pnigophobia. Fear of suffocation. On June 15th, her mother found her in the bathtub of her apartment with a plastic bag over her head. There was a suicide note, supposedly in her handwriting, but I just don’t buy it.
Three: Mara Agajanian. Fresno. Hemophobia. Fear of blood. Found in the bathtub on August 17th, with her wrists slit. But a hemophobe would no more have cut her own wrists than a pnigophobe would have tied a plastic bag over her head or an acrophobe would have thrown himself off a roof.
Agent Pender, something very strange and alarming is going on, but I can’t get anybody to pay any attention. Maybe it’s because I’m a PWSPD that the police in those three cities just won’t take my fears seriously, but let me assure you that just because somebody has SPD does not make them paranoid. SPD and paranoid schizophrenia are two separate and distinct disorders that have no more in common than, for instance, measles and appendicitis.
I don’t know what else to say, other than please, Agent Pender, won’t you at least look into these cases? Because if you won’t investigate three deaths in three different jurisdictions, I don’t know who will, and if you don’t, I’m afraid more of my friends are going to “commit suicide.”
Sincerely yours,
Dorie Bell
And there it was. Didn’t look like much in the cold, hard light of the morning, without Pender around to encourage her. But it wasn’t as if Linda had anything else going on, so she spent the rest of the morning contacting the Vegas, Fresno, and Chicago PDs in order to verify the facts, then logging on to phobia.com, the PWSPD Association web site, in order to bone up on specific phobia disorders, and just before noon-nine A.M., California time-Linda, as she noted in her log, “initiated telephone contact with correspondent.”
“Hello?”
“Dorie Bell?”
“This is Dorie.”
“I hope I didn’t wake you, Ms. Bell.”
“Not at all. Is this about Wayne?”
“No, this is Linda Abruzzi with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I’m calling in response to your letter to Special Agent Pender.”
“Oh, thank God.”
Not exactly the kind of response Linda was accustomed to getting when she called somebody at nine in the morning, their time, and identified herself as FBI. Still she stuck to Bureau-cratese: “Special Agent Pender has passed your letter on to me for disposition, and I need to ask you a few-”
The other woman cut her off in midsentence. “It’s happened again.”
“What’s happened again, Ms. Bell?”
“My friend Wayne hasn’t been seen since Sunday night. He was supposed to be
“Wait a minute, slow down there, Ms. Bell-let’s take it from the top.”
So they did, they took it from the top, and by the time they reached the bottom, Linda was a believer. After promising to call Dorie back as soon as she had any information and deflecting her effusive and prayerful thanks, Linda clicked off the receiver, then called her old friend Bobby Emmett, who was still with the San Francisco field office.
Linda and Bobby had worked the Polly Klaas kidnapping together back in ’93-what a cluster-fuck that had been. Old FBI truism: the more agents assigned to a kidnapping investigation, the worse the chances for a successful resolution-if by successful you mean finding the victim alive. The FBI’s failures were loud and public, its triumphs often quiet and private-which was the way it had to be, of course.
And being a low-seniority agent in a high-visibility manpower rollout was no picnic. But if you had to spend eighteen-hour days canvassing neighborhoods, knocking on doors, fielding hot-line calls from wackos and publicity hounds, or, toward the end, cruising up and down Highway 101 looking for unmarked graves, there wasn’t a nicer guy to do it with than Bobby Emmett.
True to form, Bobby agreed to get in touch with one of his contacts in the SFPD, then get back to Linda. But
