when he did, not long afterward, the news wasn’t good-not for Wayne Summers, and certainly not for Linda’s first Liaison Support investigation.
“Turns out Mr. Summers has an uncle pretty high up in the SFPD,” Bobby explained. “They’ve been all over this one, and according to them, it looks like your boy drowned himself. They found his cello case out on Ocean Beach this morning, along with his clothes and a suicide note. Haven’t found the body yet, but you know the riptide out there.”
“The note-does it look legitimate?”
“His mother verified the handwriting.”
“Can you get hold of it for me?”
“No can do. You’re lucky you even caught me here-I’m off to Seattle in a few hours. Been loaned to Antiterrorism-they’re beefing up for this Y2K deal.”
“How about this afternoon, then? The fact that it looks like a suicide makes it a better fit for the profile.”
“Linda, I have to go. If I were you, I wouldn’t put a lot more effort into this one. Coincidences happen, you know? And suicides come in clusters.”
“You’re probably right,” said Linda distractedly-she was trying to remember Ocean Beach from her San Francisco days. Dog shit, broken glass, murderous riptide, seals by the dozens on the rocks below Cliff House, and seagulls by the hundreds, wheeling and screaming and fighting for garbage and picnic scraps. Western gulls, California gulls, herring gulls, Heermann’s gulls: you could throw a french fry in the air and nine times out of ten it would never hit the ground. “Thanks for the help.”
But as she prepared herself mentally for the unpleasant task of calling Dorie Bell back and giving her the bad news about her friend Wayne, Linda was still far from convinced. Sure, suicides did sometimes come in clusters, and sure, coincidences did happen. But so did murder. And Ocean Beach was no place for an ornithophobe, thought Linda-especially a suicidal one.
2
“Watch out!” called Missy. She knew the man with the hook was hiding behind the door, and that as soon as Audrey Hepburn opened it, he would…
Missy rarely answered the telephone, partly because Simon didn’t like her to, and partly because it was generally a frustrating experience. But all morning it had been
“Hello?”
“Hi, Missy. It’s Dorie. Remember me?”
Of course she did-Dorie gave absolutely the
“Hi. Is Simon there?”
“In the basement.”
“What? I’m sorry, honey, he’s what?”
“Basement. He is in the basement.” But she could have repeated herself all day and not been understood. Stupid tongue. Stupid mouth. “Wait.”
Even though the basement door was securely locked and bolted, you couldn’t have dragged Missy near it with a team of horses. She beeped Simon with their two-way, then went back to her movie, leaving the receiver off the hook. A few minutes later, a frowning Simon showed up in the doorway wearing his kneepads and his rubber boots, smelling of wet cement. Missy waved the pager in the direction of the phone.
“Hello?…Oh, hi, Dorie, what’s-…Oh, no. Oh, no…Listen, Dor’, I want to take this in the other room…. Yeah, no sense getting the kid all upset.” He handed the phone to Missy. “I’m gonna take it in my room-would you hang this up for me?”
And she did. Simon raised his hand as if he were going to strike her; then his mustache twitched; then he laughed. “I meant after I picked up the other phone.”
“Then why didn’t you say so?” Missy said coolly, without taking her eyes off the television screen, where Cary Grant (who with his silver hair and dimpled chin looked a lot like Simon, at least to Missy’s eyes) was sliding,
Simon, who’d been up since well before dawn-he’d driven to San Francisco and back to drop off the note and cello case at Ocean Beach, then worked like a galley slave all morning-still hadn’t decided what to do with the birds when Missy summoned him up from the basement to take Dorie’s call.
And while this afternoon’s news update from the troublesome Ms. Bell wasn’t entirely bad-according to the FBI agent she’d been in touch with, apparently SFPD had bought the suicide note, hook, line, and sinker-it was alarming to learn that she’d gotten the FBI involved in the first place. Simon would have to accelerate his timetable-a road trip was definitely in order.
But he couldn’t leave Missy alone, and he’d given her attendant the week off in order to have more privacy with Wayne. Now he’d have to get Tasha back, but before he could do that, he’d have to do something about the birds in the basement. All on three hours of sleep. Busy, busy, busy, but at least he wasn’t bored. That was the important thing-Simon had never encountered anyone who suffered from boredom to the extent he did, with the possible exception of Grandfather Childs, who’d known it well enough to have given it its name: the blind rat.
Only, the way Simon pictured it as a boy, it was more like a grub, a fat, blind, hairless grub gnawing away at him from the inside, robbing him of his peace, of his rest, and if he went too long without sufficient stimulation, of his sanity.
But with another session of the fear game to look forward to in the near future, the blind rat was not likely to be an immediate problem. And this game would be an easy one to prepare for: all he needed, really, was some Rohypnol, with which he was already well supplied, and a few masks, which shouldn’t be all that difficult to procure, Simon reminded himself, not with Halloween less than two weeks away.
3
They got him. They got him good.
First they tortured him a little. No congratulatory messages at work Monday, no retirement luncheon, no gold watch.
But Pender had been determined not to let it get to him. On his way home he stopped at the strip mall in Potomac and picked up videos of
Since his divorce ten years earlier, Pender had been living in a ramshackle house on a hillside above Tinsman’s Lock, Lock 22 of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, on federal land originally ground-deeded to former slaves after the Civil War and held now by Pender on a grandfathered National Park Service lease.
Among the advantages of living at Tinsman’s Lock: a heavily wooded lot, no neighbors, and gorgeous views of the C amp;O, the Potomac, and the Virginia countryside beyond; it was also cheap. But chief among the disadvantages was the reason it was cheap: according to the terms of the lease, all visible improvements beyond the existing underground power and phone lines had to be period-any time between 1850 and 1890 would do-and not many people, it seemed, were willing to pay Montgomery County prices for a Tobacco Road home.
As for the interior, in the ten years Pender had lived there, more than one woman had tried her hand at decorating, but none of them had lasted long enough to make much of a dent, domesticity-wise. As his old friend
