Fear itself: a novel Read online

And all Missy had left of Tweety was the cage. Even though its emptiness made her a little sad, it helped Missy remember how yellow Tweety had been, and how prettily she sang, and the way she crooked her head sometimes as though she were asking Missy if she still loved her. Which was why, when Nurse Apple tried to take it away, Missy had to throw a royal until they came to what Nurse Apple called an arrangement: Missy could keep the cage by her bed if she let Nurse Apple wash it down real good first.

  A few minutes after Nurse Apple took the cage into the downstairs bathroom, the doorbell rang. Missy knew she wasn’t supposed to get out of bed, but she didn’t get to answer the door very often and wasn’t about to let an opportunity like this pass her by. She slipped on her pink chenille robe; the bell rang again as she padded barefoot into the foyer.

  “Hold your horses,” she called, fumbling with the lock. “Just hold your horses.”

  7

  After Pender’s last physical, his doctor had suggested he take up smoking. Why would I want to do that? Pender asked. You’re a dangerously obese, hypertensive, fifty-five year old man with a drinking problem, the doctor had replied—I just thought you might want to go for the perfecta.

  Six weeks later, trudging up a steep blacktop driveway on a warm autumn day, Pender had occasion to remember those words. By the time he reached the top, his yellow Ban Lon polo shirt was clinging like a damp second skin, he could feel his heart pounding, and if a genie had popped out of the azalea bushes lining the driveway and offered him three wishes, the first one would have been for an oxygen mask.

  Not that he regretted his decision to ditch Sid at the airport, impulsive though it may have seemed. The trigger had been the telephone call from Linda Abruzzi. Without access to the PWSPD Association, Pender knew, the investigation was back to square one. He’d had a few suggestions for Linda—surely the hotel where the convention had been held would have, if not a list of attendees, then at least a roster of hotel guests for the weekend in question. And with the phobia.com address currently unoccupied, perhaps she could get Thom to arrange some sort of pop-up that would alert visitors or redirect them to an FBI site, while she herself worked the Las Vegas, Fresno, and Chicago police departments to get them to reopen their investigations in light of recent events.

  But that was about all Pender could come up with—nothing case-breaking, nothing she wouldn’t have figured out on her own eventually. No, at this point, if the case was going to be broken, it was going to be broken by good old-fashioned police work. The Bureau already had an Evidence Response Team with a good criminalist going over Dorie’s house in Carmel—so the question Pender had asked himself, as he and Sid were waiting in the bar for their flight to be called, was what, if anything, could he bring to the party?

  The answer wasn’t long in coming. He’d interviewed Dorie Bell—he had the name of at least one living PWSPD convention attendee. And according to Dorie, that same attendee who lived in nearby Berkeley had helped finance the convention—he had to know more about the PWSPD Association than Dorie had.

  Unless of course the association was nothing but an Internet dummy, something the killer had set up in order to provide himself with a pool of victims. Which, Pender realized, would make the man who was financing the operation either a complete sucker, an accomplice, or the killer himself. Which meant in turn that it was high time somebody interviewed Mr. Simon Childs, of Berkeley. Somebody cautious enough to show up on Mr. Childs’s doorstep without advance notice, somebody experienced enough to ascertain what Mr. Childs knew without alerting him to the fact that he was under suspicion.

  Pender had nominated himself, of course—and there were no other candidates.

  The address had been in the phone book: 2500 Grizzly Rock Road, Berkeley. The house was built of weathered stone and dark timbers. The front door, rough-planed black oak, was opened by a short, fat, balding woman wearing footed pink pajamas under a pink robe. Her complexion was mottled, white as a chronic shut-in around the eyes, brick-red, ointment-smeared patches of sunburn on her cheeks and brow, and she appeared to be almost as out of breath as Pender.

  “Heyyo.” Deep voice, unmodulated. Down Syndromer—this would be the sister Dorie had mentioned. Older than Pender had pictured—but then, DSers tended to live a lot longer nowadays. “Hi. Is Simon home?”

  And although he couldn’t comprehend all that she said next, thanks to the time he’d spent with his sister Ida’s son, Stan, who’d also survived to middle age but had passed away a few years ago, Pender understood enough of it that when she concluded by pointing downward, he understood. “Simon’s in the basement?”

  An enthusiastic nod, a delighted grin—she was clearly tickled to have made herself understood.

  “Could you get him for me?”

  “Ohhh no.” The nod turned to a shake. There was a wary quality to her grin now; it no longer lit up her eyes. Pender, who read nonverbal responses the way poetry lovers read verse, was immediately intrigued. Something was making the woman uncomfortable—the basement? interrupting Simon? interrupting Simon in the basement?—and whatever it was had set off his cop radar.

  “Why not?” After spending his entire adult life in law enforcement, although Pender still couldn’t have said for sure whether cop radar was something old FBI agents developed or whether they just didn’t get to be old FBI agents without it, he had definitely learned to trust it.

  “Gary,” said the woman.

  “Somebody named Gary’s down there?”

  Her shoulders slumped. A lifetime of not being understood, thought Pender. He slapped himself on the forehead comically. “I’m such a stupidhead. Give me one more chance?”

  “Gary, gary.” She hugged herself and pantomimed a mock shudder.

  “Scary—it’s scary down there.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I know what you mean—basements can be scary places. If you’d like, I could go down there with you.”

  The shudder was genuine this time.

  “Or I could go down by myself—you wouldn’t even have to go.”

  She said something he couldn’t quite make out—I hate him? I’ll get him?—and turned away, leaving the door ajar. Pender thought about it for a good two, two and half seconds (since she lacked the mental capacity to give informed consent, it wouldn’t exactly have been a kosher entry even if she’d invited him in, which she hadn’t), then followed her inside.

  8

  Warm water, no pain. Strawberry bubble bath—Missy’s favorite, as Dorie recalled. She leaned back, rounding her shoulders to fit the curving metal sides of the tub.

  “Feeling better?” asked the now unmasked Simon. He was sitting on an overturned milk carton next to the tub with his knees drawn up and his chin cradled in his palm like Rodin’s Thinker.

  “Much better.” True enough: even knowing she was going to die soon, this was paradise compared to her last thirty-six hours—or however long it had been. Simon had given her a Percodan for her pain, and equally important, a glass of water to wash it down with, and though he’d immediately retied her ankles after helping her into the tub, he’d subsequently untied her wrists so she could wash herself. It felt good to have her hands free again; she’d almost forgotten what it was like. And as for the trade-off—the Percodan, in addition to taking away her pain, had also taken all the fight out of her—she was scarcely aware of it.

  Simon, however, for all his languid posing, was dialed in dead center, acutely attuned to every nuance of Dorie’s mood, every fluctuation of her spirit. He knew they didn’t have much time left together, but he was hoping to make the most of it. First, though, he had to get her relaxed and off her guard again—not an easy task, given the circumstances.

  “Are you sure you’re not hungry?”

  “I was a few hours ago. I don’t think I could eat anything now.”

  “Well, just let me know.”

  “I will.”

  Dense silence, broken only by the sound of the bathwater lapping hollowly against the
sides of the tub when Dorie shifted her position and the whistle of air through her broken nose on the tail end of each exhale. The term awkward pause didn’t begin to cover it. Simon tried once more to get a conversation going. “I like your hair up like that.” Absent a comb or hairpin, she had twisted her brown braid into a precariously balanced bun.

  Dorie closed her eyes. The painkiller had given her a new kind of courage—the courage not to care.

  He tried again: “What do you think of this Y2K deal?”

  “Doesn’t matter to me—I’m not going to be around for it, am I?”

  “That depends,” said Simon. Over the years he had learned the importance of leaving his victims with a little hope. Without hope, there was no fear. But he could tell she didn’t believe him—she didn’t even ask the almost automatic question: depends on what? Instead she turned away, picked up the bath sponge, squeezed it over her head. Her eyes were closed just long enough for him to slip on the Kabuki mask he’d been holding on his lap, out of her line of sight. It must have seemed to her as if it had appeared out of nowhere. Again he felt the shock pass between them like an electric current. Then her eyelids fluttered, her eyeballs rolled back in her head, and her head drooped forward onto her chest.

  Now, he thought—do it now, don’t be greedy. All he had to do was put his hand on top of her head, shove her down under the water, and hold her there. She might not even wake up—so much the better for her. And if she did wake up, if she struggled a little, so much the better for him.

  9

  “Page him—you’re paging him.” The penny hadn’t dropped for Pender until Childs’s sister pushed the button on the two-way pager clipped to the railing of the hospital bed set up by the tall, arched windows at the far end of the high-ceilinged, oak-beamed living room.

  She held up the device in one hand, pointed to it with the other, pursed her lips, and shook her head sadly—it was a duh face if Pender had ever seen one.

  “Is this your bed?” he asked her.

  She nodded.

  “Are you ill?”

  She tapped her chest. “Ticker.”

  Just like his nephew, Stan. “I bet you’re supposed to be in bed.”

  A sly grin. “’Posed to.”

  “C’mon, in you go.” Pender helped her back up onto the bed, pulled the covers up to her rib cage, and was tucking in the corners when he realized they were no longer alone. He turned slowly, saw a slender man in black slouched casually in the archway next to the massive fieldstone fireplace, arms folded at his chest, weight on one leg, one slippered foot crossed nonchalantly over the other as if he were modeling clothes in a magazine ad.

  Pender let the details register: white male, early fifties, approximately six foot one, approximately one hundred and sixty pounds. Cleft chin, trim gray mustache, sleepy eyes, silver hair, prominent widow’s peak. Black slippers, black pleated slacks; the cuffs of his blousy black shirt were turned up.

  “Mr. Childs?”

  A nod—barely perceptible.

  “Special Agent Pender, Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  “Nice to meet you,” said Childs. He crossed the room, held out his hand. His handshake was surprisingly firm, given his languid manner; his palm was cold and damp, as if he’d only just dried it. “I see you’ve met Missy.”

  “I’m afraid I got her out of bed.”

  “Not your fault—she’s supposed to have a nurse with her at all times.” Childs turned to Missy, asked where the nurse was. The reply was unintelligible, at least to Pender.

  “Mr. Childs, is there someplace we can talk privately?”

  “Sure, follow me. And Missy—no more getting out of bed. If you need anything, just holler—we’ll be in the kitchen.”

  “Peachy keen,” replied Missy.

  Simon’s beeper had gone off just as he was bending over the tub. He’d given the other unit, Missy’s unit, to the nurse, with instructions to beep him only in the event of an emergency, so when the summons came he’d rushed upstairs, expecting to find Nurse Apple performing CPR on Missy—or pulling the sheet up over her face: that was the first, unacceptable image that had crossed his mind.

  When instead he found Pender tenderly tucking Missy into bed, recognized him as the man he’d last seen talking to Dorie over her kitchen table, then learned that he was an FBI agent, a flood of conflicting emotions washed over Simon—relief over Missy, then panic, then the rage that invariably followed panic. He knew better than to act on it, though, and by the time Pender turned around, Simon had mastered his emotions well enough to deliver an I’d- like-to-thank-the-Academy performance. And now it was Pender who was off his guard. Turning his back.

  If only I had some kind of weapon, thought Simon. The knives were all stowed away in a high, Missy-proof cabinet on the far side of the room. Nearer to hand, however, suspended from the rack above the central butcher-block workspace, hung Ganny Wilson’s three cast-iron skillets. Papa Bear, Mama Bear, Baby Bear, Little Simon used to call them. Papa Bear would be too heavy to swing, Baby too light to do much damage, but Mama Bear—Mama Bear would be just right. Somehow Simon knew in advance exactly what it would feel like: the blow would be cushioned by the thin wool fabric of Pender’s beret; the shock would travel all the way up Simon’s arm to his shoulder.

  First, though, he needed to find out what Pender already knew. It couldn’t be too much, or he’d never have shown up alone like this. Would he have time to break out Plan B, which involved grabbing Missy and the getaway bag and heading south of the border, to Dr. Andrew Keene’s secure condo in Puerto Vallarta? Simon had to know—Mama Bear would just have to wait.

  Simon adopted what he hoped was an appropriately concerned, mildly puzzled John-Q.-Citizen-dealing-with-the-fuzz expression: “So, what can I do for you, Agent Pender?”

  “Do you know Dorie Bell?”

  “Yes—she’s a friend of mine.”

  “Where did you meet?” With a suspect, as opposed to a witness, you always ask a few questions you already know the answer to first—give them a chance to lie early, save everybody some time.

  “We met at the PWSPD convention in Las Vegas.”

  “When was the last time you were in Carmel?”

  “Missy and I were down there around the end of June. We had a wonderful time—visited the Aquarium, drove down to—”

  Oh-ho, thought Pender. The first two answers had been unequivocal; this one sounded more as if Childs was trying to lead the conversation away from the question. “Excuse me, Mr. Childs? Are you saying that was the last time you were in Carmel. In June?” Polite, but dubious enough to draw Childs out—if the guy was dirty, he’d start tap-dancing anytime now.

  And sure enough: “Are you saying it wasn’t?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Agent Pender, what’s this all about?”

  Tap dancing? The guy was turning into fucking Bojangles. “Mr. Childs, we have reason to believe Miss Bell has been kidnapped.”

  And Childs followed his lead fluidly: “No! Oh, my God, poor Dorie. What do they want?”

  “Who?”

  “The kidnappers. If it’s money, I could—”

  “It’s not money, Mr. Childs. When was the last time you spoke to Ms. Bell?”

  Simon saw his chance, and took it. “Yesterday morning. She was planning to drive down to Los Angeles with some guy she’d met.”

  By now, Pender was feeling the chill he’d told Linda always to trust. If he’d had his SIG Sauer with him, he’d have pulled it now, held Childs at gunpoint until the tac squad arrived, then claimed that Childs had attacked him so the entry and search would be kosher.

  Of course, Pender knew there was also a possibility that both he and his hunch were entirely full of shit, and that either Dorie had changed her mind or he had misunderstood her when she told him she’d be around all day Thursday, and that the chill he was feeling was only the sweat drying on his Ban Lon shirt—Lord knows he’d been wrong before. But what he wasn’t going to
do at this point, right or wrong, gun or no gun, was leave Childs alone long enough to kill Dorie—if she wasn’t dead yet—then make a run for it.

  Which meant he’d have to do a little fancy dancing himself. “Really! Los Angeles, you say.” He started to reach for his trusty notebook, then remembered that he was no longer carrying it. “This man she’d just met—did she happen to give you a name?”

  “I’m afraid not,” said Childs, edging to his left.

  It seemed to Pender that the man was trying to ease around behind him. Like a fighter trying to avoid being cornered, Pender edged to his own left. “Did she tell you anything at all about him?”

  “Excuse me?”

  That was a bad sign—if Childs was no longer paying attention to the questions, he was probably preparing to make his move.

  “Never mind.” They had casually circled each other; one more quick step, and Childs was no longer between Pender and the doorway. Whatever he’s planning, he won’t want to do it in front of Missy, thought Pender, turning suddenly and starting back down the hallway toward the living room.

  Childs caught up, grabbed Pender’s elbow. Stronger than he looks, thought Pender. He kept going, towing Childs impersonally in his wake like a big dog straining at its leash. Just as they reached the living room, a middle-aged nurse wearing a cardigan sweater over her uniform appeared in the archway on the far side of the room, holding an empty birdcage aloft like a brakeman’s lantern.

  10

  There had been a moment of surrender, no denying that. The second time Dorie faked a syncope, it wasn’t to lull Simon, like the first time, it was to lull herself. Close your eyes, let go. It’s not real anyway—you’ve dreamed it a thousand times. Maybe not exactly like this, in a metal tub in a basement, the mask face leaning over you, the surprisingly gentle hand pressed against your forehead, urging you down, down, under the warm, soapy, strawberry-scented water—but you knew it would be something like this.