Fear itself: a novel Read online

  If he’d had a gun, of course, he could have solved the problem with two shots and been back in Berkeley by midnight, but he’d thrown away his short-barreled .38 in horror six weeks earlier after coming within a whisker of using it to end a particularly virulent siege by the rat. Only the knowledge that Missy still needed him had kept him from putting a bullet through his brain; it wasn’t until he found himself kneeling by her bedside as she slept, trying to work up the courage to kill her first, that he’d come to his senses.

  So: no gun. He’d have to wait the bald guy out, hope he left soon. If so, the game was on. If not—and it was entirely possible that Dorie was sleeping with the guy, she’d all but thrown herself at Simon back in June—Simon would have to wait until they were asleep, then bash and run, which was not his style at all.

  But then again, being on the wrong end of a lethal injection wasn’t exactly his style either.

  6

  A cozy kitchen, a fresh-brewed pot of red Typhoo tea that contained enough caffeine to give a meth freak the jitters, good conversation with a fine-looking woman—there are worse ways to spend an evening, thought Pender.

  “Why masks?” was his first question.

  Dorie shrugged. “Quien sabe? I’ve been hypnotized, I’ve been regressed, I’ve had my past lives done—yeah, I know, welcome to California—and I still don’t have any idea. Ask a dozen shrinks, you get a dozen different stories. One says change or loss is the trigger, another one says trauma, another says there doesn’t have to be any trigger. Some say genetics, some say brain chemistry. There’s some evidence for that—phobics have greater blood flow on the right side of the brain, and an overactive amygdala.”

  “What do you think? What does your gut tell you?”

  “That it doesn’t matter why. Origin: irrelevant. All that matters is that I know that if I see a mask, I’m going to have these terrible feelings. I’m going to feel like I’ve slipped into a nightmare, like anything that’s possible in a nightmare is possible now. My heart will start pounding; I’ll get short of breath, hyperventilate. I’ll feel like I’m dying, or paralyzed, and I’ll know I’m going to make a spectacle of myself, maybe pass out and break my nose, which I’ve already done twice, as you may have guessed from the zigzag.” Dorie rubbed her nose ruefully.

  “It’s not the masks I’m afraid of, mind you: it’s the anxiety attack, and the idea it could be triggered at any moment. One speaker at the convention described it as going around with a cocked gun; somebody else said a phobia is like a hole in your life that you could fall through at any time.”

  “Tell me about the convention,” said Pender.

  “Like I said in the letter, it was fantastic. Amazing. We had shrinks, we had symposiums, we had day trips. Everybody stayed in the Olde Chicago—it was luxe, Ed—first class all the way.”

  “Must have been expensive.”

  “That was the best part—it was sort of pay-what-you-can, and the PWSPD Association picked up the rest.”

  “And the association is supported how? On dues?”

  “Just contributions.”

  “Must be some awfully wealthy phobics out there.”

  “Between you, me, and the lamppost…” Dorie leaned forward; by dint of sheer willpower, Pender managed to keep his eyes from straying cleavage-ward. “…most of the expenses for the convention were underwritten by my friend Simon—the one who lives in the house he was raised in?”

  “In Berkeley.” Pender just wanted to show her he’d been paying attention.

  “Right. That’s Simon Childs, as in Childs Electronics. His grandfather started the company—I guess he’s got a trust or something. But he’s very cool about having all that money—nobody’s supposed to know he’s supporting the association. He just wants to be treated like everybody else.”

  “Admirable. How long have you two known each other?”

  “We met at the convention, kind of stayed in touch. He and his sister came down for a weekend around the end of June. She has Down syndrome—it’s so sweet the way he dotes on her.”

  “Not to pry,” said Pender, “but were you two…say, more than just friends?”

  “No, just friends.”

  The reply was quick enough, but registered on Pender’s finely calibrated bullshitometer nonetheless. Maybe a spurned overture on either side? “You sure about that?”

  Her eyebrows arched, her eyes turned a slightly darker shade of blue. Pender raised both hands in a gesture of surrender. “All right, all right. But there’s something you need to understand. There’s a rule of thumb in my business: If you want to find the predator, first find the herd. The herd was in Vegas, which means, assuming we have a serial killer on our hands—and right or wrong, at this point we’d be fools to assume otherwise—the chances are, oh, say about ninety-nine out of a hundred that he was at that convention, and about ninety-five out of a hundred that he was one of the attendees—otherwise he’d have stood out more.”

  “So what you’re saying is, I already know the killer.”

  “More than likely.”

  “God, that’s spooky.”

  “It’s also how we’re gonna catch him. And we are going to catch him—as these investigations go, this is going to be a slam dunk. It’ll take some manpower—we’ll have to interview each of the attendees, narrow the pool down to anybody who hasn’t got an alibi for…what were the dates again?”

  “April twelfth, June fifteenth, and August seventeenth,” said Dorie without hesitation.

  “Slam dunk, then,” said Pender, glancing at his watch. Eight-forty-five—he and Sid had a nine o’clock dinner reservation at Club XIX, the four-star restaurant at the Lodge that Sid had been salivating over all day. When Pender took out his cell phone to call a cab, though, Dorie wouldn’t hear of it; she insisted on driving him back to Pebble Beach herself.

  “It’s the least I can do,” she told him, as she cleared two weeks’ worth of water bottles, sandwich wrappers, rags, old brushes, and empty paint tubes off the passenger seat of the old Roadmaster. “I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to thank you.”

  “I haven’t done anything yet,” replied Pender.

  “You listened, you gave me hope. That’s a lot.” Dorie slid behind the wheel, engaged in her usual struggle with the seat belt—they just didn’t make shoulder harnesses to fit tall gals with big boobs—and turned the key in the ignition. “C’mon, Mary—you can do it,” she urged. And Mary did it, turned right over. “Attagirl.”

  “You named your car Mary?” As they drove through the dark wooded streets of residential Carmel, Pender finally managed to get his seat belt buckled—they didn’t exactly build them for somebody his size and shape, either.

  “After Mary Cassatt. You know—the Impressionist painter. She’s so old now, though, I’m thinking about renaming her Grandma Moses.”

  “Don’t do it,” said Pender. “Never rename a car—it’s supposed to be bad luck.”

  “I thought that was boats.”

  “Cars, too. My ex-wife got my old T-Bird in the divorce. Changed her name from Lola to Daisy—the car, that is. Totaled it three weeks later.”

  “Was she hurt?”

  “I told you, she was totaled.”

  “Your wife, I meant.” Then Dorie glanced over, saw him grinning; she couldn’t help but notice that he wasn’t half as homely when he smiled.

  They had to stop at the Pebble Beach gate and tell the guard their business in order to avoid the seven-dollar riffraff tariff. “God, I hate this place,” muttered Dorie through clenched teeth.

  “I take it you’re not a golfer.”

  “No, I’m a painter. And these bastards think they own some of the greatest views in the world. Did you see the Lone Cypress today?”

  “Magnificent,” said Pender.

  “Did you know it’s against the law to sell any images of it? You even hang a painting of that tree in a gallery, Pebble Beach Corporation takes you to court.”

  They pulled up in fro
nt of the Lodge a few minutes after nine. Dorie had to get out and walk around the car to let Pender out—the passenger door didn’t open from the inside.

  “I’m not sure of the protocol,” she said. “Is it okay to hug an FBI agent?”

  “Normally you need to fill out a few forms in triplicate and submit them to—”

  But she’d already thrown her arms around him. “Thank you.”

  “My pleasure.” It was, too: she gave him a good full-body hug—none of that tentative, shoulder-hunching, stingy-chested nonsense. And she was tall enough that they fit nicely together. “You take care now—and try not to worry too much. These guys have cycles. The intervals tend to shorten, but judging by what you’ve told me, we probably have another two months before he kills again. That’ll probably be more than enough time to catch him.”

  “That’s good to know,” said Dorie. “In a twisted kind of way. But you’ll stay in touch, right?”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “I’ll be home all day.”

  That was the plan, anyway. Dorie had a show coming up in February, at the Plein Air Gallery in Carmel. She already had plenty of product for the wall space, but she knew herself well enough to foresee the inevitable panic as the opening approached: the paintings she’d already selected would start looking like crap to her, at which point it would be good for her peace of mind to have some backups ready. And with her oils requiring a minimum of three months to dry, it was time to get cracking.

  Tomorrow, then, she would spend putting the finishing touches on Wayne’s sunset, gessoing canvases, and psyching herself up for a painting marathon. Five commercial plein airs in five days, starting with the bell tower over at Carmel Mission, the closest thing there was to a guaranteed sale, now that the Lone Cypress was off limits.

  The problem was, Dorie had already painted the damn tower from every conceivable angle in every season—which was why she needed another day to psych herself up. Making a living through her painting, a dream of Dorie’s from childhood, had turned out to be a trade-off after all—but then, what hadn’t?

  Returning to a dark house, fumbling her key into the lock, Dorie began to have second thoughts about her lights-off policy. It would be oh so easy for someone to lie in wait in the bushes and jump her on the dark doorstep. Perhaps she could have one of those motion-sensor floods installed—then the light would only come on when she needed it. Of course, any real security measures would have to start with fixing the lock on the studio door, which had been broken for three, four years.

  Once inside, though, Dorie was comfortable with the familiar darkness of the house she’d grown up in. She didn’t have to turn on the hall light to find her way back to the kitchen, where she put the kettle on to boil in the dark, not to save electricity, but to watch the blue gas flame dancing. Dorie was an intensely visual person; as a child, she had once mentioned to her father that the blue of the gas flame was the most beautiful blue in the world.

  “No, sweetheart, I’m afraid I have to disagree with you there,” he’d replied thoughtfully, his sibilants coming out wet and juicy around the stem of his pipe. “The most beautiful blue in the world is the blue of my little girl’s eyes.”

  Oh, Daddy, she thought now, what a great thing to say. He’d been dead twelve years and she still missed him. Mom, too—he’d only outlived her by six months. Just kind of gave up without her. They were buried together in the old Monterey cemetery out by El Estero, next to Dennis the Menace Park; that second funeral, the orphan-maker, had been a gut-wrenching experience even for the forty-year-old Dorie.

  For some reason, the blue flame didn’t seem quite so enchanting tonight—it looked cold to Dorie, like the light from a distant star. Then she switched on the low-hanging chandelier over the kitchen table and her nightmare began.

  At first, she thought it was a nightmare, the mask-in-the-window nightmare. Because there was the window, high in the wall, and there was the mask, a white Lone Ranger–type mask, and the eyeholes were empty, the way they always were in the dream.

  But she wasn’t screaming, the way she always did in the dream, nor did she wake up, the way she always did. Instead she felt her scalp prickling and saw the familiar multicolored fireflies swimming in front of her eyes as she tumbled through the darkness.

  7

  In her seven years with the Bureau, Linda Abruzzi had worked more than her share of shit jobs and shuffled more than her share of paper—federal employment background checks, interstate car theft investigations that involved comparing VIN numbers on computer printouts that were longer than she was tall, follow-the-money RICO probes—but nothing as soul-deadeningly, eye-strainingly, sleep-inducingly boring as going through fourteen file boxes of sloppily photostatted bank records.

  Her initial inclination had been to blow it off. She’d finger-walked through the first few boxes, jotted down a few code numbers at random, then buzzed Miss Pool and asked her if she could come up with a number for the Chicago PD’s homicide division.

  “I’ll be right in,” was the somewhat puzzling response.

  “No, I just need—”

  A moment later, Miss Pool appeared in Linda’s doorway. She had taken off her suit jacket; she was wearing a sleeveless black jersey under it. Good upper arms for a woman her age, thought Linda; no wobble—she must work out.

  “You didn’t have to get up—I only wanted a phone number.”

  “I know, hon—but don’t you want to finish going through those boxes first?”

  “Why would I want to do that? You know as well as I do it’s busywork.”

  “Because Maheu obviously doesn’t want you to.”

  “Now you’ve lost me entirely,” said Linda. “Why doesn’t Maheu want me to go through the records he asked me to go through?”

  “Because he doesn’t want you to find something.”

  “But there’s nothing there to find!”

  “Oh?” said Pool mysteriously, raising her left hand with a flourish and tapping the rather masculine onyx band she wore on her ring finger before going back to her desk.

  “Oh.” A ringer—of course. Pool had just warned her that neither Maheu nor the counterspooks were above planting a deliberately doctored record somewhere in the files. Something so obvious that a diligent investigator could not have missed it, and so suspicious that only a double agent would have failed to report it.

  Linda had ended up working on the floor all day—it was easier than hauling the boxes onto the desk—and by quitting time she had pains shooting up her legs to her butt, and her legs were so stiff she had to haul herself up using the corner of the desk for leverage. Miss Pool, who’d popped her head into the doorway to say good night, hurried over to help her.

  “Don’t let the bastards wear you down,” whispered Pool, who proved to be even stronger than Linda had suspected, as she helped Linda to her chair.

  “Never,” Linda said, swiveling her chair around to face her computer, intending to log back on to phobia.com—she was on her own time now.

  Pool shook her head regretfully. “Sorry, no overtime.”

  “I won’t put in for it.”

  “Maheu wants me to log your hours. I’d fudge it, but your ID logs you in and out every time you go through a door. Then there are the gate logs and the—”

  “It’s okay, I understand. And thanks for the tip about the, you know…” Linda tapped her own bare ring finger.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “No, I—”

  “I mean that literally,” said Pool. “Don’t mention it.”

  The drive back to Georgetown was a typical Beltway nightmare. At the 66/495 maze, an SUV cut over into Linda’s lane, nearly clipping the Geo’s front bumper, and when she hit the horn, the driver gave her the finger. Linda thought about flashing her shield at him, just to give him a scare, then remembered that the days when you could cow somebody with a badge were long gone—nowadays you had to have a weapon to back it up.

  Not that
she would have drawn her weapon on a civilian over a traffic dispute even if she had been packing. But Linda had learned over the years that being armed changed the way a woman, especially a small woman, thought about herself in relation to the world. And now that she was no longer strong enough or steady enough on her feet to make use of the martial arts training she’d received at the Academy, it seemed to Linda that the Bureau should have insisted she carry a gun, at least until or unless she developed any optical or cognitive symptoms.

  But there was no sense letting her mind wander down that path, Linda reminded herself. The FBI wasn’t fair, the disease wasn’t fair, and life wasn’t fair—big hairy deal, film at eleven. Better to concentrate on her job. Because she still had a job to do, an important one—the only hang-up was that until God in his infinite fucking wisdom decided to get Maheu off her ass, she’d have to do it on her own time.

  The Georgetown brownstone was dark when Linda got home, which was not unusual: Jim and Gloria Gee were both attorneys, dinkies (double income, no kids) who dined out more often than in. Gloria had left a note for Linda—”dinner and a movie, back late”—on the kitchen table, along with the classifieds, which she had thoughtfully opened to the apartment rentals. Not a particularly subtle hint, thought Linda—somehow things had gone from the stay-as-long-as-you-need-to stage to the don’t-let-the-door-hit-you-in-the-ass-on-your-way-out stage without any intermediary steps.

  Linda glanced through the listings while her pot pie nuked, but without much hope. She already knew what she’d find in her price range—diddly—and wondered again whether she ought to take Pender up on the offer he’d made toward the end of the party last night (Linda hadn’t split early after all) of a spare room in the old house above the canal. Be nice and peaceful out there—unless of course Pender had ulterior motives. Then she looked down at herself and laughed. Yeah, right—you’re a fucking femme fatale. It’s the ankle braces—they drive men wild.