Endangered Species (12 page)

over a fireplace broadcasting the soulless life of a television on mute.

The budgerigars, one blue, one green, pecked around the base of the

telephone.  Frederick had the bachelor's habit of dining in front of the

TV and there was usually a tidbit to he had about this time of the

evening.

Danny, the blue budgie, had Anna Pigeon to thank for Taters .

When Frederick had become enamored of Anna he'd taken pity on Danny's

isolation and bought him a ladyfriend.  The girl at the pet shop, still

in high school and no more a judge of bird gender than Frederick, had

lost her fifty-fifty gamble.  Still it was a happy ending .

The birds were close as brothers.

Making squeaky noises with his lips, Frederick put out his finger. Danny

hopped aboard and looked at him with one bright eye .

Piedmont, Anna's tomcat, would devour his feathered friends if ever he

got the chance.  Frederick hoped that wasn't a metaphor for his

relationship with the little ranger.

He smiled at the word.  It never crossed Anna's mind that she was

little.  Probably she'd be offended if he suggested it.  He had learned

to be careful around her.  If he picked up one end of a piano she'd run

around to lift the other.  One day she was going to hurt herself.  One

day she was going to get herself killed.

Frederick sat with that thought for a moment.  Danny flew to the top of

his head and scratched a cascade of baby-fine hair over his forehead. It

tickled the bridge of his nose.  Time for a haircut.  Absently he shoved

it and an agitated budgie back.

Life without Anna, at least tethered to his heart by phone line, was not

unthinkable.  Unfortunately, at forty-five with twenty-three years in

law enforcement, there was very little left that was unthinkable.  But

living alone had grown tiresome, the long-distance relationship a lonely

and irritating compromise ." I wish Anna liked the city," he said to the

bird on his head ." Or I liked dirt and bugs and thousands of square

miles of nothing."

Anna had said she was going for a swim.  Frederick thought of her firm

body slipping through the sea and felt a pleasant stirring.

"Guess it's time to earn my keep," he said to the little green bird

hopping along the edge of the table.

A pair of heavy plastic half-glasses, the cheap kind from the grocery

store, lay near the phone.  Frederick pushed them halfway up his long

nose with a practiced movement and studied the numbers he'd written on

the back of July's electric bill.

In the year he'd been with Anna her sister, Molly, had taken on

superhuman proportions.  He'd never met or spoken with her but he didn't

doubt she knew everything about him, from how he voted in the last

election to the size of his penis.  Once a man started sleeping with a

woman, he was a fool to think he had any secrets left.

Cradling the telephone to his ear, he dialed.  He hadn't much of an idea

what he could say or do.  Death threats were vague unpredictable things

and could mean anything from a desire for power over someone to an

actual warning.  The motive was always to harass but the degree of real

danger was on a sliding scale.  Too often the procedures TV had taught

the public to believe in as standard magic-DNA, fingerprints, paper

type, handwriting-couldn't be applied.  Career criminals, those citizens

who tended to have their fingerprints on record, weren't much given to

letter writing.  Computers had done away with the idiosyncrasies of the

old typewriters, and most grades of paper were sold by the tens of

millions of sheets.

He would listen, make suggestions, earn some Brownie points, and maybe

something clever would come to him.  Adolescent as it was, Frederick

admitted to a fantasy of rescuing Anna's sister from fiends most foul.

It would look great on his rdsum6.

"Hello," snapped over the line, and he was alarmed to find Molly home. A

message on a machine would have been the easy way out.

"This is Frederick Stanton of the FBI," he said stiffly, then rolled his

eyes at himself.

"This is Dr.  Pigeon," returned a cool voice.

Title to title, they waited.

"I just called to see if my introduction was truly pompous or if I

should work on it," Frederick said.  Molly laughed and he was relieved.

The laugh itself was an infectious cackle suitable for the kidnapper of

Toto and other strong women in history.

It died away and a black void of phone silence crawled into Frederick's

ear.  Having initiated the contact, he was obliged to go first ." Anna

asked me to call.  She's worried about the threats you've been getting."

There was a sharp intake of breath that he took for outrage till he

remembered Molly was a smoker.  As a young man he'd smoked .

Caffeine and telephones still brought on the occasional urge ." Why

don't you give me your read on it?  I'm not sure what, if anything, I

can do to help.  Maybe just allay Anna's fears." He couldn't remember

ever having used the word "allay" in a sentence.  He realized he wanted

to impress Molly Pigeon.

Another indrawn breath, then Molly said: "Much as I hate to admit it,

this one's got me twitchy." Like Anna's, the psychiatrist's voice was

deep, but there was a distinct difference.  Molly sounded as if she

weighed each word, passing judgment on its deservedness before allowing

it utterance.  Frederick suspected Molly would be even harder to know

than Anna.  Rather than being put off, he found it challenging.

"I've had death threats before-I imagine you have, too."

Frederick nodded, then remembered to accompany it with the appropriate

listening sound.

"This one-or maybe I should say these, I've heard from her three times

now-have a different feel to them.  They're very cold .

Very concise.  More as if she has been assigned to .  .  .  to do this

job, rather than a frothing-at-the-mouth hatred."

Frederick waited till he was sure she'd finished then he asked: "Why do

you think it's a woman?"

"I know it's a woman," Molly said ." The choice of words, the

handwriting, the stationery, the voice on my message machine, all were

female."

" Could you be fooled?"

A moment's silence, then: "Yes."

Frederick admired an answer devoid of excuses.  Anybody could be fooled

anytime.  Professionals had a harder time admitting that than most.  His

opinion of Molly went up a notch.  Till that instant he'd not realized

how prepared he was to dislike her.  Defensive, he told himself.  Anna

had talked so much about her sister, he'd felt intimidated.

He asked Molly all the questions Anna had asked and then drummed his

fingers on the coffee table, hoping for a constructive thought.  Molly

waited without nervous chatter and he almost forgot she was there.

"Okay," he said finally ." What we've got is basically nothing, so I'm

not going to tell you to call the police.  At this point it would be a

waste of time."

"(',ood," Molly said, I)Lit Frederick wasn't listening, he was following

his train of thought.

"What I can do in my exalted position as an FBI guy-" He almost added,

"and your sister's boyfriend," but the absurdity of the word derailed

the thought ." What I can do," Frederick pushed on, "is set the

computers to computing.  Find out if there's any history of this

particular pattern.  If you've got the names and dates of birth of

anybody you think might be involved, I can run them for criminal

histories.  If there are fingerprints on the note, I can run them ;ind

see if we get a hit.  All this will probably lead nowhere but it's

standard operating procedure.  It'll at least clear the decks a little.

If you like, I've got some things VOLI can do."

Let me get a pen," Molly said, and: "Shoot."

"'These threats usually come on "he tail end of some event, something

fairly recent.  The Count of Monte Cristo notwithstanding, most folks

don't carry a grudge that long."

"Attention deficit disorder," Molly said, and Frederick laughed.

"Write down any event surrounding you-maybe you were only peripherally

involved-that might generate an impulse for revenge .

Go back, say, six months, no more.  Vary your routines: when you go out,

how you get to work, where you eat lunch.  Don't be predictable.  Pay

attention to anyone you see more than once when there's no reason

to-maybe on the subway and later at a restaurant.  That sort of thing."

"Damn," Molly said ." Now I'm getting scared."

"Scared is good," Frederick told her.

"Trust your paranoia?"

"What scares Anna?" he asked apropos of nothing, and was startled at the

suddenly voiced thought.

" Everything that shouldn't and nothing that should."

Loyalty to Anna seeming at odds with the need to know her better,

Frederick was debating whether to ask Molly to elaborate .

After a moment's pause she took the decision from him.  He could hear

caution in her voice and knew he was being trusted.  Afraid to break the

gossamer thread of her approval, he listened with the mouthpiece held

away from his face lest a stray noise distract her.

"After Anna's husband, Zach, was killed she went into a black depression

and stayed there for close to a year.  During that time she was not

sane.  We didn't lock her up, but I came close a time or two .

She tried to kill herself.  Not cries for help so much as to take her

mind off worse things, if you can imagine.  Anyway Molly drew out the

word and Frederick could hear the conversation was about to come to a

close.  He let the breath he'd not realized he was holding escape.

"Anyway, she came out of it, but somewhere along the line she lost

something."

"Survival instinct?" Frederick hazarded a guess.

"I don't know.  I'm working on it.  I've got to run.  Have you anything

else?"

Frederick had barely voiced his "No" before the line went dead.

Clearing the bird droppings off his calendar, he took it from beneath

the phone.  Business put him in Baltimore on Friday.  If Molly was

amenable, he'd stop over in New York on the way home.

Meeting the mythical sister, he mocked himself, but the thought excited

him.

T F I V E A.  M.  Anna slunk downstairs to reap the rewards of coffee

Theans sown the night before.  Their quarters were blessed with a

state-of-the-art automatic coffee maker and each evening she made it her

business to load it and set the timer.  In order to maintain the charade

that they were indispensable, all fire crews on this presuppression

assignment worked six a.m.  to six p.m.; a lot of hot, slow hours to

fill with ever-vigilant boredom.  Coffee gave her a reason to get out of

bed.

Eschewing the idea of community cooking, each member of this crew had

decided to fend for himself and, burrowing through the refrigerator in

search of heavy cream for her coffee, Anna could catalogue her fellows

by what they ate: Vegetables and peanut butter for AI.  Kraft macaroni

and cheese, made in vats and eaten for days-Dijon.  The beer and red

meat were Rick's.  A jar of Miracle Whip, three loaves of Wonder bread,