Fear itself: a novel (25 page)

And call it foolish, even infantile, but slowly his feet began to move, shuffling through the water, one step at a time, but one foot following the other, until he’d reached the tub.

Afterward Simon couldn’t remember turning off the water; all he knew was that it was quiet again, except for the sound of the water still dripping down the staircase, and he was leaning over the tub looking down at poor drowned Nelson.

My last surviving friend on earth, he thought sadly—then it was time to go.

The next time Pender’s cell phone rang, Dorie rolled over sleepily and patted his cast. “It’s okay, I’m up.”

More or less—she dozed, drifting in and out of a pleasant Vicodin haze, comforted by the sound of Pender’s voice and the solid, grounding presence of his big body beside her in the bed. They hadn’t made love yet. Once they were actually in bed together last night, broken-boned, drugged, and exhausted, common sense had kicked in—or was it maturity? It
was
going to happen, though, maybe soon—Dorie was as sure of that as she’d ever been about anything.

“Who was that on the phone?”

“First call was McDougal, my boss. He’s putting Linda Abruzzi in charge of coordinating the investigation. Second call was Pool.”

“Who’s Pool?”

“She runs the FBI. I figured Abruzzi could probably use a few pointers getting this thing off the ground. But to get McDougal to put her in charge, I had to promise to stay out of it.”

“But what if you’d stayed out of it before? Where would…Where would that…”
Where would that leave me?
Dorie couldn’t bring herself to finish the question, probably because she knew the answer: in Simon’s basement.

“Sid Dolitz says there’s an old Yiddish expression that translates: ‘In the land of What-If, all travelers are unhappy.’ Of course, being Sid, he might have made it up. How’s your nose?”

“I think it probably hurts something awful, but I took a Vicodin when I woke up and another one when I woke up the second time, so the pain ain’t reaching the brain. How’s your arm feeling?”

“Like it got whacked with a frying pan.”

“May I recommend a Vicodin?”

“I already took one.”

“Take another.”

“You think?”

“Hey, it worked for me.”

Excited as Linda was about finally having something useful to do, she also wondered whether she might be in over her head. After all, she asked herself as the afternoon wore on, what did she know about coordinating an investigation of this size and complexity, involving five separate investigations in five separate jurisdictions and almost certainly more to come, in addition to an interstate manhunt and a growing media interest that was rapidly threatening to turn into a feeding frenzy?

Precious little, came the answer. And she didn’t feel right asking Pender for advice on how to conduct the rest of the investigation, not after McDougal had specifically informed her that part of her assignment was to keep him as far away from it as possible.

Once again, it was Pool to the rescue. She showed up out of nowhere around three-thirty—Linda certainly hadn’t called her—dressed, not for success, but for raking leaves on a Saturday afternoon, hit the phones, called in a few favors or engaged in a little blackmail, and by six o’clock (miraculous as Pool’s earlier Bureaucratic machinations had been, this one was on the order of parting the Red Sea), the bogus bank records were gone, and Linda’s little office in the DOJ-AOB had been turned into a mini-SIOC (Strategic Information and Operations Center) command post, complete with additional phone and data lines and a cork-backed map of the U.S. that took up the entire wall behind Linda’s desk, along with tiny color-coded flag pins with which to track Childs sightings—white for
reported,
red for
confirmed.

And while the map was going up, Pool, as per Pender’s suggestion, transferred a copy of the database program Thom Davies had devised for Pender a few years ago—a cascading boilerplate calendar, year tiles opening up into months, months into days, days into hours—onto Linda’s computer and, under the pretext of showing Linda how to use the program, gently reminded her of the importance of establishing a time line for her suspect: If you want to know where somebody’s going, first you have to know where they’ve been.

Linda didn’t need a second hint. She set to work, culling data on Simon Childs from every available source, starting with Dorie Bell’s letter and ending with the preliminary findings of the Evidence Response Team still combing through the house on Grizzly Rock Road, and entering it into the database herself. Three hours later, not only did she have a preliminary time line, admittedly with more gaps than entries, tracking Simon Childs from birth through yesterday, but through a sort of immersion therapy, she had begun the unpleasant but necessary process of trying to get into the killer’s mind by first letting him into her mind.

The way it worked, you absorbed and memorized every shred of information about your suspect, until you were as conscious of his tendencies, his likes and dislikes, as you were of your own; when things were really cooking, a stimulus would be almost as likely to bring up one of the suspect’s mnemonic associations as it would one of your own. That way (at least theoretically; Linda had never done this sort of thing before), when the time came, you’d not only know which way your suspect was going to jump, but when, and how high.

Early as it was in the process, then, it was no accident that on her way home that night, when Linda stopped at the Safeway in Potomac to get what passed for a deli sandwich this far from the Bronx and saw a teenage girl with Down syndrome in the parking lot, she thought immediately of Missy Childs.

And later that night, as she lay in bed trying to get to sleep, instead of having her thoughts dwelling morbidly on her MS, as they had almost every night since her diagnosis, Linda found herself thinking about something that Kim Rosen had posted on the PWSPD web site less than a week before she died.

Ain’t that the truth, thought Linda. She opened an eye. It was nearly one
A
.
M
., according to the glowing green hands on her alarm clock, and something was nagging at her. Not Kim, not Simon—something closer to home. Something she’d left undone? Half done? Never mind: if it was important, she’d—

Then it came to her: the laundry. She’d left one load wet in the washer this morning, one load damp in the dryer. Abrootz old girl, she told herself, you’re gonna have some serious ironing to do tomorrow.

Not yet, thinks Simon, swimming up through the darkness toward consciousness. Not just yet. He’s been dreaming; Missy was there; he doesn’t want to lose her again quite so soon.

But it’s too late—he’s awake now, surrounded by blackness. For a moment his mind is a delicious blank—he can’t quite place himself in time or space. He might be anywhere, any age, a child in his own bed, awakening from an afternoon nap, or an eighteen-year-old nodded out in a crash pad in the Haight. Then he opens his eyes, turns his head, sees the glowing red numbers on the cheap clock radio next to the bed. Three
A
.
M
. Figures; he’d dropped the Halwane around midnight.

He sits up, fumbles for a light switch. The motel room materializes around him. Pastel walls, TV on the dresser, still life on the wall: this is where the blind rat lives, he thinks—in a generic, three-in-the-morning motel room outside Winnemucca, Nevada. At least it’s a smoking room, he tells himself, firing up the half-smoked joint he’s left in the ashtray against just such a contingency.

And as he waits for the weed to take effect, he finds himself wondering where Missy is spending the night. On a roll-out slab in a pitch-black drawer in the coroner’s basement, most likely. Don’t be afraid, he wants to tell her—you don’t ever have to be afraid again.

He spreads his map out on the bed and, using his thumb and forefinger as calipers, measures out how far he’s come on 80, then doubles that, pivoting the thumb and forefinger around twice to calculate how far he’s likely to get tomorrow. The second time, his forefinger lands on Ogallala, Nebraska. Two more digital pirouettes, and his forefinger is poised over La Farge, Wisconsin, where Pender’s sister lives.

Monday night, then: at his current pace, he can expect to reach La Farge sometime Monday night. Tomorrow he’ll make the initial overtures. If the real Arthur Bellcock hasn’t already been in touch with her, he’ll set up an interview—have to get a tape recorder on the way, or maybe just a notebook—arrive early, scope out the scene, look for signs of surveillance.

If the coast is clear, he shows up as Bellcock. If it’s not, he moves on to one of the other names on the—

No! If there are any signs of surveillance or even suspicion, it dawns on Simon, that would mean the whole Arthur Bellcock scenario is blown. Which would mean in turn that Pender knows he is being stalked—Simon would have lost the element of surprise.

So the question he has to ask himself at this point is, Is it worth it? Is finding out what Pender’s afraid of worth the risk of putting him on his guard?

Simon fires up the roach again, takes a serious hit, and waits for the answer to come to him.

“Thank you for another day, O Lord; may I use it to your everlasting glory.”

And it did look to be a glorious Indian summer Sunday. Sunny, once those high clouds burned off, with highs in the low seventies—about ten degrees higher than normal for Wisconsin, this time of year, but Ida Day would have started her morning with the same prayer of thanks if it had been fifty and raining, or twenty below and snowing. When you were seventy and still had all your faculties and most of your teeth, every day was a good day.

Mind you, Ida’s idea of how to use a Sunday to the Lord’s glory was not the same as most folks, especially around La Farge. For one thing, it didn’t include church. She and Walt had always distrusted organized religion; the more organized it was, the more they distrusted it. If she wanted the word of God, Ida had only to look up at the sampler hanging over the bureau. Deuteronomy 31:8: “The Lord Himself goes before you and will be with you; He will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged.”

She had stitched it herself, for Walt, to encourage him during those last difficult days. Throat cancer—no goddamn way to go. Ida still had Walt’s old army Colt in the bottom drawer of her bureau; if and when she found herself in a similar situation, she was reasonably confident she’d have the right combination of courage and cowardice to use it.

But today was not a day for morbid thoughts. Today was a day for, let’s see…for apples! She still had a few bushels left over from the Gays Mills Applefest. Oh, yes—Ida could almost smell it already, the sweet, faintly winey bouquet of autumn apples being cidered.

Although, come to think of it, cidering was best left for a cool day; not only were you less likely to draw wasps, but you could mull the first gallon to warm you.

Then Ida remembered the pumpkins sitting on the front porch. She’d told herself she wasn’t going to carve jack-o’-lanterns this year, but yesterday the little Steinmuller boy had come trudging up the sidewalk hauling a rusty red wagon piled high with pumpkins he’d grown himself, a dollar for the big ones, fifty cents for the little ones, two bits for the gourds. It was right off the cover of a
Saturday Evening Post;
how could she resist?

Pumpkins, then. After breakfast—two eggs and a rasher of bacon, black coffee, and her first Pall Mall of the day (don’t bother lecturing her: she’s already buried two doctors; three, if you count Walt)—Ida sharpened her carving knife on a Washita stone dampened with vinegar, spread newspapers out on the porch, turned the likeliest looking pumpkin around and around until she discovered its natural face, and had just finished sawing off its cap when the phone rang.

“It never fails,” she grumbled, hauling herself up from the overturned milk crate she’d been sitting on and hurrying into the house to pick up the phone in the living room before the answering machine in the kitchen got into the act. There was nothing Ida hated more than shouting
hold on
into the receiver while her own flat Appleknocker voice bleated
I’m not here now, leave a message at the tone
into her ear.

“Hello?” She’d made it.

“Ida Day?”

“Yes?”

“Ida Pender Day?”

“Yes?”

“Mrs. Day, this is Arthur Bellcock.”

“The man who’s writing the book about Eddie?”

“One of the only advantages to a name like mine, Mrs. Day, is you never get confused with any other Arthur Bellcocks.”

“Yes, I suppose that’s true. Eddie told me he’d given you my name and that you’d probably be in touch, but I thought it wasn’t going to be for another month or so.”

“That
was
the plan, but due to a scheduling conflict, I’ve had to push things up a few weeks. I was wondering, and I understand if it’s an inconvenience, but I’m actually down in Madison winding up another project, and it would be so helpful if I could drive up tomorrow evening.”