Jonathan Nasaw - Fear itself

“What are you going to call her?”

“Tweety, silly.”

“Tweety Silly?” teased Simon. “That’s a funny name.”

“Brat,” said Missy.

“Brat,” replied Simon. As he bent over the bed to kiss her on the forehead, the canary began to sing. Simon turned out the light, but left the hall light on and the door ajar.

“Good night, sis.”

“Good night,” Missy called. “Sweet dreams.”

“Let’s hope so,” muttered Simon, as the canary fell silent. “God, let’s hope so.”

The morning after Pender’s retirement party, the spookily efficient Miss Pool made a single phone call, and in nothing less than a Bureau-cratic miracle, twenty minutes later two burly men in white coveralls showed up to haul away Pender’s files.

Linda then tackled the task of cleaning out Pender’s desk and discovered the bottle of Jim Beam he’d left behind for her. She thought about throwing it into the wastebasket, but reconsidered: according to rumor, Counterintelligence was going through FBI trash now on a regular basis, trying to find the mole who had tipped off a major operation-the tunnel under the Russian Embassy, again according to rumor.

Two hours later, while Linda was on-line, scrolling through the phobia.com chat room archives, the same two men in coveralls, accompanied by Special Agent Steve Maheu, returned with dolly-load upon dolly-load of white cardboard file boxes. Maheu, a crewcut member of the FBI’s Mormon Mafia, wearing a gray suit especially tailored to hide the umbrella up his ass (according to Pender), informed Linda that she’d been loaned to Counterintelligence.

“Actually, I’m working on something kind of promising at-”

He cut her off in midsentence. “Actually, you’re working on whatever I say you’re working on, Abruzzi. Unless you are physically unable to perform the duties to which you are assigned, in which case I suggest you hand in your badge and let’s get this charade over with before you embarrass the Bureau any further.”

Lucky for you they took my gun away, Linda felt like saying. But what she did say, quietly, after counting to ten in Italian (a trick her mother, from the Sicilian side of the family, the side with the temper, had learned from her mother when she was a little girl), was, “Good lord, you really believe that, don’t you? That I’m embarrassing the Bureau.”

“These boxes,” he continued, as if she hadn’t spoken, “contain computer printouts of every transaction in every known bank account keyed to the social security number of any agent, clerk, or charwoman with knowledge of a recent operation which may have been compromised from the inside.”

“You mean the tun-”

Maheu cut her off again. “Excuse me? I didn’t hear that,” he said pointedly.

“I said, what fun.”

“That’s better. I don’t know how you did things in San Antonio, Abruzzi, but here in Washington we don’t deal in gossip, especially in matters of security.”

“Sorry.” Linda, a born wiseass, refrained with difficulty from pointing out that technically they weren’t in Washington, they were in Virginia.

“Your job is to go through these transaction records one account at a time. The names have been redacted and code numbers substituted. If you find any unusual deposits, or pattern of deposits, write the code number down on a sheet of paper.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Do you really think somebody who’s spying for the Russians is going to deposit the payoffs into his checking account, for crying out loud?”

“No. If I thought there was a chance in Hades of that, I’d assign a real agent to the job. And who said anything about Russians?”

Uno, due, tre, quattro…

Eight miles high, somewhere over Kansas, Pender turned to Sid Dolitz. “Well?”

Sid polished off the last of his crab cocktail, took another sip of complimentary champagne, and patted his lips with a linen napkin-he always flew first class. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Why would I be kidding? I’m sitting next to the man who invented profiling.”

“I think Brussel, Teten, and Mullany, among others, might have something to say about that.”

“But they’re not here,” Pender pointed out.

“If they were, they’d tell you only an idiot would try to come up with a psychological profile based on such flimsy data.”

“Give me a flimsy profile, then.”

“I don’t do flimsy,” said Sid.

Pender waited him out.

“Okay, okay. Assuming it’s the same perp, assuming all the alleged suicides are really homicides, and with a caveat the size of your enormous ass, here’s a shot in the dark: antisocial personality disorder, more commonly known as psychopathy, but compounded by a phobia disorder, manifesting counterphobically.”

“And now for the English translation…?”

“Here’s my theory: As a psychopath, our man’s biggest problem is boredom.” They were taking the killer’s gender for granted: serial poisoners aside, at a conservative estimate, ninety-seven out of a hundred serial killers are male. “Psychopaths characteristically demonstrate abnormally low cortical arousal levels, so they’re constantly in search of stimulation. Extreme stimulation: in order to reach the same level of satisfaction and enjoyment you or I might achieve from watching a good movie, your average psychopath has to torture a cat or get into a fistfight. And as for reaching the levels of cortical arousal the normal person gets from any activity they’re passionate about, like sex, or at our age, golf-”

“Speak for yourself,” said Pender.

“-the psychopath might have to actually murder somebody. But here’s where it gets interesting: given that the victims all had different specific phobia disorders, and taking into account the manner of their respective deaths, I think it’s highly probable that our man is a phobophobe.”

“What’s that?”

“Fear of fear: a phobophobe is afraid of fear itself. But this subject’s phobia would seem to be manifesting counterphobically-in other words, he seeks out that which he’s afraid of-which in turn fits hand in glove with the psychopathy: he fights his boredom by feeding on fear.”

“Sounds like one scary sonofabitch,” said Pender.

“He’d probably be very gratified to hear you say that.”

“I don’t want to gratify him, I want to catch him.”

“You’re retired.”

“Not technically.”

“You’re not on active duty.”

“A mere technicality.”

“You’re really going to go through with this?”

“Bet your ass.”

“A word of advice, then: Don’t underestimate this man. The original name for psychopathy was manie sans delire, which means ‘mania without delusion.’ He may be crazy as a shithouse rat, to use the technical term, but his mind is at least as clear and focused as yours. Probably more so, considering the amount of booze you’ve been putting away lately.”

“You think I’m drinking too much?” Pender was genuinely surprised.

“For a small county in Ireland, no. For one man, yes.”

On Wednesday morning, Simon Childs attempted to soften the blow by taking his sister to the Denny’s in Emeryville for a breakfast that would have felled a lumberjack, before breaking the news that he had to go away again for a little while.

“How long?” she asked, as morosely as she could with a mouth full of hash browns.

Simon leaned across the table and wiped the corner of her mouth-she hated for him to do that in public, but was too depressed to protest. “It’s just for a day or two-tops. And here’s the good news: I talked to Ganny Wilson this morning-if you want, you can stay with her until I get back.”