Jonathan Nasaw - Fear itself

After the chapel, the Moorish bell tower. Pender took advantage of the elevation to call Dorie’s number; he tried it again as they strolled through the gardens behind the church. “I don’t understand it-she said she’d be home all day.”

“So you keep saying.”

“Maybe her phone’s out of order.”

“Maybe. Or maybe she took one look at you, decided to head for the hills.”

“You’ve always been jealous of my success with the ladies,” said Pender.

“Yeah, that and your wardrobe. Look, if you want to drive by her house, see if she’s okay, quit nudging and just say so.”

“Good idea,” said Pender, as if he hadn’t been dropping hints to that effect since they’d left Pebble Beach an hour earlier.

“Where’s Mary?” asked Pender, as they pulled into Dorie’s driveway, Sid behind the wheel of their rented car.

“Who’s Mary?”

“Mary Cassatt-Dorie’s car. Roadmaster wagon. Should be in the carport.”

“Let’s review, shall we?” Sid shifted into park, but did not cut the engine. “Lady’s not answering her phone and her car’s not in the driveway. What does that tell us, pard?”

But Pender had already unbuckled his seat belt. “Be right back.”

“It tells us the lady is out,” Sid explained to the now empty passenger seat, as he switched off the ignition. “It tells us the lady is not at home.”

Pender rang the bell, tried the front door, which was locked, then checked the windows for signs of forced entry as he walked around the side of the house. The back door was also locked. Okay, so maybe she flaked, he told himself. Or maybe it’s me, maybe I read too much into it when she said she’d be home all day.

But as he continued past the studio (once a sleeping porch, now glassed in and shuttered) and around the far side of the house, where a narrow, musty-smelling cement walkway was hedged in by a high board fence overgrown with ivy, keeping his eyes trained on the ground for blood spatters, footprints, whatever, he almost walked smack into the studio door, which had swung open, blocking the walkway.

Pender stuck his head through the doorway. Dim light, shutters closed, smell of paint, turpentine, linseed oil. “Dorie?”

No answer. He entered the studio, glanced around. Everything looked about the same as it had last night, when she’d given him the grand tour. The canvases she had intended to gesso today were still stacked against her workbench, and her plein air gear-portable easel, folding stool, walking stick-was leaning against the wall, just inside the door.

“Dorie?” he called again, mostly for form’s sake. He was pretty sure she wasn’t home-the house just felt empty-but he continued across the hall into the kitchen anyway, and as soon as he saw the puddle of dried vomit on the parquet floor, Pender understood, with a certainty inaccessible to anyone who hadn’t spent his entire adult life in law enforcement, that he had just half-assed his way into the middle of a crime scene.

The climate inside the DOJ-AOB was so oppressively perfect that toward the end of her second day closeted with the mountain of redacted transaction records, Linda Abruzzi would have killed for a little fresh air or sunlight-even a rainstorm-and was beginning to entertain Count of Monte Cristo fantasies. I could tap on the wall in Morse, she thought, make contact with some other poor office-bound wretch-maybe we could tunnel to freedom together.

Around four o’clock, as she was washing her hands in the ladies’ room after using the facilities, Linda asked her reflection in the stainless steel mirror over the sink (for security reasons, there were no glass mirrors in the building) to remind her again why she was putting herself through this, when she could have been kicking back at her parents’ new house out on Long Island, being waited on hand and foot by her mother.

But all she got out of the haggard brunette in the mirror, who appeared to be trying to disprove the second half of the old saw about how you couldn’t be too rich or too thin-alarmingly prominent Neapolitan nose and a chin you could have opened a beer bottle on-was a beats-the-crap-outta-me shrug.

“Okay, back to work,” she ordered herself. “There’s only another hour left-then you can go home and feel sorry for yourself.”

Forty-five minutes later, she felt like celebrating instead, having stumbled across a federal credit union account so bogus it was a wonder it hadn’t stunk up the whole office. Some GS-13, judging by the size of the paycheck automatically deposited into his or her account every month, had also made several large cash deposits spread out over a period of thirty months.

“Bingo,” she called to Miss Pool in the outer office. “I’ve either found our you-know-what or uncovered the dumbest double agent in the history of espionage.”

“Congratulations.” Pool appeared in the doorway; she already had her coat on.

“Should I call Maheu now, or wait until tomorrow morning?”

“Neither.”

“When, then?”

“Two weeks from yesterday.”

“How come?”

“Because that’s how much time they’ve budgeted for the job.”

“And if I finish early, he’s only going to come up with some more shit work?”

“I believe that’s the plan.”

“Thanks, Pool. What would I do without you?”

“Hon, you don’t ever want to find out.”

The brownstone in Georgetown was empty again when Linda got home a few minutes after six. Instead of a note on the kitchen table, there was a pink Post-it on the computer in the living room: “L: Prefer you not use this machine. Thanks, G.”

Fine, thought Linda-I can take a hint. Still, as she reached into her purse for her cell phone, she was surprised at how badly the rejection hurt. Tears in her eyes, lump in her throat, empty feeling in the pit of her stomach. Oh, grow up, Abrootz, she ordered herself. Just grow the fuck up.

“Pender.”

“Ed, it’s Linda. I-”

“Linda! Good work-thanks for getting back to me so quickly. Here’s what I need: First of all, forget Maheu. Rule number one for getting along in the Bureau: Better to ask forgiveness than permission. Okay?”

“Yes, but I-”

“Good. Now, what I want you to do: I want you to log on to that web site…”

“Ed.”

“…and see if you can contact the webmaster or the system administrator, whatever they call it, find out whether-”

“Ed!”

“What?”

“I’m not in the office, and I haven’t gotten any messages from you. I was just calling to ask you if your offer of a spare room is still open.”

“Absolutely. There’s a key under the stone Buddha on the back porch. Pick out any bedroom but the first-that one’s mine-help yourself to anything you need.”

“Thanks so much. Now, what were you-”

“Dorie Bell’s disappeared.”

“Oh, shit.”

“My sentiments ex-” He broke off in midsyllable. Linda heard someone yelling in the background, then Pender shouting, “FBI! I’m FBI, don’t shoot!”

“Ed? Ed, what’s going on?”

“Linda? Still there?”

“I’m here, Ed.”

“Barney Fife just showed up-looks like I’m going to have to get back to you.”

“Ed, wait-”

“Gotta go.”

More shouting in the background, then the line went dead.

They say when you’ve been shot or stabbed you don’t feel the pain right away. Not so with a broken nose, as Dorie could have testified even before this most recent fracture. The agony is immediate-sharp and centralized at first, then spreading outward from its locus, swelling and blossoming until it envelops your entire head, which feels as big as a float in the Thanksgiving Day parade. Then, just when you think it can’t get any worse, the throbbing begins-slow, rolling waves with barely enough time between ebb and flood, between dread and pain, to form a wordless prayer, much less a coherent thought.