Jonathan Nasaw - Fear itself

“Ain’t that the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question?” Pender sopped up yolk with a corner of toast. “You’ve known him for a while. Did he ever mention the names of any close friends, relatives, anybody who might hide him out? My guess is it’ll be someplace in the Bay Area-he’d have to have gotten that car off the road pretty quick.”

“Nothing comes to mind. But they’re gonna catch him, right?”

“What? Oh, sure. You bet.”

“You don’t sound very convinced.”

Pender looked up from his plate. “Scout, I’ve been chasing monsters for a long time.” There was a seen-it-all sadness in his soft brown eyes. “You tell me how much you want to hear.”

“I’ve been hiding from monsters for a long time,” replied Dorie. “You tell me what you think I ought to know.”

While Nelson had been in the bedroom closet facing his demons, Simon had been in Nelson’s bathroom preparing to face his demon-singular. With every pass of Nelson’s electric clippers another piece of it had appeared in the mirror. Bzzz, there went the widow’s peak and the rest of the wavy silver hair. That much had been part of Plan B all along-Simon had come to identify so strongly with his handsome head of silver hair that cutting it off was the first thing that came to mind when he thought about disguising himself.

But then, bzzz, there went the two-day stubble and bzzz, there went the mustache, and Simon was reminded that it had been in order to disguise the long, cruel upper lip he’d inherited from the Childs side of the family that he’d grown the stash in the first place.

But a shaven head and face did not a demon make. It wasn’t until the eyebrows were gone that it really started to take shape. Even then the transformation into Grandfather Childs, who as a boy had suffered from an attack of scarlet fever so virulent it left him without a hair on his body, wasn’t complete until he’d finished the difficult task of clipping back the lashes.

Luckily Nelson had a pair of safety-tipped (what else?) nail scissors. Leaning over the sink until his face was within inches of the mirror, his eyes tearing like a soap opera queen, Simon clipped the lashes as close to the lids as possible, then leaned back, and voila, the piece de resistance. While he’d never thought of his pale blue eyes as cold, once the lashes were gone, they were positively reptilian.

Which would come in handy even after he finally left the shelter of Nelson’s house, Simon knew: not only wouldn’t the authorities be looking for a bald scalp, but no one would ever peer too long or too hard at the face under this chrome dome, not with eyes like these staring back at them.

They even made Simon uncomfortable. He turned away from the mirror, bending down to rummage through the catchall storage space under the sink until he found some witch hazel to use as aftershave-he didn’t want to spoil the effect by dousing himself with Nelson’s Old Spice.

He wasn’t surprised when Nelson refused to come out of the closet at first. Hey, the longer the better, thought Simon. Delayed gratification and all that. And once he saw that Nelson had fallen for the heavy-footsteps-down-the-hall-then-tiptoe-back-to-the-room ploy, he waited, still as a spider, to see if Nellie would actually try to lock the door.

What did surprise him was that Nelson had figured it out so quickly, before Simon could spring his own surprise. But Simon was nothing if not resourceful when it came to the game. He helped Nelson up, led him over to the bed, and let him weep for a few minutes, until Nelson had a few endorphins pumping.

Then, when he judged the time was right, he arranged the lighting and removed Nelson’s blindfold.

“I’m afraid that in this case, identifying Simon as our suspect was the easy part,” explained Pender, over another round of Tree Frogs. “His mistake was making your PWSPD Association disappear. As long as we thought it was legit, he’d have been just another member of the potential victim pool-at least until he’d been interviewed and his alibis checked out.”

“Which wouldn’t have been nearly in time to save me,” said Dorie, who was at the sink washing the dishes. Couple of beers and another Vicodin, she was feeling no pain. “You know I owe you my life. Have I thanked you yet?”

“Don’t get sentimental,” said the secret sentimentalist. “Like I said, that was the easy part. Now that he’s on the run, this thing could go flying off in any one of a dozen different directions, and I don’t just mean geographically. Personality like that, no telling what’s going to happen. Especially with his sister gone-God, I felt terrible about that.”

“Her doctor said it could have happened any time.”

“Yes, well, she saved my life-and she’s not even around for me to thank. Were they as close as they seemed?”

“Closer.”

“Think there was anything…” Pender put down his bottle and waggled his good hand iffily.

Dorie shuddered. “I don’t know and I don’t want to know.”

“Doesn’t matter-we can assume news of her death will come as quite a blow to a man who’s already stressed-out to the max just from the strain of being a fugitive, and probably wasn’t that stable to begin with. So on the one hand, we might be dealing with a disorganized psychotic serial killer on the edge of snapping. Most likely outcome there is either suicide or suicide by cop. Soon, if it hasn’t happened already.

“On the other hand, we might be dealing with a cunning, organized psychotic serial killer, now in a white-hot rage, with considerable resources, who has a plan, a false identity, some money stashed away, maybe a hideout someplace where they don’t ask too many questions. If that’s the case, there are so many ways this can go, I couldn’t handicap it if I tried. I can tell you that very few serial killers ever quit voluntarily. So if they haven’t caught him or found his body by the time we wake up tomorrow morning, we could be in for a long, bumpy ride.”

“Do you think he might come after either of us?” asked Dorie, sitting across from Pender again.

“Probably not. I can’t remember a case where an organized serial killer came after a victim a second time, unless they were related. As for him coming after me, that’s even less likely. Serial killers choose victims they can dominate and control. Cop killers are different. They have the assassin mentality, and as a rule of thumb, they generally don’t care which cop they kill. It’s rarely personal.”

The plates were clean by now, the bottles empty. Dorie stifled a yawn. “Getting to be that time,” she said.

“Definitely getting to be that time,” Pender agreed.

“I aired out the guest bedroom. Nobody’s used it since…Good lord, since Simon and Missy stayed here.”

“In June, right?”

“In June. He was taking Missy on vacation to make up for having been away on some kind of…of…”She finished the sentence with a moan.

“What?”

“Some kind of business trip. It must have been Chicago-he must have just come back from killing the Rosen girl.” She shuddered. “I hope you don’t mind sleeping up there-I changed the linen.”

“The guest bedroom’ll be fine,” said Pender. He had, of course, been entertaining fantasies about sleeping with Dorie tonight, but he didn’t think there was much of a chance Dorie would want to sleep with him, banged up, exhausted, and traumatized as she was. For that matter, he wasn’t entirely sure he really wanted sex tonight either, banged up, exhausted, and traumatized as he was. Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained-and what a tragedy it would have been if it turned out that she was willin’ and only waiting for him to make the first move. “In the absence of any other offers, of course,” he added.