Jonathan Nasaw - Fear itself

Not that he blamed her. After what she’d been through, Dorie would be lucky if sleep disturbances were the worst, or last, of her problems. And awake, despite all she must have gone through in that basement in Berkeley, she never complained, which Pender found extraordinary in a day and age when everybody who’d ever had their fanny patted as a kid called themselves a sexual-abuse survivor, and feeling sorry for yourself was practically a cottage industry. Pender was impressed-he only wished he could somehow rescue her from the psychological and emotional shitstorm as successfully as he had from physical danger.

He knew, of course, that it was a risky game, this white knight business. The relationship burying ground was littered with the corpses of failed white-knight/damsel-in-distress romances; nowadays they even warned recruits in the Academy about the syndrome.

But what was a secret sentimentalist to do? Pender was a goner long before the relationship was consummated late Sunday morning. The consummation itself was necessarily gentle. Due to their injuries, they were forced to make love, in Pender’s phrase, like porcupines-very carefully-but perhaps because of the time they’d already spent in bed together, there was little of the awkwardness, emotional discomfort, or uncertainty that so often marked first sexual encounters, even at their age.

Afterward, Dorie went back to sleep; soon she was tossing and whimpering again. Pender reached across his body with his good arm, patted her shoulder, stroked her side all the way to the swell of her hip, then back again, murmuring that it was all right, that everything was okay now.

Which was a lie-everything was not okay. Simon Childs, the man who’d done this to Dorie, was still out there somewhere. And if this case had been personal before, it was doubly so now. Pender tiptoed out of bed without waking Dorie this time, and took his cell into the bathroom with him.

The call came in just as Linda was thinking about knocking off for the day. There had been no developments in the investigation, no Childs sightings, either reported or confirmed. He’d probably gone to ground, was the consensus; if the pressure was kept on, sooner or later he’d have to surface, if only to change holes.

In the meantime, she’d made her calls, exchanged a little small talk on the order of sucks catchin’ a Sunday shift, whaddaya gonna do? and gotten a few BOLOs posted that might have languished in somebody’s in box. When the phone rang around quarter to three, she thought it might be one of the callbacks she’d left. Instead it was Pender. She tried, she really did: she told him McDougal had handed her the investigation on the express condition that she keep Pender out of it.

He didn’t sound very impressed. “How long have you been with the Bureau?”

“Seven years.”

“And you still can’t tell when your boss is just covering his ass?”

“He didn’t sound like he was just covering his ass. He sounded concerned.”

“Yes, kiddo-he’s concerned about covering his ass. Let me ask you two questions. One: What’s the priority here-what’s the job?”

“That’s a no-brainer. The job is apprehending Childs as quickly as possible. What’s the second question?”

“Can you do a better job apprehending Childs as quickly as possible with or without the benefit of my twenty years of experience?”

“Well, with it. But McDougal told me-”

“Linda, I don’t care what McDougal told you-his priorities are exactly the same as yours. And mine. And anybody else in law enforcement who hasn’t got his head so far up his ass he can count his own fillings. Agreed?” Then, without waiting for an answer: “Attagirl. Now, the first thing you have to understand…”

So much for McDougal and the hierarchy; so much for going home early. According to the Book of Pender, the first thing Linda had to understand was that the cops on the street, both local and federal, weren’t going to need any help from her when it came to the usual avenues of investigation. With or without Liaison Support, the evidence response techs would hoover up every shred of gross or trace evidence; the Berkeley cops would comb all of Childs’s reported haunts; the so-called suicides in Vegas, Fresno, and Chicago would be reopened as homicide investigations; and every friend, neighbor, or casual acquaintance Childs had ever called or been seen with in public or visited or written a check to in the last year or so would receive at least cursory attention from law enforcement.

Now, the time line Linda was working on would be lots of help there, Pender assured her (as soon as he mentioned the time line, Linda realized how it had happened that Pool had just sort of magically turned up at the office Saturday afternoon), and sooner or later events would start dictating her course of action. For instance, he could almost promise her more work than she could handle as the ERT in Berkeley continued to unearth the corpses in Childs’s basement.

But until then, he explained, Linda could basically expect law enforcement to be all over Simon Childs’s recent past and foreseeable future like Yogi Bear on a picnic basket. So what Pender suggested was that as soon as the time line was done, Linda turn her efforts to probing a little deeper into Childs’s past. Were there any childhood friends whom he hadn’t seen in a long time, whom he might be desperate enough to seek out as a fugitive? How about medical records? Not just his current physicians-investigators would be lined up five deep at their doors-but his former doctors, all the way back to his pediatrician. If in addition to being a psychopath, Childs was also a counterphobic phobic, as Sid had suggested, perhaps he’d seen a shrink as a child. That’d really give the profilers something to work with.

Encouraged and energized, even inspired by Pender’s call, Linda worked what was left of her ass off for the rest of the afternoon (of the twenty pounds she’d lost this year, at least ten had to have come off her rear end), but by eight o’clock, five on the West Coast, everything was done that was going to get done on a Sunday evening, so an exhausted Linda packed it in.

Basta, as her mother used to say to her father when he worked on Sunday-enough is enough, even God rested on the seventh day. Then, of course, Mom Abruzzi would do a load of ironing, maybe vacuum the curtains, cook a five-course Italian dinner, and mend clothes all through 60 Minutes. After all these years, Mom still had no idea what Mike Wallace looked like, went the family joke, because she never looked up from her sewing basket.

Thinking about home always made Linda hungry. When she got back to Pender’s, she went straight to the kitchen and opened the fridge before she even took off her coat. The freezer compartment was well stocked-sort of: if somebody had gone through the frozen food section of the supermarket and selected TV dinners solely on the basis of fat grams, the higher the better, they’d have ended up with something very like the contents of Pender’s freezer.

Linda opted for the Marie Callender’s spaghetti carbonara (what a concept, she thought: some twisted guinea genius had actually looked at a bowl of pasta and said to himself, you know what this needs? — white gravy and bacon), and while it was heating, she made her traditional, not to say mandatory, Sunday night phone call. It went well-Mom didn’t nag her about moving back home. She mentioned it three or four times, but by Italian-mother standards that didn’t count as nagging. Then she’d handed the phone to Dad, who told Linda he couldn’t talk long because The Sopranos was coming on.

Oh, Dad, she wanted to moan, not you, too. Linda had tried to watch the show once-it was the episode where the bumbling FBI agents tried to plant a bug in Tony’s basement; she’d felt like throwing her shoe through the screen. And Charlie Abruzzi, of all people, should have known better-you didn’t run an Italian butcher shop in the Bronx for forty years without learning what the mob was really like; Big Pussy my ass!