Jonathan Nasaw - Fear itself

Her choice of emporiums backfired on her, though. Khaki’s advertised itself as a classy, post-preppy kind of store, but Pender had made a beeline for a rack of Hawaiian shirts and picked out a couple of doozies; he was trying on Panama hats when his cell phone began chirping.

Weird, thought Dorie, watching Pender as he wandered over to the doorway of the shop for better reception. She’d never fallen for a homely man before-it took some getting used to. Not in bed, oddly enough-she was surprised to learn how little looks seemed to matter when you were making love-but in broad daylight those eyes, under that scarred expanse of scalp, seemed much too small, and that putty nose and those LBJ ears much too big; only the full-lipped mouth was just about right, but somehow when it broke into that easy grin, it made the rest of the face seem just about right, too.

Still, she couldn’t help comparing him to Rafael, her Big Sur carpenter. Walk into a joint on Rafe’s arm, and you could sense every other woman in the place curling up with jealousy like the wicked witch’s toes after the ruby slippers were removed. And when Rafe was working, with his muscles rippling beneath his sweat-stained T-shirt like Brando’s in Streetcar and the heavy suede carpenter’s toolbelt slung diagonally athwart his narrow hips-

“Hey, Dorie!” Pender waved her over, his hand covering the mouthpiece of the phone. “Have you ever heard of a shrink named Luka-Janos Luka?”

“Janos Luka? Sure, who hasn’t?”

“Me and Abruzzi, for two.”

“He’s a famous gestalt therapist-he worked with Perls and Maslow, all those guys. He must be about a million years old by now-he still runs the Lethe Institute, down in Big Sur. Why?”

“Apparently he was Simon Childs’s psychiatrist at one time.” Then, into the phone again: “Linda? Yes, Dorie knows him.”

“Hey! I didn’t say I-”

Pender put a forefinger to his lips, gave Dorie a wink. “Yeah, he’s an old friend of hers. She says he’s pretty reclusive, though-maybe you ought to let us make the first contact…. Right, right, somebody from the resident agency should definitely do the interview itself…. Of course I will.…Okay, talk to you later.”

“What was that all about?” asked Dorie.

“Just a little Bureau-cratic gamesmanship. How long a drive is it?”

“How long a drive is what?”

“From here to Big Sur,” said Pender-and here came that grin again, lighting up his whole face, chasing away all the ugly.

Linda Abruzzi was no fool-she understood that Pender’s promise to have somebody from the FBI’s resident agency in Monterey conduct the formal interview with Dr. Luka was probably bogus. But if the priority here was catching Childs, then having a Bureau legend like E. L. Pender doing your background interviews was like having Derek Jeter for a pinch hitter: you’d be a fool if you didn’t bring him off the bench. And as a law school graduate, Linda was quite familiar with the concept of plausible deniability-as was Deputy Director Steven P. McDougal, she was reasonably certain.

Besides, Linda had other fish to fry. In the same carton as the medical records-actually just the bills-she had found both Simon’s and Melissa’s birth certificates, so as soon as she got off the phone with Pender, she called Thom Davies and asked him to perform a little of his database wizardry.

A few minutes later, as she was lifting the latest forensic report from Berkeley off the fax tray-middle-aged female with a titanium screw in the left femur, a type of screw that had only been in use since 1992, the medical examiner had assured Linda-Davies called back to report that Simon Childs’s long lost mother was lost no longer.

“Good work,” Linda told him.

“Piece of piss,” said the expat Brit. “According to social security records, she’s been living at the same address in Atlantic City for over fifteen years. If you consider four hundred and fifty dollars a month living, that is.”

“Kimberly Rosen would,” said Linda grimly, glancing up to the two photographs from the Chicago PD she’d posted on her victims’ bulletin board. The first was a perky three-quarter head shot of Kim from the New Trier yearbook, class of ’95; the second was a full-face shot from the Cook County morgue, class of ’99.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Miss Delamour?”

“Not Dela more, it’s Dela- moor, comme le francais.”

“Sorry, Miss Dela- moor.”

“Aah, call me Rosie, ever’body else does.”

Plastered, Linda told herself-four o’clock in the afternoon and she’s plastered. Interviewing drunks was like fishing-you let them ramble a bit, then you reel them in, let them ramble, reel them in. “Rosie, I’m calling about your son.”

“Got no son.” The way she said it, though, it was less a denial than it was a renunciation. “Tried to explain, he didn’t wanna hear.”

“Explain what, Rosie?”

“Why.”

“Because I’m trying to get in touch with him.”

“No, why-explain why. Why I left.”

Oh, swell, thought Linda: it’s turning into an Abbott and Costello routine. “When was this, Rosie?”

“Too late. It was too late. Guess I waited too long. To call.”

Linda tried again-this could be the break they were looking for. “Rosie, I need to know when you last spoke to Simon.” Elementary psycholinguistics: “I” statements often elicited responses where questions failed.

“I dunno, this year, last year-no, wait, I remember. It was February-February fourth. Missy’s birthday. He wouldn’t lemme…said it would only…wouldn’t lemme…”

Not recent, then, thought Linda, as Rosie began sobbing on the other end of the line-so much for our big break. “February fourth of this year?”

A drawn-out, drunken wail that under other circumstances might have been almost farcical, followed by an extended silence broken by the clink of ice in a thin-walled glass. “Rosie?”

“Who is this?”

“Linda Abruzzi.” Linda decided not to identify herself as an FBI agent just yet-she didn’t want to arouse any maternal protective instincts. “I’m trying to get hold of Simon-it’s very important.”

“S’matter, he knock you up or something?”

“No, I-”

“Listen, Bootsie honey, I haven’t seen my children since nineteen fifty-one. That’s, uh-That’s almost-That’s a helluva long time. He don’t know where I am, and if he ain’t home, I don’t know where he is. So unless you get some kind of weird kick out of making old ladies cry, why don’t you let me get back to my shows and I’ll let you get back to whatever you were doing.”

“Rosie, there’s something you should-”

Click. Linda redialed, but the phone was now off the hook. Fuck it, she thought, putting down the phone and picking up the fax from the medical examiner in Berkeley again. Let somebody else tell Rosie her daughter’s dead and her son’s a monster-there must be people who get paid for that.

Simon hid in a utility closet off the snake exhibit area until the last employee had left the reptilarium a little after seven-thirty. When he emerged with his pencil flashlight (the Volvo, having belonged to Nelson, was well-stocked with flashlights, flares, and even a first-aid kit), the snake room was pitch-dark save for the red glow of the exit lights over the doors.

The glass fronts of the snake cages were set flush into a curved wall ringed by a sloping carpeted ramp from which the public could view the snakes in safety. Simon circled the ramp all the way around to the back, until he reached the door marked Staff Only-No Public Access, which led, he had learned that afternoon, to the workroom in the center of the circle of cages. It was locked, but a hard kick sprang it; a moment later Simon found himself inside the workroom, surrounded by cages containing a veritable who’s who of the world’s most venomous snakes.