Fear itself

10

Packing was no problem-Linda had more or less been living out of her suitcase since she got to Washington. She knew it would have made more sense to move up to Pender’s on the weekend, but she wanted to avoid her former dear friend Gloria-she wasn’t sure she could count high enough in Italian to keep from saying things she’d regret later.

As it was, she confined herself to a terse Post-it note with her new address. She had considered playing a computer prank on them that the boys in San Antone had once played on her-changing the default address on their browser from Yahoo to the SSN, the Scat Sex Network, which would plaster coprophagous images all over their screen when they logged on-but decided against it at the last minute.

Lock the front door, drop the key through the mail slot, haul the suitcase out to the Geo. Linda’s legs were pretty much gone, this late in the day: she nearly overbalanced as she lifted the suitcase into the trunk, and her thigh muscles were quivering as she drove away with her left shoe poised over the brake in case she needed to make a sudden stop. Eventually, she knew, she’d be reduced to driving with hand controls-if she was lucky.

Linda was halfway to Pender’s when her cell phone began chirping. She fished it out of her purse without taking her eyes off the road.

“Abruzzi.”

“It’s Pender.”

“Are you all right?”

“Little misunderstanding-we’re all on the same page now.”

“What happened to Dorie Bell?”

“All we know for sure is that she’s gone. The concern is, if it is our man that’s got her, his cycle has shortened from one victim every two months to two victims in one week. What we need to do-what you need to do-is see if you can get hold of somebody at the PWSPD Association, get them to fax you a copy of the membership roster, which at this point is beginning to look like a list of potential victims, then find out who their webmaster is, see if you can get a warning posted on the site.”

“I’ll get on it first thing tomorrow morning,” said Linda.

“Now would be better. I’ll give you Thom Davies’s number. He’s with the CJIS over in Clarksburg-he ought to be able to help you.”

Linda parked behind Pender’s Barracuda, which was shrouded beneath a form-fitting tarpaulin, left her suitcase by the front door, and followed the grassy flagstone path around back.

“Up the wooden mountain,” she told herself dubiously, eyeing not only the rickety steps leading up to the porch, but the haphazard maze of timbers, struts, and cross braces that supported the railed platform itself. She shuddered, thinking back to the party. At one point, late in the evening, there must have been two dozen of them out there singing oldies-it was a wonder the whole thing hadn’t come down.

Fortunately, the steps were also railed and the railings close enough together to use as parallel bars. If they can take Pender’s weight, they can take mine, Linda told herself. She felt like planting a flag when she got to the top.

Linda remembered the Buddha from the party. It was Tibetan, the first scowling Buddha she’d ever seen, and couldn’t have resembled Pender more closely if he’d sat for the sculptor. “It was the only thing my ex didn’t get after the divorce,” he’d explained. “And that was only because she didn’t want it.”

By the time she’d retrieved the key, descended the wooden mountain, walked back around the house, and dragged her suitcase inside, she was ready to collapse onto the orange sofa.

But Pender was right-now would be better. Back at the Academy, Linda had been taught that serial killers were characteristically divided into two types, organized and disorganized offenders. The phobia killer, as she’d come to think of him (they’d have to come up with a more colorful name when they took the investigation public-unless, of course, they had a suspect by then), was obviously organized, and one particularly bothersome characteristic of organized serial killers, the instructor from the Behavioral Sciences Unit had explained to the trainees, was that they got better at it as they went along. They selected their victims more carefully, planned their attacks more meticulously, and, especially alarming from the law-enforcement point of view, they tended to learn from their mistakes.

But the fact that the phobia killer was organized didn’t mean his personality wasn’t subject to deterioration, and the evidence that his homicidal cycle was shortening could be taken as an indication of a downward spiral. More active meant crazier; crazier meant more active-literally a vicious cycle.

So she compromised-she took her phone out of her purse, dialed the number Pender had given her, and then collapsed onto the sofa by the living room fireplace.

“Davies here.” British accent.

“Mr. Davies, this is Linda Abruzzi. I believe we met at Ed Pender’s retirement party. He suggested I-”

“Sorry, Thom’s gone home for the evening. This is a recording, actually. Leave a message at the beep, he’ll get back to you in the morning. Beep.”

“Please, it’s a matter of-”

“If you say ‘life and death,’ I shall positively hurl.”

“I was going to say extreme urgency. But as a matter of fact…”

“Linda, darling, the night I got home from E. L. Pender’s retirement party, I gathered my little family round the hearth. ‘From now on,’ I told them, ‘Daddy will be spending his evenings and weekends at home. He’ll be able to help you with your homework, attend your dance recitals and your Little League games-he’ll even have time to learn all your names.’ My dear wife wept for joy, Linda-she literally wept for joy.”

“So what are you doing in the office, this time of night?”

“With six children, it’s the only place I can get any fucking peace and quiet.”

“Excellent. First rate. Here’s what we’re looking for…”