Fear itself

5

Twenty-five hundred Grizzly Rock Road had been transformed into a crime scene. Floodlit, yellow-taped, crawling with cops, besieged by reporters and mobile uplink news vans, the grand old dame was being accorded no more privacy than the corpse of a murder victim when Pender and Dorie arrived from the hospital in the back of a squad car, accompanied by a preppy-looking Berkeley homicide detective.

Special Agent Eddie Erickson, from the San Francisco field office, offered them a walk-through. Dorie, dressed in a set of borrowed pink scrubs, declined with a shudder, preferring to wait for Pender in his rented Toyota, which was still parked on the street near the bottom of the steep driveway, where he’d left it only-it hardly seemed possible-six hours earlier.

Every inch of the basement was brightly illuminated; Erickson led Pender through the maze to a chamber where a tech from the Evidence Response Team was using what looked like an alien-technology metal detector to sweep the smooth, level cement floor, which was higher by several inches than the rest of the basement, while another tech monitored a computer readout-they were employing state-of-the-art infrared heat-sensing technology to look for bodies.

“What’s the count so far?” asked Erickson.

“Just the one-but the wet cement’s throwing off my calibration-and of course if a skeleton’s clean enough, it won’t put out enough heat for us to pick it up.” The second tech turned to Pender. “The top layer of cement was put down pretty recently. It’s only about two centimeters thick except over in that corner, where it goes down almost two meters. I have a hunch that once we take ’er down to there, we’re gonna be in business.”

After a quick stop-off in a chamber that housed a jackhammer, kidney belt, protective eyewear, shovel, spade, and several bags of lime and Quik-Dry cement, Erickson led Pender back upstairs. The living room was still being dusted for prints; up in the master bedroom, Special Agent Ben Wing, from the San Jose resident agency, was seated at Childs’s computer terminal.

“Any luck?” Erickson asked him.

“Yes, sir,” said Wing. “All bad. One of the local yokels-” He glanced at the Berkeley detective trailing along behind Erickson and Pender. “Whoops, sorry. I mean, one of the indigenous experts up here tried to access it without checking for booby traps. The first key he pressed trashed the hard drive-what I’m doing now is the cyber equivalent of sifting through the ashes.”

“Could Childs have rigged it himself?”

“He’d almost have had to. Or hired some gunslinger-no reputable security consultant would install a fail-safe device to nuke the client’s system in the event of a breach.”

“That gunslinger idea-that might be worth following up,” suggested Pender.

“You think?” said Wing, archly.

“Us local yokels are already on it,” explained the detective, as Wing turned back to the machine. “By tomorrow we’ll have his bank records, and take it from there.”

Pender followed Agent Erickson back downstairs. “Looks like you guys are all over it,” he said-he felt as if he were expected to say something.

“Yeah-yeah, I think our chances are pretty good. It’s not like he has much experience, rich fucker on the run. Take good care of Miss Bell, though-if there’s any trouble with the warrant, I at least want to be able to put him away for kidnapping with special circumstances and bodily harm.”

“Don’t forget assault,” Pender reminded Erickson, nodding toward his broken right arm, which had begun to throb as the anesthetic started to wear off. “With intent,” he added-after all, if Childs’s blow had been an inch or two to the right, there would have been three more bodies under two meters of Quik-Dry cement in that last chamber: his, Dorie’s, and Nurse Apple’s.