Fear itself

9

Excited as Linda was about finally having something useful to do, she also wondered whether she might be in over her head. After all, she asked herself as the afternoon wore on, what did she know about coordinating an investigation of this size and complexity, involving five separate investigations in five separate jurisdictions and almost certainly more to come, in addition to an interstate manhunt and a growing media interest that was rapidly threatening to turn into a feeding frenzy?

Precious little, came the answer. And she didn’t feel right asking Pender for advice on how to conduct the rest of the investigation, not after McDougal had specifically informed her that part of her assignment was to keep him as far away from it as possible.

Once again, it was Pool to the rescue. She showed up out of nowhere around three-thirty-Linda certainly hadn’t called her-dressed, not for success, but for raking leaves on a Saturday afternoon, hit the phones, called in a few favors or engaged in a little blackmail, and by six o’clock (miraculous as Pool’s earlier Bureaucratic machinations had been, this one was on the order of parting the Red Sea), the bogus bank records were gone, and Linda’s little office in the DOJ-AOB had been turned into a mini-SIOC (Strategic Information and Operations Center) command post, complete with additional phone and data lines and a cork-backed map of the U.S. that took up the entire wall behind Linda’s desk, along with tiny color-coded flag pins with which to track Childs sightings-white for reported, red for confirmed.

And while the map was going up, Pool, as per Pender’s suggestion, transferred a copy of the database program Thom Davies had devised for Pender a few years ago-a cascading boilerplate calendar, year tiles opening up into months, months into days, days into hours-onto Linda’s computer and, under the pretext of showing Linda how to use the program, gently reminded her of the importance of establishing a time line for her suspect: If you want to know where somebody’s going, first you have to know where they’ve been.

Linda didn’t need a second hint. She set to work, culling data on Simon Childs from every available source, starting with Dorie Bell’s letter and ending with the preliminary findings of the Evidence Response Team still combing through the house on Grizzly Rock Road, and entering it into the database herself. Three hours later, not only did she have a preliminary time line, admittedly with more gaps than entries, tracking Simon Childs from birth through yesterday, but through a sort of immersion therapy, she had begun the unpleasant but necessary process of trying to get into the killer’s mind by first letting him into her mind.

The way it worked, you absorbed and memorized every shred of information about your suspect, until you were as conscious of his tendencies, his likes and dislikes, as you were of your own; when things were really cooking, a stimulus would be almost as likely to bring up one of the suspect’s mnemonic associations as it would one of your own. That way (at least theoretically; Linda had never done this sort of thing before), when the time came, you’d not only know which way your suspect was going to jump, but when, and how high.

Early as it was in the process, then, it was no accident that on her way home that night, when Linda stopped at the Safeway in Potomac to get what passed for a deli sandwich this far from the Bronx and saw a teenage girl with Down syndrome in the parking lot, she thought immediately of Missy Childs.

And later that night, as she lay in bed trying to get to sleep, instead of having her thoughts dwelling morbidly on her MS, as they had almost every night since her diagnosis, Linda found herself thinking about something that Kim Rosen had posted on the PWSPD web site less than a week before she died.

I know how people think. They think your doing it on purpose, or your doing it for attention, and that if only somebody would grab you by the collar and give you a good shaking, maybe slap you around a little and tell you its all in your head, you idiot, its only in your head, that you’d be cured. And what they don’t understand is that life has already shook us dizzy and slapped us silly. And knowing that the fear is in your head doesn’t make it easier to bear, it makes it harder. Because you can protect yourself from something outside, you can run away or lock your door or get a gun. But there’s no place to run when the fear is inside you, and even if you do run, there’s no place to hide.

Ain’t that the truth, thought Linda. She opened an eye. It was nearly one A.M., according to the glowing green hands on her alarm clock, and something was nagging at her. Not Kim, not Simon-something closer to home. Something she’d left undone? Half done? Never mind: if it was important, she’d-

Then it came to her: the laundry. She’d left one load wet in the washer this morning, one load damp in the dryer. Abrootz old girl, she told herself, you’re gonna have some serious ironing to do tomorrow.