Fear itself

2

On Sunday, Linda was up at dawn. From her bedroom window she could see the mist rising placidly from the domesticated water of the canal, like steam from a bowl of soup. The autumn colors of the surrounding woods were muted, drenched in the morning dew.

It occurred to Linda, as she made her way sleepily across the hall to the bathroom, that nobody had told her what hours she was expected to keep. Like today, for instance. Was she supposed to come into the office on Sunday? If so, to do what? Answer the phone? Call forwarding could take care of that. Work on her time line? The Visa and Pac Bell printouts detailing Childs’s credit card purchases and telephone calls wouldn’t be coming in until tomorrow at the earliest. So why go into the office?

The answer came to her after breakfast, as she was down in the cellar ironing, with the second load of yesterday’s laundry now spinning in the dryer. The BOLO, she thought: a “Be On the Lookout” for Simon Childs was undoubtedly being sent out to every law enforcement agency in the United States. But then, so were dozens of other BOLOs, every day of the week. Go-getters memorized them, doughnut dunkers ignored them, but what about your average cop, overworked, overBOLOed, drowning in a sea of red tape and paperwork? Wouldn’t a call or a fax or a heads-up of some kind from a genuine (well, almost genuine) FBI special agent go a long way toward raising his or her consciousness as to the importance of Being On the Lookout for a particular suspect, at least until the Ten Most Wanted List had been updated to include him?

More than likely, thought Linda, holding her favorite blouse up to the unshaded bulb hanging from a crossbeam, to examine the results of her ironing. Still a little wrinkled after twenty-four hours in the dryer, but close enough for guvmint work, as they used to say in San Antone; or at any rate, close enough for guvmint work in an empty office on a Sunday morning.