Fear itself

6

On her fourth night in the country, Linda managed to sleep through the worst of the quiet, awakening Monday morning to the racket of songbirds. And although she still found herself looking forward to going to work, after her Betaseron injection she brought her soy-protein smoothie out onto the porch and took her time drinking it-she had figured out by now that until Simon Childs was in custody, these early breakfasts were probably going to be her only chance to enjoy the fabulous autumn foliage in the daylight.

And she was right-things did start heating up Monday. At six in the morning, Pacific time, federal agents, armed with search warrants obtained on the basis of Simon Childs’s bank records, raided Kenneth “Zap” Strum’s SoMa loft. The discovery of Zap’s body, the medical examiner’s estimation of the time of death, and the fact that Childs’s fingerprints were not only all over the loft, but on the murder weapon as well, put Childs in San Francisco no later than Saturday.

Meanwhile, the evidence response techs were hard at work digging up the cellar of the Childs mansion. The corpses, in varying states of decay, were all buried at the same depth, four to six feet, not stacked vertically, but evidently Childs had laid a thin layer of cement over the entire floor of the chamber every time he buried one, either to minimize the odor or disguise the fresh patch. Only four corpses had been uncovered so far, three female, one male, but there were a dozen thin strata of cement. As per Pender’s suggestion, Linda asked Thom Davies at the CJIS in Clarksburg to massage the appropriate databases for possible matches between missing persons and found bodies.

She also asked Thom to have copies of all reports of new so-called “stranger” homicides (assailant believed to have been unknown to the victim) received by the NCIC (National Crime Information Center) forwarded to her as they came in. Any patterns, or any correspondence of victims to names or locations that had or would come up in the Childs investigation, would not go unnoticed for long.

Something else hadn’t gone unnoticed by Linda: all this, all she had done, all she was doing, she could do from her office chair. And all across the country, she knew, there were FBI agents performing jobs no more physically demanding than this. The only difference was that they were special agents and she was an investigative specialist. It shouldn’t have mattered to her, of course, but somehow it did. The proudest day of her life had been the day she earned the right to call herself Special Agent Abruzzi. You shouldn’t take something like that away from somebody without an awful good reason, thought Linda.

She didn’t have much time to brood, though. At the crack of noon-opening of business on the West Coast-Linda initiated contact with the venerable San Francisco law firm of Bobbeck, Pflueger, and Morrison, which had been administering the Childs Trust since the death of Marcus Childs, Simon’s grandfather, in1963. One switchboard operator, two secretaries, and a paralegal later, she found herself speaking with an actual Pflueger, Hearst Pflueger IV, Esq., who was, he told her during a surprisingly pleasant conversation, the third of his line to grace the firm’s letterhead. She had been prepared for a lot more resistance, but when she told him why she was calling, and what she was looking for, Pflueger was unexpectedly forthcoming, for a big-shot attorney.

He’d been expecting a call ever since he’d read the newspaper Saturday morning, he told her. “I wish I could say I was more surprised, but my father, who was Marcus Childs’s personal attorney, always said there was more to the old man’s death than met the eye.”

“That would have been Hearst Pflueger the third?”

“Trey-everybody called him Trey. He thought there was something off about the grandson-unsound, I believe was the word he used.”

“Have you ever met Simon personally?”

“I did. I was fresh out of law school-”

“Which one?”

“Boalt, of course.”

“I went to Fordham.” Might as well establish a little common ground, let him know she was a lawyer, too.

“Yes, I thought I detected a New York accent in there somewhere. As I was saying, I was fresh out of Boalt, just passed the bar, Trey put me in charge of the trust. Basically, I controlled Simon’s money from 1967 until 1969, when he turned twenty-one, and during that period he must have called me at least every six weeks asking me to release funds above and beyond his monthly allowance, which was considerable.

“He even showed up at the office a few times, obviously under the influence of drugs-our interactions were not at all pleasant, Agent Abruzzi. He used to refer to me as-forgive me-fuckface. Whenever somebody called the switchboard and asked for Mr. Fuckface, the switchboard operator always put him straight through.”

“The fact that you’re alive and talking to me now, Mr. Fuh-Oh, God.”

“Quite all right.”

“I’ll try that again. The fact that you’re alive and talking to me now, Mr. Pflueger, tells me they could have been a whole lot more unpleasant. How long will it take you to get those records to me?”

“I’ll make you a deal. As an attorney yourself, you understand I can’t just release a client’s confidential documents. What I can do, though, is have my people dig out the old files and start Xeroxing them while your people obtain a subpoena for them. We won’t contest it-as soon as the subpoena arrives, I’ll have the files overnighted to you.”

“Thank you so much, Mr. Pflueger.”

“I’m on the board of the San Francisco Symphony, Agent Abruzzi. You can thank me by catching that monster before he kills any more promising young cellists.”

“We’re doing our best, sir.”

“I know you are.”

The mail arrived while Linda was on the phone asking Eddie Erickson, the case agent in San Francisco, to obtain the subpoena for the Childs Trust files. Along with a manila envelope from the Fresno Police Department, there was a box containing a videotape from the Las Vegas PD.

Instead of going down to the DOJ-AOB cafeteria for lunch, Linda ate at her desk while running, reversing, rerunning, and rereversing an edited dub of a grainy, jerky, stop-motion security video showing two men getting into an elevator at 23:57 hours on 04/11/99.

Simon Childs and Carl Polander, of course, in the lobby of the Olde Chicago Hotel and Casino, where the PWSPD convention had taken place. Sunday night-the convention was over, most of the attendees had checked out and gone home. Linda, who’d only seen Childs’s DMV photo, couldn’t take her eyes off him. Sitting at her desk, using the remote to operate the VCR in the corner of the room, she watched the loop over and over, until his slouching posture, his air of calm self-assurance, the way he smoothed his palm across his widow’s peak as he stepped into the elevator (probably caught a glimpse of himself in one of those convex elevator mirrors), was part of her, as familiar as her dad’s sore-footed butcher’s walk or the little moue her mom made into the mirror when she was putting on her lipstick.

“That’s him, eh?”

Linda looked up, startled-Pool was in the doorway. “That’s him.” She stopped the tape, rewound it, switched off the VCR. “Something occurred to me while I was watching: I’ll probably never see him.”

“In the flesh, you mean?”

“Yeah. By the time this is over, I’ll know more about that man than I knew about my first boyfriend, but I’ll never actually see him in person,” mused Linda, opening the envelope from the Fresno PD and placing a stack of color photographs on her desk.

“Unlike that poor gal,” said Pool, pointing to the print on the top of the stack. Taken from a bathroom doorway, it showed a nude woman sitting up in a bathtub, her heavy breasts lolling to the sides, her head thrown back so far that her long dark hair cascaded over the back of the tub; her eyes were closed and her lips parted in what might have been ecstasy.

Mara Agajanian, of course-and despite appearances, the picture was not soft-core porn, but evidence, as the rest of the photos (the pink-tinged water, the close-ups of the slashed wrists) made clear. But as she shuffled through them, Linda kept coming back to that first one. It was the old what’s-wrong-with-this-picture? game-she got it on the third pass.

“Look at that,” she said to Pool, pointing to the long dark spill of hair draped over the back of the tub. “Wouldja look at that.”

Pool, to her credit, got it right away. “He brushed her hair,” she said. “The s.o.b. brushed her hair.”