Fear itself

Micrurus Fulvius Fulvius
1

The wooded hillside below Pender’s house sloped down to a narrow strip of lawn abutting the eastern bank of the C amp;O; a tall windbreak of mixed white ash, box elder, hawthorne, sycamore, and sugar maple lined the towpath along the western bank. From the porch, Linda saw the broad silver ribbon of the Potomac winding lazily in the distance through the Froot-Loopy autumn countryside.

She also saw her breath. Enjoy the view while you can, Linda told herself-in a few weeks those trees will all be bare.

Linda glanced at her watch-6:30-washed down a handful of vitamins with the dregs of her breakfast smoothie, grabbed her cane, and pushed herself up from her chair. Then it was heigh-ho, heigh-ho, down the River Road we go, to the DOJ-AOB in suburban Virginia, where she received a familiar howdy from the gate guard, who examined the backseat, trunk, and undercarriage of the Geo anyway. The daily security code for the underground garage was 1220, which also happened to be her mom’s birthday; Linda told herself that meant it would be a lucky day for her.

It was a busy one, at any rate. Two more corpses-well, skeletons-had been unearthed in Simon Childs’s basement, so Linda spent the entire morning reviewing the missing persons printouts for the western states that Thom Davies had culled from the NCIC database over the weekend. Some went back as far as 1968. Where there seemed to be at least a possibility of a match, Linda would fax the preliminary forensic data to the appropriate local authorities.

Around one o’clock, the eleven cartons of records arrived from Bobbeck, Pflueger, and Morrison-Mr. Pflueger had been as good as his word. She enlisted Pool’s help in cataloguing the contents, which took most of the afternoon. What’d you do in the FBI, Mommy? she imagined her kids asking her someday in the distant future. Darlings, I shuffled paper like nobody’s business.

Then she remembered that she wasn’t going to be having any kids-or, most likely, any distant future. And although the realization wasn’t exactly news, it did rattle her a little, sucker punching her like that. Too bad, so sad, get over it, she ordered herself, and went back to her paper shuffling.