Fear itself

7

“How are you feeling, hon?” Miss Pool asked from the doorway. She already had her coat on.

“Like death warmed over,” replied Linda. The sluggish, leaden feeling had persisted all day. No real symptoms had popped up, which made her think she might indeed be having a Betaseron reaction-but if so, it had lasted longer than it ever had before.

“Why don’t we call it a day?”

Linda looked up at the clock: 5:10. “You go on home-I’ll lock up.” A little joke: the office locked itself, of course.

“What are you working on?”

Linda held up a faxed death certificate. “Elaine Ferry, Petaluma. She was a pharmacophobe-terrified of taking drugs, even prescribed medicine. They found her at the bottom of her swimming pool twelve years ago, wearing an overcoat with the pockets stuffed with rocks.”

“Virginia Woolf,” said Pool.

“Beg pardon?”

“That’s how Virginia Woolf drowned herself.”

“Yes, well, the thing is, the SF field office got a call from Elaine Ferry’s mother yesterday-she recognized Simon Childs as a friend of her daughter’s. They got permission for an exhumation and necropsy, to run some toxicology exams on the bones, teeth, hair if any, for traces of parent drugs or metabolites.”

“Are they likely to find anything after all this time?”

Linda shrugged. “It’s like that joke about the guy who lost his watch on Forty-second Street but looked for it on Forty-third because the light there was better-you can only do what you can do. And who knows, maybe they’ll find a note tucked between her ribs: ‘I did it, Love Simon.’”

“Which reminds me,” said Pool. “Do you have any plans for Halloween?”

“Is it that time already?”

“This coming Sunday. The reason I asked, we always have a costume party and put together a haunted house for the trick-or-treaters. Why don’t you come by-we’d love to have you.”

It occurred to Linda that after working with Pool for a week and a half, she still had no idea who that “we” represented. Husband, girlfriend, aged parent? “I don’t know-I don’t have a costume or anything.”

“We’ll fix you up-you can be a bloody corpse in the haunted house.”

“Somehow, being a bloody corpse has never been one of my ambitions,” remarked Linda, as the phone rang. Pool started back to her desk to answer it-Linda gave her a g’wan-g’home-getouttaheah wave and picked it up herself.

It was Pender. “Got any red pins on that map yet, kiddo?”

“Just the one in San Francisco.”

“Stick another one in Concord.” He told her about finding Nelson Carpenter in the bathtub.

“Homicide?”

“Unless he glued himself to the enamel.”

Linda winced. “Any estimate as to the time of death?”

“The M.E. hasn’t gotten here yet. From the looks of it, I’d say around a week.”

“Oh, jeez.”

“Oh, jeez is right.” But Pender spared her the worst of the details: the floating, gas-bloated corpse, the sloughed skin. “And guess what we found in the garage?”

“Silver Mercedes convertible.”

“And guess what we didn’t find?”

“Whatever Carpenter drives.”

“Late-model white Volvo sedan, according to the mailman. I’ll call you back as soon as the plate numbers come in from the DMV.”

“I’ll get the BOLO updated. Do we want to notify the public?”

“No-hold that back. If he knows we’re looking for the Volvo, there goes any chance of catching him in it. As it is, we’ll probably find it abandoned some-Whoops, here comes Erickson. Gotta go. I’ll call you back with the plates and the VIN.”

Pender broke off the connection. Linda opened her desk drawer and took out the box of flag pins, then scooted her chair all the way over to the left of the big map behind her desk. But when she tried to insert a red one into the dot marking Concord with her left hand, it slipped from her fingers, the tips of which seemed to have fallen asleep.

Must have been leaning on it funny, she told herself, bending to pick it up. Next thing she knew she was on the floor-the flexion of her neck had sent a bone-jarring jolt of electricity shooting down her spine and fanning out across her entire neural network.

It was like being hit by a bolt of lightning, was how Linda described it to the nurse over the telephone, when she was able to use the telephone.

“Give me your number,” said the nurse. “I’ll have the doctor call you back.”

At five o’clock? thought Linda. And do you have a nice bridge in Brooklyn to sell me? “You promise?”

“I promise. Just stay where you are.”

“No problem,” said Linda wryly.