Fear itself

5

Once again, time demonstrated its essentially elastic nature for Linda, as she and Buchanan waited for the callback from Larry LaFeo. Fifteen minutes, he said-it would take him fifteen minutes to get to Rosie Delamour’s apartment. That was at eight-thirty, but the Danish Modern clock in the Gees’ kitchen might as well have been a Dali watch, as slowly as time seemed to be passing.

Guilt, of course, was no stranger to a good Catholic girl like Linda, but even when you’re only beating yourself up, you still get to rest between rounds. And being an FBI agent, Buchanan reminded her, was like being a surgeon or an air traffic controller: you make a mistake, sometimes people die. Comes with the territory-you don’t like it, maybe you should go into advertising, where the worst that happens, somebody buys a crummy car.

Which didn’t mean OPR wasn’t going to have her on the griddle-but neither, given the current climate, were they going to be eager to broadcast the fact that one of their agents had endangered two civilians, with fatal results. They’d probably settle for a medical retirement, and there was a provision in her federal health coverage plan that would-

Buchanan’s cell phone beeped; they both jumped.

“Buchanan…Yeah, that’s the one…Okay…Okay, got it…Affirmative, keep me in the loop….”He hit the disconnect, but didn’t put the phone back in his pocket.

“Well?” said Linda. “I’m dyin’ heah.”Dog Day Afternoon was one of her favorite movies.

“The Lexus is parked out front of the building. Atlantic City PD is bringing up their tac squad.”

More Dali’s-clock watching. Buchanan left the kitchen, returned with two cups of hot coffee from God-knows-where. Linda switched from feeling guilty about the Gees to trying to decide whether she’d been negligent in not having Rosie put under surveillance. But yesterday, she reminded herself, there was no reason to believe Childs was even west of the Mississippi. So maybe she could let herself off on that one.

Or maybe not. The next call came in at nine-fifteen.

“Buchanan…No shit?…Sounds about right…. Let me know.” Again the disconnect, followed by the infuriating stage pause.

“C’mon, spit it out.” Linda wasn’t sure how much more suspense she could take.

“He’s there, all right. They have the mother on the phone-she called them while the tac squad was moving into place. She told the negotiator he’s holding a gun on her. She says he says he doesn’t want to shoot her, but he will if they try to come in. But the situation is currently stable, so as long as they have Childs contained, they want to wait him out, see what develops.”

“If they have Childs contained. Rosie’s his mother, Joe. She could be covering for him. He could be miles away by now.”

“I’m sure they thought of that,” said Buchanan. He called LaFeo back, though. “Larry, Abruzzi wants to know how you know he’s really in there…. Check, got it.…I’ll let her know.” He gave Linda the thumbs-up. “Negotiator says you can hear him talking in the background.”

“Guess I’m getting paranoid.” So much for all our scenarios, thought Linda. You can spitball until you’re out of paper and spit, and in the end it plays out the way it plays out. His mother-he wanted to see his mother.

Special Agent Lawrence LaFeo’s last call came in at nine-thirty-seven. ACPD officers were in the process of clearing the building floor by floor, and LaFeo himself was on his way up to the fifth floor with Mark Scott, one of the FBI’s best hostage negotiators, who’d just arrived from Philadelphia, the field office with jurisdiction over Atlantic City.

Special Agent LaFeo’s last words, to Buchanan anyway, were, “I’m getting too old for this shit,” apparently in reference to the long climb. He promised, as he’d been promising all night, to call Buchanan back, keep them in the loop, so when ten o’clock had come and gone with no word, Buchanan called him and got a “not-responding” message on his cell screen.

“It must be going down,” he told Linda. “God-damn I wish I was there.”

So did Linda-until the call came in at ten-fifteen from LaFeo’s partner, Special Agent Lisa Kingmore, out on the street outside Rosie’s apartment building. Buchanan could barely hear her over the roar of the flames and the screaming sirens-not that there was much to tell at that point, other than that there’d been one hell of an explosion, and that the top two floors of the building were fully involved.

Eventually, with both Linda and Buchanan working their phones, they managed to piece an outline of the story together. At nine-forty-six, just around the time LaFeo and Scott would have been reaching the fifth floor, Rosie had mentioned something to the ACPD negotiator about smelling gas. The explosion had followed within seconds (the negotiator was still deaf in one ear from percussion tinnitus), blowing a hole clean through to the kitchen of the adjoining apartment (or so it was believed).

Casualties, in addition to the partially deafened negotiator and a few Atlantic City cops down in the street who’d been slightly injured by falling masonry, included both Childs and Rosie, probably killed in the explosion, as well as LaFeo, Scott, a sergeant from the tac squad, and Mrs. Schantz, Rosie’s eighty-year-old next-door neighbor, who had all perished in the fire.

It would take another hour before the fire was brought under control, and yet another forty-five minutes until it was extinguished, and the arson investigators could begin the grisly work of sorting out the bodies. Exhausted as she was, Linda wouldn’t allow herself to relax, much less head home, until Agent Kingmore, who had attached herself to the arson boys (always the first ones in after-and sometimes before-the all clear), was standing in what was left of Rosie’s kitchen, looking down at two charred corpses, one female, one male.

And yes, the male, though curled up now, had probably been a six-footer in life, according to the arson investigator, who ought to have known, having seen quite a few of what he referred to as the crispy critters.

As for a more definitive identification, Linda was told that would have to wait at least until Simon Childs’s dental records were obtained from his dentist, presumably in the Bay Area, for comparison with the corpse’s dentition. But at this point nobody doubted it was Childs-certainly not Linda. Why, then, was she so reluctant to give it up and go home that Joe Buchanan practically had to drag her out to her car? Maybe it was because she already knew that this would be her last case.

And not just because of the Lhermitte’s sign, or the numbness and tingling spreading up her left arm, but because Joe was right-when you screwed up in this job, people died. First the Gees, then Rosie and all the others. Linda thought back to her conversation with the poor old drunk only yesterday afternoon.

Let somebody else tell her her daughter’s dead and her son’s a monster-there must be people who get paid for that.

Good call, Abrootz, she told herself, as she climbed into the Geo. Then something else occurred to her: her grand gesture this evening, unburdening herself to Joe Buchanan, had been unnecessary. She’d gotten her wish-no, not wish, never that. What she’d wished for on the ride down was a false alarm. Instead, the second scenario: Gloria, Jim, Childs all dead. But as far as she was concerned, the results would have been even better this way-no one would ever have had to know who Skairdykat really was.

But maybe it wasn’t too late. She could go back inside, throw herself on Joe’s mercy, beg him to keep silent. He was a field agent, he’d understand. And he wouldn’t even have to lie-just forget something a fellow agent had told him.

Sure, she would still have to resign, for all the reasons she’d already laid out for herself. But not in disgrace. And she would have spared herself the OPR grilling and all that other unpleasantness.

It all sounded good-so good that even thinking about it helped lift some of the crushing weight from Linda’s bony shoulders, as she buckled her seat belt, turned the key in the ignition, and drove off, leaving Conroy Circle, her career, and her professional reputation behind, but bringing away with her the last few tattered shreds of her self-respect.