The Girls He Adored

61

In the old days, FBI agents had to leave at least three telephone numbers so they could be reached at all times. With the advent of sky pagers and cell phones the rigid call-in procedures had been relaxed-only Thom Davies knew that Pender was staying at the Holiday Inn in Plano. So it came as a surprise when the phone in Pender's room began ringing just as he emerged from the bathroom after his shower on Monday morning, still wearing the plastic Holiday Inn shower cap to protect his injured scalp.

“Pender here.”

“Pender, this is Steve Maheu. I'm calling for Mr. McDougal.”

“He's not here,” said Pender, just to mess with Maheu, a nondrinking, nonsmoking, crew-cut Mormon. For Pender, one of the benefits of having known McDougal since their academy days was not having to go through Steve Too to get to Steve One.

“You know perfectly well what I mean. I'm calling on his behalf, at his request. You really tore it this time, Pender-Steve specifically asked me to tell you that he's not going to pull your ashes out of the fire.”

“What fire?”

“Did you interview a Mr. Horton Hughes yesterday?”

“We had a pleasant poolside chat.”

“Apparently Mr. Hughes didn't find it all that pleasant. And apparently Mr. Hughes is also a close personal friend, not to mention a generous supporter, of a senator from Texas who shall be nameless. Can you see where this is going, Ed?”

“Nowhere, Maheu. Absolutely nowhere. I conducted an interview, the subject was not forthcoming, I-”

“Subject? You were interviewing the relative of a victim.”

“In my best judgment at the time, I also had to consider him a possible suspect. He was screwing his wife's best friend before she disappeared, and his wife's best friend's daughter afterward. I had to elimin-”

“I don't care who he was screwing, and I'm not going to debate this with you, Pender. You're off the investigation, starting now. Come home and turn in your badge or kiss your pension goodbye.”

“Has McDougal even spoken to Thom Davies? Does he know what I'm onto here?”

“You mean your printout of forty-three career criminals, one of whom who may or may not have known the subject briefly a dozen years ago? Yeah, we're all just thrilled to death, Ed-that'll break the case wide open for sure. Now get your sorry behind back to Washington on the next flight out. And consider yourself suspended from active duty in the meantime-from this point on, if you so much as ask somebody the time of day in an official capacity, I'll pull your credentials so fast your underwear'll fall down.”

“Whoops,” said Pender. “Couldn't hear you. Sounds like we have a bad connec-”

He made a crackling noise and hung up the phone, counted to ten, then took it off the receiver and went back into the bathroom. He removed the shower cap and bent his head to inspect his scalp. It had been torn in three places by the rounded edge of the handcuffs. Two of the wounds had required six stitches, the other had taken eight. He could see where the last stitch on the longest cut had worked loose. The butterfly bandage Anh Tranh had applied was still in place, and that Chinese salve she'd given him must have been the real deal-the ragged edges of the wound had already knitted together.

Pender took the tin of salve, a box of gauze pads, and a roll of adhesive tape from his toilet bag, cut four long strips of tape and laid them sticky side up on the chrome shelf under the mirror, then overlapped four pads on top of those, the way Annie had done. After smearing the salve directly on the cuts with his forefinger, he slipped his hands under the tape and gauze arrangement, lifted it in the air like a priest serving mass, flipped it over onto his head, and pressed the tape down firmly.

Then he brought his hat into the bathroom and set it atop the bandage, intending to trim the tape so it wouldn't be visible. But the hat was too small. It was also bloodstained and irreparably crumpled at the crown. Pender took it off and turned it in his hands.

“Hat, you've been a good old rounder and a good old pal,” he declared. “For almost ten years now, through thick and thin- mostly thin-you stuck with me. And now that you've been used up in the service, I'd like to give you the official FBI send-off. Tum te tum, tum te tum…”

As the last note of Taps died away, Pender dropped the hat into the wastebasket under the sink, then flushed the toilet for the sound effect.

“And one more thing,” he called to the hat on his way out of the bathroom. “If I were you, I wouldn't count on that pension.”