Fear itself: a novel

by Jonathan Lewis Nasaw

  Like most Navy men, the retired chief petty officer (Cappy was his nickname, not his rank) was prompt. He pulled up in front of Rosie’s apartment building in his ’68 Harley Electra Glide with the fishtail mufflers and the studded cowboy saddle (he could still ride the Hog, he just couldn’t lift it if it spilled), walked it into the vestibule (the bike wasn’t entirely secure even there, and sometimes it leaked a little oil, but he’d be damned if he was going to leave it out on the street in this neighborhood), and rang the buzzer to apartment 5-B at precisely five-fifteen. When Rosie failed to buzz him in, his first thought was that she had fallen asleep on the couch watching her soaps. His second thought was that his hopes for a successful date were probably as doomed as his first ship, the escort carrier Ommaney Bay, which went down off Luzon in January of ’45.

  But it never occurred to Cappy to just turn around and go home. Rosie might need him—she might have passed out, fallen, struck her head on something. You could bleed to death from a scalp laceration—that’s how Bill Holden kicked it. Like they say, it ain’t the fall that kills you, it’s what you hit on the way down.

  So he mashed all fifteen buttons on the wall with the flat of his big hand, waited by the door, and sure enough, somebody buzzed him through. Intercom must still be fubared, he decided, on his way up the stairs. Somebody oughtta call the super.

  A little winded, he stopped to catch his breath at Rosie’s door, then rang the bell. No answer, but he could hear it ringing. He knocked anyway. “Rosie, you okay in there?”

  The peephole darkened. “Go away.” Man’s voice.

  Cappy knew he wasn’t Rosie’s only fella. Hell, she wasn’t his only gal—or hadn’t been, until Helen Breen, Tommy Breen’s widow, finally passed. But Wednesday night was their night, Cappy and Rosie’s, and had been for years. Something wasn’t copacetic around here. “Where’s Rosie?”

  “You Cappy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She doesn’t want to see you.”

  “I’d like her to tell me that.”

  “She told me to tell you.”

  Cappy drew himself to his full height—once, six-two, still close to six-one—and crossed his arms over his chest. “Either I see Rosie or I call the cops.”

  The door opened. Cappy found himself face-to-face with one of the creepiest guys he’d ever seen. And balder than Cappy on his worst day, bald right down to his eyeballs. “C’mon in.”

  Cappy brushed by him—he’d dealt with more desperate characters than this in his thirty years in the Navy; hell, he’d been commanded by more desperate characters than this. Rosie was lying on the Murphy bed, a cold compress over her forehead. She sat up.

  “Cappy, this is my son, Simon,” she said, weakly, but with an undertone of pride in her voice. “Simon, this is my friend Cappy I told you about.”

  Simon stuck his right hand out, reached behind him with his left to close the door. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Didn’t sound that way a minute ago.” But Cappy shook the man’s hand. He knew how big a deal this was for Rosie—she’d often mentioned the children she’d been forced to abandon as infants. “Rosie baby, why don’t we take a rain check on dinner? You probably want to have a little time alone with your boy here.”

  “Yes, that might be—”

  “I wouldn’t think of it,” said Simon quickly. The old guy seemed to be pretty clueless as to Simon’s recent notoriety, but you never knew, he could leave here, turn on a radio, pick up a paper, watch the news, make the connection. “I’m the one who came busting in without calling first. Why don’t we have dinner together—we’ll send for takeout. My treat.”

  “Very kind of you,” said Cappy, trying to work his way around Simon, who was standing with his back almost to the door. “But I couldn’t possibly…”

  “Oh, yes, you could,” said Simon, reaching behind his back and drawing the Colt from his waistband. “You really, really, could.”

  Cappy backed away from the door. Rosie saw the gun for the first time. “Simon, what are you—”

  “I’m in a little trouble. Mom.” The word sounded strange to Simon, coming out of his own mouth—he hadn’t used it as a form of address since he was three. “I can’t take a chance on Cappy here dropping the dime on me.” He turned back to Cappy. “Why don’t you join your girlfriend on the bed—I’m sure you’ve been there before.”

  9

  To Linda’s surprise, the doctor, with whom she’d had only one appointment shortly after her transfer to Washington, returned her call within a few minutes; to her relief, he didn’t sound particularly alarmed.

  “It’s called Lhermitte’s sign,” he told her. “If you hadn’t already been diagnosed with MS, it would be a red flag—as things stand, it just tells us what we already know. The numbness and tingling in your fingers concerns me more. That’s a new symptom, is it not?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And we have you on a course of Betaseron every other day?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Side effects?”

  “Just the red blotches at the injection site—and those flu symptoms I told you about.”

  “Let’s stay with it, then, and if necessary we’ll think about stepping it up a notch after your next evaluation. When are you scheduled to come in?”

  “First of the month—I guess that’s Monday.”

  “I’ll see you on Monday, then. And until then, I want you to take it easy. Avoid stress, no strenuous physical activity. And by all means try to avoid any sudden bending or twisting of your neck.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Linda promptly. As far as she was concerned, one Lhermitte’s sign per lifetime was plenty.

  Linda hung around the office long enough to see the updated BOLO and arrange for its high-priority national distribution to law enforcement only, then left for home. Although the information about the vehicle Childs might be driving was the closest thing to a break in the manhunt thus far, it wasn’t the sort of break you’d expect to bring about immediate results.

  Nor would it have, if the car had still been in California, or even a neighboring state. But on M Street in Georgetown, a Volvo with California plates might have been conspicuous enough to have been noticed even if hadn’t already accumulated two tickets and a tow warning since Tuesday evening.

  Linda had left the office by the time the patrol car called it in. She was traveling north on the River Road and had just passed the sign for Piney Meetinghouse Road (she loved that name), which meant she was only a few miles from Tinsman’s Lock, when her cell phone started chirping.

  “Abruzzi.”

  “Joe Buchanan, Metro.” Washington Metropolitan on Fourth Street was the FBI field office with jurisdiction over the District of Columbia. “Thought you might want to know a patrol car spotted your Volvo in Georgetown.”

  “Georgetown,” echoed Linda dully.

  “Yeah. No sign of Childs yet. They pulled off it right away and set up a surveillance perimeter: if he so much as shows his—”

  “Joe—what was the location of the car?”

  “I don’t remember exactly. Somewhere on M, I think—I can get it for you if it matters.”

  “Please,” said Linda so calmly it was hard to believe that her world, and what was left of her career, was crashing around her ears.

  “Just a sec.”

  It was more than a sec, it was an eon, an age, an eternity, during which Linda tried to tell herself that although M Street’s retail shops and restaurants were within walking distance, even her walking distance, of the Gees’ brownstone—it was a long street—this could be a coincidence. But deep down she knew better: even before Buchanan came back on the line to confirm her worst fears—the Volvo was parked only two blocks from Conroy Circle—her mind had already switched into cover-your-ass mode. You don’t have to tell them, she reminded herself; it still could be a coincidence. Or maybe it wasn’t Skairdykat at all, maybe he got the address some other way.

  Yeah, sure. And maybe Go
d didn’t make little green apples, and maybe Hoover and Tolson were just good friends. “Joe, I’ve got an address about two blocks north of there that needs to be checked out soonest. Seventeen Conroy Circle, that’s one seven C-O-N-R-O-Y. It’s a one-family brownstone. I stayed there for a few weeks when I first got to Washington. Should be two residents, James and Gloria Gee—that’s G-E-E.”

  He told her he could have somebody there in five minutes—Metro agents were already converging on Georgetown. And although he did not ask her why the Gees were at risk, or what the connection was to Childs, she knew that before too long, the question would have to be asked.

  Along with a few others. Such as what the fuck could you have been thinking, putting civilians in jeopardy like that?

  No excuse, sir, she muttered to herself as she switched off the cell phone and slipped it back into the pocket of her black wool car-coat. A glance in the rearview mirror—all clear. She jammed on the brakes and wrenched the wheel to the left, throwing the poor Geo into a screaming, sliding, four-wheel-drift of a U-turn.

  As she passed Piney Meetinghouse Road again, this time from the opposite direction, her phone went off in her pocket.

  “Terry Marks, Hostage Rescue. We’re setting up a perimeter around Seventeen Conroy. There are no signs of movement inside, and nobody’s answering the phone, but there’s a broken pane of glass in the back door. We want to go in quick, while we still have the element of surprise, but I need to get some more information first. I understand you’re familiar with the house?”

  “Yes.”

  “There are two occupants?”

  “Yes: Gloria Gee, Chinese-American female, age thirty-seven, height five-two, weight around one-five, one-ten. Jim Gee, Chinese-American male, late thirties, five-seven, around one-forty.”

  “Short Chinese—that’s good; nobody’s likely to mistake either of the hostages for the suspect.”

  “Not unless you have Stevie Wonder going in.”

  “Any entrances or exits other than the front and back doors?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “What’s the layout inside?”

  Linda gave Marks a walk-through, first from the front door, then the back.

  “Good job. One more thing, what do they drive?”

  “Jim drives one of those new Mercedes SUVs, blue with gold trim. Gloria has a late-model Lexus, that champagne color—I don’t know the license numbers.”

  “The Mercedes is here—we’ll get the Lexus plates from motor vehicles, thanks.”

  Linda wished him luck, which was more than she dared hope for for herself. There were only two ways this could play out that wouldn’t mean the end of her career. The first was a complete false alarm, in which case, once the confusion had been cleared up, she might get off with a reprimand and a nasty note from OPR in her personnel file.

  The second involved the HRT killing Childs on the way in, then finding two more dead bodies, in which case there would be no need to clear up the confusion. No one but herself would ever have to know that Childs had been drawn to the house by a decoy she had set up, a decoy that in the end had succeeded only in drawing the hunter to his prey.

  The Gees would still be dead of course, but Linda would be in the clear. And that’s what counts, isn’t it? she asked herself bitterly.

  10

  The three of them shared the bed. Cappy and Rosie sat next to each other at the head, framed by the alcove in the wall that hid the old-fashioned, pull-down Murphy bed during the day. Rosie had a newly opened bottle of Select Choice propped between her legs. The hell with measuring it out, she had decided; the hell with the glass, the ice, and the tonic, for that matter.

  Simon sat cross-legged at the foot of the bed. Oddly, he wasn’t as put out by Cappy’s intrusion as he might have been. Things hadn’t worked out the way he’d thought they would when he called directory information from the Gees’ kitchen and wangled Rosie’s address out of the operator with a sob story about how it was his mom’s birthday and he had to get some flowers delivered. It was almost too intense, being alone with his mother after all these years—a lifetime, really. But in addition to being mother and son, they were also virtually strangers to each other. The third party changed the equation—Simon found himself playing to the old man as if he were an audience of one.

  “I was just telling my mother about a woman named Ida I met in Wisconsin,” he explained. “Ida asked me a question that’s been rattling around in my head for days now—I was hoping maybe Mom here could answer it for me.”

  Simon’s eyes traveled from Cappy to Rosie. Despite the strain he’d been under, despite the Ecstasy, the sinsemilla, and the dearth of sleep, it seemed to Simon that his mind was clearer than it had been since this whole sorry business had begun. (Although the crosstops he’d been popping like Pez all afternoon might have had something to do with that.) “How about it, Mom? What’s the secret? How can a mother bring herself to walk away from a year-old baby girl with Down’s and a three-year-old who’s just lost his father?”

  And at that moment, he realized that it no longer even mattered what her answer was—it was finally getting to ask the question that had made the difference, that had brought him to this place of clarity.

  Skairdykat

  1

  The media was already gathering outside Conroy Circle, which was, as the name suggests, a cul-de-sac. Sawhorses blocked the entrance; Linda flashed her shield, and the D.C. cops manning the barricades let her through.

  I think we can probably rule out a false alarm, Linda told herself wryly, as the Geo rolled past the media circus to join the cop circus. Patrol cars, unmarked Bu-cars, ambulances, Hostage Rescue Team in full ninja gear straggling out of number seventeen, Evidence Response Team straggling in, paramedics stowing away their gurneys, coroner’s men unfolding theirs, D.C. cops standing around everywhere. Linda parked behind an Animal Control van. As she reached for her cane, an agent wearing a blue windbreaker with the letters FBI in yellow across the back approached her.

  “You Abruzzi?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m Joe Buchanan. Thanks for coming down.” He opened the door for Linda, helped her out of the car. “We figured since you were familiar with the house, you might be able to spot if anything was missing, anything out of place. You up for a walk-through?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Linda, surprised at how readily she was able to don a brisk professional demeanor. Maybe feeling numb inside somehow made it easier. If so, she was all for numb. “What have we got?”

  Or perhaps she was more transparent than she’d hoped—Buchanan put his hand on her shoulder. “I understand these people were friends of yours?”

  Linda nodded warily.

  “It’s not pretty in there.”

  “Then let’s get it over with,” said Linda. Too late to turn squeamish now. She’d played with their lives and was responsible for their deaths—the least she could do was look at their corpses. She felt as if she owed them that much, somehow.

  The walk-through, though it was Linda’s first “wet” crime scene (not unusual for an FBI agent—the Bureau was rarely the initial responder or lead agency on a fresh homicide), wasn’t so bad initially. Not downstairs, anyway, which was both surprising, because they were just removing the blanket covering the body on the couch as she limped into the living room, and predictable, because it was probably the shock of seeing Jim’s savagely mutilated corpse that caused Linda’s mind to protectively dissociate, to pull back in order to distance itself from the carnage.

  Linda’s detachment was tested in a different way when she glanced into the guest bedroom. Nothing gruesome about it—the shocking part was that it looked pretty much the way it had the night she’d moved out. That’s what got to her: for a second, she saw her own corpse lying on that bed, the bed she’d slept in for three weeks, the bed she’d have been sleeping in last night if not for sheer undeserved luck.

  She shook it off, followed Buchanan up the stairs a
nd into the Gees’ bedroom, feeling as if she were seeing and hearing everything from inside a deep-sea-diver’s helmet. There were blood spatters on one of the bed pillows; black hair littered the floor around the vanity. Linda turned to Buchanan, asked the question with her eyes.

  “She’s in the bathroom,” he replied. “In the tub.”

  “Yes, he likes to bathe them,” said Linda.

  Gloria was not alone.

  “I think I found the envenoming point,” said Reilly, the forensic technician kneeling beside the tub, when Buchanan and Linda appeared in the doorway. With gloved fingers he tilted Gloria’s shorn head up and to the side to show them a small, ragged-edged hole in her neck.

  “Not how I pictured a snakebite,” said Buchanan, peering over his shoulder.

  “Coral snakes have short mouths and stubby fangs—they have to chew their way in.”

  “How about the facial lacerations?”

  “Razor—probably some kind of box cutter or utility knife, with the blade extended a few millimeters.”

  Coral snakes…chew their way…razor blade. Think about something else. “Why are her eyes drooping like that?” asked Linda.

  “That’s one of the symptoms of a neurotoxin, which would fit with the coral ID. Corals are Elapidae—neurotoxic venom, borderline lethal.” Then, to Buchanan: “Did they find it yet?”

  “No, they’re sending for a dog.” He turned to Linda, still in the doorway. “First man up the stairs saw this skinny striped snake coming out of the bedroom. Red, black, and yellow. They think either it got into the walls, or else it’s up in the attic.”