The call came in just as Linda was thinking about knocking off for the day. There had been no developments in the investigation, no Childs sightings, either reported or confirmed. He’d probably gone to ground, was the consensus; if the pressure was kept on, sooner or later he’d have to surface, if only to change holes.
In the meantime, she’d made her calls, exchanged a little small talk on the order of sucks catchin’ a Sunday shift, whaddaya gonna do? and gotten a few BOLOs posted that might have languished in somebody’s in box. When the phone rang around quarter to three, she thought it might be one of the callbacks she’d left. Instead it was Pender. She tried, she really did: she told him McDougal had handed her the investigation on the express condition that she keep Pender out of it.
He didn’t sound very impressed. “How long have you been with the Bureau?”
“Seven years.”
“And you still can’t tell when your boss is just covering his ass?”
“He didn’t sound like he was just covering his ass. He sounded concerned.”
“Yes, kiddo-he’s concerned about covering his ass. Let me ask you two questions. One: What’s the priority here-what’s the job?”
“That’s a no-brainer. The job is apprehending Childs as quickly as possible. What’s the second question?”
“Can you do a better job apprehending Childs as quickly as possible with or without the benefit of my twenty years of experience?”
“Well, with it. But McDougal told me-”
“Linda, I don’t care what McDougal told you-his priorities are exactly the same as yours. And mine. And anybody else in law enforcement who hasn’t got his head so far up his ass he can count his own fillings. Agreed?” Then, without waiting for an answer: “Attagirl. Now, the first thing you have to understand…”
So much for McDougal and the hierarchy; so much for going home early. According to the Book of Pender, the first thing Linda had to understand was that the cops on the street, both local and federal, weren’t going to need any help from her when it came to the usual avenues of investigation. With or without Liaison Support, the evidence response techs would hoover up every shred of gross or trace evidence; the Berkeley cops would comb all of Childs’s reported haunts; the so-called suicides in Vegas, Fresno, and Chicago would be reopened as homicide investigations; and every friend, neighbor, or casual acquaintance Childs had ever called or been seen with in public or visited or written a check to in the last year or so would receive at least cursory attention from law enforcement.
Now, the time line Linda was working on would be lots of help there, Pender assured her (as soon as he mentioned the time line, Linda realized how it had happened that Pool had just sort of magically turned up at the office Saturday afternoon), and sooner or later events would start dictating her course of action. For instance, he could almost promise her more work than she could handle as the ERT in Berkeley continued to unearth the corpses in Childs’s basement.
But until then, he explained, Linda could basically expect law enforcement to be all over Simon Childs’s recent past and foreseeable future like Yogi Bear on a picnic basket. So what Pender suggested was that as soon as the time line was done, Linda turn her efforts to probing a little deeper into Childs’s past. Were there any childhood friends whom he hadn’t seen in a long time, whom he might be desperate enough to seek out as a fugitive? How about medical records? Not just his current physicians-investigators would be lined up five deep at their doors-but his former doctors, all the way back to his pediatrician. If in addition to being a psychopath, Childs was also a counterphobic phobic, as Sid had suggested, perhaps he’d seen a shrink as a child. That’d really give the profilers something to work with.
Encouraged and energized, even inspired by Pender’s call, Linda worked what was left of her ass off for the rest of the afternoon (of the twenty pounds she’d lost this year, at least ten had to have come off her rear end), but by eight o’clock, five on the West Coast, everything was done that was going to get done on a Sunday evening, so an exhausted Linda packed it in.
Basta, as her mother used to say to her father when he worked on Sunday-enough is enough, even God rested on the seventh day. Then, of course, Mom Abruzzi would do a load of ironing, maybe vacuum the curtains, cook a five-course Italian dinner, and mend clothes all through 60 Minutes. After all these years, Mom still had no idea what Mike Wallace looked like, went the family joke, because she never looked up from her sewing basket.
Thinking about home always made Linda hungry. When she got back to Pender’s, she went straight to the kitchen and opened the fridge before she even took off her coat. The freezer compartment was well stocked-sort of: if somebody had gone through the frozen food section of the supermarket and selected TV dinners solely on the basis of fat grams, the higher the better, they’d have ended up with something very like the contents of Pender’s freezer.
Linda opted for the Marie Callender’s spaghetti carbonara (what a concept, she thought: some twisted guinea genius had actually looked at a bowl of pasta and said to himself, you know what this needs? — white gravy and bacon), and while it was heating, she made her traditional, not to say mandatory, Sunday night phone call. It went well-Mom didn’t nag her about moving back home. She mentioned it three or four times, but by Italian-mother standards that didn’t count as nagging. Then she’d handed the phone to Dad, who told Linda he couldn’t talk long because The Sopranos was coming on.
Oh, Dad, she wanted to moan, not you, too. Linda had tried to watch the show once-it was the episode where the bumbling FBI agents tried to plant a bug in Tony’s basement; she’d felt like throwing her shoe through the screen. And Charlie Abruzzi, of all people, should have known better-you didn’t run an Italian butcher shop in the Bronx for forty years without learning what the mob was really like; Big Pussy my ass!
But at least the Sunday call helped clear the nostalgia out of Linda’s system. After all, she told herself as she climbed into bed that night, home is where you make it. And life is what you make of it. She understood how blessed she was to have a job where she could make a difference.
It was like her dad said when she told him she wanted to change careers and apply to the FBI. The secret to happiness, he told her, was to be able to go to bed Sunday night looking forward to getting up and going to work Monday morning.
“Do you?” she’d asked.
“Hell no,” he replied. “By the time I figured that out, I already had a wife and three kids to feed.”