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job. And who said anything about Russians?”
    Uno, due, tre, quattro…

2

    Eight miles high, somewhere over Kansas, Pender turned to Sid Dolitz. “Well?”
    Sid polished off the last of his crab cocktail, took another sip of complimentary champagne, and patted his lips with a linen napkin—he always flew first class. “You’re kidding, right?”
    “Why would I be kidding? I’m sitting next to the man who invented profiling.”
    “I think Brussel, Teten, and Mullany, among others, might have something to say about that.”
    “But they’re not here,” Pender pointed out.
    “If they were, they’d tell you only an idiot would try to come up with a psychological profile based on such flimsy data.”
    “Give me a flimsy profile, then.”
    “I don’t do flimsy,” said Sid.
    Pender waited him out.
    “Okay, okay. Assuming it’s the same perp, assuming all the alleged suicides are really homicides, and with a caveat the size of your enormous ass, here’s a shot in the dark: antisocial personality disorder, more commonly known as psychopathy, but compounded by a phobia disorder, manifesting counterphobically.”
    “And now for the English translation…?”
    “Here’s my theory: As a psychopath, our man’s biggest problem is boredom.” They were taking the killer’s gender for granted: serial poisoners aside, at a conservative estimate, ninety-seven out of a hundred serial killers are male. “Psychopaths characteristically demonstrate abnormally low cortical arousal levels, so they’re constantly in search of stimulation. Extreme stimulation: in order to reach the same level of satisfaction and enjoyment you or I might achieve from watching a good movie, your average psychopath has to torture a cat or get into a fistfight. And as for reaching the levels of cortical arousal the normal person gets from any activity they’re passionate about, like sex, or at our age, golf—”
    “Speak for yourself,” said Pender.
    “—the psychopath might have to actually murder somebody. But here’s where it gets interesting: given that the victims all had different specific phobia disorders, and taking into account the manner of their respective deaths, I think it’s highly probable that our man is a phobophobe.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Fear of fear: a phobophobe is afraid of fear itself. But this subject’s phobia would seem to be manifesting counterphobically—in other words, he seeks out that which he’s afraid of—which in turn fits hand in glove with the psychopathy: he fights his boredom by feeding on fear.”
    “Sounds like one scary sonofabitch,” said Pender.
    “He’d probably be very gratified to hear you say that.”
    “I don’t want to gratify him, I want to catch him.”
    “You’re retired.”
    “Not technically.”
    “You’re not on active duty.”
    “A mere technicality.”
    “You’re really going to go through with this?”
    “Bet your ass.”
    “A word of advice, then: Don’t underestimate this man. The original name for psychopathy was manie sans délire, which means ‘mania without delusion.’ He may be crazy as a shithouse rat, to use the technical term, but his mind is at least as clear and focused as yours. Probably more so, considering the amount of booze you’ve been putting away lately.”
    “You think I’m drinking too much?” Pender was genuinely surprised.
    “For a small county in Ireland, no. For one man, yes.”

3

    On Wednesday morning, Simon Childs attempted to soften the blow by taking his sister to the Denny’s in Emeryville for a breakfast that would have felled a lumberjack, before breaking the news that he had to go away again for a little while.
    “How long?” she asked, as morosely as she could with a mouth full of hash browns.
    Simon leaned across the table and wiped the corner of her mouth—she hated for him to do that in public, but was too depressed to protest. “It’s just for a day or two—tops. And here’s the good news: I talked