Free Cold Fear by Rick Mofina Page A

he lived in jet planes. With this Montana case, he will
have investigated in all fifty states. What an achievement to go with his
broken marriages. Some people get gold watches, a nice pen. What did he have? A
collection of court papers calling him the defendant.
    His first wife was Denise, the nurse at George
Washington. They were young, sexually addicted to each other but incompatible
as spouses. After three years, it ended as passionately as it began, with
dishes smashed, screaming, tears, door-slamming and a call from her lawyer.
Last he had heard, Denise had moved to London, married a doctor, had a baby
girl.
    Meredith, his second wife, ended things quietly six
months ago with an e-mail. Error-free, grammatically correct, as surgically
effective as a scalpel to the heart. That was her style. Zander could just
imagine her calendar that day, certain it went something like: White House
Counsel meet, book, spa, New York trip, Ritz for one hour of illicit sex with
D.A. lawyer in Manhattan, alert husband it is over, pick up gown for Lincoln
Center gala. They lasted six years until she typed the words, “As of this
date, I am seeking a divorce.” Typical of Washington’s cover-your-ass
bureaucracy. “As of this date.” Nice one, Meredith . Near the end, when
she booked the sessions with the counselor for them, she never made the
appointments. Twice, he had sat alone in the waiting room of the counselor’s
office in Alexandria, leafing through the same outdated copy of People magazine. Looking out at the Potomac and the capital, realizing her no-shows
were intended to humiliate him. A metaphor for her middle finger.
    He remembered that day he received her marriage-ending
e-mail, he typed back five words.
    “I know you’re fucking Pearson.”
    She responded, “Good.”
    She loved what he loathed: the power, the politics, the
parties, the sycophants, the networking. It actually turned her on. He was a
federal cop who dreamed about escaping his life inside the Beltway to a place
with real people, who looked you in the eye and meant what they said. A place
like Montana or Idaho. Lots of antigovernment sentiment there. I’d fit right
in , he laughed to himself. But for now, he’d settle for his small rented
bungalow on a dead end street shaded by forest in College Park, near the
university. Thank God, no kids. Zander then realized he was forty-three, and it
saddened him.
    For the past twenty years of his life, the only marriage
that had worked for him was the one between him and his job. Zander had always
been a front-line agent. He had developed a reputation for being a stubborn,
thorough, SOB investigator, one of the Bureau’s best. He missed nothing. It was
common for him to be assigned to the FBI’s top teams on major files, like Oklahoma City, Lockerbie, the World Trade Center. He joined Bureau teams assisting other
police agencies, or helping salvage a messed up case. His expertise grew out of
his early successes in crimes against children: parental kidnappings,
exploitation, stranger abductions. Zander took those cases personally. He was
the champion of the victim and virtually everyone else, living or dead, was a
suspect in his eyes until he seized the truth by the throat and presented the
file for prosecution.
    Whenever his name came up--and it always did whenever
agents sat around over a beer--the younger ones would inevitably ask: Anybody
work with Frank Zander? What’s his story? I hear that guy is a cold machine, a
guilt detector. He does not miss. Was he born that way or constructed in a
secret basement lab in the Hoover Building? Case-hardened agents, those who
knew, would usually recount a variation of the legend that circulated among the
tribal camps of the FBI across the country.
    Francis Miller Zander was a rookie working a junior role
for the Bureau assisting locals in Georgia. A young mother of two small boys,
who lived in a rural trailer park, supporting her family as a hairdresser,
reported her