The Boys from Santa Cruz (10 page)

A patrol car shuttled Ajanian and Pender down to the Little League field being used as a helipad. The Humboldt County search-and-rescue helicopter was behind second base, ready to take off. Running in a crouched trot, holding on to his hat with one hand and holding the unfashionably wide lapels of his sport coat closed with the other, Pender followed Ajanian into the chopper.
The sheriff introduced him to his two young, flight-suited deputies, Gabel and Garner. Seconds after they lifted off, the sun, which had set a few minutes earlier, was briefly and gloriously resurrected, streaking the dark gray horizon with crimson and yellow bands. Then it disappeared again as the helicopter tilted dizzyingly, wheeled eastward, and continued to climb.

Mountainous terrain rushed by beneath them; rolling hills gave way to bristling ravines and rocky crags. When they reached the designated coordinates, they saw the CDF helicopter circling over the body, shining its bobbing searchlight on a brave white scrap of cloth suspended in the evergreen canopy. The two pilots exchanged thumbs-up through their Plexiglas canopies, then the forestry chopper wheeled away into the darkness. Ajanian duckwalked up to the front of the cabin, removed his cap (Pender had been right about the comb-over), put on a headset with a microphone, conferred briefly with whoever was at the other end, then put his hat back on and duckwalked back to his deputies.

“THE CONSENSUS IS, WE’D JUST AS SOON BRING HER OUT TONIGHT,” he shouted over the noise of the rotors. “YOU GUYS GET THE FINAL SAY, THOUGH. IF YOU THINK IT’S TOO DANGEROUS TO BRING HER UP IN THE DARK…”

The consensus
?
Ajanian’s got to be the king of buck passing,
thought Pender. Asking a search-and-rescue daredevil whether something was too dangerous was like asking a three-year-old whether candy was too sweet.

The rescue operation commenced smoothly. While the pilot maneuvered them into position, Gabel attached a safety harness to the cable holding the body basket, basically a stretcher with side rails and straps, and when they were directly above the body, he lowered himself over the side, with Ajanian aiming the searchlight, Pender operating the electric winch, and Garner spotting his partner.

“LOWER, LOWER,” Garner called to Pender, who was trying not to notice how close they were to the cliff.
“SLOW IT DOWN…SLOWER! OKAY, A LITTLE LOWER…AAAND…STOP! STOP IT AND LOCK IT.”

It took Gabel only a few minutes of midair ballet to free the body from the trees and strap it into the basket. But
only
is a relative concept when at any moment a capricious up-, down-, or cross-draft might have dashed the dangling deputy against the side of the cliff or sent the helicopter spiraling into the ravine.

Working the winch again, Pender didn’t get a look at the dead girl until the other three had finished wrestling the basket into the chopper, which rose vertically to gain clearance the second the grisly cargo was aboard, then veered away from the mountainside.

The supine corpse, Pender noted, was in full rigor, arched drastically, with the head and heels touching the stretcher and the pelvis upthrust in a ghastly parody of sexual ecstasy. The girl’s outspread arms were curved gracefully, as if she had been flash-frozen in the middle of a swan dive. Rather than risk further damage to the body by trying to work it free, Gabel had sawn off the branch upon which she’d been impaled, so the front of her T-shirt, stiff with dried blood, was poked up above her heart.

Pender’s gaze traveled upward to the girl’s neck. With the upper surface of the body pale from postmortem lividity, the dark bruises on either side of the throat were clearly visible even in the dim light of the helicopter. As for her eyes, well, they were gone. One socket gaped raw red; the lid of the other had collapsed inward, giving the socket a shrunken appearance. Pender’s stomach churned; he tasted the bile rising in his throat, clamped his lips together, swallowed it back down.
You’ve seen worse than this,
he told himself.
Get a goddamn grip.

Ajanian, who wasn’t looking all that chipper himself, agreed with Pender that the degree of rigor mortis and the absence of blanching meant the girl had been dead at least twelve hours. He had noticed the bruised throat, too, but agreed that the amount of blood on the T-shirt meant she had to have been alive when she
was impaled, which ruled out strangulation as the immediate cause of death.

But whatever had ultimately killed the girl—presumably they’d know more after the autopsy—Ajanian was adamant that if nothing else, the presence of the bruises on her throat meant Luke Sweet would now have to be considered a danger to public safety. This would alter the character of the search considerably. No more all-volunteer or one-person search parties, to begin with. And the public would have to be alerted along with law enforcement.

The sheriff was all but licking his mustache at the thought of a well-attended press conference, with TV lights blazing and microphones bristling, but he still wanted Pender’s help in covering his ass. “WE’RE IN AGREEMENT, RIGHT?” he shouted, as the lights of the ball field came into view.

“YES AND NO.”

Ajanian, incredulous: “EXCUSE ME?”

“YES, HE COULD BE DANGEROUS. NO, I DON’T THINK YOU SHOULD ANNOUNCE IT.”

On the ground, while the deputies and paramedics were transferring the now blanket-covered body from the basket to a gurney, Pender explained his reasoning to the sheriff. There were too many people with too many guns out there, he said—it would be like painting a bull’s-eye on the kid’s back. And since Pender also had the impression that the more threatened the boy felt, the more dangerous he’d become, declaring him a threat to the public would only increase the danger to both himself
and
the public.

“So what am I supposed to tell
them,
then?” Ajanian said testily, adjusting his cap as the men and women with the cameras and microphones closed in on them.

“As little as possible,” suggested Pender.

“Thanks for nothing,” Ajanian whispered out of the side of his mouth as the flashbulbs started popping.

“The Bureau is always happy to be of assistance to local law enforcement agencies,” replied Pender.

“Hi. You must be Luke.” Dark-haired Indian girl, around my age and height, soft-spoken, pretty cute.

“If I must, I must.” I hadn’t seen Rudy since he’d left the kitchen twenty minutes ago.

“I’m Shawnee. Uncle Rudy says you’re gonna be staying with us awhile, and I should find you a room.”

“Okay by me,” I told her. But in that rambling old house by the river, “finding” a room had a double meaning. Because of the way it had been built and altered and added on to over the years, the place was like a three-dimensional maze, with forked, rambling corridors, secret rooms, and staircases that led up, down, sideways, and in some cases, to nowhere.

So I followed Shawnee up, down, and sideways, to a room on the second-and-a-half floor. It wasn’t much bigger than a closet, with a low, slanting ceiling and barely enough space for a twin bed and a small chest of drawers. Even so, I was a lot better off than I’d have been being lost in the mountains, or dead, both of which had already loomed as strong possibilities that night.

Lying in bed, through the tiny, open window I listened to the running river, which sounded like a hundred people whispering in a foreign language, and heard an owl hooting in the darkness. It must have been around midnight by then. Beat as I was, I thought for sure I’d fall asleep the second my head hit the pillow, but then I realized I had to take a piss.

On the way up, Shawnee had showed me the bathroom I was supposed to use. I pulled on my jeans, opened the door, and climbed down the short, steep staircase, but when I reached the hallway, I couldn’t remember to save my life which way I’d come, from the left or the right.

You probably should have left a trail of bread crumbs,
I told myself.
Then I eeny-meeny-miny-moed which way to go, and picked wrong. The door I chose opened on a rickety wooden staircase built along the side of the house. The
outside
of the house. But when you gotta go, you gotta go, and the great outdoors seemed like as good a place as any, so down the steep wooden stairs I went.

The grass was damp under my bare feet. The river smelled fresh and new, and the night sky was amazing, with the stars scattered like diamonds across black velvet. I took a mighty whiz into the flower bed alongside the house. Just as I had finished and was shaking off, I heard a car or truck climbing the driveway and saw the beam from its headlights sweeping toward me across the lawn.

I moved a few feet up from where I had pissed, flattened myself against the side of the house, and held my breath. The light kept coming and coming, stopping just short of my toes. It was so bright I could see the individual blades of grass casting shadows. Then it went out. Car doors slammed. I heard men’s voices. “Take him into the barn,” said one of them. I was pretty sure it was Rudy.

From where I stood, I was staring straight at the barn in question, only fifteen or twenty yards across the lawn. I started edging my way around to the back of the house. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a cluster of dark figures crossing the lawn, and quickly crouched behind the nearest bush.

A light went on in the barn. Rudy was standing under a swinging lamp hanging from the underside of the loft. The cluster of figures on the lawn resolved itself into two men half-dragging a third man by the arms. They hauled him into the barn and slung him onto the floor, and in the instant before Rudy slid the barn doors closed, I recognized the fallen man by the white feathers in his headband. It was Buzzard John.

I crossed the lawn quietly on my bare feet and peeked through the slit between the two sliding doors.
“My…fucking…house,”
Rudy was saying, accenting each word as he stood over Buzzard John, whose headband had slipped down over one bleeding eyebrow.
The other eye was all puffy and purple, and his thin blade of a nose was mashed sideways. “You bring a stranger to
my…fucking…house
!”

“It was a kid,” Buzzard John said through swollen lips. “He didn’t have nowhere else to go.”

“Then you take him to
your
house, you call me on the telephone. But you don’t bring a stranger to
my…fucking…house
!”

I swear to god, part of me wanted to bust in and rescue Buzzard John. After all, where would I have been if he hadn’t stopped for me, or brought me here? But Rudy definitely had a point. My dad would have agreed with him. Big Luke had an under-the-counter business, too, and I wasn’t even allowed to bring any
friends
home with me (not that there was anybody especially clamoring for the honor), much less strangers.

Anyway, what could I have said that would have made a difference? It wasn’t like Rudy owed
me
any favors. No, all I was likely to accomplish by sticking my two cents in was to get myself beat up and kicked out.
They were probably almost finished with him anyway,
I told myself as I turned away from the barn and headed back across the lawn to the house.

Pender ducked out of Sheriff Ajanian’s press conference and caught a ride back to the lodge with a freelance photographer. The search-and-rescue effort had been suspended for the night, the lights were dimmed, and the sound of snoring emanated from the cots set up around the periphery of the main room.

Pender’s intention had been to look for a motel in which to spend the night, but the Bu-car was blocked in by a fire truck. He decided he was too exhausted to drive, anyway, and wandered off
in search of a spare cot to crash on. It was hard to believe that he’d gone swimming in the Kern River only that morning; the idyll with Amy already felt like ancient history.

The beds and cots were all taken, but there was an unoccupied sofa in a darkened office on the second floor that looked like it would do in a pinch. Pender took off his shoes and curled up on his side, fully clothed, using the arm of the couch for a pillow. But as soon as he closed his eyes, the dead girl’s ravaged face appeared to him out of the darkness, eyeless and accusatory, and suddenly he was wide awake again.

He swung his feet off the couch and sat up, his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, wondering if there was anything he could have done differently last week. Maybe if he’d questioned the boy a little more skillfully that night in Santa Cruz, Little Luke would still be behind bars, and little Dusty would still have her eyes. “I
had
him,” he said aloud. “I had the little bastard in my goddamn hands and I let him get away.”

“Yeah, tell me about it,” said a slurred male voice from across the room.

Startled, Pender looked up and saw a man sitting in the dark, with a bottle on the desk in front of him. “Who’s that?”

“Owen Oliver.
Doctor
Owen Oliver, not that it matters anymore.” The man switched on the gooseneck desk lamp, and Pender recognized the Mountain Project psychologist Sheriff Ajanian had pointed out earlier. Gone were the corduroy jacket and the tie; his shirtsleeves were unbuttoned and turned back loosely, and his hair was a wispy mess.

“Sorry for busting in on you,” said Pender, climbing wearily to his feet. “I was looking for a place to sleep—I didn’t see you there.”

“No, no, stay where you are.” Grandly, his shirtsleeves flapping, Dr. Oliver waved him back down. “Care for a nightcap?”

“I’m not really supposed to…”

“Me neither.” Oliver grabbed the bottle of Johnnie Walker Red
by the neck, rose with difficulty, wobbled across the room, and perched unsteadily on the arm of the sofa. “Here. Hope you don’t mind drinking out of the bottle. I had a glass, but it broke. Story of my life.”

Pender wiped the top of the bottle with his palm, took a slash, and handed it back. “Thanks. I needed that.”

“Me, too.” Oliver took a slash in return, then wiped his mouth with his dangling sleeve. “He’s a psychopath, you know. A flat-out, textbook psychopath.”

“Little Luke, you mean?”

“Yeah. Little Luke.” A harsh laugh. “Antisocial personality disorder, we’re supposed to call it nowadays. DSM says the kid has to be at least eighteen for you to make a diagnosis, but I say, why wait? Act now and beat the crowd. Because it’s all there. In spades. Superficial charm, failure to conform to societal norms, deceit, aggression, pervasive disregard for the rights of others. And family history—did I mention family history?” He took another slug. “I knew it, too. By the second day. Should’ve sent him back then and there,” Oliver continued. “Know why I didn’t?”