The Boys from Santa Cruz (15 page)

Pender’s new office had a low acoustic ceiling and fluorescent light panels. Three walls were decorated to his specifications with
corkboards and whiteboards; horizontal windows set into the fourth wall looked out over the manicured grounds. Seating himself at the scarred oak-veneer desk he’d brought over from Liaison Support’s old basement offices next door to Behavioral Science, Pender could see all the way to the defensive driving course in the hazy blue distance.

After settling into a creaky, wide-bottomed oak swivel chair that had also accompanied him from the old office, Pender donned his half-moon drugstore reading glasses and opened the square, cream-colored envelope from the former Pam Pender. Glossy black letters on heavy card stock informed him that Pamela Jardine (her maiden name), formerly of Blatty and Broom Realty, had opened her own office, Jardine & Associates, and was available to assist him with all his real estate needs, residential or commercial.

Pender’s real estate needs, however, were currently nonexistent—not long after the divorce, he had signed a National Park Service Heritage Lease for a ramshackle cabin overlooking the C & O Canal. So after running Pam’s card and envelope through his personal shredder, he turned his attention to the daily printout of stranger homicides compiled for him by Thom Davies, a database manager working out of the CJIS headquarters in Clarksburg, West Virginia.

The computer printout, arranged chronologically on perforated, vertically accordioned computer paper, included all newly reported homicides, or attempted homicides, believed to have been committed by a person or persons unknown to the victim. (Fortunately for Pender’s workload, in America the average murder victim was three times more likely to be killed by a family member or acquaintance than by a stranger.) Pender read it carefully as always, relying on his prodigious memory to alert him to telltale patterns, such as victims with descriptions similar to those in previous stranger homicides, or killers with similar m.o.’s.

Today, it was the location of a week-old double murder on the
printout that caught Pender’s eye. Santa Cruz, California, once known to the FBI’s monster hunters as the serial killer capital of the United States, with three separate multiple murderers operating simultaneously during the early seventies.

For Pender, however, the words
Santa Cruz
brought to mind a quick succession of images from the summer of 1985: the stakeout in the post office, the skull in the tomato patch, the fifteen-year-old boy who’d dropped out of a second-story window. Suddenly he realized he had no idea how any of it had come out. How many bodies had been dug up? Had anyone else ever been arrested for the snuff films? And what about Little Luke? Had he ever been found, alive or dead, and if alive, what had become of him?

But that was life in Liaison Support for you. Rarely did Pender find himself involved in either the beginning or the end of an investigation, and although during his travels he was often called upon to interview imprisoned serial offenders for ViCAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, since he’d never interviewed a criminal he’d helped apprehend, there was no sense of closure there, either.

So Pender wouldn’t have wasted any of his precious time wondering what had become of Luke Sweet if the identities of the victims in that double homicide in Santa Cruz—Frederick and Evelyn Harris; married couple; ages seventy-three and seventy, respectively—hadn’t rung a bell.

Pender put down the printout, picked up his phone, speed-dialed Thom Davies in Clarksburg, got his British-accented voice mail. “CJIS, Thom Davies. Leave your message at the tone, and please bear in mind: a lack of foresight on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.”

“Hey, Thom, it’s Ed Pender. Could you take a look in your magic box, see what you can come up with on one Luke Sweet, Jr.? That’s Luke as in the third book of the New Testament, Sweet as in, please sweetheart, do this for me ASAP. I think we might have a live one.”

The old man’s golf game was a zigzag journey of short increments; a diagram of his progress from tee to green would have resembled a map of a honeybee’s pollen dance. His putting was nothing to write home about, either, but he dressed a good game, from his fawn-colored Ben Hogan cap to his tasseled FootJoys, and never cheated, never improved a lie or took a mulligan even when he was playing alone.

Early morning was the old man’s favorite time of day. The tattered wisps of fog scudding across the emerald fairways, the smell of the dew-damp grass, the hoarse barking of the sea lions conspired to awaken even his age-dimmed senses. “It doesn’t get much better than this, does it, Willis?” he said to his favorite caddy, as the two stood alone on the fourth tee, waiting for a doe and her white-spotted, wobbly-legged fawn to cross the misty fairway.

“Lord, no,” said Willis Jones, who’d had to drag himself out of a warm bed while it was still dark out, then ride two buses and a company shuttle. As he knelt to tee up the rich old white man’s ball for him, he spied a shiny green golf cart bucketing along at top speed down the cart path, heading toward them from the fourth green, with the driver leaning out the side, steering with one hand and waving with the other.

“Now what does that fool think he’s doin’?” the caddy muttered when the cart left the path to cut diagonally across the fairway toward them, tracing dark stripes against the grain.

“Stop, stop,” called the old man, waving his arms over his head. “Wait there, I’ll come to you.”

His caddy followed him, leaving the old man’s bag behind but carrying the three-wood he’d been about to hand him.

“Mr. Brobauer?” Dressed in a worn denim jacket and jeans
with the cuffs turned up, the man climbing down from the cart was of medium height, round-shouldered, and barrel-chested, with close-cropped hair and an almost simian brow.

“Yes, I’m Judge Brobauer.” Although it had been many years since he’d served as a Superior Court justice, the old man had retained the customary honorific.

“You have to come with me right away. There was an accident.” The words came out flat and underinflected, like an over-rehearsed speech in an elementary school play.

“To whom?” asked the old man, a widower with two grown children and no grandchildren.

“I…don’t know. But you have to come with me right away.”

Willis Jones shook his head firmly. “Somp’ns not right, Judge,” he said, interposing himself between the other two, with his back to the newcomer. “I don’t know this fella from Adam, I never even
seen
him around here before. So how ’bout you let
me
give you a lift back to the clubhouse, just to—”

Brobauer heard a flat, anechoic popping sound. Jones crumpled violently to the ground like a hundred-and-sixty-pound marionette with all its strings cut simultaneously. It happened so quickly and bloodlessly that Judge Brobauer half-expected Jones to scramble to his feet, grinning, as if he were performing in a
Candid Camera
stunt. Instead, the hulking newcomer waved a smoking pistol in the direction of the cart he’d arrived in. “Get in,” he said matter-of-factly.

Brobauer glanced from the man with the gun to the man on the ground, then back to the man with the gun. “We can still work this out,” he said. “I could say your gun went off accidentally. You could plead involuntary manslaughter.”

The gunman shook his head slowly but firmly. “If you don’t get in the cart I’ll have to kill you here.”

“No, wait, listen to—”

“I am going…to count…to three.”

“Please, you have to—”

“One.”

“let me—”

“Two.”

“Just listen to—”

“Three.”

“Quitting time,” said Pool, standing in the doorway of Pender’s office, holding her purse.

“Already?” Pender glanced at his watch, widened his eyes comically. “Oh well. Like the frog said, time’s fun when you’re having flies.”

“Are you working late?”

Pender nodded. “One thing I’ve learned about the Beltway at rush hour: you can spend it sitting in traffic or you can spend it sitting in your office—either way, you spend it sitting.”

“Good night, then.”

“G’night, Pool.” Pender waited with his great bald head cocked, listening for the civilized little
ding
of the elevator bell and the
whoosh
of the elevator doors, then unlocked the bottom left drawer of his desk, took out a shot glass and a bottle of Jim Beam, and poured himself his first drink of the day.

To demonstrate his mastery over the booze (as if holding off your first drink until after 5:00 weren’t proof enough), Pender took only the smallest of sips, savoring it appreciatively and at length before knocking back the rest of the shot. He sighed as the whiskey hit his stomach and began to spread its amber warmth outward.

After his second drink, Pender had mellowed enough to think about telephoning Pam to congratulate her on opening her own
agency. Then he remembered how badly their last conversation—it had to have been at least a year ago—had gone, and had just about decided to send her a congratulatory telegram instead, when his desk phone rang.

“Pender here.”

“Ed, it’s Thom Davies.” Pronounced
Davis
—the database wizard was an expatriate Shropshire lad.

Pender grabbed a pad and pencil. “What’ve you got for me, Tommy boy?”

“The greatest of admiration, along with the following information regarding your alleged live one.”

“Shoot.”

“All righty, then: Mistah Sweet, he dead.”

“Dead,” Pender echoed weakly. He’d been so sure of the scenario he’d constructed in his mind that he’d forgotten it was only a scenario.

“Dead. Deceased. ’E’s a stiff. Bereft of life. Pushing up daisies. Kicked the bucket. Joined the bleedin’ choir invis—”

“I got it, I got it.” Pender cut him off before he could run through the rest of the dead parrot sketch. “This
is
Luke Sweet
Junior
we’re talking about?”

“It is indeed. Do you remember that California mental hospital that went up in blazes a couple of weeks ago?”

“Vaguely.”

“That’s probably because Oklahoma City knocked it clean off the front pages two days later. At any rate, according to the San Jose
Mercury News,
your man was one of the inmates presumed to have died in the fire.”

“Presumed?” Pender pronounced it with the same distaste most people reserve for words like
smegma.

“I gather there was some difficulty sorting out the remains.”

“Yeah, well, speaking of remains, I see by today’s stranger homicides list that somebody murdered Sweet’s maternal grandparents last week.”

“So you think the reports of his death may be exaggerated?”

“Considerably. Would you mind faxing over those newspaper articles?”

“Or I could teach you how to run a search on your computer. You know, that white box thingie on your desk, looks a little like a television set?”

“I was wondering what that was,” said Pender.

“He lives, he wakes,” says a voice somewhere above and behind Ellis Brobauer. “’Tis Death is dead, not he.”

Brobauer takes stock: he is lying on his back on a grassy, gently sloping hillside, his arms outstretched. Ache in his neck, wrenching pain in his shoulders, fingers numb. Eyelids glued together, crusty with gunk; lips dry and cracked with deep, painful fissures. The North African sun beating down—somehow Rommel must have flanked the column, cut off his unit. Brobauer can’t remember his tank being captured; he wonders how badly he was injured, and how his crew had fared.

“Water,” he croaks. His throat is raw, as though he’s been screaming for hours. When there’s no response, he tries again, in his rudimentary, phrase-book German.
“Wasser, bitte.”

Glug-glug-glug.
Waves of warm water cascade down, pounding against Brobauer’s upturned face as he spits and sputters and gasps for air, tossing his head from side to side, trying to evade the deluge.

Then it’s over. Brobauer licks his lips, then opens his eyes a slit, squinting against the glaring sky. Suddenly it all comes back to him: the solo morning round, the stranger who shot Willis Jones, the jouncing, stiflingly hot ride in the trunk of the stranger’s
BMW. “Who are you? What do you want? If it’s money, I assure you I can— What are you doing? Wait, stop!”

The denim-clad man pauses with the wooden mallet raised. In his other hand he holds a metal tent stake with a sharp, serrated tip poised above and between the third and fourth metacarpals of Ellis Brobauer’s outstretched right hand. His eyes are oddly out of focus, as if he were seeing things that weren’t there, or not seeing things that were. “What?”

His mind momentarily blank, Judge Brobauer blurts out the first thing that pops into his head—anything to keep that mallet from beginning its downward arc. “Why—why are you doing this?”

The other man lowers the mallet and closes his eyes; while he speaks, in an uninflected monotone, his eyeballs shuttle back and forth behind the closed lids, as if he were reading a teleprompter. “I’m only twenty-five years old, but I’ve already been lied to and betrayed by everyone I’ve ever trusted, robbed of my freedom and robbed of my mind, then locked up for life in this shithole they call Meadows Road.”

Brobauer’s abductor opens his eyes again; the unfocused look returns. “Wish me luck, Pocket Pal,” he adds, raising the mallet, and with a series of forceful taps he drives the leading edge of the stake through Ellis’s palm, neatly parting the metacarpals without breaking them, and pinning the back of the old man’s hand against the grassy hillside.

Just before six o’clock, the fax machine in Pool’s outer office/command center dinged and began spitting out pages. Pender gathered them up, brought them back to his office, and locked the door behind
him. Then he poured himself another shot, put his feet up on the desk, tilted his creaky old behemoth of a chair back, back, back until his head was level with his chocolate brown Hush Puppies, and began reading.

BONNY DOON MENTAL HOSPITAL DESTROYED BY EXPLOSION, FIRE
, shouted the large-type, front-page headline in the morning edition of the San Jose
Mercury News
on April 18.
DEATH TOLL COULD REACH
20
was the subhead. Pender had to put on his half-moon reading glasses to make out the text, which had been further reduced in size by the faxing process.