The Boys from Santa Cruz (17 page)

Skip returned the call from his corner office. “Warren. Skip.” In San Francisco, business etiquette required the use of first names for everyone below the rank of mayor.

“Thanks for getting back to me, Skip. Are you aware of what’s going on vis-à-vis my father?”

“Just what I read in the
Chron
this morning. Do the cops have any leads yet?”

“Cops! Hah! You can stuff what they know in the proverbial gnat’s ass and still have room for a set of matched luggage. I spoke with Lil this morning”—Warren’s older sister was named Lillian, although as Herb Caen had once remarked in his column, most newspaper readers thought her first two names were Prominent Socialite—“and we both agreed we want you to look into this on behalf of the family.”

“I have to tell you, Warren, police departments do not generally appreciate P.I.’s getting involved with ongoing homicide investigations.”

“And I have to tell you, Skip, I’m so frustrated with the lack of motivation on the part of the Monterey Sheriff’s Department that at this point I could give a proverbial rat’s proverbial ass what any police department does or does not appreciate.”

Skip punched the air in silent triumph, then sighed audibly into the phone like a man coming to a hard decision. “Okay, Warren, let me see what I can find out.”

“Thank you. We—we’d be grateful.” For the first time in the conversation, there was a catch in Warren’s voice. Suddenly Skip realized that the poor bastard was hurting, that his
father
had just
been kidnapped, for shit’s sake.
Protestants,
thought Skip:
if it was
my
dad, I’d have been a basket case by now.

“De nada,”
said Skip, a little more gently. “I’ll get back to you as soon as I know anything.”

9:00
A.M
., Eastern time. Just another morning at the office for Pender. Coffee, a couple Danish, the sports section of
The Washington Post.
Not a bad life if you can stand the excitement.

As always, Pender saved Shirley Povich’s column for last, then brushed the crumbs from his desk blotter, and with a yellow legal pad and a coffee mug full of sharpened pencils at hand, he began placing calls and returning phone messages in geographical order, working from east to west according to time zone.

Normally he would have postponed his West Coast calls until after lunch, but today he was so antsy about this Luke Sweet business that he postponed lunch instead. Long-distance directory assistance gave him the number for the Santa Cruz County Coroner’s Office, a division of the sheriff’s department. The deputy who answered the phone connected him with Sergeant Bagley, the ranking officer, and Bagley referred him to the forensic pathologist Dr. Alicia Gallagher.

“Good morning, Dr. Gallagher. This is Special Agent E. L. Pender, with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I understand you were in charge of identifying the victims in the Meadows Road fire?”

“That’s correct,” she said, with what may have been a sigh.

But sighs were more than okay with Pender. He loved to hear them when he was conducting an interview: they almost always meant
ask me more.
“It must have been one unholy mess,” he prompted.

“That’s a bit of an understatement.”

“How so?”

“Oh, let me count the ways. To begin with, the building was a brick structure, which may have worked for the third little pig, but is a very bad idea in California. How it survived the ’89 quake is anybody’s guess. Then there was the initial explosion of a few thousand cubic feet of natural gas, causing a partial structural failure and triggering an absolute holocaust of a fire. At its peak, over seventy-five percent of the building was engulfed. Then, as the fire grew hotter, what was left of the building underwent a catastrophic structural collapse—in layman’s terms, the place completely pancaked.”

Pender gave her a little
whew
—just enough to let her know he was paying attention without interrupting the flow.

“Exactly. And do you know how you identify a human body after it’s been blown up, smashed, incinerated, then crushed again under a few thousand tons of brick and rubble, Agent Pender? Well, neither do I.”

“And yet you had to,” Pender prompted gently.

“Precisely. We had to. And of course they weren’t all as bad as that worst-case scenario I gave you. We managed to identify all but four of the bodies through dental records.”

She sounded reluctant to go on. Pender prodded her gently. “And the rest?”

A deep breath, an unmistakable suck-it-up sigh. “By the time we reached the bottommost strata, there were four names unaccounted for out of the list of all those known to have been present at the hospital at the time of the explosion. Two patients, two orderlies. So what we did was—ultimately, it was Sergeant Bagley’s call, but I believe the sheriff signed off on it as well—we took the organic matter we found at the bottom of the pile—enough to fill a shoe box, none of it with viable DNA—and declared it mixed remains. We gave a portion to the families of any of the remaining unaccounted-fors who requested it. We didn’t fudge the identification, mind you—they knew what they were getting.”

“I don’t doubt it for a moment,” said Pender. “And please understand that nobody’s second-guessing you here. But now comes the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, if that doesn’t date me too badly. Those two unaccounted-for patients—would one of them have been Luke Sweet?”

Long pause, troubled pause. Then: “Yes. Yes, that’s correct. How did you know?”

Pender felt like whooping in triumph, but he settled for drawing a series of exclamation points on his legal pad—he didn’t want her to think he was gloating. “Somebody murdered Sweet’s grandparents last week—a real hack job, from what I understand. Seeing as how that’s only a week after their psychopathic grandson disappeared in a suspicious fire, it just seemed like too much of a coincidence.”

“Oh. Oh I see,” said the doctor. “And now
I
have a sixty-four thousand-dollar question for
you,
Agent Pender: Are we talking about the Harris murders?”

“We are.”

“And Luke Sweet was their grandson?”

“He was.”

“Holy moly,” said Dr. Gallagher.

“I take it you’re familiar with their case?”

“I caught it. Another unholy mess. The bodies had been decapitated, dismembered, and strewn all over the Santa Cruz Mountains. We never did find the heads.”

“Holy moly back atcha.”

“Of course, it could still be a coincidence.”

“Absolutely,” said Pender—but they both knew he didn’t mean it.

The crust of the Blasted Land is coal black, porous, and brittle, with burrs that look sharp enough to slice through tender human flesh, but crumble like volcanic ash beneath Asmador’s feet. Jets of steam vent upward from bottomless cracks in the broken ground; the air smells foul and scorched, as though someone, somewhere, were burning a gigantic omelet made with rotten eggs.

Above the jagged horizon, the sky is a smoky, bloodshot gray. The light is diffuse, directionless. Slumped beneath the weight of the dead human he carries on his shoulders, Asmador trudges listlessly through a landscape devoid of shadow, toward the crumbling ruins of an ancient amphitheater. He passes beneath an arched entryway, its portcullis raised, and strides down a dank, dirt-floored tunnel that dips beneath the coliseum walls, then rises gradually, opening out onto a bullring circled by tier upon tier of stone benches.

There are no spectators at this meeting of the Concilium Infernalis—just Asmador and the Council members themselves, who have convened at the far end of the arena floor, twisting and squirming in high-backed, thronelike chairs framed from human bones and upholstered in leather tanned from human skins.

Because many of them are shape-shifters, lacking in repose, and others sport multiple heads (Asmodeus the Dandy, for instance, has three, a bull, a ram, and a human male, all symbolic of lechery, while Azazel the Armorer wears seven serpent heads, each of which has two faces), it’s difficult for Asmador to be sure how many of them are present as he shuffles forward to lay his burden, the bloodied, partially consumed corpse of an old man, at their feet. “Three down, three to go,” he announces.

Sammael the Red, also known as the Poison Angel (in Hebrew,
sam
means poison,
el
means angel), steps forward in his human
guise: youthful, handsome, and redheaded, with a sneer that always makes Asmador want to check to make sure his fly is closed. “Three down, my feathered ass! The first two hardly suffered, and this one died of a heart attack.”

This seems a little unfair to Asmador—but perhaps fairness isn’t a quality one should expect of a high-ranking demon. “I’ll do better next time, I promise. Just tell me which of them it should be.”

“The answer is in the Book,” hisses Sammael, disconcertingly transmogrifying into his other aspect—half-human, half-vulture. Even more disconcertingly, the Blasted Land begins to shimmer and fade like a soap bubble around him. “The answer is always in the Book,” he adds, his form so faint Asmador can see right through him. He laughs, and then he’s gone, and the others with him. But his laughter lingers. That’s one of the Poison Angel’s more annoying traits, Asmador remembers: that mocking, disembodied laughter.

Infantile Paralysis, the gift that keeps on giving,
thought Skip, washing down two more Norco tablets with the dregs of his third cup of coffee. Polio was a rotten enough deal; post-polio syndrome, with a median onset of over thirty years after the initial course of the disease, felt a little like piling on to Skip.

Still, all things considered, he’d gotten off relatively lightly, and he knew it. Having a withered left leg inches shorter than the right and fused at the ankle for good measure may not have been a picnic, but it beat the crap out of dying in an iron lung, like some of the kids he’d known in the hospital. And he couldn’t blame PPS for the damage his bobbing, skipping gait had done to his hips and spine—it was his own child-self’s fault for insisting on wearing
Keds or PF Flyers like the other kids, instead of the built-up shoe his orthopedist had prescribed.

While waiting for the pain pills to kick in, Skip worked the Brobauer case in his mind. No ransom demands had been received yet—Warren or Lillian would have been notified. But if money wasn’t the motive, what was? Ellis Brobauer had no known surviving enemies, and there’d been no family squabbles or romantic/sexual entanglements that Warren or Lillian were aware of—or would admit to, anyway. Nor had there been any work-related problems. According to Warren, except for a little rainmaking and a little estate work for his oldest clients, Ellis Brobauer had more or less retired from the law firm that bore his name.

But along with that coveted corner office, Judge Brobauer had retained the services of his secretary, the unforgettably named Doris Dragon. If the old man had been involved in some risky business that had led to his kidnapping and/or murder, Ms. Dragon, who’d been with him since the Ford administration, might know something about it.

It was worth a shot, anyway. Skip hauled the phone book down from the shelf and found a listing for Dragon, D., at 1000 Mason Street, which he guessed would be somewhere up on Nob Hill. She recognized his name—“Leon’s boy, of course”—and agreed to meet with him, although she doubted she could be of much help.

It took Skip five minutes to get to the car, ten minutes to reach Nob Hill, and another ten for a handicapped parking space to open up across the street from 1000 Mason, which turned out to be the grand old wedding cake of an apartment house known as the Brocklebank, where James Stewart had stalked Kim Novak in
Vertigo.

Ms. Dragon met Skip at the door of her seventh-floor apartment dressed in a fitted pantsuit of cobalt blue accessorized with a turquoise scarf. With her apricot-colored hair teased up into a hollow-looking pouf and her eyelids red beneath a hasty application of mascara, she might have been Margaret Thatcher’s slightly slutty older sister.

“I’ve been wracking my brain all morning,” she told Skip as she led him down a dark hallway to a living room cluttered with enough Oriental rugs, hangings, furniture, and tchotchkes to stock a good-size antiques store. “But I honestly can’t think of any reason anyone would want to harm Judge Brobauer.”

“Has he been working on any contentious cases lately?”

“As far as I’m aware, the only case he’s involved in directly is an estate matter. An elderly couple had been planning to leave everything in a trust for their grandson, who’s been institutionalized for several years. They had to rewrite their wills after the boy was killed in that terrible fire last month—surely you must have seen it in the news?”

But Skip had spent the last two weeks of April vacationing on Maui with his on-again, off-again lady friend—no newspapers, no television.

“It was a place called Meadows Road? North of Santa Cruz?”

Meadows Road! Meadows fucking Road. “Excuse me, Ms. Dragon? This grandson—was that Luke Sweet, by any chance?”

“It was. His grandparents were Fred and Evelyn Harris. They’d been clients of Mr. Brobauer for thirty years. When he told me they’d been murdered last week, you could have knocked me over with a feather.”

“I know what you mean,” Skip murmured.

“But I can’t see how that would have anything to do with his abduction—it wasn’t as if the wills were being contested. I believe most of the estate is going to be divided up among charities, now that the grandson is deceased.”

But Skip’s thoughts were already tending in the same direction as those of a certain overweight FBI agent in Quantico, Virginia, 2,843 miles to the east. “Excuse me, Ms. Dragon. Do you happen to know whether the authorities are absolutely
sure
Luke Sweet is dead?”

“I certainly hope so,” she replied. “As I recall, the young man was a rather nasty piece of work.”

“Oh, gawd,” said Steven P. McDougal, the head of the FBI’s Liaison Support Unit.

“What?” Pender was dressed for spring in a green-and-yellow madras sport jacket over a short-sleeved cotton-poly pink dress shirt that had been white until he’d laundered it with a pair of red socks a few months ago; his too-short, too-wide necktie might have been hand-painted by Jackson Pollock on a bad peyote trip.