The Boys from Santa Cruz (20 page)

“Well, shit, buddy!” Pender sounded impressed.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining.” Skip added hurriedly. “I like being a P.I. I have my own agency now, with a dozen operatives, I set my own hours, I’m making a decent living. But compared to what you do, going after serial killers and shit, it makes tracking down deadbeats and repoing cars look kind of, I don’t know, kind of…
blah.
”

“Trust me, it’s not that exciting. I spend a third of my time on the phone, another third going over computer printouts, and most of what’s left dealing with Bureau-crats and bullshit.”

By the time the waitress arrived with their orders, the conversation had turned to business. Since Pender had an appointment with a Detective Klug from the Santa Cruz PD at two o’clock, while Skip had promised to show up in Salinas to identify Brobauer’s corpse no later than three, they had to talk while they ate—never a good idea when scarfing American comfort food.

“Luke and I actually got along pretty well, once he got over the idea he could con me into cutting him loose.” Skip was fighting a losing battle trying to keep the overstuffed filling of his tuna melt from squishing out the other side every time he took a bite. “But the second I handed him over, he went bananas. Split this one orderly’s nose wide open with a head butt, knocked another one on his ass before they got a needle into him.”

Pender’s triple-decker sandwich was presenting him with the usual dilemma: take out the toothpicks and have the sandwich fall apart, or leave them in and risk spearing his palate. He compromised by moving the toothpicks outward in increments, which only postponed the inevitable structural failure. “I’ve seen the bananas act. He tried to get to me after I interviewed him at his
grandparents’ house—it took two big Santa Cruz cops to bring him down.”

“Yeah, he told me about that,” said Skip. “Then he said they sent him to some wilderness training school, and he and his girlfriend escaped, then she fell over a cliff.”

“Thrown over, more likely,” said Pender, picturing the eyeless corpse in the rescue basket. But like many sewer workers, Pender had long ago erected a fire wall between his job and his appetite; he ate on as he talked. “I went through her autopsy report on the plane this morning. The M.E. determined she died from the fall, but her body also showed signs consistent with rape—abrasions on the hoo-ha and so on—and there were bruises on her neck. My guess is that he probably strangled her until she was unconscious, raped her either before or after or both, then tossed her over the cliff, either thinking she was dead or making sure of it.”

“Well, he sure fooled my ass,” said Skip. “I totally bought it.”

“Oh, he’s convincing, all right. Most psychopaths are. But I’ll bet you anything he didn’t tell you about his pal Brent.”

“Who?”

“Yeah, I didn’t think so.” Pender used the side of his pinkie nail to work a scrap of toothpick cellophane from between two teeth, then flicked it away. “Brent Perry was one of the other Mountain Project kids. Our boy Luke clubbed him over the head, left him by the side of the trail with his brains leaking out. Then there was this Indian pot dealer up in Humboldt whose family took the Lukester in after he ran away from the Mountain Project.
He
was found stabbed to death in a motel room near Stockton, and guess whose fingerprints were all over the room?”

“The Lukester’s?”

“You got it.”

Pender plucked a scrap of bacon off his napkin, popped it into his mouth, then looked up slyly. “So what do you say, Magnum, P.I.? You want to work with me on this, find out whether catching serial killers for the FBI really beats repoing cars? I can’t promise to
pay you anything, but I can probably score you an FBI sweatshirt or a cap or something.”

Skip briefly considered whether Pender might be making the offer out of…well, out of the P word. But Pender didn’t strike him as the pitying type. And besides, since he was already involved on behalf of a client, who was to say it wasn’t a matter of the
FBI
helping
him
? “Man, I’d be honored,” he told Pender.

When they’d finished eating, Pender grabbed the check and Skip left the tip. Skip took a toothpick from the dispenser at the cashier’s counter; Pender pocketed a handful of mints. They left the diner together, and shook hands out in the parking lot. “It’s a lucky thing we happened to run into each other back there,” said Pender.

“As we say in California, there are no accidents,” Skip told him.

Pender laughed. “That must make your insurance companies awfully happy.”

Detective Lloyd Klug was a scrappy old-timer with gray hair cut
en brosse
and the flattened nose of a pugilist. Pender figured him for a welterweight, the kind of brawler who’d gladly take two shots to land one. He met Pender in the lobby of the Santa Cruz Police Department headquarters, a mission-style structure on Center Street with arched doorways and a red-tiled roof. His first question, after they’d shaken hands, was, “Mind if I smoke?”

By way of answer, Pender flashed his Marlboro hard pack. They adjourned the meeting to the courtyard, which had as a centerpiece a circular fountain with a sculpture of what looked like two elongated shark’s fins sticking up from its center. Klug
fired up a Camel straight and apologized for his sketchy grasp of the Harris case.

He’d only been assigned to it the day before, he told Pender, when the Santa Cruz municipal police department took over jurisdiction from the county sheriff. It had been one of those jurisdictional pissing contests: two headless bodies had been discovered up in the unincorporated hills, and it wasn’t until after they’d been identified that a search of their home indicated they had been murdered inside the city limits.

“And even then, the sheriff’s department held on to it until yesterday, probably on the off chance they’d be able to solve it. When that didn’t turn out to be so easy, lo and behold: ‘Sorry, our mistake—I guess it was you guys’s case all along.’”

You guys’s.
“Am I right in guessing you’re not from around here?”

“Philly. I came out here twenty years ago. Smartest move I ever made.”

“You’re going to look even smarter when this is over,” said Pender.

Klug worked a shred of tobacco from between his teeth, spat it out cleanly, expertly, just beyond the toes of his Bates Uniform oxford-style cop shoes. “Oh?”

Pender laid it all out for him: the psychopathic grandson who would have been everybody’s prime suspect if he weren’t already deceased; the coroner who now admitted he might not be all that deceased after all; the possibly related kidnap-murder down in Monterey County just the other day.

“So listen,” Klug said when Pender had finished. “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but I’ve dealt with the Bureau before, so I gotta ask: Is there some quid pro involved here?”

“What?”

“You looking to put the cuffs on him, hold a press conference? Or maybe there’s a federal warrant out for him someplace?”

Pender sighed. “Let’s make a deal. You don’t assume I’m a
face-time-hungry Bureau asshole, I won’t assume you’re a local yokel who couldn’t find a turd in a bag of marshmallows.”

“At least until proven otherwise,” said Klug.

“You bet,” said Pender.

As a private investigator, Skip Epstein had encountered no shortage of cheating spouses, insurance fakers, and runaway debtors. What he hadn’t seen many of were dead bodies, so for a moment there, when the jumpsuited morgue attendant had lowered the rubber sheet to reveal the face of the corpse underneath, Skip saw stars, heard a roaring in his ears, and retasted the tuna melt rising in his gorge. When he came back to full consciousness after a brief temporal discontinuity, Sergeant Darrien, the sheriff’s deputy who’d walked him down to the morgue, was holding him by the elbow to steady him while the morgue attendant held out a barf basin.

“I’m okay now,” Skip protested unconvincingly.

Darrien led him over to a folding chair. “Is that Mr. Brobauer?”

“Judge Brobauer—no question about it. But what in God’s name happened to his eyes?”

“Turkey vulture, we think. There were some feathers scattered around where we found the body.”

“Really? And where was that?” Skip put a little extra gee whiz in his voice, trying to draw Darrien out without seeming to be grilling him.

“On a ridge just south of Big Sur. Sickest crime scene I’ve ever seen.”

“No shit?”

“Swear to God. The victim was staked to the ground with metal
tent stakes, and there was a dead animal placed on his chest—a
very
dead animal. I can’t tell you what kind—that’s a control variable.” Control variables were clues the police held back in order to weed out the nut jobs who came out of the woodwork to confess every time a juicy murder hit the news.

Just then the phone on the wall started ringing. The sergeant excused himself to answer it, then turned back to Skip after a brief conversation. “I’m supposed to bring you back upstairs,” he said tersely. “Lieutenant Farley wants to talk to you.”

Farley, Skip soon discovered, was a compact, khaki-uniformed forty-something with a square face and a Julius Caesar haircut. He greeted Skip coldly, nodded toward an uncushioned, decidedly unergonomic wooden chair next to his desk, then turned back to his computer and ignored Skip for the next few minutes.

Sitting down provided Skip with momentary relief—he’d done more walking in the last few hours than he normally did in a week. But after a few minutes in the hard-bottomed chair, his pain returned with a vengeance, and brought a gang of friends along for company. Skip dry-popped two Norco that left a not-unwelcome bitter taste at the back of his throat.

Finally the lieutenant looked up at him. “Epstein, eh?”

He’d pronounced it as if it rhymed with
mean
instead of
fine;
Skip let it go. “Yes, sir.”

“David Epstein?”

Skip nodded, not sure where this was going, but not much liking the ride.

“Friend of the victim’s family, eh?”

Another nod.

“Any reason why you didn’t happen to mention to anybody down here that you were a private investigator?”

Oh, crap. “It didn’t seem relevant—I only came down to ID the body.”

“I see. And you’ve done that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s Brobauer?”

“No question.”

“Good. Now get the hell out of here.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“They’re all one-syllable words, they shouldn’t be that difficult to understand.”

“But—”

“And when you get back to San Francisco”—enunciated with extreme distaste, if not full-out loathing—“please inform Warren Brobauer that if and when the Monterey County Sheriff’s Department requires the assistance of a private investigator, rest assured we will send for one. Until then, if I catch you sticking your nose into one of my cases without permission, I’ll have your license pulled so fast your head’ll spin like that girl in
The Exorcist.
”

Afterward, Skip would admit to Pender that he knew his response was childish. In the interest of public safety, he should have given Luke Sweet’s name to the detective, hurt feelings or no hurt feelings. Instead, he’d turned in the doorway on his way out and called, “Chuck you, Farley!”

It sure had seemed like a good idea at the time, though, he told Pender.

“Say what? You’re breaking up.”

“I SAID: IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME!” Skip shouted into his cell. Driving north up the peninsula on 101, he had just cleared San Jose and was hoping to reach San Francisco before the rush-hour traffic closed in.

“No harm done,” said Pender, speaking from a slightly mildewed room in the least expensive motel in Santa Cruz, the Bide-A-Nite on Soquel Avenue. “I told Klug about Brobauer, so if he hasn’t already hooked up with Farley on that, he will soon.”

“And Klug likes Sweet for the Harris murders?”

“Adores him.” A snick and a hiss—Pender had fired up a Marlboro with his venerable Zippo. “You know, I was thinking, as long as the locals down here seem to be getting their shit together, how
about you and me taking a run up to Sweet’s old place to poke around? That’s where he tried to hole up the last time he was on the run.”

“Sure, why not?” said Skip. “Maybe I’ll get lucky twice.”

They agreed to meet at Skip’s apartment around nine o’clock the following morning. After giving Pender directions and signing off, Skip noticed that his cell phone battery was getting low. He switched the phone off, hooked it up to the car charger, and spent the rest of the ride listening to drive-time sports talk on KNBR. A particularly evocative beer commercial started him thinking about the icy green bottle of Heineken currently chilling in his refrigerator—he was all but salivating by the time he pulled into the single-car garage attached to his apartment.

The phone was fully charged by then. Skip unplugged it from the charger and slipped it into the right front pocket of his slacks. He used the remote device clipped to the sun visor to close the garage door behind him, and entered the apartment through a connecting door that led directly from the garage into the kitchen.

Still thinking about that beer, he tossed his jacket over the back of a kitchen chair, then headed straight for the refrigerator. Opened the door. Stooped to reach for the bottle of Heineken on the bottom shelf. Sensed movement behind him. Started to turn. Felt a blow on the back of the head and saw the universe explode into jagged spears of white light against a black velvet backdrop.

Whoever wrote that song wasn’t kidding about the morning fog filling the air,
thought Pender, when he reached San Francisco early the next morning. Even with the headlights and windshield wipers on, he couldn’t see much farther than the end of the Toyota’s hood. Somehow he found his way to Francisco Street, though, and pulled into a convenient parking spot directly across the street from Epstein’s building.

A mist of silver droplets hung suspended in the air like a stop-motion rainstorm, muffling the
thud
of the car door. The city smelled of the ocean, sharp tang and faint rot; the pavement gleamed wet and gray. A rolled-up newspaper in a thin plastic bag lay on Epstein’s doormat. Pender picked it up and pressed the
doorbell, heard chimes bing-bonging inside.
Excuse me, I’m looking for Tony Bennett’s heart,
he was planning to say when Epstein answered the door, only Epstein never answered the door. Pender rang the bell again and pressed his ear against the door. No footsteps, no sounds of life inside.