The Boys from Santa Cruz (21 page)

Puzzled, he took out his notebook to make sure he had the street number right, then tried the doorknob. To his surprise, it wasn’t locked. He shoved the door open and stuck his head inside. “Anybody home?” he called down the dimly lighted hallway. “It’s me, Pender.”

He closed the door behind him, put the paper down on the whatnot table next to the umbrella stand, then stooped to check out the mail that had fallen through the slot. It all had Epstein’s name on it—either that or “Occupant.”

But everything else was wrong, wrong, wrong, from the door that had not been locked to the dangling chain that had not been latched to the dual dead bolts that had not been thrown. Why would anybody so lax about security have installed redundant dead bolts in the first place?

Then there were those reddish brown flecks on the baseboard and the faint, roughly circular stain where the gloss had been rubbed off the hardwood floor of the hallway.
Mark well,
said Pender’s gut—after chasing serial killers for almost twenty years, he didn’t need phenolphthalein or luminol to tell him he was looking at blood spatter and a clumsy cleanup job.

Pender took a giant step over the stain and walked on down the hall, checking out the rooms on either side. In the living room, an upright vacuum cleaner stood abandoned, its power cord still plugged into the socket. In the kitchen, a full bottle of Heineken lay on the floor next to the refrigerator.

By now, Pender was in full don’t-fuck-up-the-crime-scene mode. Touching nothing, planting his feet wide so as not to step where footprints were most likely to be found, he used his handkerchief to turn the doorknob by the base when he opened the
door of the bedroom at the end of the hall. The bed was unmade, with a duvet and a pair of pajamas on the floor, and the door of the adjoining bathroom was open. Backing out, Pender grabbed the edge of the door rather than the knob, and yanked the door closed behind him.

The door to the left of that one was slightly ajar. Pender edged it open, glanced around. Originally a guest bedroom, judging by the single bed and narrow dresser, the room was currently being used for storage. An old TV console minus the TV, an upended rowing machine leaning against the wall, boxes of old clothes, books, cassettes, LPs, board games, rolled-up posters, and small appliances, including a radio with a cracked Bakelite case and a toaster oven with a frayed cord.

It all looked random enough at first glance, but a closer inspection revealed to Pender’s trained eye a story written in the dust. A pattern of scrapes, drag marks, and rectangular depressions in the nap-worn carpet told him that someone had recently cleared a path diagonally across the room, shoving cartons aside to drag something heavy from the doorway to the closet.

In order to avoid disturbing the marks on the floor, Pender delicately picked his way around the edge of the room. When he reached the closet door, he took a deep, deliberate breath—slow the breath, slow the painful pounding of the heart—then used his handkerchief to turn the knob.

Sometimes you know what you’re going to see before you see it; sometimes you’re wrong. Pender had himself so convinced he was going to find Epstein’s body in the closet that after the door swung open, releasing the sickly sweet odor of day-old death, it took him a few seconds to realize that it was
not
Skip Epstein in drag he saw lying crumpled in the back of the cluttered, junk-filled closet, but a brown-skinned woman with her head wrapped in a bloody turban of paper towels.

When Skip regained consciousness the previous night, he’d been lying on his kitchen floor with his hands tied behind his back, a throbbing at the base of his skull, and a rubbery-smelling sack covering his head. An inner voice had tried to convince him that he was having a nightmare, that if only he could wake up, it would all be over, but he wasn’t buying it.
Face it, man,
he’d told himself:
Luke Sweet’s got you now. Same as he got his grandparents, same as he got Judge Bro——

Oh, God!
A wave of sheer animal terror had overwhelmed Skip when he pictured the old man’s eyeless corpse. He’d fought against the panic and mastered it to a degree, but had still been trembling when a firm hand gripped his arm just above the elbow and steered him through an open door. Unable to see or smell anything through the rubber sack, he hadn’t realized he was in the garage until he heard the clank and whine of the electric door rising above him.

Sweet’s car must have been parked directly outside the garage, backed up with its rear bumper nearly flush with the garage entrance and the trunk lid raised, Skip had realized, because the door was still rising overhead when a hard shove on the back sent him tumbling blindly into the trunk. Turning as he fell, he’d landed hard and curled up instinctively on his left side, with his knees almost to his chest; the trunk lid had slammed closed only inches above him.

Skip had spent the next several hours being tossed around, half-asphyxiated, in the trunk of the moving car. Eventually, mercifully, he’d passed out, and when he’d come to again, he’d found himself lying on a hard floor somewhere so deep in the boondocks that all he could hear were crickets and a lonesome hooting that even a city boy like Skip was able to identify as an owl.

Stiff-jointed, bruised, and sore, his hips and head aching and his bladder all but bursting, Skip had to beg his captor to let him take a piss. The man—presumably Luke Sweet—had untied Skip’s wrists and ankles but left the rubber sack covering his head, then led him outside to pee against what Skip guessed, from the hollow spattering sound, was probably the side of a wooden building.

Back inside, lying on his left side with his wrists and ankles bound again, Skip had heard the rasp of a disposable cigarette lighter; seconds later, the funky, leafy scent of pot smoke had been so strong he could smell it through the rubber sack. “Listen, Luke,” he’d said, raising his unsupported head, “you’ve got this all wrong. I’m on
your
side, Luke.”

“My name,” the other man had replied, “is Asmador.”

“Okay, Luke, Asmador, whatever you want to call yourself, all I’m saying is, your grandparents asked me to find you before the cops did, and bring you to Meadows Road so you could get some treatment. Otherwise you’d have gotten thrown into Juvie, or maybe even done hard time if they decided to try you as an adult. I thought I was doing you a favor—I had no way of knowing they were going to keep you there all those years.”

The only response had been the hiss of a deep, long toke, followed by a spate of coughing. Skip’s instinct, or compulsion, had been to talk on despite the absence of feedback, if only to keep the darkness at bay. And the withdrawal symptoms: going from eight Norco tablets a day down to zero without tapering off first was going to be like hitting the brakes at a hundred miles an hour without a seat belt—helloooo, windshield! “I swear, Luke—”

“Asmador,” the other man had hissed again, between tokes.

“Sorry, Asmador. I swear, even if you did blow the place up, your secret’s safe with me. I mean, I saw them beat you up when you first got there, and God knows what they’ve put you through since. In my book, they deserved whatever they got.”

No answer. Skip had tried another approach. “Hey, what do you say you take this bag off my head? Just for a couple minutes—I promise I won’t peek. It’s just that it’s getting kind of hard to breathe under here. Okay, Luke? I mean, Asmador?”

But by then Sweet had been snoring stertorously—he’d either fallen asleep or was feigning it. Skip had sighed, rolled onto his back, and closed his eyes, intending to rest for a few minutes and let his head clear while he worked out his next move.

The next thing he knew, it was morning. Birds were singing, a faint glow of daylight had crept in under the neck of the rubber sack, Skip’s head was pounding, and the old familiar pain in his lower back and hips had turned feral, like a family pet gone rabid. Rolling onto his right side for relief, Skip felt something in his right front pants pocket digging painfully into his right thigh.

Something hard.

Something like a cell phone.

Pender used his cell phone to call 911. He was waiting outside Epstein’s door with his badge case clipped to the breast pocket of his sport jacket and his badge hanging in plain sight when the first cruiser arrived. The rest was attitude—he treated the responding officers as if they’d been dispatched to
his
crime scene, directing them to stand guard outside Epstein’s door and make sure nobody touched the doorknob until it had been dusted.

Pender maintained control of the scene until a pair of veteran SFPD homicide detectives arrived in an unmarked car. Their initial assumption was that the missing man had shot his cleaning lady and fled; it took Pender a good deal of effort to convince the locals
that they were dealing instead with a homicide-kidnapping case involving a serial offender.

Pender’s next move was to give the San Francisco detectives the names of their counterparts in Santa Cruz and Monterey. When he’d finished doing that, his job as liaison support was over. Or so Steve McDougal informed him via his cell phone a few minutes later.

“You don’t understand, Steve,” said Pender, who had stepped off the curb and was now performing a primitive cell phone reception dance in the middle of Francisco Street, shuffling around in circles holding the phone to one ear and sticking his forefinger in the other. “Epstein was
working
with us—we can’t just turn our backs on him.”

“What’s this
we
stuff, kemo sabe?”

“All right,
I
was working with him. So there’s—”

“Ed.”

“No way I’m—”

“Ed?”

“Walking away from—”

“Ed!”

“What?”

“I want you on the next available commercial flight home. You’re a fifty-year-old liaison support specialist, not a case agent, not a field agent. If field assistance is requested, the Bureau has field offices and resident agencies from one end of California to the other, and if any liaising needs to be done, you can do it from here as easily as you can from there, with considerably less damage to my budget.”

“What if I pay my own expenses? It’s already Friday—what do you care where I spend the weekend?”

There was no immediate response. Pender wasn’t sure whether McDougal had been struck dumb, or if they’d lost the connection—either way, he decided to take the silence for permission. “Thanks, Steve, you won’t regret it,” he said, and hurriedly pushed the End Call button.

“Luke?” you call. “You there, Luke?”

No response. You lie still, holding your breath and listening intently for the faintest rustle to betray the other man’s presence. Then when you’re sure you’re alone—or as sure as you can be: there’s always the possibility Sweet is also lying still and holding
his
breath—you roll onto your stomach, wriggling and squirming, squirming and wriggling, until you’ve twisted your pants around on your hips far enough to bring the pocket with the phone in it within reach of your hands, which are still tied together behind your back, palms facing.

Somehow you manage to slide both hands into your pocket, but not far enough to reach the phone, which is jammed into the very bottom of the pocket, just out of reach of your yearning fingertips. So you stretch and strain and arch your spine backward and your shoulder blades downward, fighting for one…last…crucial…mini…micro…millimeter…

There! Got it!

Now bring your thumbs into play…trying to flip the phone open…can’t quite…almost there—
Ouch, ouch, cramp, thumb cramp, sonofa
——

Calm down, wait for the cramp to pass, try again. Work your thumbs up, up…force them into the gap…try to leverage the—

Sonofabitch!
It can’t be done. You can’t open the phone without taking it out of the pocket, any more than you could open a sandwich without taking it out of the Baggie.

Okay, okay, don’t panic. Slight adjustment necessary. Plan B: instead of working the trousers
sideways
any farther, work them
downward,
down over your hips. One of those if-you-can’t-raise-the-bridge-lower-the-water deals. Or in this case, if you can’t raise
the phone, lower the pocket by lowering the pants. It doesn’t have to be far…just far enough…an inch, another inch…

Ta-daaaaa!
The phone is out. Now work your thumbs between the gap again, pry the halves apart…a little farther…

Ta-daaaa
again: the phone is open.

Now visualize the faceplate. Small buttons numbered like a telephone dial. Larger buttons above them marked with little telephone icons—the one on the left is for placing or answering calls. But first you have to turn it on—that’s the larger button on the right, that’s the one you need to press and hold first.

Problem: the buttons are set nearly flush with the base—you can’t tell which is which just by touch.

Solution: just keep pressing buttons and holding them down, one after the other, until you find the one that goes
beep.

Okay, pressing buttons now. Trial and error: no beep…no beep…no beep…

Beep.

Lacking permission to request support from the Bureau’s San Francisco field office, Pender decided to try a different approach. Before leaving for Marshall County, he dropped by the Buchanan Street offices of Epstein Investigative Services. The receptionist, Tanya, an otherwise attractive young lady with Smurf blue hair, was bristling with rings, studs, and so many piercings it looked as though someone had taken a riveting gun to her face. Even before Pender tinned her, he could tell that she was as yet unaware that Epstein had been kidnapped only a few blocks away.

He broke the news gently, stressing that there was every reason
to believe Skip was still alive. Tears sprang to Tanya’s eyes nevertheless.
Don’t cry,
Pender wanted to tell her,
you’ll rust.

Minutes later, he was addressing the assembled staff in a small conference room behind the bull pen—you could tell by the ping-pong table that it was seldom used for conferences. A motley crew, casually dressed for the most part in T-shirts, bowling shirts, jeans, and cross-trainers, they sat in stunned silence after Pender finished talking.