After nuking a Hungry-Man Salisbury steak dinner and pouring himself a Thirsty-Man tumblerful of Jim Beam on the rocks, Pender set up a TV tray in the living room, intending to watch the Orioles game while he ate. Instead he found himself thinking about Little Luke. A flat-out, textbook psychopath, the Mountain Project shrink had labeled him—no wonder he’d ended up in a mental hospital. But had the boy ever been convicted of any murders? Or even been tried? Pender decided to ask Thom Davies to search the CJIS records first thing in the morning.
He also made up his mind to get in touch with the Santa Cruz coroner to find out whether Luke Sweet, Jr., was maybe dead, really dead, or really, really dead. And while he was at it, he decided to contact the homicide detectives investigating the Harris double murder to let them know it might not be a stranger killing after all.
Looking up at the television, Pender realized that although the Orioles game was in the third inning, he hadn’t seen a single play. Nor did he recall eating, although he must have, because the plastic tray had been cleaned out, right down to the dessert brownie.
Feeling cheated, he nuked another dinner, refilled his tumbler, and set up a second TV tray for the sheaf of faxed newspaper articles he’d brought home with him. Then he donned his half-moon specs and read through the articles while he ate, glancing up at the television only when he heard a loud crack of the bat, or when the home crowd roared loudly enough to attract his attention.
The last clipping was dated April 25. Twenty-one confirmed dead was the final body count, which included Little Luke. No one left missing or unaccounted for. The initial explosion was held to be the result of arson at the hands of person or persons unknown, said person or persons believed to have perished either in the initial explosion or in the subsequent fire.
That last item, Pender realized, would explain why the investigation might not be vigorously pursued: the locals were assuming the perp was deceased. But then again, they were also assuming that Luke Sweet was deceased, and Pender’s gut continued to insist that they were dead wrong about that.
CHAPTER TWO
1
6:00 A.M., Pacific daylight time. The pain in his hips and lower back awoke Skip Epstein as surely and promptly as any alarm clock or telephone wake-up service. Rolling over onto his side, he fumbled around for the bottle of Norco tablets on the bedside table, and washed two of them down with a swig of bottled water.
6:40 A.M. For the first and probably last time that day, nothing hurt. Skip might even have been a little buzzed—sometimes it was difficult for chronic pain sufferers to distinguish between a drug high and the euphoria that came with being temporarily pain free. Five minutes, he told himself: you can have five minutes to enjoy it.
6:45 A.M. Okay, five more minutes.
7:30 A.M. The thump of the Chronicle hitting the front door of Skip’s two-bedroom flat on Francisco Street—he lived on the ground floor and rented out the top to a family of Russian immigrants—finally lured him out of bed. Even in San Francisco’s prosperous Marina district, there were people who saw a newspaper lying on the sidewalk as fair game. But the walk from the bed to the door reawakened the pain in his hips; bending stiffly from the waist to pick up the paper reaggravated the ache in his back.
One glance at the front page and the pain was momentarily forgotten. PROMINENT SF ATTORNEY MISSING, BELIEVED KIDNAPPED, read the headline. CADDY FOUND SHOT TO DEATH was the subhead, which seemed like kind of an ass-backward priority to Skip, but not particularly surprising.
Accompanying the article was a photograph of Ellis Brobauer shaking hands with Assembly Speaker Willie Brown at a black-tie charity event. Skip skimmed the story on the stoop, in his bathrobe. As he reentered the apartment, he heard the telephone ringing and hurried down the hall to the kitchen—you couldn’t say ran, though he did employ the awkward, hopping gait that had earned little David Epstein the nickname Skip in grade school.
Skip managed to snatch the wall phone out of the cradle just before the answering machine intercepted the call. He was glad he had, because it was his father on the line, and Leon J. Epstein, Esq., took machine-answered calls as personal affronts. “Did you see, Davey?”
“I saw.”
“What do you think?”
“I think somebody wanted that corner office of his real bad.” Though largely retired and spending most of his time at his second home in Pebble Beach, the Chairman Emeritus of Wengert & Brobauer had refused to give up his twenty-third-floor office with its power view of the bay from Alcatraz to Treasure Island.
“Not funny, sonny. You know how much our family owes that man?” With Ellis’s backing, Leon Epstein had become the first member of his faith ever to make full partner at Wengert & Brobauer.
“I know, Dad.” When Skip first struck out on his own, folks weren’t exactly knocking each other down for the privilege of hiring a gimpy P.I. Jobs and referrals from W & B had kept him afloat that first year, and the law firm was still one of Epstein Investigative Services’s most important clients.
“So what do you think?”
“Professionally?”
“No, as a baseball fan.” Leon J. rolled his eyes—yes, over the phone. “Of course, professionally.”
“Unless there was some contact they’re not telling us about, this was no kidnapping for ransom.”
“Which you know because…?”
“Kidnappers who’re hoping for ransom almost always contact the family within the first few hours to tell them not to call the cops.”
“So if not ransom, then what?”
Skip shrugged—if his father could roll his eyes over the phone, Skip could shrug. “Who knows? Listen, I gotta go, Dad. If I hear anything over the grapevine, I’ll let you know.”
The Buchanan Street headquarters of Epstein Investigative Services were a vast improvement over the old digs, in a derelict warehouse south of Market that had been condemned after the ’89 quake. In the new offices, the receptionist sat behind a swooping art deco counter that looked like it belonged in an airport terminal, while the heart of the business, the bull pen, was situated in an airy, well-lighted room that took up over half the floor. There, skip tracers in soundproofed carrels employed telephones and personal computers in an ongoing campaign to threaten, cajole, hoodwink, and bamboozle bureaucrats, contacts, and functionaries into disclosing the whereabouts of debtors, deadbeat dads, repossessable vehicles, and white-collar criminals.
Although the Marina district location was only a few blocks from his apartment on Francisco Street, Skip drove to work as always, parking his Buick in a reserved space in the basement garage. He took the elevator up to the second floor, stopping off at the reception desk long enough to admire Tanya’s latest piercing and pick up his messages, one of which was from Warren Brobauer, Ellis’s son, currently the managing partner of Wengert & Brobauer.
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.”
“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.”
2
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.
3
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 remembe
rs: that mocking, disembodied laughter.
4
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.
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