“Thanks so much. And, Skip?”
“Warren.”
“Lil and I want whoever did this caught and punished. Have you made any progress on your end of the investigation?”
“Matter of fact, I have.” He told Warren what he’d learned so far.
“Stay with it, then, if you don’t mind. Because quite frankly, Skip, I’ve spent half the morning on the telephone with the lead homicide detective down there, and just between us, I’m neither thrilled by his attitude nor overwhelmed with his intelligence. In fact, I’m not sure he could find his ass with both hands if he were sitting on them, something at which he appears to have a good deal of practice.”
“Okay, Warren, I’m on it. I’ll give you a call as soon as I have anything to report. And once again, I’m so, so sorry about your dad.”
“Thank you. ’Preciate it.”
Skip clicked off, then hit the intercom button. “Tanya, would you get me the address of the Monterey County morgue? I think it’s part of the sheriff’s department. I also need directions to Meadows Road, that mental asylum that blew up a few weeks ago. I was there ten years ago, but all I seem to remember is that it’s somewhere north of Santa Cruz.”
“So is half the state of California,” the receptionist pointed out. “Could you be more specific?”
“Remind me again why I put up with your crap?”
“Because nobody else is willing to work for this pitiful salary.”
“Oh, right. Never mind.”
2
Asmador had arrived in San Francisco around two o’clock in the morning and parked the Beemer just down the street from Epstein’s building. He’d climbed in back to catch a few hours of sleep, which was all he really needed, and awoke with the sun. Pissed into a plastic milk jug. Broke his fast with a Snickers bar. Waited and watched Epstein’s door from the front seat, absentmindedly fingering the gun in his pocket.
Gradually the street had come to life. Female human walking a dog. Chronicle truck spitting out rolled-up newspapers that thud and thump against doors, onto walkways, into hedges. Garage doors opening, disgorging single-occupant vehicles. Little humans skipping or plodding off to school by twos and threes.
Epstein’s building was two stories high, beige stucco with dark brown trim. Asmador’s attention had been focused on the front door, waiting, watching, willing it to move, when someone tapped on the car window. Startled, Asmador had pressed his nose against the tinted glass and seen a meter maid rapping the window with her summons book, then pointing to the alternate side of the street parking sign, and giving him the thumb—g’wan, get outta here.
And of course, no sooner had Asmador pulled away from the curb than he spotted a white Buick backing out of the garage of Epstein’s building and driving away. With an oath, he’d started up the BMW, pulled out without signaling, and tromped down on the accelerator. At the end of the block he’d almost plowed into the back of the Buick, which had stopped for a light, and had to slam on the brakes.
Asmador had to wait a few seconds for Epstein’s car to pull away, then followed it at a discreet distance until it disappeared into the maw of a basement parking garage on Buchanan Street, with a sign that read PARKING BY PERMIT ONLY. Seeing no empty parking spots on either side of Buchanan, Asmador turned right into the Safeway lot and parked the Beemer head-on in an angled stall directly across the street from the underground ramp. Then he settled back to watch and wait, his hands folded across his chest and his eyes half-closed.
One hour later, almost to the minute, spotting the white-on-white grille of the Buick emerging from the darkness of the exit ramp across the street, Asmador starts up his engine, throws the Beemer into reverse—and nearly backs into some old beater of a Chevy that’s blocking him in. He jams on the brakes, hits the horn, sticks his head out the window. “Out of my way! Get out of my way!”
The driver, a forty-something female, smiles and holds up a polite wait-a-sec finger, points to the car backing out in front of her. Meanwhile the Buick is turning left on Buchanan, heading toward the bay. Asmador sounds the horn. The woman gives him a helpless what-can-I-do? shrug. Asmador pounds the steering wheel in frustration as the Buick turns left again onto Marina Boulevard.
When the way finally clears, Asmador burns rubber backing out. But when he reaches the Marina Green, the Buick is nowhere in sight, so he buys a Croissan’wich and coffee at the drive-thru window of the Burger King on Bay Street, then returns to Francisco, parks across the street from Epstein’s building, and settles in for what he expects will be another long wait.
But only a few minutes later, a Hispanic-looking woman in a green maid’s uniform shows up on Epstein’s doorstep and lets herself in with a key. Asmador gobbles down the rest of his Croissan’wich, then slips the gun, with the safety off and a round in the firing chamber, into the back of his jeans before crossing the street and ringing Epstein’s doorbell.
“Jess?” says the cleaning woman, opening the door.
Only nine days ago, Asmador had found himself stammering helplessly at the grandparents’ door, unable to remember the little speech he’d memorized. When the old man tried to slam the door in his face, he’d had to bull his way in and kill them both immediately to keep them from calling for help. And even though the vultures had eventually feasted, or at least snacked, on their bodies, all in all, the Council had not been pleased.
And only two days ago, although Asmador had successfully memorized the speech he’d prepared for his meeting with Judge Brobauer, his delivery had been so awkward it had alerted both the old man and his caddy.
But somehow, in the intervening forty-eight hours, Asmador’s communication skills have improved exponentially. “Hello there. Hola! I’m an old friend of Mr. Epstein—he said it’d be okay if I wait for him here until he gets back.” Without waiting for an answer, he shoulders his way past her into the hallway, baring his teeth in what is intended to be a reassuring smile. “It’ll be all right, I promise. I’ll take full responsibility.”
“Hokay, but joo wait here. I call Mr. Skeep, tell heeng joo here.”
“Actually, I was hoping to surprise him.”
“Surprise heeng?” the woman parrots uncomprehendingly.
“Yeah, you know, like this.” Asmador draws the .38 from behind his back and shoots her twice, once in the chest as she backs away with both hands raised, and again in the head as her body lies twitching on the hardwood floor.
3
Pender’s early morning flight from Dulles to San Francisco was three-quarters empty, so flying coach was not the ordeal it might have been, and the landing went smoothly enough. The rent-a-car, however, turned out to be a generic white Toyota with all the legroom and power of a bumper car, and there wasn’t much in the way of scenery at first—Highway 101 was mostly industrial parks and shopping malls all the way from San Francisco to San Jose.
It wasn’t until he’d turned off onto Highway 17, a dappled, winding, two-lane mountain road lined with sharp-smelling eucalyptus and towering redwoods, that Pender felt he was really back in California. From 17, he followed a succession of narrow, winding roads that plunged deeper and deeper into the Santa Cruz Mountains, and as brightest noon turned to dusk in the canyons, Pender was forcibly reminded that it was in these dark and brooding hills that Kemper, Mullin, and Frazier had plied their bloody trade.
As it turned out, Pender could have saved himself the trip. There was nothing left of Meadows Road but a gatehouse at the bottom of the steep, narrow driveway and a vast, debris-filled hole in the ground at the top, currently being excavated by two scurrying backhoes and a queue of patient dump trucks.
But having come this far, Pender was determined to make the best of it. After parking the Toyota on the far side of the hole, next to a makeshift chainlink construction fence, he loosened his tie, took off his tomato-soup–colored sport jacket, and draped it across the back of the front passenger seat, then set out to explore the periphery of the blast, dime-store pocket note
book and tooth-marked pencil stub in hand.
The first thing he noticed was that the trees on the edge of the woods, some twenty yards from the edge of the building’s footprint, had either been stripped and scorched on the side facing the blast, or leveled entirely. Hard to believe anyone could have lived through that son of a bitch.
Yet many had. Was Little Luke one of them? If so, how had he managed to get away without anyone noticing? Of course, it must have been a real clusterfuck here after the explosion…
While Pender’s mind nattered on, his Hush Puppies carried him into the woods. Nearly two and a half weeks after the fire, there was still a light dusting of ash on some of the bushes. Behind this tame woodland loomed a forbidding-looking stone fence some ten feet high, topped with electrified wire. Pender jotted down a note, “Elec. fence: juice?” to remind himself to inquire whether the power had been knocked out immediately after the explosion, thereby making the fence, if not inviting, at least climbable.
Unless of course the juice was supplied at the gatehouse, and the gatehouse juice was on a separate line from the hospital. “Pwr source?” he wrote. Then, “Auto theft?” meaning that if Little Luke had gotten over the wall, it would be nice to know if any cars had been stolen within hiking distance of the hospital that day.
And so question led to question until Pender had filled a page of the notebook with one- or two-word entries. When he got back to his car, there was a late-model, white-on-white Buick parked next to it. A lanky guy with faded reddish brown hair leaned against the side of the Buick, surveying the ruins.
“Hey, how’s it going?” called Pender.
The guy gave him a wary nod. Suddenly Pender realized that with his jacket off, his shoulder holster was in plain sight. So much for staying undercover, he thought, sticking out his hand and smiling unthreateningly as he approached the other man.
“Ed Pender, FBI.”
“Epstein. Skip Epstein.”
Epstein waited for Pender to reach him, rather than coming forward to meet him halfway. Glancing downward as they shook hands, Pender noted the mismatched legs and built-up shoe. “Quite a mess,” he said, gesturing to the obscenely empty hole.
“No shit,” said Epstein.
“You here on business, or just having a look-see?”
“Little of both.”
“Meaning…?”
Epstein sighed. “I’m a licensed private investigator,” he said wearily, as if he were gearing up for a hassle.
But a hassle was the last thing Pender, who taught a daylong course in the art of affective interviewing at the Academy every year, had in mind. “Cool,” he said, in the vernacular of the natives. “Are you on a case?”
“A client asked me to look into a recent kidnapping in Pebble Beach.”
Pender’s turn to sigh. “Pebble Beach!” he said, in the same tone of voice Homer Simpson reserved for the word doughnuts.
“Golfer, eh?”
“I try,” said Pender. “Who got kidnapped?”
“Actually, it’s a homicide now. Some backpackers found the body early this morning, down in Big Sur.”
“So what are you doing all the way up here?”
“The victim was an attorney. His last case involved rewriting the will of an old couple whose grandson had been a patient here. He was supposed to have been killed in the explosion, this grandson.”
“Only you’re not all that sure he was,” said Pender, trying not to sound smug.
Epstein looked surprised. “That’s right. And neither is the coroner. Because just last week—”
“The grandparents were both murdered,” Pender broke in. “I know—that’s why I’m here, too.”
Epstein raised an eyebrow. “Luke Sweet?” he said carefully.
“Luke Sweet.”
“Well, fuuuuck me,” Skip muttered.
“How ’bout if I just buy you lunch,” suggested Pender, “and we’ll see how it goes from there.”
4
Pender followed Epstein’s Buick down out of the mountains to a retro-style diner on Ocean Street in Santa Cruz. They sat in a red vinyl booth with its own Seeburg jukebox outlet and ordered from a laminated menu featuring fifties-style comfort food at mid-nineties prices. Skip had a tuna melt, side slaw, and fries; Pender made his selection in accordance with the set of road rules he’d worked out over many years of traveling, which he was more than happy to share with Skip.
“One, it’s not cheating if you’re at least a day’s travel from home. Two, always memorize where the bathroom is before you go to bed, in case you have to get up in the middle of the night to piss. Three, when in doubt, order the club sandwich. It’s hard to screw up a club sandwich.”
“I’ll keep it in mind.”
“So how long have you been a P.I.?”
“A little over ten years.”
“Do you like it?”
“It’s okay. When I was a kid, though, adults’d ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up—I’d tell ’em a G-man.”
Pender chuckled. “Now, there’s a term you don’t hear much anymore.”
“The thing is, I’d always get this weird look back. It wasn’t until I was ten or twelve that I realized you never see an FBI agent with a limp on TV or in the movies.”
Pender gave him a whaddaya-gonna-do? shrug. Then after a vaguely uncomfortable pause in the conversation: “You know, I wasn’t going to ask. But since you brought it up…?”
“Polio. I was one of the control subjects in the first trials of the Salk vaccine—you know, one of the kids who got an injection of saline solution instead of the vaccine. We were all supposed to get the real thing after the trials, of course, only by then it was too late. Which makes me one of the last, possibly the last, polio case in the USA. So to quote Abe Lincoln quoting the guy who got tarred, feathered, and ridden out of town on a rail: ‘if it wasn’t for the honor of the thing…’”
“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, Pende
r 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.
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