“As we say in California, there are no accidents,” Skip told him.
Pender laughed. “That must make your insurance companies awfully happy.”
5
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.
6
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.”
&nbs
p; “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.
CHAPTER FOUR
1
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.
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.
2
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 g
ot 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.
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