The Boys from Santa Cruz

Pool.

“From your ex,” she announced, handing Pender an envelope.

“I trust you took the liberty of having it sniffed for explosive residue,” said Pender. The acrimonious divorce proceedings, initiated by Pam in August of ’85, while Pender was still out in California watching snuff videos, had been finalized on the first of May 1986-nine years ago yesterday-with Pam getting the house, the car, a monthly alimony check for the next five years, and Purvis the dog-she even got the goddamn dog.

Pender’s new office had a low acoustic ceiling and fluorescent light panels. Three walls were decorated to his specifications with corkboards and whiteboards; horizontal windows set into the fourth wall looked out over the manicured grounds. Seating himself at the scarred oak-veneer desk he’d brought over from Liaison Support’s old basement offices next door to Behavioral Science, Pender could see all the way to the defensive driving course in the hazy blue distance.

After settling into a creaky, wide-bottomed oak swivel chair that had also accompanied him from the old office, Pender donned his half-moon drugstore reading glasses and opened the square, cream-colored envelope from the former Pam Pender. Glossy black letters on heavy card stock informed him that Pamela Jardine (her maiden name), formerly of Blatty and Broom Realty, had opened her own office, Jardine amp; Associates, and was available to assist him with all his real estate needs, residential or commercial.

Pender’s real estate needs, however, were currently nonexistent-not long after the divorce, he had signed a National Park Service Heritage Lease for a ramshackle cabin overlooking the C amp; O Canal. So after running Pam’s card and envelope through his personal shredder, he turned his attention to the daily printout of stranger homicides compiled for him by Thom Davies, a database manager working out of the CJIS headquarters in Clarksburg, West Virginia.

The computer printout, arranged chronologically on perforated, vertically accordioned computer paper, included all newly reported homicides, or attempted homicides, believed to have been committed by a person or persons unknown to the victim. (Fortunately for Pender’s workload, in America the average murder victim was three times more likely to be killed by a family member or acquaintance than by a stranger.) Pender read it carefully as always, relying on his prodigious memory to alert him to telltale patterns, such as victims with descriptions similar to those in previous stranger homicides, or killers with similar m.o.’s.

Today, it was the location of a week-old double murder on the printout that caught Pender’s eye. Santa Cruz, California, once known to the FBI’s monster hunters as the serial killer capital of the United States, with three separate multiple murderers operating simultaneously during the early seventies.

For Pender, however, the words Santa Cruz brought to mind a quick succession of images from the summer of 1985: the stakeout in the post office, the skull in the tomato patch, the fifteen-year-old boy who’d dropped out of a second-story window. Suddenly he realized he had no idea how any of it had come out. How many bodies had been dug up? Had anyone else ever been arrested for the snuff films? And what about Little Luke? Had he ever been found, alive or dead, and if alive, what had become of him?

But that was life in Liaison Support for you. Rarely did Pender find himself involved in either the beginning or the end of an investigation, and although during his travels he was often called upon to interview imprisoned serial offenders for ViCAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, since he’d never interviewed a criminal he’d helped apprehend, there was no sense of closure there, either.

So Pender wouldn’t have wasted any of his precious time wondering what had become of Luke Sweet if the identities of the victims in that double homicide in Santa Cruz-Frederick and Evelyn Harris; married couple; ages seventy-three and seventy, respectively-hadn’t rung a bell.

Pender put down the printout, picked up his phone, speed-dialed Thom Davies in Clarksburg, got his British- accented voice mail. “CJIS, Thom Davies. Leave your message at the tone, and please bear in mind: a lack of foresight on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.”

“Hey, Thom, it’s Ed Pender. Could you take a look in your magic box, see what you can come up with on one Luke Sweet, Jr.? That’s Luke as in the third book of the New Testament, Sweet as in, please sweetheart, do this for me ASAP. I think we might have a live one.”

2

The old man’s golf game was a zigzag journey of short increments; a diagram of his progress from tee to green would have resembled a map of a honeybee’s pollen dance. His putting was nothing to write home about, either, but he dressed a good game, from his fawn-colored Ben Hogan cap to his tasseled FootJoys, and never cheated, never improved a lie or took a mulligan even when he was playing alone.

Early morning was the old man’s favorite time of day. The tattered wisps of fog scudding across the emerald fairways, the smell of the dew-damp grass, the hoarse barking of the sea lions conspired to awaken even his age- dimmed senses. “It doesn’t get much better than this, does it, Willis?” he said to his favorite caddy, as the two stood alone on the fourth tee, waiting for a doe and her white-spotted, wobbly-legged fawn to cross the misty fairway.

“Lord, no,” said Willis Jones, who’d had to drag himself out of a warm bed while it was still dark out, then ride two buses and a company shuttle. As he knelt to tee up the rich old white man’s ball for him, he spied a shiny green golf cart bucketing along at top speed down the cart path, heading toward them from the fourth green, with the driver leaning out the side, steering with one hand and waving with the other.

“Now what does that fool think he’s doin’?” the caddy muttered when the cart left the path to cut diagonally across the fairway toward them, tracing dark stripes against the grain.

“Stop, stop,” called the old man, waving his arms over his head. “Wait there, I’ll come to you.”

His caddy followed him, leaving the old man’s bag behind but carrying the three-wood he’d been about to hand him.

“Mr. Brobauer?” Dressed in a worn denim jacket and jeans with the cuffs turned up, the man climbing down from the cart was of medium height, round-shouldered, and barrel-chested, with close-cropped hair and an almost simian brow.

“Yes, I’m Judge Brobauer.” Although it had been many years since he’d served as a Superior Court justice, the old man had retained the customary honorific.

“You have to come with me right away. There was an accident.” The words came out flat and underinflected, like an over-rehearsed speech in an elementary school play.

“To whom?” asked the old man, a widower with two grown children and no grandchildren.

“I…don’t know. But you have to come with me right away.”

Willis Jones shook his head firmly. “Somp’ns not right, Judge,” he said, interposing himself between the other two, with his back to the newcomer. “I don’t know this fella from Adam, I never even seen him around here before. So how ’bout you let me give you a lift back to the clubhouse, just to-”

Brobauer heard a flat, anechoic popping sound. Jones crumpled violently to the ground like a hundred-and- sixty-pound marionette with all its strings cut simultaneously. It happened so quickly and bloodlessly that Judge Brobauer half-expected Jones to scramble to his feet, grinning, as if he were performing in a Candid Camera stunt. Instead, the hulking newcomer waved a smoking pistol in the direction of the cart he’d arrived in. “Get in,” he said matter-of-factly.

Brobauer glanced from the man with the gun to the man on the ground, then back to the man with the gun. “We can still work this out,” he said. “I could say your gun went off accidentally. You could plead involuntary manslaughter.”

The gunman shook his head slowly but firmly. “If you don’t get in the cart I’ll have to kill you here.”

“No, wait, listen to-”

“I am going…to count…to three.”

“Please, you have to-”

“One.”

“let me-”

“Two.”