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.
It was worth a shot, anyway. Skip hauled the phone book down from the shelf and found a listing for Dragon, D., at 1000 Mason Street, which he guessed would be somewhere up on Nob Hill. She recognized his name-“Leon’s boy, of course”-and agreed to meet with him, although she doubted she could be of much help.
It took Skip five minutes to get to the car, ten minutes to reach Nob Hill, and another ten for a handicapped parking space to open up across the street from 1000 Mason, which turned out to be the grand old wedding cake of an apartment house known as the Brocklebank, where James Stewart had stalked Kim Novak in
Ms. Dragon met Skip at the door of her seventh-floor apartment dressed in a fitted pantsuit of cobalt blue accessorized with a turquoise scarf. With her apricot-colored hair teased up into a hollow-looking pouf and her eyelids red beneath a hasty application of mascara, she might have been Margaret Thatcher’s slightly slutty older sister.
“I’ve been wracking my brain all morning,” she told Skip as she led him down a dark hallway to a living room cluttered with enough Oriental rugs, hangings, furniture, and tchotchkes to stock a good-size antiques store. “But I honestly can’t think of any reason anyone would want to harm Judge Brobauer.”
“Has he been working on any contentious cases lately?”
“As far as I’m aware, the only case he’s involved in directly is an estate matter. An elderly couple had been planning to leave everything in a trust for their grandson, who’s been institutionalized for several years. They had to rewrite their wills after the boy was killed in that terrible fire last month-surely you must have seen it in the news?”
But Skip had spent the last two weeks of April vacationing on Maui with his on-again, off-again lady friend-no newspapers, no television.
“It was a place called Meadows Road? North of Santa Cruz?”
Meadows Road! Meadows fucking Road. “Excuse me, Ms. Dragon? This grandson-was that Luke Sweet, by any chance?”
“It was. His grandparents were Fred and Evelyn Harris. They’d been clients of Mr. Brobauer for thirty years. When he told me they’d been murdered last week, you could have knocked me over with a feather.”
“I know what you mean,” Skip murmured.
“But I can’t see how that would have anything to do with his abduction-it wasn’t as if the wills were being contested. I believe most of the estate is going to be divided up among charities, now that the grandson is deceased.”
But Skip’s thoughts were already tending in the same direction as those of a certain overweight FBI agent in Quantico, Virginia, 2,843 miles to the east. “Excuse me, Ms. Dragon. Do you happen to know whether the authorities are absolutely
“I certainly hope so,” she replied. “As I recall, the young man was a rather nasty piece of work.”
5
“Oh, gawd,” said Steven P. McDougal, the head of the FBI’s Liaison Support Unit.
“What?” Pender was dressed for spring in a green-and-yellow madras sport jacket over a short-sleeved cotton-poly pink dress shirt that had been white until he’d laundered it with a pair of red socks a few months ago; his too-short, too-wide necktie might have been hand-painted by Jackson Pollock on a bad peyote trip.
“It looks like the Easter Bunny threw up on you.”
“That’s a good one, chief. Not new, but good.” Pender and McDougal went back a long way together. They’d shared an apartment as recruits, and after graduation they’d both been posted to the Arkansas field office in Little Rock, where during their rookie year, Pender had taken a bullet meant for McDougal. True, it was only in the buttocks, but a grateful McDougal had saved Pender’s job at least twice in the intervening decades, and he still ran interference between Pender and the Bureau-cracy on a regular basis.
Of course, even with Steve McDougal running interference, there was a price to be paid for individualism in the buttoned-down, black-Florsheimed world of the FBI. Pender would never make AD, SAC, or even ASAC, and after twenty-three years on the job, he had gone as high on the GS pay scale as a special agent could go. But he doubted he’d have been any happier in management, or that any bump in salary could possibly equal the satisfaction that came with getting serial killers off the street. And besides, Pender sometimes argued, when you were as bald and homely as he was, having people make fun of your clothes was something of an improvement.
Their minimum daily banter requirement fulfilled, McDougal leaned back in his desk chair and laced his hands behind his head. He was in shirtsleeves; the diagonal silver stripes of his navy blue necktie matched his thick, brush-cut hair to perfection. “What’s up?”
“I think we’ve got a live one out in California. Kid from Santa Cruz-”
McDougal groaned.
“-name of Luke Sweet, Junior. Luke Senior was the perp in that snuff porn case in Marshall County, back in ’85. You loaned me out to Izzo in Organized Crime for the stakeout, remember?”
“Refresh me.”
“There were two filmed, or I guess I should say videotaped murders, but they dug up three female bodies altogether. Luke, Jr.-Little Luke, we called him-was implicated in one of the snuff films. He also strangled his girlfriend and threw her body over a cliff, nearly killed another boy, and according to the records Thom Davies pulled for me today, he was also a suspect in the murder of an Indian pot dealer in Stockton. But his grandparents managed to pull some strings, got him declared non compos, and committed him to a private mental hospital. Place called Meadows Road. Which burned down last month, allegedly with him in it.”
“Whose
“Mine,” replied Pender, unapologetically. “My gut tells me there’s a good chance it was Little Luke who torched it, and an even better one that he survived the fire.”
“Does your gut have any…What’s that word? Oh yes:
“A week after the fire, somebody killed both of Little Luke’s grandparents.
“And our jurisdiction?” McDougal said dubiously. “Last time I checked, this was still the
“So was the original case, the snuff video. And we were called in to consult by both the Marshall County and
