The Boys from Santa Cruz

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