The Boys from Santa Cruz

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.”

“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