But by the time the nineties staggered around, both Pender's career and his marriage were in tatters. Too many road trips, too many affairs on both sides, and too much booze. If Steve McDougal hadn't put his considerable clout on the line, Pender would almost certainly have lost both his job and his pension along with his wife.
In time Pender had managed to pull his life together, but neither his marriage nor his career ever recovered. After the divorce, and a leave of absence to dry out, he spent most of his time behind a desk searching the national crime databases, looking for patterns that might indicate a serial killer was plying his trade.
Occasionally McDougal would send him out to interview a convict who was suspected of multijurisdictional crimes, but it was understood by all concerned that Ed Pender would never work another case as a field investigator, not after the fiasco back in 1994. In fact, he'd been lucky to keep his job at all in light of the stunt he'd pulled, holding a press conference in Reeford, Pennsylvania, after the special agent in charge had expressly forbidden him to go public with the investigation.
The missing woman was over eighteen, the SAC had argued, she had left behind a moonstruck note to the effect that she was eloping with the man of her dreams, and there was no evidence of a forced abduction: nothing, in short, to justify alarming the public by declaring that a new serial killer was on the loose.
But Pender, who had searched the NCIC missing persons files, was able to inform the SAC that as far as he could determine, this particular missing woman, Gloria Whitworth, just happened to be at least the sixth strawberry blond in the past six years to “elope” with the man of her dreams, then drop from sight.
“The whole thing stinks to high heaven,” Pender had argued. “We have these women, their looks range from plain to downright homely, except for their hair-they all have beautiful strawberry blond hair. None of them has much in the way of a social life-no boyfriends.
“Then suddenly they fall in love with a mystery man. He avoids being seen by the women's friends and families. No photographs, no prints left behind, but the descriptions tally for the sightings we do have-short, slight, good-looking, dark eyes, hair either dark or bleached.
“And within a week of meeting this mystery man-two weeks at the outside-they run away with him and are never seen again. My God, man, what more do you want?”
“How about a body?” the SAC had responded. “A sign of a forced abduction? Something better than a vague general description that would prove it's even the same man? A single piece of evidence to indicate any of the women was even harmed, much less killed? The bureau hunts serial killers, not serial seducers.”
Pender had been with the FBI long enough to understand the reasoning behind the SAC's decision. The bureau had always been a reactive, not a proactive, organization. An ambitious manager moved up through the bureaucracy by padding his stats, allocating his resources to investigations like interstate car thefts that produced quantifiable results, and letting the local authorities handle the loser cases.
But every instinct Pender had-and by this time he had been hunting serial killers for the better part of two decades-told him that going public in order to warn all the girls with the strawberry curls to beware of short, dark, charming seducers, could do nothing but save lives.
So he did, SAC or no SAC. And within an hour of that first and last press conference, broadcast only on one local TV station before the bureau put the kibosh on it, Pender had been summoned back to Washington to face disciplinary action from the OPR-the Office of Professional Responsibility. McDougal managed to save his ass again, but he'd spent the next stretch of his career performing routine background checks of prospective federal employees-the classic FBI punitive assignment.
In the years following Reeford, several more strawberry blonds disappeared, but in none of these cases had anyone caught so much as a glimpse of the mystery seducer. So in the long run all Pender's press conference had managed to accomplish was to drive the already wary Casey deeper into the shadows-and that hurt Ed Pender far worse than the official reprimands.
By the time McDougal agreed to form the Casey task force (or exploratory committee, as he preferred to call it-McDougal, too, knew how to cover his ass: you didn't get as far as he had in the bureau without a Ph. D. in CYA), Pender was out of the doghouse. And as recognition for his apparently having been right about Casey's existence all along, McDougal had given him a seat at the table.
As time wore on, however, and no bodies were discovered, Pender's judgment was called into question again. Eventually the task force evolved into a one-man crusade. At least once a week Pender would search the NCIC missing persons database and a half dozen other systems to see if any more women with hair described as reddish blond or strawberry blond had turned up missing.
When Donna Hughes's name popped up on the NCIC database in June 1998, Pender's first reaction was that she was too old, too good-looking, and too married to fit the victim profile. But the more he reviewed the file forwarded from the Dallas field office, the more convinced he was that Casey had struck again. Though he was unable to persuade McDougal to send him to Texas, he was successful in having Mrs. Hughes added to the list of Casey's possible victims.
Now there was Paula Ann Wisniewski, the young woman from Santa Barbara whose death had resulted in the first decent Casey suspect since the investigation began. Only a man as obsessed as Pender would have had Thom Davies, an FBI database expert, compiling lists of all disappearances or violent deaths involving females with red or blond hair on a weekly basis, or noticed, on his follow-up, the discrepancy between the hair color on the police report-blond-and that on the coroner's-red.
Pender had immediately asked for the postmortem photos to be color-faxed to him. Unfortunately the coroner's flash Polaroids, though gruesome enough, were not much help, chromatically speaking. But since the man in custody fit the description of the suspect in the first seven suspected Casey abductions and had used a knife purchased in Texas, the state where the last Casey abduction had taken place, and most important, because McDougal had no one else available, he had reluctantly agreed to send Pender out to California to interview the suspect.
And after talking to Deputy Jervis, so strong was Pender's hunch that the man in custody was Casey that if he could have been equally as sure that all the victims were accounted for, Pender would never have put his own life in jeopardy trying to tie him to the other crimes.
Instead he'd have flown back for a VICAP interview after the trial, gotten what he could out of the monster, then returned to D.C. to accept the retirement that the bureau was so anxious to foist upon him, and let California take care of Casey. They had lethal injection in the Golden State now; too good for scum like that, but what could you do?
But in addition to the probability that Casey's victim count was higher than currently suspected, there was something else to factor in: the possibility that one or more of the strawberry blonds still survived. Admittedly far- fetched, still it was a fantasy of Pender's, never to be spoken aloud, barely acknowledged even to himself except as a vague mental image: he'd open a cellar door, and there they'd all be, Gloria, Donna, Dolores, and the others, staring up at him through the darkness, somewhat the worse for wear, but alive. Alive.
It was that image-that and the autopsy photos-that made up his mind for him. Fortunately, a seasoned player like Pender knew the first rule for getting along in the bureau-cracy: Better to ask forgiveness than permission. So when he called his office later that afternoon after checking into the Travel Inn in Salinas, he reported only that he had scheduled a jailhouse interview the following afternoon, Wednesday, July 7, and expected to be back home no later than Friday.
Then he put out the Do Not Disturb sign, showered, and climbed into bed stark naked save for his sleeping mask and earplugs, intending to make up for the sleep he'd lost the night before.
But no sooner had Pender closed his eyes than faces began to swim through the blackness behind the sleeping mask. Poor puzzled Paula Wisniewski, watching her own entrails spilling out onto her lap. Terry Jervis, skewered through both cheeks with a souvenir bowie knife. Gloria Whitworth and the other strawberry blonds, faces he'd seen only in snapshots, yearbooks, or in framed photos on their parents' mantels, but animated now by his imagination, pleading to him from the darkness. Don't forget us, don't forget us, don't forget us.
And most disturbing of all, Pender saw the ruined visage of Refugio Cortes, who was still lying in the locked ward of Natividad Hospital with his nose splashed halfway across his face, wondering what it was going to be like going through life with an empty scrotal sac and a dick like a trodden Polish sausage.
8
