The Boys from Santa Cruz (3 page)

“And me without my spoon,” Pender muttered, as the flashbulbs began to pop.

Once the body had been photographed in situ from every imaginable angle, the deputies struggled in vain to remove it from the trunk. It wasn’t until after they’d drained off the water that they realized the head was firmly encased in eight to ten inches of melted, rehardened plastic.

Yet another surprise was in order for the deputy who’d been assigned to free the body by chipping away at the plastic. Up close and personal, he announced, the corpse appeared to be female from the waist up and male from the waist down.

One more important discovery was made by one of the weaker-stomached deputies. After getting a good look at the star attraction, the man had staggered off into the bushes to launch his lunch and returned with a videocassette he’d found lying in the dirt. He handed it to Izzo, who showed it to Pender, who winced when he saw the label:
Principals of Accounting, Tape 4.

“C’mon, there’s bound to be a VCR in the trailer,” Izzo said eagerly.

“Let me know how it comes out,” said Pender.

Izzo thought Pender was kidding at first. He started toward the trailer, then turned back—Pender hadn’t moved. “What’s the problem, Ed?”

Pender shrugged. “I’ve been chasing serial killers going on ten years now. I’ve seen shit that’d turn Jack the Ripper’s stomach. Half-eaten corpses, skulls stacked like cannonballs on the courthouse lawn, you name it. But up until three weeks ago, I’ve never actually had to watch the victims suffering before they died. Now it seems like everybody and their brother’s got a camcorder. Mapes and Nguyen, Sweet and Swantzer, it’s like a fad or something, and lemme tell you, podner: it’s getting real old, real fast.”

Izzo, who’d taken a sudden interest in studying the dirt at
his feet, waited a few seconds, then asked Pender if he’d finished venting.

Pender nodded—a short, sharp nod, like a bull rider signaling for the chute to be opened.

“Good,” said Izzo. “Because I’m at least as sick of this shit as you are, and I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to watch this thing by myself.”

Once I’d decided where I was going, my next problem was figuring out how to get there. After weighing all the options, I decided to take Teddy’s Olds. It seemed like it would be more fun than taking the bus and less risky than hitchhiking with a backpack full of dope. And if I did get pulled over, not having a driver’s license was going to be the least of my problems.

The car was a ’77 Delta 88 with air-conditioning, a tape deck, and a V-8 engine that pressed you back against the bench seat when you floored the accelerator. I had all the weed I could smoke and enough money to buy all the fast food I could eat, so in spite of all the harsh things that had happened to me that day, once I got the hang of driving, I was almost happy.

The closest I came to getting arrested wasn’t while I was driving, it was when I pulled in for gas at an ARCO mini-mart near Davis. By the time I saw the highway patrol car parked outside, I was already committed. I figured driving away without buying anything would have looked even more suspicious, so I pulled up to the pumps, got out of the car, went inside, gave the guy a twenty against a fill-up, went back out to the pump, pushed the button for the 87 octane, lifted the nozzle casually, turned around, and discovered there was no place to put it—the gas tank was not on that side of the car.

I was sure the cop was checking me out. The scorched Mohawk alone would have caught his attention. Not to mention my
WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU LOOKING AT
? T-shirt.
Be cool,
I ordered myself.
Gas tank must be around the other side.
Fortunately, the hose reached. Unfortunately, the tank wasn’t on that side, either. I nearly pissed my pants.
Where’s the fucking gas cap? Is the cop getting suspicious? Don’t look at him, don’t look at him. But if he sees I don’t know how to fill up the car, he’s going to think I stole it.
To cover myself, I knelt down and pretended to check the right rear tire.
Think, dude, think! It’s got to be someplace!

So now I was walking around the stupid car, tugging the hose as far as it would stretch, pretending to check all the tires and the lights and shit. The cop’s eyes were boring holes in me, and I was trying to act casual, but I was sweating bullets and my mind was racing a million miles a second by the time I noticed that the rear license plate was mounted on a spring. Suddenly it all came back to me. In the Olds, the rear license plate flipped down and the gas cap was hidden behind it. I must have seen Teddy do it a dozen times. End of crisis.

The rest of the ride was a piece of cake. It was dark by the time I reached my old hometown of Santa Cruz, where the palm trees meet the pines. I have to admit I got a little lump in my throat when the candy-colored lights of the Boardwalk came into view. We’d had some good times in this town, me and my mom. I used to have a season pass for the rides. Once I rode the Giant Dipper sixty-seven times in a row. I even had a little gang of friends. We were eleven, we had bicycles and boogie boards, and we owned that town from the university heights to the beachfront flats.

Then my mother died and I went to live with my grandparents, Fred and Evelyn Harris. That lasted about six months, until my grandfather slapped me for calling my grandmother a bitch (which I didn’t, I only said she was
acting
like a bitch, which she was). Anyway, I punched him in his droopy nuts, and they sent me to live with my father.

But now my father was dead, too. I knew that for sure by this time: I’d heard it on the car radio. They said he’d shot himself to avoid being taken into custody, but they never said why he was being taken into custody in the first place.

I didn’t know if Fred and Evelyn had also heard the news. They probably had, I thought, but since they hated my father more than they hated me, I hoped that would work in my favor. If they were willing to let bygones be bygones, I figured, so was I.

“Stop it there,” said Izzo. He and Pender were sitting side by side on the narrow, scratchy sofa bed in the living room of the trailer, watching
Principals of Accounting, Tape 4
with the lights dimmed and the blinds drawn.

Pender hit the Pause button. The background rattle and hum of the air-conditioning swelled to fill the silence. “What?”

“You missed it. Run it back—there was a reflection in the window over the bed.”

Pender reversed the tape, then ran it forward in slow motion, freezing the image when a figure wearing a backward-facing baseball cap and a San Francisco 49ers jersey appeared briefly in the dark glass of the horizontal window over the bed, peering into the viewfinder of the camcorder balanced on his shoulder. They couldn’t quite make out the face behind the viewfinder. All they knew for sure was that it couldn’t have been Luke Sweet or Theodora Swantzer, Sweet’s transgendered, ex-con partner, because those two were both clearly visible on the bed. Butt-naked save for their Lone Ranger masks and Swantzer’s genital-concealing panties, they were taking turns smacking around a skinny, teenage runaway who looked as if she were just beginning to realize how much trouble she was in.

The agents exchanged grim smiles. It had been doubly hard on them, watching the victims suffering, knowing that the killers were beyond the reach of earthly justice. It felt as if Sweet and Swantzer were taunting them—
look what we did,
they seemed to be saying with every thrust and blow,
look what we got away with—and you can’t…fucking…touch us!

So the discovery that the unspeakable pair had had an accomplice buoyed the agents’ spirits a little. Izzo jotted down the time on the VCR counter—fourteen minutes into the tape—and made a note to have somebody blow up and tweak the frames in question. Then they settled back to watch the rest of the horror show, which ended shortly after the victim’s death, with Luke Sweet delivering a chilling throwaway line—“You like apples? Well, how do you like them apples?”—as he climbed off the corpse.

The screen went dark. Over the hum of the air-conditioning, they heard the hackle-raising sound of a baying hound—the state police had brought in a cadaver-sniffing dog to search the property. “You look like you could use a drink,” Pender told Izzo, thirstily eyeing the nearly full bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the counter separating the living room from the kitchen area.

“Didn’t anybody tell you FBI agents aren’t supposed to drink alcohol, especially on the job?” Izzo asked him.

“Yeah, I think I heard something like that once,” said Pender as he rinsed out two water glasses. “Ice?”

“Sure.”

Pender was about to open the refrigerator door when one of the photographs affixed to it by magnet caught his eye. It was the former Unsub, standing in front of the trailer with his arm around a teenage boy. The boy was sporting a Mohawk hairdo and an adolescent scowl, and wearing a red 49ers jersey with the number 16 across the front. Pender took it down and turned it over—across the back of the snapshot, someone had written “Big Luke, Little Luke, Father’s Day,” with a felt-tipped pen.

“Oh jeez,” he said, wincing.

“Beg pardon?” called Izzo.

“That ‘accomplice’ we were looking for, the one with the camera? It’s Sweet’s son. Little Luke. Looks like he’s around fourteen, fifteen years old.”

Izzo winced. “Man oh Manischewitz,” he groaned. “Just when you think it can’t get any sicker.”

Not only had it been four years since I’d last been to Santa Cruz, but back then I’d been getting around on a bicycle. I didn’t exactly get lost, but I must have made a wrong turn, because I found myself driving past the Boardwalk.

I pulled over to watch the people hanging out on the steps near the carousel, thinking I might see some of my old friends. I didn’t, but I did see quite a few kids around my age, clusters of them laughing and acting goony, couples making out or strolling with their arms around each other’s waists. Some of the white kids were punked out like me. Part of me despised them, but another part of me could imagine a different world, where if you were alone and there was a group of kids your age and style, you could just hook up with them. Of course, if they’d known I had all that dope and money, it would have been
them
trying to hook up with
me
.

It was around ten o’clock when I rang my grandparents’ bell. Fred was already in his bathrobe and pajamas. Tall man, severe, always looked like he’d just finished shaving. I could tell by the look on his face that he knew what had happened.

“It’s him,” he called up the stairs to my grandmother. He didn’t say hello, but he didn’t slam the door in my face, either. A few seconds later Evelyn came bustling down the stairs in her nightgown and threw her arms around me. I was taller than she was, now. It
was the first anybody had touched me since Teddy knocked me down this morning. For some reason I burst into tears. I didn’t even know I had any tears in me.

I slept in my old bed in my old room that night. Clean sheets, cool ocean breeze, a long hot shower, salve for my burns, then one of Teddy’s pain pills, and I was in dreamland. My dreams weren’t as gory as you’d have expected, though. I didn’t relive the events of the morning or anything like that. Instead, I dreamed that I’d driven Teddy’s car someplace, only now I couldn’t find it and I couldn’t remember how to get home.

Early evening. Plenty of light, but the afternoon heat had largely dissipated by the time Pender and Izzo made it up to the derelict school bus where the boy in the photograph had been living.

“What a way to raise a kid.” Izzo glanced around at the third-world squalor. Broken windows, bare, stained mattress, dirty clothes, empty Coke cans, potato chip bags, Twinkie wrappers, crumpled tissues. “You have to feel sorry for the little bastard. I wouldn’t be surprised if they forced him to work the camera for them—maybe even molested him.”

“That could explain why he shot Swantzer, first chance he got,” said Pender. The deputies who’d discovered the bus earlier had already found the boy’s thirty-ought-six hunting rifle and a box of cartridges identical to the ones found down by the clearing.

Pender and Izzo picked their way to the back of the bus, where the boy had carpeted the grimy, rust-pocked, ribbed metal floor with a fragment of Oriental rug, and fashioned a crude tent by hanging Indian bedspreads from the ceiling. A glass ashtray was filled with cigarette butts, and there was a well-worn copy of
The Catcher in the Rye
on the rug, next to a black plastic film canister and a pack of rolling papers. Pender opened the little film can, shook a manicured green bud onto his palm. “Sinsemilla,” he said. “No seeds. Ten times as strong as the old Mexican reefer—or so they say,” he added quickly.

Izzo brushed a cobweb from the shoulder of his jacket and sniffed the air disapprovingly. “C’mon, let’s get out of here before the smell starts to cling—I just had this suit dry-cleaned.”

Pender followed Izzo back up the aisle and down the rubber-matted steps, feeling more than a little creeped out and claustrophobic himself.

“Excuse me, are you done in there?” The deputy who’d lost his lunch and found Tape 4 was waiting outside the bus, along with an eleven-year-old female officer—that’s how old she looked to Pender, anyway. “The sheriff wants us to toss the bus as soon as you’re finished.”

“Toss away,” said Izzo.

“And while you’re searching,” added Pender, “if you turn up anything that might give us a hint as to where the kid’s heading, an address book, something like that, let me know right away.”

Meanwhile, out behind Big Luke’s trailer, the cadaver dog, a lugubrious-looking bloodhound named Beano, had planted himself on his haunches in the middle of the tomato patch and let out a bloodcurdling howl that echoed across the summer-gold hillside. By the time Pender and Izzo arrived, the deputies had pulled up the staked plants, roots and all, and begun to dig in earnest, their spades biting into the sun-baked earth with a meaty-sounding
ch-chunk, ch-chunk.

From the pile of discarded plants, Pender selected a dusty, ripe-red, sun-warmed beefsteak tomato the size of a softball and was looking around for a hose or a spigot with which to rinse it off when one of the deputies’ spades struck something hard.