The Girls He Adored

17

Just after two o'clock on Wednesday afternoon, Lieutenant Rigoberto Gonzalez of the Monterey County Sheriff's Department- early forties, perfectly pressed uniform, carefully trimmed black mustache-met Pender in the alley next to the old jail, abandoned now except for the ground-floor cellblock in the east wing, and led him from the brightness of a sunny Salinas afternoon into the gloomy half-light of the jail. Directly ahead of them were sliding barred doors. Gonzalez turned right instead, and Pender followed him into a messy, crowded, claustrophobic little room that looked more like the office of an old-time two-pump country gas station than the command post for a metropolitan jail.

“You carrying?” asked Gonzalez, unholstering his own weapon, the sheriff's department standard-issue Glock. 40. Pender handed his SIG Sauer to Gonzalez, butt first; the deputy checked it out. “I thought you guys carry Glocks now.”

“I'm more comfortable with the SIG.”

“Not as much stopping power with a nine as with a forty.”

“The dual action is faster, though. I figure I can always shoot 'em twice.” Pender hadn't actually fired a shot in anger since his days as a Cortland County sheriff's deputy, but he remained range-qualified with both pistol and shotgun.

After locking up the guns and introducing Pender to Frank Twombley and Deena Knapp, the two deputies on duty, Gonzalez led Pender through the office-they were now on the other side of the sliding barred doors-then to the left, down a narrow corridor to the jail's old visiting room, bare save for a single metal bench suspended like a shelf from the back wall. The windows that had once separated the inmates from their loved ones were boarded up, the telephones gone, their torn wires sticking out from the wall at three-foot intervals.

“You can change in here.” Gonzalez handed Pender a paper bag containing an orange jumpsuit, a gray T-shirt, white socks, and rubber sandals.

Pender asked Gonzalez if there was any significance to the variety of jumpsuit colors he'd seen the inmates wearing.

“Orange is for your violent felons, red for nonviolent felons, green for misdemeanors.”

“So I'm a violent felon?”

“You'd have to be, for us to put you in with the Ripper. We keep the prisoners strictly segregated in the holding cells.”

“You call him the Ripper?” asked Pender, unfolding the jumpsuit and checking it for size. XXL-close enough.

“Did you see what he did to that girl?”

“Unfortunately, yes-I saw the autopsy photos.”

Gonzalez left Pender in the visiting room, returning a few minutes later with a full set of handcuffs, leg irons, chains, and a padlocking belt to pull the ensemble together. When he finished securing Pender, he stepped back and nodded approvingly. Bald, scowling, immense, the FBI man might have been the enforcer for a gang of over-the-hill outlaw bikers.

“Agent Pender, you could give mean a bad name. What do you want to be in for?”

“What do I look like I'd be in for?”

Gonzalez narrowed his eyes, gave Pender an exaggerated onceover. “How about rape? No offense.”

“None taken. But with a face like mine, who'd ever believe I had trouble getting any?”

The deputy grinned. “With a face like yours,” he said, “we should probably make it serial rape.”

The holding cells were at the opposite end of the corridor. Gonzalez opened the metal cabinet containing the door control panel beside the entrance to the cell block. Inside the cabinet were four vertically sliding knobs above a solid steel wheel eighteen inches in diameter. All four knobs were down in the red, or closed, position; Gonzalez raised the fourth until it showed yellow, then cranked the big wheel clockwise.

Ready? mouthed Gonzalez.

Pender nodded.

“Then let's go, pendejo!”

Gonzalez stepped behind Pender and shoved him through the portal into the darkness. Pender stumbled forward down the dim corridor. A high windowless wall loomed to his left. To the right, his peripheral vision picked up dozens of shadowy figures stirring restlessly behind floor-to-ceiling bars, visible only in silhouette and motion, like nocturnal animals in the zoo when the infrareds are turned off. Then, before Pender's eyes had a chance to become accustomed to the tenebrous light, Gonzalez slid the last door open, shoved Pender inside, and he was one of them.