The Girls He Adored

27

“If you touch me there again, you're going to have to marry me. Or at least kiss me.”

Nurse's aide Rosa Beltran, sponge-bathing the comatose patient in room 375, leaped back from the bed, spilling the basin of warm soapy water over the patient, the bed, and herself. “Muy gracioso,” she said-border slang for “very funny”-and hurried off to fetch the charge nurse, who immediately paged the resident on call.

“What time is it?” was Pender's first question, as the resident, a Bengali woman half his age, checked his pupils while Rosa remade the bed.

“One o'clock,” she said in a musical, singsong Indian accent.

“I hate to ask this, but what day?”

“Friday-you have been unconscious since Wednesday afternoon. How are you feeling?”

“Like I just broke the Guinness World Record for hangovers.”

“I'm not surprised-in addition to the concussion you sustained, it took twenty sutures to close up the scalp lacerations. Fortunately, there is no fracture.”

“My ex always said I had a thick skull. How about something for the pain?”

“Just a few minutes longer, please. The neurologist must examine you first.”

By now Pender's mind had filled in the remaining memory gaps. “Did they get him?” he asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Casey-did they get him?”

“You can ask your friend all about that.”

Pender couldn't tell whether the look the young doctor gave him on her way out of the room was one of pity or compassion. Either would have been appropriate: Special Agent Thomas Pastor, in a bureau-approved blue suit, conservative tie, and well-shined Florsheim wing tips, entered Pender's room wearing an expression that would have been more appropriate in a seafood store-a seafood store with insufficient refrigeration, thought Pender.

“I just want to get a few things straight for the record,” he informed Pender after introducing himself. “My understanding is that you not only identified yourself as an FBI officer while still in the cell with the prisoner, thereby provoking the prisoner to attack you and resulting not only in the prisoner's escape, but in the death of one deputy, and the severe injury of another-”

“What are you talking about? I never-”

Pastor, standing over the bed, pulled out his notebook. “According to Deputy Knapp, you called out to Deputy Twombley to let you out of the cell, that you had everything you needed.”

“I was already unconscious. It must have been Casey-he's a brilliant impersonator.”

“I'm sure he is,” said Pastor drily. “It's a moot point anyway. According to Steve Maheu”-Maheu, known to Liaison Support staffers as Steve Too, was Steve McDougal's second in command- ”you weren't even authorized to be in that cell in the first place.”

“Bullshit. Sheriff Bustamante told me-”

“I don't give a fuck what Sheriff Bustamante told you-no one in the bureau ever authorized a known fuckup like E. L. Pender to go undercover for a jailhouse interview. So if you want to blow smoke up somebody's butt, save it for the OPR boys-they have filters up their ass. All I want to hear from you is what you learned from Casey, if anything, that might help us get him into custody- to get him back into custody.”

A wave of dizziness washed over Pender. He closed his eyes and fought against the debilitating throbbing in his head. Muzzy as he still was, he understood now which way the wind was blowing. The FBI rarely admitted to a mistake-when it did, you could bet it already had a scapegoat saddled up and ready to ride.

Which meant, Pender knew, that the best outcome he could hope for was to be offered his pension in exchange for his badge. In other circumstances, the deal would have been acceptable, even welcome-at last he'd have a chance to work on his golf game, see if he couldn't whittle his handicap down into the respectable teens. But everything had changed in the last forty-eight hours. Now more than ever, Casey was his responsibility-and when, inevitably, the monster waltzed with another strawberry blond, she would be his responsibility too. And so would the next, and the next, and the next.

Suddenly Pender realized that there was nothing he wouldn't do, nothing he wouldn't risk, including his pension. Besides, he thought, gingerly fingering his bandaged head, this thing was personal now.

“Pastor,” he said miserably, opening his eyes, letting the tears well helplessly.

“What?”

“He wouldn't tell me a fucking thing.”

“Now why doesn't that surprise me?” Pastor pocketed his notebook, handed Pender his business card. “Write it up anyway, mail the report to me. Preferably from another state.”

The worst-dressed agent in the history of the FBI left Natividad Hospital against his doctor's orders, but with a smaller bandage on his head and a bottle of Vicodin in his pocket. He was wearing the same loud sport coat, brown Sansabelt slacks, iridescent gray Banlon polo shirt, and stingy-brim herringbone hat he'd worn to the jail Wednesday afternoon. Two days in a paper sack had not improved the drape of the clothes; the hat sat crookedly on his rebandaged crown.

Pender cabbed back to Alisal Street, and after retrieving his gun from the jail office and the rented Toyota from the parking lot, headed for the nearest McDonald's (not counting the IV drip, he hadn't had any nourishment since that sandwich in the courthouse Wednesday afternoon), ordered a #1 Extra Value Meal to go, and brought it back to his room in the Travel Inn, where he pondered his next move.

The big problem would be getting information from official sources, he thought, washing down his second Vicodin of the afternoon with a super-sized Coke. He had a shadow copy of the entire Casey file with him (he knew it more or less by heart anyway) but very little data on Paula Ann Wisniewski, the young woman whom Casey had disemboweled. That wouldn't even be in the NCIC computer yet-he'd need someone with access to the sheriff's department records to get it for him.

But who? Pender was in no better favor with the sheriff's department than he was with the FBI. Then he thought of calling Terry Jervis. It was a long shot-and he'd have to get by the formidable Ms. Winkle-but if anyone wanted Casey worse than Pender did, it would be either Deputy Jervis or Deputy Knapp, and Knapp was back in the trauma ward of Natividad Hospital, heavily sedated.

Nobody picked up the phone at the little ranch house in Prunedale, however-after six rings, Pender heard an answering-machine message in Jervis's lockjaw voice:

“We're not home. We're going up to Reno for some R amp;R. Leave a message at the beep, we'll call you when we get back.”

Pender hung up. There was something wrong here. Plenty wrong. First, the woman he'd interviewed Tuesday morning would not have been in shape for an R amp;R jaunt only three days later. Second, no cop would leave a message like that on an answering machine. Third, and most telling, even if she had been well enough to take a vacation and foolish enough to announce to prospective burglars that the house would be empty, why would Terry Jervis have been the one to record the message, with her jaw wired shut and every word a painful effort?

His cop radar went off like a car alarm; the problem of his next move was solved. Pender bolted his Big Mac and took a quick shower with a plastic laundry bag over his head to keep the bandages dry. On his way out of the room he stuffed the cardboard container of fries into the roomy side pocket of his plaid jacket to snack on as he drove.

Two newspapers on the lawn. The mailbox stuffed. The bright flowers drooping in their beds for lack of watering. Pender reached inside his jacket and unsnapped the leather flap on his holster- the women who tended this house with such care would not have gone off on vacation without notifying the paperboy or the post office, or arranging for a neighbor to pick up the mail and water the flowers.

At this point, according to the rules, Pender should have been calling for backup. Of course, according to the rules, he shouldn't have been there in the first place. No sense sneaking around, he decided-if he were being watched from inside, that would only telegraph his suspicions. Instead he marched boldly up the walk and rang the bell with the tip of his ballpoint pen so as not to smudge any latent prints. No answer.

“Terry, it's Agent Pender,” he called softly-it would have hurt his head to shout. “I just have a few more questions for you.”

Still no answer. He put his ear to the door-no sounds coming from inside the house. He walked around the side of the house to the back, saw what appeared to be drops of dried blood on the cement walk a few feet from the unlatched screen door, and a wider, streaky stain on the doorstep. Pender knelt, read the blood splatters like a tracker. Like tracks, they had a story to tell.

He nudged the screen door open wider, and with his feet straddling the stain, peered through the window in the kitchen door, trying to see through the crack in the gingham curtains on the other side of the glass. He could just make out a long reddish brown streak across the kitchen linoleum. Looked like more blood; looked like drag marks.

Pender now knew what was waiting for him inside; his reaction would have been difficult for anyone but another seasoned investigator to understand. Along with a whisper of dread, he felt a sense of awe so profound it was almost religious. There, on the other side of this thin door, lay a hushed, virgin crime scene.

Virgin-could anyone appreciate what that meant to Pender? Even FBI field agents rarely arrive at a murder scene first-they are almost always called in by the local authorities. As for visiting firemen like the so-called profilers of the Behavioral Sciences Unit, or the Investigative Support or Liaison Support operatives like Pender, they considered themselves lucky if they were even called to a crime scene.

And if they were, it was rarely until long after the local yokels had trampled the lawns and carpets, bagged key evidence instead of leaving it in situ, picked up items and put them down in almost the same spot, turned bodies over before photographing them, that sort of thing.

Yet a good investigator operated by reading a crime scene as if it were a work of art. It wasn't simply a case of looking for fingerprints or checking the redial on the phone. Everything in the painting, from a single brush stroke to the total gestalt, revealed something about the painter. And inside this house was Casey's most recent masterpiece-there wasn't a chance in hell Pender was going to call for backup just yet.

He looked the back door over carefully, peered through the curtains again-no deadbolt. Just the door lock-a thumb-latch with a keyhole. He had a lock pick that he'd carried in his wallet for nearly thirty years and hadn't used in twenty, but he didn't want to start mucking up the entry surfaces before the latents had been lifted.

He halfheartedly tried the thumb-latch, crooking his forefinger around the base where no prints were likely to be found, and pulling downward; to his surprise, he felt it move and heard a click. The door sprang open-it hadn't been locked in the first place. Pender stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

Already he had an idea of how Casey had gained access. The blood spots outside the house were few, tight, and round. They had to have come from a victim close to the ground, or the pattern would have been more spread out, and the splatter points more elongated. But the drag marks beginning at the door and extending across the kitchen floor were broad and bloody; a heelmark on the linoleum showed Casey digging in, leaning against a heavy load.

So: it was probably Aletha, Pender reasoned. (He always thought of victims by their first names when he was working a case.) Somehow Casey had lured her outside, or she'd heard something and gone out to have a look. Casey knocked her to the ground from behind-she didn't start bleeding until she was down. He had to have used a club, probably Twombley's nightstick, as there wasn't enough blood for a knife, and he wouldn't have risked a gunshot. She fell face forward; Casey started to drag her inside, discovered it was harder to drag a body facedown, turned her over to get her through the door.

Where the drag marks ended lay a pool of blood, dried and cracked like mud-here Casey had left her lying. But for how long? Pender was vaguely aware that the dishes in the sink, the dirty pans on the stove, and the empty cartons of milk and eggs on the counter had been left behind, not by one of the tidy housekeepers who lived here, but by Casey. Still Pender ignored them for the moment-they were out of place chronologically. Casey hadn't come here to dine.

Then why had he come? For Terry. For revenge. Casey didn't know Aletha from a hole in the wall. So he dropped her clear of the door, left her lying in the kitchen. But at some point he must have stepped in all that blood-his tracks led out of the kitchen and into the living room, where they grew fainter before disappearing entirely at the door leading into the garage.

Inside the garage, Pender inspected an old Honda and a careworn Plymouth. The ignition wires of the latter were hanging out from under the dashboard-it was probably the car Casey had boosted from the lot behind the jail. No sign of the green Volvo Pender saw in the photograph on Terry's nightstand Tuesday, though. Working hypothesis: Casey arrived in the Plymouth, spent enough time here to eat several meals, then departed in the Volvo.

As Pender reentered the house and made his way down the hallway toward the bedroom where he'd interviewed Terry three days earlier, his excitement at being in on a virgin crime scene was tempered by a foreknowledge of what was waiting for him behind that half-open bedroom door. He understood that everything would change when he stepped through it: he would no longer be alone.

You are a camera, Pender warned himself as he slipped sideways through the door. You are an investigative tool. You are a stand-in for the killer. Get inside the killer's head, not the victim's.

In short, he told himself everything he'd been trained to tell himself at such moments, and it didn't help worth a damn when he opened the door and saw the two corpses posed side by side, propped up against the headboard.