The Boys from Santa Cruz

5

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.

“I think I hit bone,” called the deputy, dropping to one knee and brushing away the loose dirt. “Yup, definitely hit…looks like…yup, it’s a skull, all right. Who’s got the camera, somebody got the camera?”

Pender’s tomato didn’t seem quite so appealing now. He reared back and tossed it as far as he could, heard it land far down the hill with a fat, wet splat.

“Good arm.” A girlish voice behind him.

Pender turned-it was the little female deputy. “I think I pulled something,” he said, gingerly rotating his shoulder. “What’s up?”

She handed him a small address book, faux-leather cover, two inches wide, three inches high. On the first page, under “If found, please return to,” the name Luke Sweet was written in a childish hand, with one Santa Cruz address crossed out and another penciled in. Pender flipped through the pages. The first entry was under D, for Dad. No phone number, just “Dad,” a long, cryptic number, and an address that explained the cryptic number: San Quentin Prison, Marin County, CA.

Another half dozen entries-presumably Luke’s buddies-were alphabetized by their first names-Joe, Kent, Larry, Michael, Micky-but on the G page was an entry for Grandpa Fred amp; Grandma Evelyn, with the same address as the one penciled in on the first page. At some point, obviously, Little Luke had moved in with his grandparents.

Which didn’t mean that was where he’d gone now, but it was the closest thing to a lead they’d had since they learned of the boy’s existence. Pender thanked the deputy, pocketed the book, and wandered off in search of a telephone.