The Boys from Santa Cruz

3

A patrol car shuttled Ajanian and Pender down to the Little League field being used as a helipad. The Humboldt County search-and-rescue helicopter was behind second base, ready to take off. Running in a crouched trot, holding on to his hat with one hand and holding the unfashionably wide lapels of his sport coat closed with the other, Pender followed Ajanian into the chopper. The sheriff introduced him to his two young, flight-suited deputies, Gabel and Garner. Seconds after they lifted off, the sun, which had set a few minutes earlier, was briefly and gloriously resurrected, streaking the dark gray horizon with crimson and yellow bands. Then it disappeared again as the helicopter tilted dizzyingly, wheeled eastward, and continued to climb.

Mountainous terrain rushed by beneath them; rolling hills gave way to bristling ravines and rocky crags. When they reached the designated coordinates, they saw the CDF helicopter circling over the body, shining its bobbing searchlight on a brave white scrap of cloth suspended in the evergreen canopy. The two pilots exchanged thumbs-up through their Plexiglas canopies, then the forestry chopper wheeled away into the darkness. Ajanian duckwalked up to the front of the cabin, removed his cap (Pender had been right about the comb-over), put on a headset with a microphone, conferred briefly with whoever was at the other end, then put his hat back on and duckwalked back to his deputies.

“THE CONSENSUS IS, WE’D JUST AS SOON BRING HER OUT TONIGHT,” he shouted over the noise of the rotors. “YOU GUYS GET THE FINAL SAY, THOUGH. IF YOU THINK IT’S TOO DANGEROUS TO BRING HER UP IN THE DARK…”

The consensus? Ajanian’s got to be the king of buck passing, thought Pender. Asking a search-and-rescue daredevil whether something was too dangerous was like asking a three-year-old whether candy was too sweet.

The rescue operation commenced smoothly. While the pilot maneuvered them into position, Gabel attached a safety harness to the cable holding the body basket, basically a stretcher with side rails and straps, and when they were directly above the body, he lowered himself over the side, with Ajanian aiming the searchlight, Pender operating the electric winch, and Garner spotting his partner.

“LOWER, LOWER,” Garner called to Pender, who was trying not to notice how close they were to the cliff. “SLOW IT DOWN…SLOWER! OKAY, A LITTLE LOWER…AAAND…STOP! STOP IT AND LOCK IT.”

It took Gabel only a few minutes of midair ballet to free the body from the trees and strap it into the basket. But only is a relative concept when at any moment a capricious up-, down-, or cross-draft might have dashed the dangling deputy against the side of the cliff or sent the helicopter spiraling into the ravine.

Working the winch again, Pender didn’t get a look at the dead girl until the other three had finished wrestling the basket into the chopper, which rose vertically to gain clearance the second the grisly cargo was aboard, then veered away from the mountainside.

The supine corpse, Pender noted, was in full rigor, arched drastically, with the head and heels touching the stretcher and the pelvis upthrust in a ghastly parody of sexual ecstasy. The girl’s outspread arms were curved gracefully, as if she had been flash-frozen in the middle of a swan dive. Rather than risk further damage to the body by trying to work it free, Gabel had sawn off the branch upon which she’d been impaled, so the front of her T-shirt, stiff with dried blood, was poked up above her heart.

Pender’s gaze traveled upward to the girl’s neck. With the upper surface of the body pale from postmortem lividity, the dark bruises on either side of the throat were clearly visible even in the dim light of the helicopter. As for her eyes, well, they were gone. One socket gaped raw red; the lid of the other had collapsed inward, giving the socket a shrunken appearance. Pender’s stomach churned; he tasted the bile rising in his throat, clamped his lips together, swallowed it back down. You’ve seen worse than this, he told himself. Get a goddamn grip.

Ajanian, who wasn’t looking all that chipper himself, agreed with Pender that the degree of rigor mortis and the absence of blanching meant the girl had been dead at least twelve hours. He had noticed the bruised throat, too, but agreed that the amount of blood on the T-shirt meant she had to have been alive when she was impaled, which ruled out strangulation as the immediate cause of death.

But whatever had ultimately killed the girl-presumably they’d know more after the autopsy-Ajanian was adamant that if nothing else, the presence of the bruises on her throat meant Luke Sweet would now have to be considered a danger to public safety. This would alter the character of the search considerably. No more all-volunteer or one-person search parties, to begin with. And the public would have to be alerted along with law enforcement.

The sheriff was all but licking his mustache at the thought of a well-attended press conference, with TV lights blazing and microphones bristling, but he still wanted Pender’s help in covering his ass. “WE’RE IN AGREEMENT, RIGHT?” he shouted, as the lights of the ball field came into view.

“YES AND NO.”

Ajanian, incredulous: “EXCUSE ME?”

“YES, HE COULD BE DANGEROUS. NO, I DON’T THINK YOU SHOULD ANNOUNCE IT.”

On the ground, while the deputies and paramedics were transferring the now blanket-covered body from the basket to a gurney, Pender explained his reasoning to the sheriff. There were too many people with too many guns out there, he said-it would be like painting a bull’s-eye on the kid’s back. And since Pender also had the impression that the more threatened the boy felt, the more dangerous he’d become, declaring him a threat to the public would only increase the danger to both himself and the public.

“So what am I supposed to tell them, then?” Ajanian said testily, adjusting his cap as the men and women with the cameras and microphones closed in on them.

“As little as possible,” suggested Pender.

“Thanks for nothing,” Ajanian whispered out of the side of his mouth as the flashbulbs started popping.

“The Bureau is always happy to be of assistance to local law enforcement agencies,” replied Pender.