The Boys from Santa Cruz

5

Just before six o’clock, the fax machine in Pool’s outer office/command center dinged and began spitting out pages. Pender gathered them up, brought them back to his office, and locked the door behind him. Then he poured himself another shot, put his feet up on the desk, tilted his creaky old behemoth of a chair back, back, back until his head was level with his chocolate brown Hush Puppies, and began reading.

BONNY DOON MENTAL HOSPITAL DESTROYED BY EXPLOSION, FIRE, shouted the large-type, front-page headline in the morning edition of the San Jose Mercury News on April 18. DEATH TOLL COULD REACH 20 was the subhead. Pender had to put on his half-moon reading glasses to make out the text, which had been further reduced in size by the faxing process.

Somewhere between two and three o’clock on the afternoon of the seventeenth, exact time still to be determined, there’d been an explosion in a private mental hospital known as Meadows Road, presumably in the basement boiler room, presumably caused by natural gas. It felt as if the entire building had been lifted off its foundations, reported one survivor. The subsequent fire had greatly complicated efforts to evacuate the confused mental patients, according to the chief of the Bonny Doon Volunteer Fire Department. Not long afterward (exact time again to be determined), the three-story building had suffered a “catastrophic structural failure.”

On the following day, The Mercury News again headlined the story. The number of injured had risen to thirty-seven, seventeen dead bodies had been identified, and a third category had been added: eleven persons “missing or unaccounted for.” At the end of the article, in smaller type (reduced to ant tracks on the fax), the newspaper printed the lists of casualties and m.o.u.f.’s for the first time.

Pender squinted over the small print long enough to realize the names were not in alphabetical order, then put the pages down, took off his half-moon reading glasses, and rubbed his eyes. He could feel a headache coming on-probably those damn drugstore glasses. One of these days, he told himself, he’d have to break down and visit an optometrist, get some real eyeglasses. The only thing holding him back was sheer vanity, not over his looks (that train left the station when he began losing his hair at the age of nineteen) but over his eyesight. Having boasted about his twenty-twenty vision too often to too many colleagues over the years, he knew he’d be eating mucho crow the day he showed up at the office wearing specs.

Back to work, this time bending over the fax with the magnifying glass, skimming down, down…And there it was, toward the bottom of the list of persons missing or unaccounted for: “Sweet, Luke Jr., 25, Santa Cruz.”

But missing ain’t dead, thought Pender. He skimmed past the text of the next day’s article to check out the appended, updated casualty list. Whoops: “Sweet, Luke Jr.” was now one of four names listed as missing, presumed dead.

Presumed-there was that word again. But why the change? Pender asked himself. How had four bodies gone from being unaccounted for to being presumed dead after only two days? It couldn’t have been through DNA identification-at that time, a one-week window was the best-case scenario for industry-standard RFLP testing, and then only if the samples were of good quality and high molecular weight. If they’d had to use the newer PCR technique to amplify the smaller or more damaged samples, the identification would have taken even longer.

So maybe they’d identified all four bodies through dental records, Pender told himself. Or maybe the Santa Cruz authorities had just assumed that no one could have survived an explosion of that magnitude. But Pender’s gut told him that someone had, and in the absence of high-molecular-weight evidence to the contrary, Pender always followed his gut.