The Boys from Santa Cruz

2

9:00 A.M., Eastern time. Just another morning at the office for Pender. Coffee, a couple Danish, the sports section of The Washington Post. Not a bad life if you can stand the excitement.

As always, Pender saved Shirley Povich’s column for last, then brushed the crumbs from his desk blotter, and with a yellow legal pad and a coffee mug full of sharpened pencils at hand, he began placing calls and returning phone messages in geographical order, working from east to west according to time zone.

Normally he would have postponed his West Coast calls until after lunch, but today he was so antsy about this Luke Sweet business that he postponed lunch instead. Long-distance directory assistance gave him the number for the Santa Cruz County Coroner’s Office, a division of the sheriff’s department. The deputy who answered the phone connected him with Sergeant Bagley, the ranking officer, and Bagley referred him to the forensic pathologist Dr. Alicia Gallagher.

“Good morning, Dr. Gallagher. This is Special Agent E. L. Pender, with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I understand you were in charge of identifying the victims in the Meadows Road fire?”

“That’s correct,” she said, with what may have been a sigh.

But sighs were more than okay with Pender. He loved to hear them when he was conducting an interview: they almost always meant ask me more. “It must have been one unholy mess,” he prompted.

“That’s a bit of an understatement.”

“How so?”

“Oh, let me count the ways. To begin with, the building was a brick structure, which may have worked for the third little pig, but is a very bad idea in California. How it survived the ’89 quake is anybody’s guess. Then there was the initial explosion of a few thousand cubic feet of natural gas, causing a partial structural failure and triggering an absolute holocaust of a fire. At its peak, over seventy-five percent of the building was engulfed. Then, as the fire grew hotter, what was left of the building underwent a catastrophic structural collapse-in layman’s terms, the place completely pancaked.”

Pender gave her a little whew-just enough to let her know he was paying attention without interrupting the flow.

“Exactly. And do you know how you identify a human body after it’s been blown up, smashed, incinerated, then crushed again under a few thousand tons of brick and rubble, Agent Pender? Well, neither do I.”

“And yet you had to,” Pender prompted gently.

“Precisely. We had to. And of course they weren’t all as bad as that worst-case scenario I gave you. We managed to identify all but four of the bodies through dental records.”

She sounded reluctant to go on. Pender prodded her gently. “And the rest?”

A deep breath, an unmistakable suck-it-up sigh. “By the time we reached the bottommost strata, there were four names unaccounted for out of the list of all those known to have been present at the hospital at the time of the explosion. Two patients, two orderlies. So what we did was-ultimately, it was Sergeant Bagley’s call, but I believe the sheriff signed off on it as well-we took the organic matter we found at the bottom of the pile-enough to fill a shoe box, none of it with viable DNA-and declared it mixed remains. We gave a portion to the families of any of the remaining unaccounted-fors who requested it. We didn’t fudge the identification, mind you-they knew what they were getting.”

“I don’t doubt it for a moment,” said Pender. “And please understand that nobody’s second-guessing you here. But now comes the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, if that doesn’t date me too badly. Those two unaccounted-for patients-would one of them have been Luke Sweet?”

Long pause, troubled pause. Then: “Yes. Yes, that’s correct. How did you know?”

Pender felt like whooping in triumph, but he settled for drawing a series of exclamation points on his legal pad-he didn’t want her to think he was gloating. “Somebody murdered Sweet’s grandparents last week-a real hack job, from what I understand. Seeing as how that’s only a week after their psychopathic grandson disappeared in a suspicious fire, it just seemed like too much of a coincidence.”

“Oh. Oh I see,” said the doctor. “And now I have a sixty-four thousand-dollar question for you, Agent Pender: Are we talking about the Harris murders?”

“We are.”

“And Luke Sweet was their grandson?”

“He was.”

“Holy moly,” said Dr. Gallagher.

“I take it you’re familiar with their case?”

“I caught it. Another unholy mess. The bodies had been decapitated, dismembered, and strewn all over the Santa Cruz Mountains. We never did find the heads.”

“Holy moly back atcha.”

“Of course, it could still be a coincidence.”

“Absolutely,” said Pender-but they both knew he didn’t mean it.