The Boys from Santa Cruz

3

Pender used his cell phone to call 911. He was waiting outside Epstein’s door with his badge case clipped to the breast pocket of his sport jacket and his badge hanging in plain sight when the first cruiser arrived. The rest was attitude-he treated the responding officers as if they’d been dispatched to his crime scene, directing them to stand guard outside Epstein’s door and make sure nobody touched the doorknob until it had been dusted.

Pender maintained control of the scene until a pair of veteran SFPD homicide detectives arrived in an unmarked car. Their initial assumption was that the missing man had shot his cleaning lady and fled; it took Pender a good deal of effort to convince the locals that they were dealing instead with a homicide-kidnapping case involving a serial offender.

Pender’s next move was to give the San Francisco detectives the names of their counterparts in Santa Cruz and Monterey. When he’d finished doing that, his job as liaison support was over. Or so Steve McDougal informed him via his cell phone a few minutes later.

“You don’t understand, Steve,” said Pender, who had stepped off the curb and was now performing a primitive cell phone reception dance in the middle of Francisco Street, shuffling around in circles holding the phone to one ear and sticking his forefinger in the other. “Epstein was working with us-we can’t just turn our backs on him.”

“What’s this we stuff, kemo sabe?”

“All right, I was working with him. So there’s-”

“Ed.”

“No way I’m-”

“Ed?”

“Walking away from-”

“Ed!”

“What?”

“I want you on the next available commercial flight home. You’re a fifty-year-old liaison support specialist, not a case agent, not a field agent. If field assistance is requested, the Bureau has field offices and resident agencies from one end of California to the other, and if any liaising needs to be done, you can do it from here as easily as you can from there, with considerably less damage to my budget.”

“What if I pay my own expenses? It’s already Friday-what do you care where I spend the weekend?”

There was no immediate response. Pender wasn’t sure whether McDougal had been struck dumb, or if they’d lost the connection-either way, he decided to take the silence for permission. “Thanks, Steve, you won’t regret it,” he said, and hurriedly pushed the End Call button.