The Boys from Santa Cruz

3

“Stop it there,” said Izzo. He and Pender were sitting side by side on the narrow, scratchy sofa bed in the living room of the trailer, watching Principals of Accounting, Tape 4 with the lights dimmed and the blinds drawn.

Pender hit the Pause button. The background rattle and hum of the air-conditioning swelled to fill the silence. “What?”

“You missed it. Run it back-there was a reflection in the window over the bed.”

Pender reversed the tape, then ran it forward in slow motion, freezing the image when a figure wearing a backward-facing baseball cap and a San Francisco 49ers jersey appeared briefly in the dark glass of the horizontal window over the bed, peering into the viewfinder of the camcorder balanced on his shoulder. They couldn’t quite make out the face behind the viewfinder. All they knew for sure was that it couldn’t have been Luke Sweet or Theodora Swantzer, Sweet’s transgendered, ex-con partner, because those two were both clearly visible on the bed. Butt-naked save for their Lone Ranger masks and Swantzer’s genital-concealing panties, they were taking turns smacking around a skinny, teenage runaway who looked as if she were just beginning to realize how much trouble she was in.

The agents exchanged grim smiles. It had been doubly hard on them, watching the victims suffering, knowing that the killers were beyond the reach of earthly justice. It felt as if Sweet and Swantzer were taunting them-look what we did, they seemed to be saying with every thrust and blow, look what we got away with-and you can’t…fucking…touch us!

So the discovery that the unspeakable pair had had an accomplice buoyed the agents’ spirits a little. Izzo jotted down the time on the VCR counter-fourteen minutes into the tape-and made a note to have somebody blow up and tweak the frames in question. Then they settled back to watch the rest of the horror show, which ended shortly after the victim’s death, with Luke Sweet delivering a chilling throwaway line-“You like apples? Well, how do you like them apples?”-as he climbed off the corpse.

The screen went dark. Over the hum of the air-conditioning, they heard the hackle-raising sound of a baying hound-the state police had brought in a cadaver-sniffing dog to search the property. “You look like you could use a drink,” Pender told Izzo, thirstily eyeing the nearly full bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the counter separating the living room from the kitchen area.

“Didn’t anybody tell you FBI agents aren’t supposed to drink alcohol, especially on the job?” Izzo asked him.

“Yeah, I think I heard something like that once,” said Pender as he rinsed out two water glasses. “Ice?”

“Sure.”

Pender was about to open the refrigerator door when one of the photographs affixed to it by magnet caught his eye. It was the former Unsub, standing in front of the trailer with his arm around a teenage boy. The boy was sporting a Mohawk hairdo and an adolescent scowl, and wearing a red 49ers jersey with the number 16 across the front. Pender took it down and turned it over-across the back of the snapshot, someone had written “Big Luke, Little Luke, Father’s Day,” with a felt-tipped pen.

“Oh jeez,” he said, wincing.

“Beg pardon?” called Izzo.

“That ‘accomplice’ we were looking for, the one with the camera? It’s Sweet’s son. Little Luke. Looks like he’s around fourteen, fifteen years old.”

Izzo winced. “Man oh Manischewitz,” he groaned. “Just when you think it can’t get any sicker.”