When She Was Bad

CHAPTER SEVEN
1

No rewards for Maxwell had been posted by the time Mick MacAlister and E. L. Pender left Santa Cruz Thursday afternoon in a red Cadillac convertible with white upholstery and a Grateful Dead skull-and-roses bumper sticker. But Pender had already called Lily’s uncle to tell him they had a line on Lily’s whereabouts, and might need to offer a reward, and Rollie DeVries had informally agreed to pony up another ten grand.

This one wasn’t about the money for MacAlister, though. It was about glory-or its modern equivalent, celebrity. Bringing in Maxwell while the hot white glare of the media spotlight shone full upon him would all but guarantee Mick his allotted fifteen minutes of fame, which nowadays could be extended almost indefinitely.

As for Pender, who’d been driving through Moss Landing-quaint fishing village on one side of the two-lane highway, hellish power plant, like something out of The War of the Worlds, on the other-when MacAlister reached him on his cell phone, it had been a mixed bag of motivations, none of them financial, that inspired him to turn around and head back to Santa Cruz.

Rescuing Lily was foremost in his mind, of course. And capturing, or rather, recapturing Maxwell was high up on Pender’s list as well, but not for the publicity. Pender had already had his Warholian fifteen minutes of fame several times over, and had always been more relieved than disappointed when the spotlight had moved on.

Instead, Pender looked on the opportunity to bring Maxwell in again as a chance to redeem two of the worst mistakes of his FBI career. Through a moment of inexcusable carelessness on Pender’s part three years earlier, the psychopath had escaped from the Monterey County jail, at the cost of half a dozen additional lives. Then after the shootout on Scorned Ridge, when Maxwell lay injured, every instinct Pender had developed in three decades of chasing serial killers cried out for him to end it with a coup de grace, or by letting Maxwell bleed out on the floor of the barn.

But although it was Irene Cogan who’d talked him out of it, then tied a tourniquet around Maxwell’s thigh, thereby saving his life, Pender still blamed himself. Witness or no witness, there were dozens of ways for a determined special agent not to bring his man in alive-and if he’d employed any of them, Patricia Benoit, Walter Smets, Alan Corder, and Cheryl Corder would still be alive.

Pender’s remaining motivations were less conscious. Chief among them were resentment for his treatment at the hands of the Portland cops-your basic “I’ll show them” state of mind-along with a severe action jones: at fifty-seven Pender was no better prepared to slip gracefully into his golden years than he had been when he reached the FBI’s mandatory retirement age two years earlier.

They drove with the top down and the CD player blaring Grateful Dead tunes. Pender, still wearing his grass-and-mustard-checked sport coat, nearly lost his hat when Mick put the hammer down on the superhighway running the length of California; he reached out to make a last-second, one-handed grab as the beret flew off his head. A few minutes later, Mick, wearing a casually matched jacket and jeans outfit of faded denim, took a joint-filled Sucrets tin from his pocket, and fired one up with a windproof butane torch.

“Don’t worry, I drive better stoned,” he told Pender, with the dangling joint glommed securely to his lower lip.

“You’re under arrest,” Pender replied.

“You got me fair and square, copper,” said the portly private eye, raising both hands over his head-at eighty-plus miles an hour, on a far-from-empty eight-lane highway.

“On second thought, maybe I’ll let it slide just this once,” Pender decided.

They made good time, stopping once for gasoline and a convenience-store chili dog that reminded Mick, a native New Jerseyan, of the sign on the old roadside greasy spoon/gas station in Tuckahoe: EAT HERE AND GET GAS. As they passed Sacramento, he lit up a second doob. Pender remonstrated, reminding him they still had a potentially hazardous job in front of them.

“What, you think I’m goin’ up against a psychopathic serial killer straight?” said MacAlister.

Which made so much sense to Pender that he found himself wondering whether he hadn’t inhaled a little secondhand smoke himself.