Pandemonium in the wake of a bank robbery interrupted. Alarm bells clamoring, sirens shrieking. On one side of the plywood and veneer tellers’ cages, hostages wept and prayed. On the other side, bodies lay motionless on the carpeted floor of the bank lobby, while a baby-faced young man in a blue FBI windbreaker shouted himself hoarse from the doorway. “You’re surrounded, give yourself up, come out with your hands on your heads,” and so on.
“Here we go again,” Special Agent E. L. Pender whispered to the man crouched next to him.
The man clapped Pender on the shoulder. “Courage, mon ami, nobody lives forever.”
They stood up. Pender crooked his arm around the smaller man’s neck from behind, and together, in lockstep, they shuffled out from behind the counter and through the waist-high swinging gate into the lobby, where the other man ducked out of Pender’s grasp.
“Freeze,” shouted the kid in the blue windbreaker as Pender’s right hand moved toward the inside pocket of his rumpled plaid sport jacket; the other man, wearing respectable banker’s pinstripes, backed away obediently, his hands half-raised. Without hesitating, the baby-faced Bureau trainee dropped to a bent-kneed crouch and fired two rounds at Pender, who grabbed his chest with his free hand (the other was still inside his jacket), lowered himself carefully to the floor, and flopped over onto his side.
The trainee crossed the room holding his nine-millimeter automatic at the ready. “Are you all right, sir?” he asked the man in the suit, without taking his eyes off the recumbent Pender.
“Just fine. You, on the other hand, are in deep, deep shit.”
The trainee looked up from Pender and saw the man in pinstripes pointing a Glock.40 at his chest. “What-what’s going on?”
“Bang,” the man replied, rather than fire off a blank cartridge-everybody’s ears were still ringing from the earlier shots.
“Congratulations, son.” Pender hauled himself to his feet and flipped his leather badge case open to show the kid his DOJ shield. “You shot your inside man, then got yourself killed.”
He returned the badge case to the inside pocket of his sport coat, then reached down to offer a helping hand to a healthy-looking brunette corpse lying on the floor with her skirt rucked up high on her shapely thigh. All over the lobby, dead bodies were springing up and brushing themselves off, while freed hostages strolled out from behind the counter, discussing their performances in low, excited tones. (All the participants, save Pender, were professional or semiprofessional actors from a D.C. casting agency under contract to the FBI; having a real, if unlikely looking, special agent playing the undercover inside man, it was believed, helped drive home the point of the exercise more forcefully.)
“Ed.” Mick Lawler, an instructor at the FBI Academy, bustled into the bank with his hand outstretched. “Thanks so much, I really appreciate your help.” He pumped Pender’s hand a few times, then turned to the crestfallen trainee, standing alone by the tellers’ cages, gun in hand. “Remember what we said about making assumptions, Mr. Kincheloe?”
After shaking hands all around, Pender exited the phony bank through the plywood front door and stepped out into the sunshine of Hogan’s Alley, the simulated small town constructed for training purposes on the grounds of the FBI Academy, which was located within the borders of the U.S. Marine base in Quantico, Virginia. He fired up a Marlboro as he strolled down the center of a deserted street lined with false-front stores, a street that ended disconcertingly as always, morphing into what might have been a rolling, landscaped college campus.
A meandering walkway bordered with flower beds climbed a grassy knoll to a recently completed minimalist office building with photographs of President William Jefferson Clinton and FBI Director Louis J. Freeh gracing the lobby wall. Pender stubbed out his cigarette in an urn filled with white sand and rode a silent elevator to the fourth floor, where the suite of offices housing the Liaison Support Unit was guarded by the fiercely protective Miss Pool.
“From your ex,” she announced, handing Pender an envelope.
“I trust you took the liberty of having it sniffed for explosive residue,” said Pender. The acrimonious divorce proceedings, initiated by Pam in August of ’85, while Pender was still out in California watching snuff videos, had been finalized on the first of May 1986-nine years ago yesterday-with Pam getting the house, the car, a monthly alimony check for the next five years, and Purvis the dog-she even got the goddamn dog.
Pender’s new office had a low acoustic ceiling and fluorescent light panels. Three walls were decorated to his specifications with corkboards and whiteboards; horizontal windows set into the fourth wall looked out over the manicured grounds. Seating himself at the scarred oak-veneer desk he’d brought over from Liaison Support’s old basement offices next door to Behavioral Science, Pender could see all the way to the defensive driving course in the hazy blue distance.
After settling into a creaky, wide-bottomed oak swivel chair that had also accompanied him from the old office, Pender donned his half-moon drugstore reading glasses and opened the square, cream-colored envelope from the former Pam Pender. Glossy black letters on heavy card stock informed him that Pamela Jardine (her maiden name), formerly of Blatty and Broom Realty, had opened her own office, Jardine amp; Associates, and was available to assist him with all his real estate needs, residential or commercial.
Pender’s real estate needs, however, were currently nonexistent-not long after the divorce, he had signed a National Park Service Heritage Lease for a ramshackle cabin overlooking the C amp; O Canal. So after running Pam’s card and envelope through his personal shredder, he turned his attention to the daily printout of stranger homicides compiled for him by Thom Davies, a database manager working out of the CJIS headquarters in Clarksburg, West Virginia.
The computer printout, arranged chronologically on perforated, vertically accordioned computer paper, included all newly reported homicides, or attempted homicides, believed to have been committed by a person or persons unknown to the victim. (Fortunately for Pender’s workload, in America the average murder victim was three times more likely to be killed by a family member or acquaintance than by a stranger.) Pender read it carefully as always, relying on his prodigious memory to alert him to telltale patterns, such as victims with descriptions similar to those in previous stranger homicides, or killers with similar m.o.’s.
Today, it was the location of a week-old double murder on the printout that caught Pender’s eye. Santa Cruz, California, once known to the FBI’s monster hunters as the serial killer capital of the United States, with three separate multiple murderers operating simultaneously during the early seventies.
For Pender, however, the words Santa Cruz brought to mind a quick succession of images from the summer of 1985: the stakeout in the post office, the skull in the tomato patch, the fifteen-year-old boy who’d dropped out of a second-story window. Suddenly he realized he had no idea how any of it had come out. How many bodies had been dug up? Had anyone else ever been arrested for the snuff films? And what about Little Luke? Had he ever been found, alive or dead, and if alive, what had become of him?
But that was life in Liaison Support for you. Rarely did Pender find himself involved in either the beginning or the end of an investigation, and although during his travels he was often called upon to interview imprisoned serial offenders for ViCAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, since he’d never interviewed a criminal he’d helped apprehend, there was no sense of closure there, either.
So Pender wouldn’t have wasted any of his precious time wondering what had become of Luke Sweet if the identities of the victims in that double homicide in Santa Cruz-Frederick and Evelyn Harris; married couple; ages seventy-three and seventy, respectively-hadn’t rung a bell.
Pender put down the printout, picked up his phone, speed-dialed Thom Davies in Clarksburg, got his British-accented voice mail. “CJIS, Thom Davies. Leave your message at the tone, and please bear in mind: a lack of foresight on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.”
“Hey, Thom, it’s Ed Pender. Could you take a look in your magic box, see what you can come up with on one Luke Sweet, Jr.? That’s Luke as in the third book of the New Testament, Sweet as in, please sweetheart, do this for me ASAP. I think we might have a live one.”