Pender’s early morning flight from Dulles to San Francisco was three-quarters empty, so flying coach was not the ordeal it might have been, and the landing went smoothly enough. The rent-a-car, however, turned out to be a generic white Toyota with all the legroom and power of a bumper car, and there wasn’t much in the way of scenery at first-Highway 101 was mostly industrial parks and shopping malls all the way from San Francisco to San Jose.
It wasn’t until he’d turned off onto Highway 17, a dappled, winding, two-lane mountain road lined with sharp-smelling eucalyptus and towering redwoods, that Pender felt he was really back in California. From 17, he followed a succession of narrow, winding roads that plunged deeper and deeper into the Santa Cruz Mountains, and as brightest noon turned to dusk in the canyons, Pender was forcibly reminded that it was in these dark and brooding hills that Kemper, Mullin, and Frazier had plied their bloody trade.
As it turned out, Pender could have saved himself the trip. There was nothing left of Meadows Road but a gatehouse at the bottom of the steep, narrow driveway and a vast, debris-filled hole in the ground at the top, currently being excavated by two scurrying backhoes and a queue of patient dump trucks.
But having come this far, Pender was determined to make the best of it. After parking the Toyota on the far side of the hole, next to a makeshift chainlink construction fence, he loosened his tie, took off his tomato-soup-colored sport jacket, and draped it across the back of the front passenger seat, then set out to explore the periphery of the blast, dime-store pocket notebook and tooth-marked pencil stub in hand.
The first thing he noticed was that the trees on the edge of the woods, some twenty yards from the edge of the building’s footprint, had either been stripped and scorched on the side facing the blast, or leveled entirely. Hard to believe anyone could have lived through that son of a bitch.
Yet many had. Was Little Luke one of them? If so, how had he managed to get away without anyone noticing? Of course, it must have been a real clusterfuck here after the explosion…
While Pender’s mind nattered on, his Hush Puppies carried him into the woods. Nearly two and a half weeks after the fire, there was still a light dusting of ash on some of the bushes. Behind this tame woodland loomed a forbidding-looking stone fence some ten feet high, topped with electrified wire. Pender jotted down a note, “Elec. fence: juice?” to remind himself to inquire whether the power had been knocked out immediately after the explosion, thereby making the fence, if not inviting, at least climbable.
Unless of course the juice was supplied at the gatehouse, and the gatehouse juice was on a separate line from the hospital. “Pwr source?” he wrote. Then, “Auto theft?” meaning that if Little Luke had gotten over the wall, it would be nice to know if any cars had been stolen within hiking distance of the hospital that day.
And so question led to question until Pender had filled a page of the notebook with one- or two-word entries. When he got back to his car, there was a late-model, white-on-white Buick parked next to it. A lanky guy with faded reddish brown hair leaned against the side of the Buick, surveying the ruins.
“Hey, how’s it going?” called Pender.
The guy gave him a wary nod. Suddenly Pender realized that with his jacket off, his shoulder holster was in plain sight. So much for staying undercover, he thought, sticking out his hand and smiling unthreateningly as he approached the other man.
“Ed Pender, FBI.”
“Epstein. Skip Epstein.”
Epstein waited for Pender to reach him, rather than coming forward to meet him halfway. Glancing downward as they shook hands, Pender noted the mismatched legs and built-up shoe. “Quite a mess,” he said, gesturing to the obscenely empty hole.
“No shit,” said Epstein.
“You here on business, or just having a look-see?”
“Little of both.”
“Meaning…?”
Epstein sighed. “I’m a licensed private investigator,” he said wearily, as if he were gearing up for a hassle.
But a hassle was the last thing Pender, who taught a daylong course in the art of affective interviewing at the Academy every year, had in mind. “Cool,” he said, in the vernacular of the natives. “Are you on a case?”
“A client asked me to look into a recent kidnapping in Pebble Beach.”
Pender’s turn to sigh. “Pebble Beach!” he said, in the same tone of voice Homer Simpson reserved for the word doughnuts.
“Golfer, eh?”
“I try,” said Pender. “Who got kidnapped?”
“Actually, it’s a homicide now. Some backpackers found the body early this morning, down in Big Sur.”
“So what are you doing all the way up here?”
“The victim was an attorney. His last case involved rewriting the will of an old couple whose grandson had been a patient here. He was supposed to have been killed in the explosion, this grandson.”
“Only you’re not all that sure he was,” said Pender, trying not to sound smug.
Epstein looked surprised. “That’s right. And neither is the coroner. Because just last week-”
“The grandparents were both murdered,” Pender broke in. “I know-that’s why I’m here, too.”
Epstein raised an eyebrow. “Luke Sweet?” he said carefully.
“Luke Sweet.”
“Well, fuuuuck me,” Skip muttered.
“How ’bout if I just buy you lunch,” suggested Pender, “and we’ll see how it goes from there.”