The Girls He Adored (19 page)

Pender cabbed back to Alisal Street, and after retrieving his gun from the jail office and the rented Toyota from the parking lot, headed for the nearest McDonald's (not counting the IV drip, he hadn't had any nourishment since that sandwich in the courthouse Wednesday afternoon), ordered a #1 Extra Value Meal to go, and brought it back to his room in the Travel Inn, where he pondered his next move.

The big problem would be getting information from official sources, he thought, washing down his second Vicodin of the afternoon with a super-sized Coke. He had a shadow copy of the entire Casey file with him (he knew it more or less by heart anyway) but very little data on Paula Ann Wisniewski, the young woman whom Casey had disemboweled. That wouldn't even be in the NCIC computer yet—he'd need someone with access to the sheriff's department records to get it for him.

But who? Pender was in no better favor with the sheriff's
department than he was with the FBI. Then he thought of calling Terry Jervis. It was a long shot—and he'd have to get by the formidable Ms. Winkle—but if anyone wanted Casey worse than Pender did, it would be either Deputy Jervis or Deputy Knapp, and Knapp was back in the trauma ward of Natividad Hospital, heavily sedated.

Nobody picked up the phone at the little ranch house in Prunedale, however—after six rings, Pender heard an answering-machine message in Jervis's lockjaw voice:

“We're not home. We're going up to Reno for some R&R. Leave a message at the beep, we'll call you when we get back.”

Pender hung up. There was something wrong here. Plenty wrong. First, the woman he'd interviewed Tuesday morning would not have been in shape for an R&R jaunt only three days later. Second, no cop would leave a message like that on an answering machine. Third, and most telling, even if she had been well enough to take a vacation and foolish enough to announce to prospective burglars that the house would be empty, why would Terry Jervis have been the one to record the message, with her jaw wired shut and every word a painful effort?

His cop radar went off like a car alarm; the problem of his next move was solved. Pender bolted his Big Mac and took a quick shower with a plastic laundry bag over his head to keep the bandages dry. On his way out of the room he stuffed the cardboard container of fries into the roomy side pocket of his plaid jacket to snack on as he drove.

Two newspapers on the lawn. The mailbox stuffed. The bright flowers drooping in their beds for lack of watering. Pender reached inside his jacket and unsnapped the leather flap on his holster— the women who tended this house with such care would not have gone off on vacation without notifying the paperboy or the post office, or arranging for a neighbor to pick up the mail and water the flowers.

At this point, according to the rules, Pender should have been calling for backup. Of course, according to the rules, he shouldn't have been there in the first place. No sense sneaking around, he decided—if he were being watched from inside, that would only telegraph his suspicions. Instead he marched boldly up the walk and rang the bell with the tip of his ballpoint pen so as not to smudge any latent prints. No answer.

“Terry, it's Agent Pender,” he called softly—it would have hurt his head to shout. “I just have a few more questions for you.”

Still no answer. He put his ear to the door—no sounds coming from inside the house. He walked around the side of the house to the back, saw what appeared to be drops of dried blood on the cement walk a few feet from the unlatched screen door, and a wider, streaky stain on the doorstep. Pender knelt, read the blood splatters like a tracker. Like tracks, they had a story to tell.

He nudged the screen door open wider, and with his feet straddling the stain, peered through the window in the kitchen door, trying to see through the crack in the gingham curtains on the other side of the glass. He could just make out a long reddish brown streak across the kitchen linoleum. Looked like more blood; looked like drag marks.

Pender now knew what was waiting for him inside; his reaction would have been difficult for anyone but another seasoned investigator to understand. Along with a whisper of dread, he felt a sense of awe so profound it was almost religious. There, on the other side of this thin door, lay a hushed, virgin crime scene.

Virgin—could
anyone
appreciate what that meant to Pender? Even FBI field agents rarely arrive at a murder scene first—they are almost always called in by the local authorities. As for visiting firemen like the so-called profilers of the Behavioral Sciences Unit, or the Investigative Support or Liaison Support operatives like Pender, they considered themselves lucky if they were even called to a crime scene.

And if they were, it was rarely until long after the local yokels had trampled the lawns and carpets, bagged key evidence instead of leaving it in situ, picked up items and put them down in
almost
the same spot, turned bodies over before photographing them, that sort of thing.

Yet a good investigator operated by reading a crime scene as if it were a work of art. It wasn't simply a case of looking for fingerprints or checking the redial on the phone. Everything in the painting, from a single brush stroke to the total gestalt, revealed something about the painter. And inside this house was Casey's most recent masterpiece—there wasn't a chance in hell Pender was going to call for backup just yet.

He looked the back door over carefully, peered through the curtains again—no deadbolt. Just the door lock—a thumb-latch with a keyhole. He had a lock pick that he'd carried in his wallet for nearly
thirty years and hadn't used in twenty, but he didn't want to start mucking up the entry surfaces before the latents had been lifted.

He halfheartedly tried the thumb-latch, crooking his forefinger around the base where no prints were likely to be found, and pulling downward; to his surprise, he felt it move and heard a click. The door sprang open—it hadn't been locked in the first place. Pender stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

Already he had an idea of how Casey had gained access. The blood spots outside the house were few, tight, and round. They had to have come from a victim close to the ground, or the pattern would have been more spread out, and the splatter points more elongated. But the drag marks beginning at the door and extending across the kitchen floor were broad and bloody; a heelmark on the linoleum showed Casey digging in, leaning against a heavy load.

So: it was probably Aletha, Pender reasoned. (He always thought of victims by their first names when he was working a case.) Somehow Casey had lured her outside, or she'd heard something and gone out to have a look. Casey knocked her to the ground from behind—she didn't start bleeding until she was down. He had to have used a club, probably Twombley's nightstick, as there wasn't enough blood for a knife, and he wouldn't have risked a gunshot. She fell face forward; Casey started to drag her inside, discovered it was harder to drag a body facedown, turned her over to get her through the door.

Where the drag marks ended lay a pool of blood, dried and cracked like mud—here Casey had left her lying. But for how long? Pender was vaguely aware that the dishes in the sink, the dirty pans on the stove, and the empty cartons of milk and eggs on the counter had been left behind, not by one of the tidy housekeepers who lived here, but by Casey. Still Pender ignored them for the moment—they were out of place chronologically. Casey hadn't come here to dine.

Then why
had
he come? For Terry. For revenge. Casey didn't know Aletha from a hole in the wall. So he dropped her clear of the door, left her lying in the kitchen. But at some point he must have stepped in all that blood—his tracks led out of the kitchen and into the living room, where they grew fainter before disappearing entirely at the door leading into the garage.

Inside the garage, Pender inspected an old Honda and a careworn Plymouth. The ignition wires of the latter were hanging out
from under the dashboard—it was probably the car Casey had boosted from the lot behind the jail. No sign of the green Volvo Pender saw in the photograph on Terry's nightstand Tuesday, though. Working hypothesis: Casey arrived in the Plymouth, spent enough time here to eat several meals, then departed in the Volvo.

As Pender reentered the house and made his way down the hallway toward the bedroom where he'd interviewed Terry three days earlier, his excitement at being in on a virgin crime scene was tempered by a foreknowledge of what was waiting for him behind that half-open bedroom door. He understood that everything would change when he stepped through it: he would no longer be alone.

You are a camera, Pender warned himself as he slipped sideways through the door. You are an investigative tool. You are a stand-in for the killer. Get inside the killer's head, not the victim's.

In short, he told himself everything he'd been trained to tell himself at such moments, and it didn't help worth a damn when he opened the door and saw the two corpses posed side by side, propped up against the headboard.

“E
XCUSE ME?”
I
RENE SPOKE
for the first time in nearly an hour. “We're getting low on gas.”

They were still on Highway 1, just south of Big Sur. Barbara was huddled in the far left corner of the backseat, her skin crawling, trying vainly to shrink away from the tip of her abductor's wickedlooking boning knife, with its outcurved, razor-sharp, nine-inch blade. Max had pulled up the hem of Barbara's T-shirt and was idly tracing a figure eight along her love-handle. He could feel Kinch yearning for control.

You'll get your turn,
Max told him.
Don't you always get your turn?

He still hadn't decided what to do with Barbara yet. He couldn't just let her go, but if he were to let Kinch hack her, Irene might find it impossible to warm up to Max. It seemed unfair somehow—still, he'd find a way to work around it. “What's the gauge show?” he asked Irene.

“About an eighth of a tank.”

“How much did we have when we left?”

“I didn't look.”

“That was a mistake,” he said quietly. “Sins of omission are punished the same as sins of commission. Are we clear?”

“We're clear.” She echoed his own words back to him, to calm him. “What do you want me to do?”

Maxwell looked out the window, saw the gated entrance to the Henry Miller Library on the left. He closed his eyes and activated Mose's extraordinary memory. “The next gas station is down in Lucia. Pull over and pump it yourself. Use this credit card.” He reached into the carpet bag he'd taken from Terry and Aletha's
house and handed her Terry's Visa card—he'd wanted to leave a trail pointing south anyway.

The stretch of coast highway between Big Sur and Lucia is as spectacularly scenic as any road on earth. The rocky cliffs and crags, the crashing surf hundreds of feet below, the blue slate Pacific stretching endlessly to a wide, curved horizon, the gold and silver play of light on the water—no one in the Volvo paid the slightest attention to any of it. Irene drove grimly, both hands on the wheel; Barbara cowered against the left rear door, trembling, eyes shut tight; Max was lost in plans and contingencies.

As they crossed Big Creek Bridge, with four miles to go until Lucia, Max leaned forward and spoke confidentially into Irene's ear, just loud enough for Barbara to overhear. “Do you know what Paula Ann said when she died?”

Irene had to force her mind through a reasoning process—she could no longer respond unself-consciously. So: what exactly had been asked? What would be an appropriate response, one that would neither encourage nor anger him?

“No, I don't.”

“She said ‘Oh.’ Just ‘Oh.’ Isn't that pitiful? I mean, of all the things she might have said.”

“She was probably in shock.”

“Well, my goodness, can you blame her?”

Facetious, thought Irene—he was bantering. Did he want her to banter back? She decided to take him literally instead—less danger of setting him off. “No, I can't.”

“Me either. I'll expect better of Barbara if I have to kill her, though. I mean, if you try anything the least bit funny at the gas station. You know, try to signal anybody, or leave a note.”