Jonathan Nasaw - The Boys from Santa Cruz

“That’s not what I said. I said she shot herself first, then she-”

“Shut up,” the lawyer said quietly but firmly. I shut up. “Agent Pender, this interview is over.”

Pender ignored him. He leaned forward and put his huge hand on my knee. It made my skin crawl. “Son, I want to help you, but you have to give me something to work with. I don’t care if you killed Teddy. Teddy was a monster, and believe me, I know, I’ve seen her rap sheet. So tell me you pulled the trigger in self-defense, I’ll buy it. It’s the victims I need to know about, so we can bring their families some peace.”

“Victims? What victims?”

“The ones on those videos you and Teddy burned before you shot her.”

“I told you, I didn’t shoot Teddy, she shot herself.” Scared, confused, close to tears, I turned to my lawyer. “You have to listen to me, he’s making this stuff up, I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

He tried to come to my rescue. “This is starting to sound like a fishing expedition, Agent Pender. Do you have any evidence to back up these charges?”

Pender turned to him. “So far, only the tape that survived the fire, and the two female bodies we found in the tomato patch,” he said cheerfully. “But they were still digging when I left.”

It was close to daylight by the time the Santa Cruz cops arrived to take me into custody. Pender had one more surprise for me: he called one of them into the backyard, and when they returned, the cop was carrying my backpack. Pender told me he was sorry, that the cop found it on his own, but I didn’t believe him on account of his grin. By now it was practically splitting his big bald head in two. The man was just so pleased with himself he was starting to look like a Muppet.

I put up a hell of a fight trying to get to him. I wanted to tear that grin right off his face, just dig my fingers under his skin and rip, but I only made it about halfway across the room before the cops got me into a choke hold. Pender’s laughter is the last thing I remember hearing before I lost consciousness.

I was only out a few seconds. Everybody was still there when I came to, but I had never felt so alone in my life. And I don’t mean just friendless or nobody-loves-me alone. I was used to that. This was a different kind of alone, this was one of those science fiction deals where the hero finds himself in some other reality, in some other dimension or on some other planet, where everything looks the same as it did before but nothing is, and nobody seems to know it but him.

As for Fred and Evelyn, they acted like I had some kind of infectious disease, drawing themselves up against the wall so as not to have me brush against them while the cops were hustling me out of the house in handcuffs.

I spent the rest of that day in holding cells, courtrooms, and the backseats of cop cars. After I was arraigned for the dope in Santa Cruz (the kid lawyer pled me not guilty), they handed me over to a sheriff’s deputy who’d driven all the way down from Marshall County to pick me up. Not looking real thrilled about his assignment, the deputy shoved me handcuffed into the back of his cruiser, where I sat or lay for the entire drive. Didn’t talk to me except to bark orders, didn’t give me anything to eat or drink, though he stopped once to feed his own face, and the only reason he let me get out to take a leak was because I warned him that otherwise I was going to piss all over the backseat.

We arrived in Marshall City early that evening. The courthouse had already shut down, so I was brought to the Marshall County Juvenile Facility for what they called processing, like I was lunch meat or something.

Thinking about lunch meat reminded me that I hadn’t eaten anything all day except for a bologna sandwich in the holding cell in Santa Cruz while I was waiting to be arraigned. When I complained, the deputy who was conducting my second strip search of the day told me I had missed dinner, but said they would be serving cookies and milk before lights-out.

I spent the night in a tiny room with a bare cot, one blanket, no pillow. One-piece metal sink-toilet. Never saw any other kids, because they’d stuck me in something they called a segregation unit, where they put kids who break their rules, or are considered too dangerous to house with the other juveniles.

Me, I was so not dangerous, all I could think about was the cookies and milk. I constructed and reconstructed that snack over and over in my mind. What kind of cookies would there be? Would I get a choice? I was hoping for chocolate chip, but I was so hungry I’d have settled for oatmeal. And how many cookies would there be? If they said cookies, plural, that would imply more than one, wouldn’t it? And what about the milk? I kept picturing a big frosty glass, but even I knew that was unrealistic. It would probably be one of those little waxy half-pint cartons like in a school cafeteria.

Pitiful, huh? Part of me aches for that poor naive kid, but mostly I’m just embarrassed for him. That deputy was yanking your chain, I want to go back and tell him. No cookies and milk for you. Just heartbreak and betrayal. So the best thing you can do is toughen the fuck up as soon as possible, because as bad as things are in your life, they’re about to get worse.

At forty, Pender discovered, he could no longer pull an all-nighter with impunity. His eyelids started closing on him a few hours into the drive back from Santa Cruz on Wednesday morning. He pulled over at a rest stop near Manteca and tilted the driver’s seat of the Bu-car as far back as it would go-when you’re six-four, you can forget about lying down in the backseat of anything smaller than a Greyhound bus. Then he tipped his tweed hat over his eyes and managed to catch an hour or two of fitful z’s.

Pender reached the Marshall County sheriff’s station, a low, adobe-style building attached by a covered walkway to the county jail, around two in the afternoon. He found Izzo packing up to fly back to New York. With Sweet and Swantzer both dead, Izzo told him, the Bureau had decided to pull the plug on this end of the operation.

“Marshall County gets jurisdiction over the snuff tape and the bodies in the tomato patch, so Little Luke’s on his way back from Santa Cruz even as we speak.”

“What about the Swantzer killing?”

“Looks like we were wrong on that one. Autopsy found a twenty-two slug in her head and a twenty-two pistol at the bottom of the trunk.”

“So maybe the kid shot her with the twenty-two?”

Izzo shook his head. “The M.E. says it’s a self-inflicted GSW.”

“But-”

“Let it go, Ed.”

“Let it go? How can you even say that? You saw that video he shot, what they did to that girl.”

“He’s only a kid. They probably forced him to hold the camera.”

“I don’t believe that for a second. I met him, Iz, I looked into his eyes, and lemme tell you, the hair on my arms stood up.”

“I repeat: he’s only a kid, Ed.”

“So were Kemper, Mullin, and Frazier-they were all kids once,” said Pender. Edmund Kemper, Herbert Mullin, and John Linley Frazier were the infamous trio of serial murderers who’d stalked Santa Cruz independently of each other in the early 1970s.

“So now he’s a serial killer? I just finished telling you, he didn’t even kill his step…his step-whatever. But don’t worry,” Izzo added, reluctantly. “It looks like the Marshall County DA agrees with you about the snuff tape. He says absent any evidence of coercion, he’s going to try to get Little Luke tried as an adult.”

Pender grinned. “I guess my work here is done, then, Nell,” he announced, in a strangled Dudley Do-Right voice, then asked Izzo if he could catch a ride to the airport with him.