The Murderer's Daughter

by Jonathan Kellerman

  Plenty of time.

  Returning outside, she gloved up and shined her Maglite on the corpse. As she’d expected, no exit wound. She prodded his back anyway; not even a bulge. Shifting her beam to the lawn, she searched for the ejected cartridge, finally located it a few feet from the body, nestled in grass.

  Pocketing her find, she kneeled by the body, carefully turned it on its back, and illuminated the inert face.

  Her initial impression had been on point: forty give or take, unremarkable features leaning toward coarse, two or three days of beard growth, a short, bristly haircut, dark on top, graying at the temples.

  The wounds she’d inflicted on his cheek looked deep but were surprisingly pallid and not leaking much blood. She’d figured she’d done more damage. Then she understood: His nonbeating heart had stopped pumping juice to his skin.

  His polyester jacket was unremarkable but for the sizable hole above his left breast. Blood rimmed the edges of the shredded fabric, but again, nothing copious.

  Like Grace, he wore dark cargo pants, probably for similar reasons. Same for the Nikes on his feet.

  Dress for success…Mr. Knife meets Dr. Blades…

  Speaking of which…she found the weapon, wiped it down, laid it on the grass, and unzipped his jacket. Underneath he wore a light-colored V-neck T-shirt. No pockets. But the pants offered plenty of storage and Grace found a cellphone, a steel ring hosting a dozen or so delicate-looking lock picks, and a short chain bearing four keys and an alarm trigger with a Chrysler logo.

  She took another look at the knife. Nasty little push-blade thing.

  She fought off a thought: This could be him looking down at me.

  Slipping out the garden door again, she scanned the street, found it empty, made her way back to the Chrysler. Beeping the car alarm off, she waited.

  Nothing.

  Time to have a look.

  The interior was spotless but the glove compartment gave up a fat wallet and a folded, legal-sized manila envelope secured by an eyelet and a string. In the trunk, she found three weapons in black nylon cases: a shotgun, a rifle, and a gray-metal handgun, larger and heavier than her Glock.

  He’d come with a personal armory but had left all his firepower in the car.

  Take a knife to a gunfight…

  Overconfidence or wanting to avoid undue noise?

  Either way, Grace knew she’d been lucky. It took her two trips to get the weapons and the other contents of the car back to her garden, another while to wipe the car down.

  Now, seeing the body, she felt nothing but serenity. One day she might wonder what that said about her. Right now, introspection was an enemy; she had three hours until sunrise, needed to use the time wisely.

  —

  Yet another silent walk up the street led her to her rented Jeep. Keeping the headlights off, she rolled slowly to her garage. Remote-controlling the door open, she backed into the space vacated by the Aston, sealed herself from view with another click.

  A second inspection of the body revealed no additional seepage but when she lifted it at the shoulders, she spied a ten-inch patch of grass where the chest had made contact that was tamped and moist and dark. Above that, a smaller blotch where the cheek wounds had leaked.

  Red dew.

  Returning to the cottage, she brought back several of the heavy-duty black garbage bags Smeralda favored and a roll of duct tape she’d used years ago, improvising a quick fix of a kitchen sink leak as she waited for the plumber.

  Double-bagging Knife’s face, she created a makeshift hood that she taped tight. The bags were too small to contain the rest of the body so she cut one into three rectangles and created a triple-ply postmortem plastic bandage that she taped snugly over the chest wound. Two more bags, each lashed tightly at wrist and biceps, served to cover his hands and arms.

  She stood and inspected her handiwork. The thing on the ground resembled something out of a horror movie. Snip a couple of eyeholes in the hood and he’d be the crazed killer. As it was, he was the hapless victim, and Grace was fine with that.

  Now the hard part. She was strong for her size but his deadweight was substantial. Cutting up another bag, she worked for a long time easing it under the body. Additional tape, quadruple layered, created two loops across his chest and over his knees: handles for gripping the harness she’d fashioned.

  As she’d hoped, the plastic served as a lubricant when she began the twenty-foot drag to the garage. But there was slippage as well and the trip was an ordeal. Once she reached the Jeep’s rear hatch, she went back and retrieved the weapons and everything else she’d gotten from the Chrysler and placed them on the floor behind the front seat. Lowering the rear seat performed double duty, creating a long bed for storage and concealing the stash from casual inspection.

  Getting the body up and in left her panting.

  Recovering her breath, she regarded the mummy she’d created with sour pride, checked the rear-deck carpeting for evidence of seepage, found none. But she didn’t delude herself that some high-tech DNA swab wouldn’t pick up a trace of something.

  Returning to the garden, she hosed down the wet spots in the grass, keeping the hose at low pressure to avoid making noise. Finally, the bloodstains had run off completely into the flower beds edging the east wall of the cottage. Using a spade from the garage, she gently tilled the dirt until she was satisfied everything looked normal. A reexamination of the lawn on all fours revealed a few stray specks of dried blood stiffening a few grass tips. Using her Maglite, nail scissors, and a sandwich bag, she snipped and barbered, deposited the trimmings into the bag, which she encased in two other bags, everything sealed. The feather-light package was secreted in her pant pocket. Same for the knife that had nearly killed her, now compressed to a stubby black oblong.

  She gave the backyard several more minutes of serious scrutiny, could see no sign of disruption.

  The entire encounter with Knife had taken seconds not minutes.

  The two of them dancing smoothly, each thinking they were leading.

  Back in the garage, she closed the Jeep’s hatch, got in the driver’s seat, was gone.

  —

  Returning to the Valley, this time on Benedict Canyon, she got back on the 101 but exited well short of the Hilton on Calabasas, gliding onto Topanga Canyon Boulevard. To the north was suburbia. South shot straight into a tortuous canyon and that’s where she needed to be.

  The road that snaked past the junction of Old Topanga and New Topanga was treacherous if you didn’t know where you were going. Grace had driven it hundreds of times at night, for recreation, working the Aston at high speed around S-curves that gave the engine a chance to breathe.

  To her left were uninterrupted banks of hillside. The right was the same except when limestone and dirt broke unpredictably, creating thousand-foot dead-drops.

  Miscalculate a turn and you were toast.

  More than once, Grace, trusting her gut and her memory, had shut her eyes as she raced along the borders of oblivion.

  Now she kept them wide open.

  —

  During the entire ride, she didn’t spot another vehicle but she did notice a few deer standing stock-still, including an elaborately pointed buck who seemed to sneer at her. And as she neared her first destination a smallish canine thing that was either a baby coyote or a fox scampered over the precipice.

  Lowering her speed, she searched for a turnoff, found one but bypassed it for another and pulled to the side and U-turned with barely enough room for the maneuver. Doubling back a mile, she parked the Jeep in the narrow strip of dirt running parallel to the blacktop.

  That placed her inches from a yawning abyss. Keeping the motor running but the lights doused, she got out, unlatched the Jeep, and eased the plastic-shrouded body down to the dirt. Breathing deeply, she used her sneakered toes and her gloved hands to nudge it closer to the edge.

  She’d chosen well; visibility was generous in both directions and the acute slope maximize
d the chance of a long, unimpeded drop.

  She waited to make sure no headlights approached, steeled herself, and pushed the body over. It thumped and rustled, faster and faster, an accelerating drumbeat.

  Finally: silence.

  If she was lucky her package would remain there a long time. Or forever. If not, she couldn’t see how it could ever be linked to her.

  Driving several yards north and reparking, she walked back and flashlit the spot where she’d dumped the body. She hadn’t left footprints, the ground was too firm, but faint tire tracks rutted and swelled the dirt and she smoothed them.

  Returning to the Jeep she U-turned again, drove south for several miles, stopped and flung the rifle over the side.

  Ten minutes later, same treatment for the handgun.

  Another five minutes and the blood-tipped grass clippings were history.

  Continuing south she came to Topanga’s terminus on PCH.

  Apparently, her karmic destination.

  Maybe at heart, she was just another California beach girl.

  —

  She drove fifty miles north to Oxnard, gliding along the blackened agricultural fringes of the gritty harbor town. The knife was flung over chain link onto a strawberry field. Maybe some lucky stoop-laborer would score personal protection.

  One of six dumpsters fronting an electronics importer in an industrial park just off Sturgis Road served as the shotgun’s new home. The park was deserted and Grace managed to hoist herself high enough to rearrange the container’s contents. Tossing cardboard and paper and packing materials like some celluloid salad, she shielded the weapon from easy discovery.

  Driving to Camino del Sol led her to Del Norte Boulevard and that got her right to the 101.

  She was back in her room at the Hilton at five forty-eight a.m.

  Fortified by a bottle of water, four caramel caffeine chews, and three sticks of turkey jerky, Grace arrayed the enemy’s belongings atop a small desk across from her generous hotel bed.

  Wallet, first. Cheap black leather, cracked at the edges, generic, packed chubby.

  An up-to-date California driver’s license for Beldrim Arthur Benn was stuck in an inner compartment—secreted but hardly hidden. The physical traits and age matched the man she’d shot. Longer hair and a grizzled mustache did nothing to blur the I.D., this was him.

  Beldrim. Effete tag for a hit man.

  Cut the bitch, Beldrim.

  Had he gone by Bell? Drim? Bill?

  Grace decided to think of him as Bill.

  Bill Benn, man about town.

  No longer.

  Suddenly, she was seized by anger. When that peaked and flickered out, something else took its place—queasy vulnerability.

  The steely resonance of narrowly missed death. The nasty little knife entering her, twisting, ravaging. For no good reason.

  She felt cold. Her hands began to shake and a wave of vertigo washed from the top of her head to her now-frigid feet and she had to hold on to the arms of her chair, work at slow-breathing, easing her autonomic nervous system back to equilibrium.

  The body initiates, the mind follows…here we go, feeling better…no, we’re not.

  Vomiting felt like the right thing to do but Grace suppressed the urge.

  It took a while to feel almost normal.

  A little improvised mantra repeated six times helped:

  Bill Benn, man no longer about town.

  Rot in hell.

  —

  The address on the license was a P.O.B. in San Francisco.

  No credit cards or anything personal in the wallet, cash had given it heft.

  Grace counted out nine hundred forty dollars in twenties and fifties, added the bills to her own money stash—victor and spoils and all that—moved the now-thin wallet to the right side of the table.

  Next, she turned to Beldrim Benn’s cellphone, hopes for enlightenment dimming when she saw it was a cheap disposable, identical brand to the second one she’d bought, with no recent calls registered.

  Not a single photo in the digital camera’s memory.

  Murderous Bill bringing virgin equipment to his assignment. For all Grace knew, the license was phony—a correct image paired with bogus information.

  She Googled beldrim arthur benn, pulled up a single hit on a seventy-six-year-old man who’d died two years ago in Collinsville, Illinois. Brief obit in the Collinsville Herald. Dearly departed Beldrim had been a carpenter. Survivors included a daughter, Mona, and a son, Beldrim A. Junior.

  The age fit.

  No mention of a wife or a widow. So probably divorced from Junior’s mom.

  So maybe that is your real name. Or you stole some poor schmuck’s I.D.

  Adding junior to the keywords pulled up two hits, both references to Beldrim Benn Junior’s position as director of operations for Alamo Adjustments in Berkeley, California. No indication what the company did.

  Something hush-hush?

  Alamo, as in remember…old grievances?

  Then she realized the real monument was housed in San Antonio. Andrew plucking associations from his brain, or had he actually lived there?

  She typed in alamo adjustments, expecting a website, social networking, a LinkedIn listing, anything.

  Nothing.

  But logging onto a website that offered pay-per-view access to older phone directories, Grace located a five-year-old address for the company on Center Street in Berkeley. So the company had once existed.

  Alamo. Fortress. Good intentions, hopeless cause. Disaster.

  Adjustments…for what? The only thing that word evoked for Grace was chiropractic and twenty minutes of pursuing that angle proved fruitless.

  Back to Benn himself. Going all covert, so something secretive—high-tech—biotech? A toxic threat that Andrew had uncovered and threatened to expose?

  Berkeley, the quintessential college town, was crammed with high-tech…but Grace couldn’t shake the feeling that Andrew had come to her because of an issue with kin. A close relative.

  For the time being, she’d stick with that.

  Andrew, dead. Probably at Bill’s hands. Or those of Bill’s partner, the heavy guy who’d tailed her on PCH.

  Bill, dead.

  One good thing about the bastard traveling light and hush-hush: His weapons were more likely to be unregistered and hard to trace.

  Grace inspected the keys on the short chain. Three Schlages in addition to the one that operated the Chrysler. No defining marks.

  In the junk pile.

  Now the envelope.

  —

  Thin packet. When Grace opened it and shook, a piece of paper dropped out.

  Fresh, white sheet, computer-typed. Neatly composed fact sheet on Grace: her name, office address, and phone numbers, professional qualifications, and a grainy black-and-white photo downloaded from the USC psych department faculty face-page.

  Seven-year-old headshot, taken right after she’d graduated and was asked to stay on as a lecturer. The youngest person in the history of the department to reach that milestone, Malcolm had informed her.

  The three of them—Malcolm, Sophie, her—had been celebrating with an extravagant dinner at Spago in Beverly Hills when he’d made the pronouncement. Sophie smiling in her quiet way, Malcolm downing his third Manhattan on the rocks and beaming.

  Grace, nibbling shrimp cocktail and marveling at how she didn’t feel any different, enjoyed seeing the two of them like that.

  She deserved the job offer but academia held no attraction for her, she’d always been one for reality.

  Still, Malcolm and Sophie were happy and that supplied a nice memory…don’t veer off the track, girl. Grace’s jaw clenched and her brain followed suit. A frisson of nausea returned and she got back to basics and examined the headshot Bill had used to I.D. her.

  She’d worn her hair down to her butt back then, parted in the middle, naturally straight but for foolish little ruffles at the ends. Ponytailing at the photographer’s request �
��to show us more of your pretty face, Doctor.”

  Not much difference between the seven-year-old headshot and now; she’d aged well. Providing Bill Benn Junior an accurate likeness. Same for anyone who picked up after him.

  Tearing the sheet into strips that she halved twice, she added the resulting confetti to the trash pile. Shaking the envelope a second time produced nothing but she peered inside, anyway. Spotted a small square of paper tucked deep in the bottom fold.

  Jostling the envelope failed to dislodge it, so she reached in, curled her fingers and tweezed, extricated a roughly scissored square of newspaper pulp, about an inch and a half wide.

  The paper was brown and brittle and as Grace held it, beer-colored flecks dropped onto the table. Laying it down, she had a good look.

  Part of a black-and-white photo, obviously cropped from a larger image.

  Blue-ink circle around the face of a boy about ten or eleven. Roundish face, handsomely symmetrical, dominated by wide pale eyes. A huge, unruly mane of blond hair sheathed his forehead and hid his eyebrows. Thick, curling strands trailed onto his chest.

  A boy swallowed by hair.

  He stared straight ahead, but not at the camera. Deep-set, sunken eyes that belonged on an old man had been stretched to their limits by fear.

  The result was pitiful. Feral.

  Familiar.

  Now Grace knew where she’d first seen the man who called himself Atoner.

  Grace’s ninth and tenth birthdays were marked by light but tasteless angel food cake and delicious chocolate mint ice cream served on brightly colored paper plates in the ranch’s kitchen.

  She knew that Mrs. Stage tried to make a party out of the situation, but each year there were different kids living at the ranch, many too young to understand what was going on, others crying a lot and in no mood to celebrate.

  The first time, a week before Grace’s ninth, Ramona asked her what flavor cake she preferred.

  She said, “Angel food, please,” because Ramona always baked angel food and even though it didn’t taste like much, Grace knew she could pull it off easily.

  “Well, sure, honey, I can do that. How about some special frosting? Chocolate, vanilla? Anything else that tickles your fancy—you tell me piña colada, I’ll sure as heck try to find it.”