The Murderer's Daughter

by Jonathan Kellerman

  The light Grace had seen issued from a six-bulb fixture missing three bulbs.

  Eyes squeezed shut, piggy face contorted in what looked like rage, Sporn thrust. The table rocked. Lily’s face remained still as that of an inflatable sex toy.

  Sporn began smacking Lily’s ass hard enough to turn it magenta, switched to grabbing her hair and yanking her head upward. Every movement was harsh, rapid, punishing. Nothing altered the frown on Lily’s lips, the blankness everywhere else.

  Resigned.

  As Grace thought through her next move, Sporn released Lily’s hair and shoved her head hard, causing it to flop on the table. The enormous hand he’d freed reached around and ringed Lily’s throat and now something changed in her listless eyes.

  Wider, brighter. The incandescence of fear.

  Then again: nothing.

  Surrender.

  Grace sucked in breath and reached into her right-hand lower jacket pocket just as Sporn’s other hand began flailing Lily’s butt hard enough for the sound to filter through glass.

  She pushed the door, felt it give, sprang forward, her silent entry aided by Sporn’s still-clenched eyelids and his raspy laughter as he smacked and throttled Lily.

  Lily saw Grace. Her eyes widened. Her mouth formed an oval of surprise.

  A willing participant? God, Grace hoped not.

  No. The poor thing was nodding at her. Encouraging her. That reverted to terror as Sporn’s paw tightened around her neck. Her tongue flopped. Her lips swelled and her eyes rolled backward.

  Grace ran forward, Glock in hand. Sporn, still lost in sadistic ecstasy, didn’t notice. Then Grace’s toe kicked something on the floor—a piece of terra-cotta that began rattling on the cement, insistent as a snare drum.

  Sporn’s eyes opened. Rage reddened his irises. His lips drew back in a snarl.

  Not just a swine, a wild boar, feral and crafty.

  Gleeful fury as he saw that his assailant was female and wispy. The leer of a wrestling favorite entering the ring, prepared to demolish.

  He let go of Lily and rushed at Grace, lips curling higher, revealing nasty-looking peg teeth. Below the hem of his T-shirt, a jelly-filled sack of belly flopped up and down. Tree-trunk thighs, on the other hand, were firm. His penis, shiny with lube and ruddy at the tip, was shrinking comically above shrunken steroid balls.

  Shooting him in the groin was tempting but no sense substituting symbolism for common sense.

  Grace stepped back as if afraid of his attack, waited until Sporn was well away from the table where Lily remained prone and inert, then aimed three bullets at his open mouth.

  Two found their mark, the third shattered the space between Sporn’s nose and upper lip. Surprised—abashed—his eyes widened and he kept coming at her, a felled redwood.

  Then he stopped. Stared at Grace’s black-masked face. Said, “Huh,” and now it was his eyes that were rolling back. His knees buckled and he fell to the ground and he toppled over, face-first.

  Blood leaked onto the ground as he twitched a few times before growing still.

  Just for good measure, Grace shot him a fourth time in the back of the head. Straight trajectory to the medulla oblongata, where a bullet was certain to snuff out basic respiration. Who knew her grad school neuropsych would come in so handy?

  She turned to Lily, who still hadn’t moved.

  Had she, indeed, been a willing partner in a long-standing B-and-D game rather than a victim? Grace didn’t want to have to deal with an unplanned foe.

  Holding the Glock at her side, she approached the table but stood well back as she tried to engage Lily’s eyes.

  Lily did nothing. Then she mouthed something.

  Thank you.

  Grace nodded and pointed at Lily’s pushed-up dress. Lily, suddenly embarrassed, rolled onto her side and moved her shoulders, trying to raise her arms to pull it down.

  A mere shrug resulted. Arms refusing to cooperate.

  Paralyzed? Had Sporn’s abuse of her neck injured her cervical spine?

  But then Lily’s right hand quivered and she was able to shake it. Then the left. Awakening after going numb from the pressure.

  She began covering herself but not before Grace took notice of buttocks splotched raw and littered with tiny bleeding crescents—nail marks. Similar marks were scabbed. Where the skin hadn’t been clawed it was black-and-blue.

  Blood oozed from some of the fresher wounds and a separate trail of crimson ran from between the cheek crack down the left thigh.

  Lily tried to lift herself, couldn’t. Grace prepared to help her.

  Lily’s face changed.

  Animated by horror as her lips worked and her eyes blinked faster than Grace thought possible.

  Lily arched her neck. Pointed.

  A warning.

  Something behind Grace.

  Too late.

  Dual points of impact ignited sparks of agony.

  At the small of her back and the nape of her neck, the latter from an attempt to yank at her ski mask from behind. She twisted out of the way but went down hard, scraping her face and her knees and her elbows on the harsh, cold floor of the conservatory. The Glock flew from her hands, thick plastic thudding to the right side of the green table where Lily now sat up, hands to her mouth, whimpering.

  Dion Larue’s attire told Grace she hadn’t screwed up, just an unlucky break.

  Black silk robe with red quilted shawl lapels, loosely belted over a naked body.

  Butting Grace with that level of force had splayed the robe’s flaps. Larue’s body was hard, tan, defined, a whole different species from Sporn. Up close, she made out the details of his face. The murderous boy who’d showed up at the ranch, taking so much from her so quickly.

  Harder, craggier, but just as handsome. No mistaking the eyes, cold but active. Assessing nonstop.

  Despite some consternation when he glanced at Sporn’s whale-corpse, no lagging of confidence as he smiled wolfishly.

  The look on his face an essay on the calculus of violence. The same determinedly destructive expression hunters got when they locked in.

  Grace forced herself not to look at the Glock but tried to recall how far away it had landed. Still in reach if she lunged skillfully? Doubtful. Was it worth a try, anyway?

  Dion Larue snorted. A low wet sound issued from between his lips and he clawed his hands and advanced on Grace, snickering, pectorals flexing, genitals swinging.

  No penile shrinkage for him; this body came alive with the expectation of blood.

  “A chick,” he said. “Are you fucking nuts?”

  He laughed—more like a cackle, unbecoming for a stud. One of the clawed hands rolled into a fist and now Grace noticed something gripped by the other. Small tube, red, the word Love barely visible.

  His own personal container of lube; the boss had come to join the party.

  Now he was going to have a different kind of fun.

  A bare foot kicked out viciously, just as it had at his wife’s foot at Monkey Island Park. But harder, much harder, and when he made contact with Grace’s ribs and pain seared her, she knew he’d broken something.

  Rolling to her right she went for the Glock.

  Larue had anticipated the move, kicked the weapon away, bent and tried to catch Grace again with a pointed foot—a martial arts thing, she vaguely remembered Shoshana showing her something like it.

  She scurried backward, avoided the blow. Dion Larue grunted and bent low and moved toward her faster but instead of making contact, he feinted to one side, then another.

  Came up holding the Glock.

  “Stupid cunt. Who the fuck are you?”

  Erection in full bloom.

  Grace said, “Shouldn’t you finish Walter off first?”

  Nothing profound, nothing clever, but it threw him, he’d assumed Sporn to be dead, Sporn was dead so what the fuck was this dumb cunt—and now Larue was realizing he’d been had and he roared and attacked.

  But the split second it h
ad taken for his thoughts to reassemble had been enough for Grace to reach into another bottom pocket of her jacket, not the easiest move, she was right-handed and this was the left pocket, definitely a disadvantage but you worked with what you had because there was no choice and what she had in her nondominant hand was her lovely little Beretta, which she transferred to her right hand and aimed upward.

  Dion Larue snarled, “Fucking bitch.”

  Same exact thing Beldrim Benn had said in her backyard.

  So unoriginal, these psychopaths.

  Grace emptied the gun into him. The erection went first, the rest didn’t really matter.

  Unlike Sporn, he died silently, immediately, landing on his side then tipping onto his back.

  No doubt about this one. His hard bronze body was a sieve.

  Collecting every shell, Grace approached Lily, now sitting atop the potting table, shivering.

  Placing a finger softly on Lily’s lips, Grace focused Lily’s head the way Azha had.

  Made sure Lily was looking squarely at her, Grace cocked an eyebrow. Enunciated clearly.

  “You’ll keep this between us?”

  Deaf and mute and brutalized beyond imagination, Lily spoke. Projecting a single word as clearly as a hearing person.

  “Yes.”

  Choosing to believe her because what choice did she have, Grace left the way she’d come.

  EAST BAY MESSENGER

  Your Alternative Berkeley-Oakland Weekly

  March 14, 2015

  Double Murder Linked to Meth

  by Fatima Card, Messenger Staff Writer

  The fatal shootings, ten days ago, of two men in the posh Claremont district have been linked to a business dispute among methamphetamine traffickers, according to Berkeley PD sources. While withholding the bulk of the details, the cops are letting on that an anonymous tip led them to discover that both victims were “active participants” in the speed biz and that the murders bore the hallmarks of professional executions, possibly by Mexican gangs.

  The homicides, to which there were no witnesses, went down in the guest house of a mansion on Avalina Street, a turf where violence is rare, taking the lives of the house’s registered owner, Dion Larue, 38, a building contractor whose outfit DRL-Earthmove, Inc., is rumored to have profited from hand-in-glove relationships with several politicos, including at least three Berkeley city council members. The second victim, Walter Sporn, also 38, worked for Larue as an on-site building supervisor and had been observed entering and exiting one of Larue’s current projects, an eco-rehab on Center Street, where a “significant” cache of meth was found.

  None of our glorious elected officials have chosen to comment.

  What a shock.

  Grace hangs from a wire.

  Half a mile below her, the jungle floor is green and dense and welcoming and if she strains a bit to one side she can spot slivers of ocean above the trees.

  It is ninety-two degrees and humid; she could be forgiven a bit of sweat.

  But she’s dry as dust.

  This isn’t the tourist-friendly zip-lining she tried a couple of years ago in Puerto Vallarta and found wanting, with its half a dozen stations hovering over maybe two hundred feet of drop, tourists holding an ergonomic omega-shaped bar as smiling guides shout encouragement in English while maintaining full control over the mechanism as arrival at each new tree is heralded by praise and ice-cold lemonade.

  This is a hardcore Costa Rican zip-lining, where the local surfers claim the sport originated. A meant-to-be-bowel-churning “canopy experience” buried in the lushness of that beautiful little country’s Pacific coast.

  The setup is anything but casual and touristy: twenty wooden platforms nailed to some of the rain forest’s tallest trees, some of the planks warping and showing their age, some even cracked and revealing an eyeful of infinity.

  Getting to many of the stations requires serious hikes on dirt ribbons barely wide enough for a fashion model or bounces on rope bridges that appear designed to fail.

  That many segments means over two consecutive hours on the wire, if no one runs into significant difficulties.

  The nerve center of the operation is a shack set deep enough in the forest that GPS cannot locate it. Tiny, gorgeous poisonous tree frogs scamper fearlessly, their jewel-like bodies hued coral red and lime green and royal blue, all of the above pied with ink-black spots so perfectly round they look fake.

  The staff consists of half a dozen drowsy surfers of various ethnicities, all of whom are resentful about having to work for money. Empty bottles of tequila, vodka, and mescal abound in the “office.” The comprehensive medical history consists of a single question. “Are you okay?”

  No one in Grace’s group, even those who’ve approached the day with obvious anxiety, admits to not being okay. There are four people besides her: two young guys—a bit overly boisterous, which probably means they’re jumpy—and a married couple in their fifties who’ve failed to reach consensus about what they are about to do.

  She: (smiling) Isn’t this going to be fun?

  He: (scowling) Depends on your definition.

  Training consists of showing everyone the thick leather gloves they’ll need to wear as they position both arms awkwardly behind their heads cupping the wire but not touching it. The only way to slow down or brake is to grip the wire and without gloves, that would sever a hand as if it were lunch meat.

  It’s all a matter of pressure, explains the surfer-in-charge, an African with heavy eyelids and a beautiful British accent.

  Too “delicate” and you’ll mess up your wrists and keep going anyway.

  Too “clamping” and you’ll come to a halt prematurely and get stuck dangling half a mile up with no one able to reach you. Should that occur, the only remedy is self-help: reversing the position of your hands, which will spin you in the opposite direction and leave you with your back to your destination.

  Then: laboriously, hand over hand, moving blindly, you will haul yourself to safety and hope for the best. Should you grow fatigued?

  The African winks and shrugs.

  —

  Grace hangs back and waits until the other four have begun, then approaches another surfer, a Latino with stoned glazed eyes.

  “I want to do it alone.”

  “Senorita—”

  “How much?”

  “We don’t do that?”

  Grace repeats the questions. The surfer’s brows knit. He consults two other surfers, cites an outrageous price.

  Grace laughs and names her price.

  The surfers react with feigned outrage.

  Ninety seconds later, an agreement is reached.

  —

  She waits until the message comes down the line: The group has completed ten stations, slowed a bit by several instances of “self-help.”

  The African says, “Okay,” and he and Grace set out.

  Everything goes smoothly until on her final ride, heading toward the twentieth station where tequila and champagne await, she grips the wire hard midway through her hurtle.

  She dangles.

  Doesn’t move.

  Silence wafts through the jungle. Then: birdcalls. Then a distant prop plane.

  Finally, the African behind her yells, “What?”

  Grace doesn’t answer.

  His voice rises. So does that of the blond surfer, probably a Scandinavian, waiting for her at the other end.

  She dangles.

  Both men are shouting.

  Grace hears the word “crazy.”

  She laughs.

  Now the Swede or whatever he is stands near the lip of the twentieth platform and points at her beseechingly.

  “Change the hands.”

  Grace kicks her legs ever so slightly. The wire hums. She moves back and forth, kicking some more, like a kid on a swing. Playing the wire, setting off a musical note.

  The surfers scream.

  The music blocks out everything.

  She thinks
of red rooms, many red rooms, a scarlet labyrinth.

  A small black convertible speeding up a road that turns red.

  Looking up, she examines the clasps that hold her to the harness that connects to the wire.

  How easy it would be…

  The African screams.

  The Swede screams.

  Only when remnants of reality have been blotted out does Grace act.

  Closing her eyes, she shifts hands.

  Rotates.

  What if she did unbuckle a clip?

  What would falling that far and that fast feel like?

  Would anyone care?

  No matter, she would.

  Smiling, every muscle functioning precisely the way it was intended, she pulls herself to safety.

  To Judah

  By Jonathan Kellerman

  FICTION

  ALEX DELAWARE NOVELS

  Motive (2015)

  Killer (2014)

  Guilt (2013)

  Victims (2012)

  Mystery (2011)

  Deception (2010)

  Evidence (2009)

  Bones (2008)

  Compulsion (2008)

  Obsession (2007)

  Gone (2006)

  Rage (2005)

  Therapy (2004)

  A Cold Heart (2003)

  The Murder Book (2002)

  Flesh and Blood (2001)

  Dr. Death (2000)

  Monster (1999)

  Survival of the Fittest (1997)

  The Clinic (1997)

  The Web (1996)

  Self-Defense (1995)

  Bad Love (1994)

  Devil’s Waltz (1993)

  Private Eyes (1992)

  Time Bomb (1990)

  Silent Partner (1989)

  Over the Edge (1987)

  Blood Test (1986)

  When the Bough Breaks (1985)

  OTHER NOVELS

  The Murderer’s Daughter (2015)

  The Golem of Hollywood (with Jesse Kellerman, 2014)

  True Detectives (2009)

  Capital Crimes (with Faye Kellerman, 2006)