Dr. Death

by Jonathan Kellerman

  "Rang the bell and took him away in front of his kids."

  "That's horrible— how could Milo do that?"

  "Not his decision. The brass went around him."

  "That's just horrible— must have been hell for you."

  "A lot worse for the kids."

  "Poor things . . . The father, Alex, is he capable of that? Sorry, they're still your patients, I shouldn't be asking."

  I said, "I'm not sure they are. And I don't have a good answer to that."

  But I'd answered her as clearly as if I'd spelled it out.

  Sure, he's capable.

  "Honey?" she said, cupping her hand around the back of my neck. She stood on her tiptoes, pressed her nose to mine. I realized I'd been standing there for a long time, silent, oblivious. The file felt leaden. I hoisted it higher.

  She put her arm around my waist and we entered the kitchen. She poured iced tea for both of us and I sat at the table, placing Fusco's opus out of my field of vision. Fighting the urge to walk away from her, throw myself into the FBI man's crusade. Wanting to build up faith in Fusco's project, discover some grand, forensic aha! that would exonerate Richard, make me a hero in Stacy's eyes. Eric's, too.

  Instead, I sat there, reached for the remote control, flicked on TV news. A red UPDATE! banner filled a corner of the screen. A very happy reporter clutched his microphone and warbled, ". . . in the murder of death doctor Eldon Mate. Police sources tell us that the man being questioned is Richard Theodore Doss, forty-six, a wealthy Pacific Palisades businessman and former husband of Joanne Doss, a woman whose suicide Dr. Mate assisted nearly a year ago. Reports of a possible murder-for-hire scheme have not been confirmed. A few minutes ago Doss's attorney arrived at the West Los Angeles police station. We'll update you on this story as it unfolds. Brian Frobush for On-the-Scene News."

  In the background was the building I'd just left. The news crew must have showed up moments after I drove away.

  I pressed OFF. Robin sat down next to me.

  We touched glasses. I said, "Cheers."

  I endured ten more minutes of togetherness. Then I told her I was sorry, picked up the file, and left.

  • • •

  Wounds.

  Fissures. Real ones.

  It was well after midnight. Robin had been asleep for over an hour and I was pretty sure she hadn't heard when I'd left the bed and made my way to the office.

  I'd started with the file, but she'd come after me. Convincing me to bathe with her, take a walk, a long walk. Drive into Santa Monica for an Italian dinner. Come home and play Scrabble, then gin, then sit side by side in bed collaborating on the crossword puzzle.

  "Like normal folks," I said, when she said she was sleepy.

  "Acting. Genius."

  "I love you— and see, I said it without making love first."

  "Hey, a new pattern."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Saying it before. How nice." She reached for me.

  • • •

  Now here I was, throwing on a robe, making my way through the dark house, feeling like a burglar.

  Back in the office. Switching on the green-shaded desk lamp and casting a hazy beam on the file.

  The room was cold. The house was cold. The robe was old terry cloth, worn to gauze in spots. No socks. The chill took hold in the soles of my feet and worked its way up to my thighs. Telling myself that was appropriate for the task at hand, I drew the file close and untied the string.

  • • •

  Fusco had spared no detail in his study of Grant Rushton/ Michael Burke.

  Everything neat, organized, subheaded, three-hole-punched. The detached precision of postmortem reports, the weights and measures of degradation.

  Page after page of crime-scene description— Fusco's summaries and analyses as well as some of the original police reports. The agent's prose was more erudite than the typically stilted cop-write, but still far from Shakespeare. He seemed to like dwelling on the nasty stuff, or maybe that was my fatigue and the cold talking.

  I stuck with it, found myself entering a state of hyperawareness as I sucked up page after page of small print, photographs, crime-scene Polaroids. Autopsy shots. The beautiful, hideous, lurid hues of the human body imploded, debased, exploited like a rain forest. Sternum-cracking, face-peeling, skin-flaying, all in the name of truth. The framing of flesh-tunnels in three-by-five universes, blossoming orchids of ruptured viscera, rivers of hemoglobin syrup.

  Dead faces. The look. Extraction of the soul.

  A realization strobed my brain: Mate would've liked this.

  Had he sensed what was happening to him?

  I returned my eyes to the pictures. Women— things that had once been women— propped up against trees. A page of abdominal close-ups, gashes and gapes on skin transmuted to plum-colored shapes sketched on gray paper. Precisely excised wounds. The geometry.

  The chill found my chest. Inhaling and letting the breath out slowly, I studied the shapes and tried to recall the death shots of Mate that Milo had showed me up on Mulholland.

  Craving equivalence between all of this and the concentric squares engraved in Mate's flabby white belly.

  Some concordance, I supposed, but once again Milo was right. Lots of killers like to carve.

  Skin art . . .

  Where was Donny Salcido Mate, self-proclaimed Rembrandt of the flesh? The Anatomy Lesson. Let us carve and learn.

  Let us carve Daddy? 'Cause we hate Daddy but want to be him? The art of death . . . Why couldn't it be him? It should be him.

  Then I thought of Guillerma Mate, the way she'd stood at the closet of that dingy little motel room, frozen, as I asked about her only child. Maybe faith was its own reward, but still, hers had to be a lonely life: a single mom, abandoned by her husband, disappointed by her only child.

  She prayed regularly, offered thanks.

  Casting her eye upon some grand world to come, or had she truly found peace? Her bus trip to L.A. said she hadn't.

  Richard and his kids, Guillerma and her boy.

  Alone, everyone alone.

  23

  THREE HOURS INTO Thursday.

  Three twenty-two A.M. and I'd finished every word in Fusco's omnibus. No thunderous conclusions. Then I went over the photos a second time and saw it.

  Crime-scene shot from a Washington State unsolved— one of the four victims murdered during Michael Burke's term as a medical student. Four killings Fusco saw as consistent with Burke's technique because the victims had been left propped against or near trees.

  The girl was a twenty-year-old waitress named Marissa Bonpaine, last seen serving shrimp cocktail at a stand in the Pike Place Market in Seattle, found a week later splayed in front of a fir in a remote part of the Olympic National Forest. No footprints near the scene; the buildup of pine needles and decaying leaves on the forest floor was a potentially fertile nest for forensic data, but nothing had been found. Add eleven days of rain to that, and the scene was as clean as the operating room the killer had intended it to be.

  Marissa Bonpaine had been savaged in a manner I now found uncomfortably familiar: throat slash, abdominal mutilations, sexual posturing. A single, deep trapezoidal wound just above the pubic bone could be considered geometrical, though the edges were rough. Death from shock and blood loss.

  No blunt-force head wound. I supposed Fusco would attribute that to the killer's escalating confidence and the seclusion of the spot: wanting Bonpaine conscious, wanting her to watch, to suffer. Taking his time.

  I checked the girl's physical dimensions. Four-eleven, one hundred one. Tiny, easy to subdue without knocking her out.

  What caught my eye wasn't any of that; after three hours of wading in gore and sadism, I'd grown sadly habituated.

  I'd noticed something glinting against the brown cushion of forest detritus, several feet to the right of Marissa Bonpaine's frail left hand. Something shiny enough to catch the miserly light filtering through the dense conifer ceiling and bounce it
back. I flipped pages till I found the police report.

  A hiker had found the body. Forest rangers and law enforcement personnel from three departments had conducted a two-hundred-yard grid search and listed their findings under "Crime Scene Inventory." One hundred eighty-three retrieved items, mostly trash— empty cans and bottles, broken sunglasses, a can opener, rotted paper, cigarette butts— tobacco and cannabis— animal skeletons, solid lead buckshot, two copper-jacketed bullets ballistically analyzed but deemed unimportant because Marissa Bonpaine's body bore no gunshot wounds. Three pairs of insect-infested hiking boots and other discarded clothing had been studied by the crime lab and dated well before the murder.

  Halfway down the list, there it was:

  C.S.I. Item #76: Child's toy hypodermic, manu. TommiToy, Taiwan, orig. component of U-Be-the-Doctor Kit, imported 1989–95. Location: ground, 1.4 m from victim's l. hand, no prints, no organic residue.

  No residue might have indicated recent placement, but the rain might have just washed any residue away. I read the rest of the Bonpaine documents. No sign anyone had considered the toy. A review of all the other Washington cases revealed no other medical toys.

  Marissa Bonpaine was the last of the Washington victims. Her body had been found July 2, but the abduction was believed to have occurred around June 17. More page-flipping. Michael Burke had received his MD on June 12.

  Graduation party?

  I'm a doctor, here's my needle!

  I'm the doctor!

  Stethoscope, hypodermic. One broken, the other intact. I knew what Milo would say. Cute, but so what?

  Maybe he was right— he'd been too damn right, so far— and the injector was nothing more than a piece of trash left by some kid who'd hiked through the forest with his parents.

  Still, it made me wonder.

  A message . . . always messages.

  To Marissa: I'm the doctor.

  To Mate: I'm the doctor and you're not.

  I reread Fusco's notes. No mention of the toy.

  Maybe I'd mention it to Milo. If he and I had the chance to talk soon.

  I flipped back to the front of the first volume, the various incarnations of Michael Burke, studied every feature of every photo. A song danced through my head— Getting to know you, getting to know all about you—but Burke remained a stranger.

  High-IQ psychopath, lust-killer, master euthanist. Comforter of terminally ill women, brutalizer of healthy females. Compartmentalizing. It helped in murder as well as politics.

  Maybe in real estate, as well. The world of distressed properties.

  Milo had his prime witness and I had two toys. Still, the wounds fit. And Milo had asked me to study the files.

  You're out of business, I'm in.

  When we'd questioned Alice Zoghbie, we'd asked her about confederates, and she'd just about admitted they existed but refused to go further, pooh-poohed the chance anyone close to Mate could have savaged him.

  Eldon was brilliant. He wouldn't have trusted just anyone.

  But Mate would've loved the idea of the MD sidekick. Another boost to his respectability— supervising an internship in cellular cessation.

  Zoghbie was worth another try. She'd worshiped Mate, would want to punish his murderer. Now I had a name to throw her, a general physical description, could observe her reaction. What risk was there? I'd call her later this morning. Worst case, she'd tell me to go to hell.

  Best case, I'd learn something, maybe make some progress revealing a new suspect.

  Someone other than Richard. Anyone but Richard.

  Stretching out on the old leather sofa, I covered myself with a woolen throw, stared up at the ceiling, knowing I'd never fall back asleep.

  When I awoke, it was just after seven and Robin was standing over me.

  "What a guy," she said, "moves out to the couch even when he hasn't misbehaved." She sat perched on the edge of the cushion, smoothed my hair.

  "Morning," I said.

  She looked at the file. "Cramming for the big test?"

  "What can I say? Always been a grind."

  "And look where it's gotten you."

  "Where?"

  "Fame, fortune. Me. Rise and shine. Fix yourself up so I can take care of you— I seem to be doing that a lot, lately, don't I?"

  • • •

  Showering and shaving provided a veneer of humanness, but my stomach recoiled at the idea of breakfast and I sat watching as Robin ate toast and eggs and grapefruit. We shared a pleasant half hour and I thought I pulled off amiable pretty well. When she left for the studio, it was eight and I turned on the morning news. Recap of the Doss story but no new facts.

  At 8:20, I phoned Alice Zoghbie and heard the taped greeting from her machine. Just as I hung up, my service rang in.

  "Morning, Dr. Delaware. I have a Joseph Safer on the phone."

  Richard's lawyer. "Put him on."

  "Doctor? Joe Safer. I'm a criminal-defense attorney representing your patient Richard Doss."

  Mellow baritone. Slow pace but no faltering. The voice of an older man— deliberate, grandfatherly, comforting.

  "How's Richard doing?" I said.

  "We-ell," said Safer, "he's still incarcerated, so I don't imagine he's doing too well. But that should be resolved by this afternoon."

  "Paperwork?"

  "Not to be paranoid, Doctor, but I do wonder if the boys in blue haven't slowed things down a bit."

  "God forbid."

  "Are you a religious man, Doctor?"

  "Doesn't everyone invoke God when times get rough?"

  He chuckled. "How true. Anyway, the reason I'm calling is once Richard does get out, he would like to speak with you about his children. How to best get them through this."

  "Of course," I said.

  "Terrific. We'll be in touch." Cheerful. As if planning a picnic.

  "What's in store for him, Mr. Safer?"

  "Call me Joe. . . . We-ell, that's hard to say . . . we both enjoy the privilege of confidentiality here, so I'll be a bit forthcoming. I don't believe the police have anything one might judge as seriously incriminating. Unless something turns up during the search, and I don't expect it will . . . Doctor, you've got more latitude than I in terms of your confidentiality."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Unless your patient poses a Tarasoff risk, you're not obligated to divulge anything. I, on the other hand . . . There are questions I don't ask."

  Letting me know he didn't want to know if his client was guilty. That I should keep my mouth shut if I knew.

  "I understand," I said.

  "Splendid . . . Well, then talk about Stacy and Eric for a moment. They seem like nice children. Bright, extremely bright, that's evident even under the circumstances. But troubled— they'd have to be. I'm glad you're on board if therapy's called for."

  "There may be a problem with that. Eric's furious with me, convinced I'm aligned with the police. I can understand that because I am friends with one of the—"

  "Milo Sturgis," said Safer. "A very effective investigator— I'm well aware of your friendship with Mr. Sturgis. Commendable."

  "What is?"

  "A heterosexual man enjoying a friendship with a homosexual man. One of my sons was gay. He taught me a lot about having an open mind. I didn't learn quickly enough."

  Past tense. His voice had dropped in pitch and volume. "Impetuous youth," he continued. "I'm referring to Eric. I have five of my own, thirteen grandchildren. Four of my own, to be truthful. My boy Daniel passed on last year. His diagnosis sped up my learning curve."

  "I'm sorry."

  "Oh it was terrible, Doctor, your life's never the same . . . but enough of that. In terms of Eric's recalcitrance, I'll have a talk with the boy. As will Richard. What about Stacy? I don't have as much of a feel for her. She sits there while Eric does all the talking. Reminds me of my Daniel. He was my firstborn, always a peacemaker— his siblings' ambassador to their mother and me when things got rough."

  I heard him sig
h.

  "Stacy's a good kid," I said. "My primary patient in the family. I had only one session with Eric, and not a complete one. The police showed up before we were through and took Richard away."

  "Yes. Dreadful. Rather cossacklike behavior . . . We-ell, thank you for your time, Dr. Delaware. Take care of yourself. You're needed here."