by Twisted
“Turn around and look me in the eye and tell me that.”
Irma complied. Dr. Marilyn stared at her. She had sharp brown eyes and a determined mouth. “Very well.”
Two minutes later, after finishing her toast: “Please, Irma. Stop sulking and get it off your chest. After all, how often do you have anyone to talk to, what with Dr. Ess and me always gone. This is such an isolating job, isn’t it— Is that what’s bothering you?”
“No, no, I love the job, Doctor—”
“Then what is it?”
“Nada. Nothing.”
“Now you’re being stubborn, young lady.”
“I— Is nothing.”
“Irma.”
“I worry about Isaac.”
Alarm brightened the sharp brown eyes, turned them vulpine, vaguely frightening. “Isaac? Is he all right?”
“Yes, he very good. Very smart.”
Irma broke down in tears.
“He’s smart and you’re crying?” said Dr. Marilyn. “Am I missing something?”
They had tea and fig jam on thin toast and Irma told Dr. Marilyn all of it. How Isaac kept coming home from school crying with frustration and boredom. How he’d finished all of his sixth-grade work in two months, taken it upon himself to “borrow” seventh- and eighth- and even some ninth-grade books and had sped through them as well. Finally, he was caught reading a prealgebra workbook slipped out of a supply room and was sent to the principal’s office for “unauthorized study and irregular behavior.”
Irma visited the school, tried to handle it on her own. The principal had nothing but disdain for Irma’s simple clothes and thick accent; her firm suggestion was that Isaac stop being “precocious” and concentrate on conforming to “class standards.”
When Irma tried to point out that the boy was well ahead of class standards, the principal cut her off and informed her that Isaac was just going to have to be content repeating everything.
“That’s outrageous,” said Dr. Marilyn. “Absolutely outrageous. There, there, dry your eyes . . . three years ahead? On his own?”
“Two, some three.”
“My eldest, John, was somewhat like that. Not quite as smart as your Isaac seems to be, but school was always tedious for him because he moved too fast. Oh, dear, we had some dustups with him. . . . Now John’s the chief resident in psychiatry at Stanford.” Dr. Marilyn brightened. “Perhaps your Isaac could be a physician. Wouldn’t that be fabulous, Irma?”
Irma nodded, half listening as Dr. Marilyn prattled.
“A child that bright, Irma, there’s no limit. . . . Give me that principal’s number and I’ll have a little chat with her.” She sneezed, coughed, wiped her nose. Laughed. “With this baritone, I’ll sound positively authoritative.”
Irma didn’t speak.
“What’s the number, dear?”
Silence.
“Irma?”
“I don’ wan no trouble, Dr. Em.”
“You’ve already got trouble, Irma. Now we have to find a solution.”
Irma looked down at the floor.
“What?” said Dr. Marilyn, sharply. “Ah. You’re worried about repercussions, about someone taking this out on you and your family. Well, dear, don’t be concerned about that. You’re legal. When we arranged your papers we were extremely careful about buttoning up every detail.”
“I don’ understand,” said Irma.
Dr. Marilyn sighed. “When we hired that attorney—the . . . abogado—”
“No that,” said Irma. “I don’ understand where Isaac come from. I not smart, Isaiah not smart, the other two not smart.”
Dr. Marilyn pondered that. Nibbled toast and put it aside. “You’re smart enough, dear.”
“Nah like Isaac. He always fast, Isaac. Walk fast, talk fast. Ocho—eight month he talk, say papa, mama, pan, vaca. The other two, was fourteen, fifteen—”
“Eight months?” said Dr. Marilyn. “Oh, dear. That’s astonishing, even John didn’t utter a word until a year.” She sat back and thought, leaned over, and took Irma’s hands in hers. “Do you realize what a gift you’ve been given? What someone like Isaac could do?”
Irma shrugged.
Dr. Marilyn stood, coughed, trudged to the kitchen wall-phone. “I’m going to call that fool of a principal. One way or another, we’ll get to the bottom of this mess.”
Dr. Marilyn confronted public school bureaucracy and fared no better than Irma.
“Astonishing,” she exclaimed. “These people are mindless cretins.”
She conferred with Dr. Seth and the two of them took it upon themselves to confer with Melvyn Pogue, Ed.D., headmaster of the Burton Academy, where John, Bradley, and Elizabeth Lattimore had earned nearly straight A’s.
The timing was perfect. Burton had come under fire from some of its progressive alumni for being lily-white and elitist, and though plans had been drawn up to increase diversity, no steps had been taken.
“This boy,” said Dr. Pogue, “sounds perfect.”
“He’s extremely clever,” said Dr. Seth. “Nice, religious little fellow to boot. But perfection’s a bit overreaching. We don’t want to pressure the lad.”
“Yes, yes, of course, Dr. Lattimore.” In Pogue’s top desk drawer was a freshly signed Lattimore check. Full tuition for an entire year, with money left over for gymnasium refurbishment. “Clever is good. Religious is good. . . . Um, are we talking Catholic?”
Isaac arrived at the Burton campus, on Third near McCadden, just a brief walk from the Lattimore mansion, freshly barbered and wearing his best church clothes. A school psychologist ran him through a battery of tests and pronounced him “off the scale.”
An appointment was made for Irma and Isaiah Gomez and the boy to meet Dr. Melvyn Pogue; Pogue’s assistant; Ralph Gottfried, the chairman of the faculty committee; and Mona Hornsby, the chief administrator. Smiling people, white-pink, invariably large. They spoke rapidly and, when his parents seemed confused, Isaac translated.
A week later, he’d transferred to Burton, as a seventh grader. In addition, he received individual “enrichment”—mostly reading by himself in Melvyn Pogue’s book-lined office.
His brothers, happy and recalcitrant in public school, thought the whole deal was weird—the Burton uniform with its silly blue, pleated pants, white shirt, powder-blue jacket, and striped tie; taking the bus to work with Mama, hanging with Anglos all day. Playing sports they’d never heard of—field hockey, water polo, squash—and one they knew about but believed unattainable—tennis.
When they asked Isaac about it, he said, “It’s okay,” but he was careful not to display too much emotion. No reason to make them feel deprived.
In reality, it was better than okay, it was fabulous. For the first time in his life, he felt as if his mind was being allowed to go where it wanted. Despite the fact that most of the other Burton students regarded him as a little dark-skinned curiosity and he was often left alone.
He loved being alone. The leather-and-paper smell of Melvyn Pogue’s office was imbedded in his consciousness, as fragrant as mother’s milk. He read—chewed up books—took notes that no one read, stayed in school well past dismissal time. Waiting, with a bag full of books, for Irma to come by to pick him up, and the two of them embarked on the long bus journey back to the Union District.
Sometimes Mama asked him what he was learning. Usually, she dozed on the bus as Isaac read. He was learning about wondrous, strange things, other worlds—other universes. At age eleven, he saw the world as infinite.
By the time he was twelve, he’d made a few casual friends—kids who invited him to their glorious homes, though he was unable to reciprocate. His apartment was clean but small, and the Union District was grimy, urban, a high-crime neighborhood. Even without asking, he knew that no way would Burton parents allow their progeny that far east of Van Ness.
He accustomed himself to a double life: Burton’s beaux-arts buildings and emerald playing fields by day, by night the burp of gunfire and screams and static-scra
tchy salsa outside the window of the closet-sized bedroom he shared with his brothers.
At night, he thought a lot about the differences among people. Rich and poor, light and dark. Crime, why people did bad things. Was there a fairness to life? Did God take a personal interest in everyone’s life?
Sometimes, he wondered about his mother. Was hers a double life, too? Maybe one day they’d talk about it.
By age fourteen, he smiled and spoke like a Burton student and had zipped through Burton’s high school math curriculum, all of sophomore biology, and two years of advanced placement history. Four years of high school were compressed to two. At fifteen, he graduated with full honors and was accepted as a “special circumstances” student at the University of Southern California.
It was in college that he decided to become a doctor, and he earned a 4.0 as a bio major with a minor in math. USC wanted to hold on to him, and by the time he graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, at barely nineteen, he’d been accepted to the Keck School of Medicine.
His parents celebrated, but Isaac wasn’t sure.
Four more years of lectures with no respite in between. Everything had moved so fast. Deep down, he knew he wasn’t mature enough for the responsibility of tending to other human beings.
He requested and received a deferral, needing a break—something leisurely, less structured.
For Isaac that meant a Ph.D. in epidemiology and biostatistics. By age twenty-one, he’d fulfilled all his course requirements, earned a master’s degree, and began work on his doctoral dissertation.
“Discriminating and Predictive Patterns of Solved and Unsolved Homicides in Los Angeles Between 1991 and 2001.”
As he sat and composed his hypothesis, hunched in a remote corner of the Doheny Library subbasement, memories of gunshots and screams and salsa filled his head.
Though care had been taken by the university to shield its boy-wonder from publicity, news of Isaac’s triumphs reached the desk of City Councilman Gilbert Reyes, who promptly issued a press release in which he took credit for everything the young man had accomplished.
Upon the strong advice of his faculty adviser, Isaac attended a luncheon where he sat next to Reyes; shook the hands of big, loud people; contradicted nothing the councilman said.
Photo opportunities were Reyes’s meat; pictures appeared in the Spanish language mailings his campaign distributed prior to the next election. Isaac, looking like a shell-shocked Boy Scout, was labeled “El Prodigio.”
The experience left him vaguely unsettled, but when the time came to request access to LAPD files for his research, Isaac knew who to call. Within two days, he had an authorized long-term visitors’ badge, a jerry-built “internship,” guaranteed access to inactive homicide files—and anything else he came across in the basement archives. His desk would be at Hollywood Division, because Gilbert Reyes was a serious buddy of Deputy Chief Randy Diaz, the new Hollywood Division overboss.
Isaac showed up at Hollywood bright and early on an April Monday and met with an unpleasant police captain named Schoelkopf, who looked like Stalin.
Schoelkopf regarded Isaac as if he were a suspect, didn’t even pretend to pay attention as Isaac rattled off his hypotheses, nor did he listen as Isaac offered profound thanks for the desk. Instead, his eyes focused on a distant place and he chewed his big black mustache as if it was lunch. When Isaac stopped talking, a cold smile stretched the facial pelt.
“Yeah, fine,” said the captain. “Ask for Connor. She’ll take real good care of you.”
CHAPTER
5
It was nothing Petra would have ever noticed. Even if it had stared her in the face.
Isaac’s neatly typed sheet lay flat on her desk. He sat in the metal chair by the side of her desk. Drummed his fingers. Stopped. Pretended to be nonchalant.
She read the heading again. Boldface.
June 28 Homicides: An Embedded Pattern?
Like the title of a term paper. And why not? Isaac was just twenty-two. What did he know about anything other than school?
Below the title, a list of six homicides, all on June 28, on or near midnight.
Six in six years; her initial reaction was big deal. For the past decade, L.A.’s annual homicide rate had fluctuated between 180 and 600, with the last few years settling in at around 250. That averaged out to a killing every day and a half. Meaning, some days there was nastiness, others nothing at all. When you considered summer heat, June 28 would most likely be one of the high-ticket dates.
She said all that to Isaac. He shot out his answer so quickly she knew he’d been expecting the objection.
“It’s not just the quantity, Detective Connor. It’s the quality.”
Those big, liquid eyes. Detective Connor. How many times had she told him to call her Petra? The kid was sweet, but there was a certain stubbornness to him.
“The quality of the killings?”
“Not in the sense of a value judgment. By quality I mean the inherent properties of the crimes, the . . .” He trailed off, plinked a corner of the list.
“Go on,” said Petra. “Just keep it simple—no more chi square, pi square, analysis of whatever. I was an art major.”
He colored. “Sorry, I tend to get—”
“Hey,” she said, “just kidding. I asked you to tell me about your statistical tests and you did.” At breakneck speed, with the fervor of a true believer.
“The tests,” he said, “aren’t any big deal, they just examine phenomena mathematically. As in the likelihood of something happening by chance. One way to do that particular analysis is to draw comparisons between groups by examining the distribution of . . . the pattern of the scores. I did exactly that. Compared June 28 with every other day of the year. You’re right about homicides clustering, but no other date presents this pattern. Even summer effects tend to manifest on weekends or holidays. These six cases fall on various days of the week. In fact, only one—the first murder—took place on a weekend.”
Petra reached for her mug. Her tea had gone cold but she drank it anyway.
“Would you like some water?” said Isaac.
“I’m fine. What else?”
“Okay . . . another way to look at it, is to simply examine inherent base probabilities—” He’d punctuated his words with index-finger jabs. Now he stopped, blushed even more intensely. “There I go again.” Another long, deep inhalation. “Let’s take it issue by issue. Start with weapon of choice, because that’s a discreet— It’s a fairly simple variable. Firearms are the clear favorite of L.A. murderers. I’ve looked at twenty years’ worth of one eighty-sevens and seventy-three percent have been carried out with handguns, rifles, or shotguns. Knives and other sharp objects are next, at around fifteen percent. That means those two modalities account for nearly ninety percent of all local murders. The FBI’s national figures are similar. Sixty-seven percent firearms, fourteen percent knives. Personal weapons—fists, feet—account for six percent and the rest is a mixed bag. So the fact that neither a gun nor a knife was used on any of the June 28 cases is notable. As is the nature of the fatal injury. In every data bank I’ve checked, blunt force homicides never rise above the level of five percent. They’re a rare occurrence, Detective Connor. I’m sure you know that better than I.”
“Isaac, I just closed two cases. A bare-fist blow to the head and a broken neck via martial arts.”
He frowned. “Then you just closed two rare ones. Have you seen many others?”
Petra thought back. She shook her head. “Not for a while.”
Isaac said, “If we get even more specific, cranial bludgeoning by unknown weapon accounts for no more than three percent of L.A. homicides. But it makes up one hundred percent of these cases. When you add the other similarities—identical calendar date, same approximate time, probable stranger homicides, and look at the probability of a chance cluster, you’re moving way past coincidence.”
He stopped.
Petra said, “That it?”
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br /> “Actually, there is a bit more. LAPD homicide detectives solve between two-thirds and three-quarters of their cases, yet all these cases remain unsolved.”
“That’s because they’re stranger homicides,” said Petra. “You’ve been here long enough to see the kind of stuff we clear quickly. Some moron holding the smoking gun when the uniforms get there.”
“I think you’re selling yourself short, Detective Connor.” Saying it sincerely, not a trace of patronizing. “The truth is you people are very effective—imagine a major league slugger hitting seven hundred. Even stranger homicides get solved. But not one of these. All that supports my thesis: these are highly irregular events. The final incongruity is that during the same six-year period, gang homicides rose from twenty percent of all homicides to nearly forty. Meaning the chance of a nongang murder lowered proportionately. Yet not one of the June 28 cases appear gang-related. Add all that up and we’re talking a combination of highly unusual circumstances. The likelihood of it boiling down to chance is one over so many zeros I don’t have a name for it.”
Bet you do, thought Petra. Bet you’re going easy on me.
She slid the list out from under his hand, took a closer look.
June 28 Homicides: An Embedded Pattern?
1. 1997: 12:12 a.m. Marta Doebbler, 29, Sherman Oaks, married white female. Out with friends at Pantages Theater in H’wood, went to ladies’ room, never returned. Found in own car, backseat, depressed skull fracture.
2. 1998: 12:06 a.m. Geraldo Luis Solis, 63, widowed Hispanic male. Found in his house, breakfast room, Wilsh. Div, food taken but no money, depressed skull fracture.
3. 1999: 12:45 a.m. Coral Laurine Langdon, 52, single white female, walked her dog in H’wood Hills, found by patrol car, under brush, six blocks from home. Depressed skull fracture. Dog (“Brandy,” 10 y.o. cockapoo) stomped to death.
4. 2000: 12:56 a.m. Darren Ares Hochenbrenner, 19, single black male, Navy ensign, stationed in Port Hueneme, on shore leave H’wood, found in alley, Fourth Street, Cent. Div, pockets emptied. Depressed skull fracture.