Jonathan Kellerman_Petra Connor 02

by Twisted

  “Someone she trusted,” said Petra. “Back to the husband.” Weird Kurt. “There’s another discrepancy between Marta and the others. She was killed on the street but then placed in her car. You could look at that as her being treated with a bit more respect. Which would also fit with a killer who knew her well.”

  He grimaced. “I should’ve thought of that.”

  Distracted. By Klara. Self-doubt. Flaco’s gun . . . my gun . . . would I ever really use it?

  “That’s why it’s good to brainstorm,” said Petra. They reached Santa Monica Boulevard. Traffic, noise, pedestrians, gay hustlers loitering on corners.

  Petra said, “Here’s yet another distinction for Doebbler: She was the first. When Detective Ballou told me he thought Kurt Doebbler’s reaction was off, and then after I met Kurt, it got me thinking: What if the bad guy never set out to commit a string of murders? What if he killed Marta for a personal reason and found out he liked it? Got himself a hobby. Which brings us back to Kurt.”

  “A-once-a-year hobby,” said Isaac.

  “An anniversary,” she said. “What if June 28 is significant to Kurt because he happened to kill Marta on that day? So he relives it.”

  He stared at her. “That’s brilliant.”

  Return of the youthful exuberance. Oddly, it deflated Petra’s enthusiasm and she said, “Hardly. It’s a theory. But at least we’re focusing.”

  “On Marta Doebbler?”

  “For lack of anyone better.”

  “Maybe,” he said, touching his bruise absently, “we should find out who knew she was at the theater. She went with friends, right?”

  Staring at her with that unlined, precocious, innocent face. She wanted to kiss it.

  They returned to the station and Petra pulled the Doebbler file. Marta had gone out with three friends and Detective Conrad Ballou had listed their names dutifully along with the fact that he’d contacted two, Melanie Jaeger and Sarah Casagrande, “telephonically.” The third, Emily Pastern, had been out of town.

  According to Ballou’s notes, neither Jaeger nor Casagrande knew for certain who’d called Marta out of the theater.

  “Witness Casagrande reports that Victim Doebbler appeared agitated by telephonic interruption and that Vic Doebbler reacted quickly to said interruption, ‘jumped out of her seat and just left. Like it was an emergency, she didn’t even apologize for having her cell phone on. Which wasn’t like Marta, she was always considerate.’ Likewise Witness Jaeger, interviewed independently.

  Vic’s husband, Kurt Doebbler, denies calling Vic at any time that night, denies owning cellular phone. K. Doebbler agreed to immediate inspection of home telephonic records, which was accomplished this morning at 11:14 a.m. per Pacific Bell, confirming said denials.”

  Ballou’s next notation identified the origin of the call as the pay phone around the corner from the theater.

  Isaac, reading over Petra’s shoulder, said, “Doebbler could’ve driven from the Valley to Hollywood, called Marta from the booth, and waited by her car. What if he agreed to have his phone records inspected because he knew they wouldn’t incriminate him?”

  Petra said, “I wonder if Mr. Doebbler has ever owned a dog.”

  She called Valley SPCA. No dog registrations at the Doebbler household, but plenty of people didn’t register their pets.

  Next, she phoned the numbers Ballou had listed for Marta’s friends, Melanie Jaeger and Sarah Casagrande. Both were now owned by new parties.

  Transitory L.A.

  DMV records showed no listings for Jaeger anywhere in California, but a Sarah Rebecca Casagrande was listed on J Street, in Sacramento. Petra got her number from the Sacramento directory and phoned it.

  The receptionist at a family medicine clinic answered. Doctor Casagrande was with a patient.

  “What kind of doctor is she?”

  “Psychologist. Actually, she’s a psych assistant.”

  “Is that like a nurse?”

  “No, Dr. Casagrande is a new Ph.D. She’s supervised by Dr. Ellis and Dr. Goldstein. If you’d like an appointment—”

  “This is Detective Connor, Los Angeles Police. Would you please have her call me?” Petra recited her number.

  “The police?”

  “Nothing to worry about,” said Petra. “An old case.”

  Next, she tried Emily Pastern, the sole friend Ballou hadn’t reached.

  A machine picked up on the fifth ring and a perky female voice said, “This is Emily and Gary Daisy’s place. We’re not in now, but if you’ll leave . . .”

  Petra sat through the message. Blocking out the words because the background noise had captured her attention.

  Running canine commentary as Emily Pastern chirped away.

  A dog barking.

  As she hung up, Mac Dilbeck passed her desk, shot her a long, unhappy look, and kept going toward the men’s room.

  She followed, waited in the hallway, was there when he exited the lav. He was only mildly surprised to see her.

  “Something up, Mac?”

  “For the record,” he said, “I thought your point about photography was good.”

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “It’s at least something, Petra. Which was more than those yahoos had to offer.” His eyes glinted. “I just got a call from one of the victims’ mother. The Dalkin kid, that freckled boy trying to look punk. Poor lady was sobbing. Begged me to say we’ve made some progress. So what could I tell her?”

  He slapped his hands together hard. The sound, as sharp as a gunshot, nearly made Petra jump.

  “You know what’s happening, don’t you, Petra? We hand them their prime suspect on a silver platter, they take over but don’t have the smarts to move their sorry butts and find him.” He looked around, as if seeking somewhere to spit. “Task force. All they’re going to do is keep taking meetings, with their easels and their diagrams. Like it’s a football play. They’ll probably give themselves a sweet little name. ‘Operation Alligator,’ some garbage like that.” He shook his head. Brylcreemed hair didn’t budge but his eyelids fluttered like crepe banners.

  “Taking their sweet time,” he went on, “until word gets out to Selden that they’re coming for him and he rabbits. If he hasn’t already.”

  He looked old, tired, miserable. Petra didn’t console him. A man like Mac wouldn’t take well to consolation.

  “It’s a drag,” she said.

  “It’s a super-drag. Regular Cagé au Follies.” His smile was nervous, fleeting. His neck tendons flexed and lumps formed under his ears. “That was a joke. By the way.”

  Petra smiled.

  Mac said, “I crack wise like that at home, everyone tells me I’m inappropriate. Believe it or not, I used to be a funny guy. Back in the service, I was part of this theater review, we had this little stage set up—in Guam—I’m talking bare-bones but we got some laughs.”

  “Musical review?” she said.

  “We had ukuleles, whatever we could come up with.” He colored. “No one dressed up as women, nothing like that, that’s not what I’m getting at. Just that I used to know my way around a joke. Now? I’m a humorless geezer. Inappropriate.”

  His discomfiture made Petra edgy. She laughed, more for herself than him. “Come over and joke any time, Mac.”

  “Sure,” he said, walking off. “We call that police work, right?”

  Petra watched him vanish around a corner. People. They could always surprise you.

  Returning to her desk, she saw Isaac hunched over his laptop.

  She returned to the Doebbler file, studied it as if it was the Bible.

  By five-thirty Friday, neither Dr. Sarah Casagrande nor Emily Pastern had returned her calls. She tried again with no success. Everyone gone for the weekend.

  Suddenly all the energy generated by her brainstorm with Isaac was gone. She walked over to his desk. He stopped typing, cleared his screen. An Albert Einstein screensaver popped up. Genius in a funny bow tie. Wild hair. But ol’ Albie’s eyes
. . .

  Isaac closed the laptop. Something he didn’t want her to see?

  She said, “Want some dinner?”

  “Thanks, but I can’t.” He looked down at the linoleum and Petra prepared herself for a lie. “Promised my mother I’d spend some time at home.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “She cooks these enormous meals and gets deeply hurt if no one’s around to eat them. My father does his bit but it’s not enough, she wants all of us. My younger brother tends to stays out late and sometimes my older brother eats on the job, comes home and goes straight to sleep.”

  “Leaving you,” said Petra.

  He shrugged. “It’s the weekend.”

  “I really do think it’s nice, Isaac. Mothers are important.”

  He frowned. Klara, her kids . . .

  “You okay?” said Petra.

  “Tired.”

  “You’re too young for that.”

  “Sometimes,” he said, “I don’t feel very young.”

  Petra watched him tramp off, lugging the laptop and his briefcase. Something was definitely weighing him down. That junkie, Jaramillo, putting on some kind of pressure? Maybe she’d disobey the Downtown gang guys and confront the kid.

  No, that would be a really bad idea.

  Still, they’d put her in a bad position. Drafting her into the unpaid job of keeping an eye on the kid with no authority to do anything.

  Babysitting, just as it had been all along.

  Could she let Isaac go down without a warning? Could she afford not to?

  Meanwhile, she’d use him on the June 28 killings.

  The mess he’d foisted on her in the first place.

  Her head hurt. Time for dinner. Another solitary night. Maybe Eric would call sometime during the weekend.

  As she cleared her desk, he phoned, as if she’d conjured him. “Free?”

  “Just about. What’s up?”

  “Doing things,” he said. “I’d like to tell you about them.”

  “I’d like to hear about them.”

  They met just after six at a Thai café on Melrose near Gardner, a place favored by faux-depressed hipsters and wannabe performers. But the food was good enough to override the self-conscious atmosphere.

  Petra figured she and Eric fit in, at least superficially. He was wearing a white V-neck T-shirt, black jeans that drooped on his skinny frame, the crepe-soled black oxfords he favored on stakeout, his oversized, multizone military wristwatch.

  Eric was as far as you could get from hip. But add up the clothes, the close-cropped haircut, the indoor complexion, the deep-set eyes and emotionless face and he looked every bit the misunderstood artiste.

  With her black Donna Karan pantsuit and matching loafers, she figured she’d be taken for a stylish career woman. Maybe someone in the entertainment biz.

  Hah!

  The place was already starting to fill but they got seated immediately, served quickly, ate their papaya salads and panang curry with silent enthusiasm.

  “So,” said Petra, “what you been doing?”

  Eric put down his fork. “Looking seriously into private work. The licensing requirements don’t seem too tough.”

  “Don’t imagine they would be.” He’d done military special op work, spent a tour as an M.P. detective before signing on with LAPD. All that had taught him endless patience for surveillance. Perfect for private work.

  “The question,” he said, “is do I go out on my own or hook up with an established p.i.”

  “So you’re definitely doing it.”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Whatever you decide is okay,” she said.

  He rolled the fork’s handle.

  Petra’s warning system, already primed by too much frustration at work, went on full alert. “Something else on your mind?”

  The frost in her voice made him look up.

  “Not really.”

  “Not really?”

  He said, “Are you upset?”

  “Why would I be?”

  “At me. For quitting.”

  She laughed. “No way. Maybe I’ll join you.”

  “Bad day?”

  One eye started to itch and she rubbed it.

  He said, “Paradiso?”

  “That, other stuff.”

  He waited.

  She was in no mood to talk. Then she was, pouring it out: shunted aside on Paradiso, Schoelkopf dissing her in front of the others. Zero progress on the June 28 killings, with the target date a week away.

  “Someone’s going to die, Eric, and I can’t do a thing about it.”

  He nodded.

  “Any ideas?” she said.

  “Not about that. As far as Selden, you’re right about the photography angle.”

  “Think so?”

  “Definitely.”

  “You’d pursue it?”

  “If it was my case.”

  “Well,” she said, “go and tell the geniuses in charge.”

  “Geniuses are rarely in charge.” His eyes slitted and he picked at his salad. Petra wondered if he was thinking about Saudi Arabia. Or a sidewalk café in Tel Aviv.

  An uneasy expression slithered onto his face.

  “What?” she said.

  He looked at her blankly.

  “You’re holding back, Eric.”

  He rolled the fork some more and she braced herself for yet another put off.

  He said, “If I go out on my own, it’ll mean less money. Until I build up a clientele. I haven’t been LAPD long enough to get a city pension, all I have is my military pension.”

  “That’s decent money.”

  “It pays the bills but I couldn’t buy a house.” He returned to his food, chewed slowly—excruciatingly slowly, the way he always did. Petra, a rapid eater, table habits borne of growing up with five ravenous brothers, typically sat idly as he finished. Most of the time it amused her. Or she rationalized that she should learn to emulate him. Now she wanted to flip his switch onto High, squeeze some emotion out of him.

  She said, “A house would be nice but it’s not necessary.”

  He placed the fork on the table. Shoved his plate away. Wiped his mouth. “Your place is small. So’s mine. I thought . . . if the two of us . . .” His shoulders rose and fell.

  Petra’s chest grew warm. She touched his wrist. “You want to move in together?”

  “No,” he said. “Not the right time.”

  “Why not?” she said.

  “Don’t know,” he said, looking about twelve years old.

  She thought about the magnitude of his loss. What it took for him to express himself emotionally even at this level. Heard herself saying, “I don’t know either.”

  CHAPTER

  36

  FRIDAY, JUNE 21, 8:23 P.M., THE GOMEZ APARTMENT, UNION DISTRICT

  The kitchen was hot and fragrant, not even a trace of Isaiah’s asphalt leaking through the savory steam.

  His mother washed dishes, pivoted to accept Isaac’s cheek peck. “You’re early.” Not true; it sounded like an accusation. “No more work?”

  “It’s the weekend, Ma.”

  “You’re not too busy to eat with us?”

  “I smelled your food from miles away.”

  “This? It’s not fancy, just tamales and soup.”

  “Still smells great.”

  “A new kind of beans, black ones but bigger. I saw them in the market, the Korean said they would be good.” She shrugged. “Maybe he’s right.”

  “Sounds pretty fancy to me.”

  “When someone gets married, I’ll make a real meal.” She began puttering at the stove. “Also rice with onions and a little chicken. This time I added more chicken stock and some carrots. I do that for Dr. Marilyn and it comes out good. I cooked a fresh whole chicken to get the stock and put the white meat in the tamales. Whatever’s left is in the refrigerator. Mostly skin, but you can snack on it now if you’re hungry.”

  “I’ll wait. Where’s Dad?”


  “On the way home. The Toyota acted up again, he had to take it to Montalvo. Hopefully he won’t get robbed blind.”

  “Anything serious?”

  “Montalvo claims some kind of filter, I don’t know that kind of thing.” She scurried to the refrigerator, poured him a glass of lemonade. “Here, drink.”

  He sipped the cool, overly sweet liquid.

  “Have another glass.”

  He complied.

  “Joel’s not coming home,” said his mother. “A night class. On Friday. Can you believe that?”

  Isaac figured Joel was lying. If it kept going like this, maybe he’d talk to him. He drained the second glass of lemonade, headed for his room.

  “Isaiah’s sleeping, so go in quiet.”

  “Did he eat already?”

  “He ate some but he’ll come to the table for more.” Small smile. “He loves my tamales. Especially with raisins.”

  “I do, too, Mom.”

  She stopped, turned. Her mouth was set tartly and Isaac prepared himself for a guilt trip.

  She said, “It’s nice you’re here, my doctor.” Returning to the stove. “For a change.”

  He removed his shoes and cracked the bedroom door carefully but Isaiah sat up in the top bunk.

  “Man . . .” Rubbing his forehead, as if trying to restore focus. “It’s you.”

  “Sorry,” said Isaac. “Go back to sleep.”

  Isaiah sank down on two elbows, glanced at the brittle shade that yellowed the solitary window. Air shaft light glared through. The security bulb, yellow-gray. The asphalt smell was strong in here.

  Isaiah said, “You’re here, bro.”

  “Got out early,” said Isaac.

  Isaiah laughed wetly. Coughed, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Isaac wondered about his lungs, the alveoli clogged with all that . . .

  “Got out early?” said Isaiah. “Sounds like probation or something.”

  Isaac stashed his briefcase well under the bed, took off his shirt, and put on a fresh T. He lifted the shade and stared down the air shaft. Stories below, garbage flecked the pavement.

  Isaiah shielded his eyes. “Cut that out, man.”