Jonathan Kellerman_Petra Connor 02

by Twisted

  Or maybe she was Italian—stop!

  He was three feet away, still struggling with the gun.

  The tall man must’ve pressed down harder on the girl’s cheek, because her features compressed and her mouth was forced shut. Eating dust; she choked, coughed.

  Isaac ripped at the pocket fuckingidiotfuckingclown

  The man faced him, translucent truncheon held diagonally across his chest. Very tall, broad-shouldered, powerful. Plaid shirt and jeans and sneakers under the white coat.

  Those shoes would leave marks in the dirt but Thad Doebbler was a careful man, an artist; he would be sure to clean them up when he was through.

  Handsome man, with the confidence that tall, handsome men acquire easily. Undeterred by Isaac’s goofy presence. He knew he could handle a fool like this.

  “Hey,” he said.

  Isaac said, “P-Kasso.”

  Doebbler’s grin died. The cudgel caught filmy moonlight and gleamed.

  Isaac’s battle with his pocket continued. All told, seconds of struggle, but it felt like years.

  Suppressing panic, he stopped. Analyzed. Felt around. Some metal piece on the gun, maybe a rough spot on the barrel, was snagged on fleece threads, the key was to free it with a circular movement rather than fight and twist it tighter.

  Thad Doebbler, his foot still on the girl’s back, stepped forward with his free leg. Long leg, big stride, the motion brought him within two feet of Isaac’s head. Striking distance.

  He lifted the weapon and Isaac danced back, while yanking his pants upward. Tight around the crotch. He’d given himself a fucking wedgie and Thad Doebbler laughed.

  See me now, Petra. Idiotclownidiotclown.

  The little dark girl moaned in pain.

  Thad Doebbler closed another few inches of the space between him and Isaac.

  Isaac said, “Let her go or I’ll shoot you. I mean it.”

  Thad Doebbler regarded Isaac with amusement. “With what? Your little dick?”

  Isaac yanked the gun free. Stepped within the downward arc of Thad Doebbler’s murderous arm. Dodged the crushing blow by inches and managed to maintain his balance as he aimed upward.

  For the handsome face.

  He pressed the trigger.

  Shut his eyes involuntarily and kept pressing.

  CHAPTER

  55

  MONDAY, JULY 1, UPPER ROCKRIDGE DISTRICT, OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA, RESIDENCE OF THORNTON “THAD” DOEBBLER

  A historian, Thad.

  A renaissance man, of sorts. Website designer, graphic artist, alternative comix illustrator, computer animator.

  Sculptor in Lucite and polymer resins and space-age plastics.

  Abstract stuff, not to Petra’s taste. But she was forced to admit that his work showed talent. Serpentine twists of translucent rods imbedded with polychrome fiber-optic filaments, good eye for balance and composition.

  Last year he’d exhibited across the bay in San Francisco, at a Post Street gallery. Two to three grand per piece and three had sold.

  P-Kasso.

  Him and Omar. Her year for artists.

  Bundles of spare Lucite rods in various sizes were stacked neatly in Doebbler’s garage.

  The largest size conformed to the June 28 skull compressions.

  When she’d met him at his brother’s, he’d claimed his home base as San Francisco. But his digs were in Oakland, nice part of town, a cute little mock Tudor on a hill, landscaped prettily. No bay view, but a tree-framed rectangle of the Oakland hills was visible from the second-floor bedroom.

  Nothing in the bedroom but clothing, a few true-crime paperbacks, and a TV on a card table. The rest of the house was similarly spartan.

  Attached to the garage, out back, was a four-hundred-square-foot windowless cinder-block add-on secured by a bolted steel door. Thad Doebbler’s track-lit studio.

  Thad Doebbler’s museum.

  A man of parts, Thad. More useful to Petra, a damned egomaniac and compulsive chronicler of his own dark side.

  Twenty-four years of dark side.

  The guy had kept every playbill, airline ticket, and receipt cataloged compulsively. Within moments, Petra was able to verify his quarterly flights to L.A. But Petra already knew that Uncle Thad stayed with older brother Kurt and niece Katya in the house on Rosita.

  Bunking down in a spare bedroom next to Katya’s, where he kept a few pairs of pants, three shirts, a leather jacket, and a black Italian sports coat. Nothing of obvious forensic value, until the techies managed to scrape tiny little stains from two of the shirts and a jeans leg that had somehow managed to survive laundering and pressing.

  Maybe it was Kurt Doebbler’s inefficient, balky Kenmore washing machine, a contraption characterized by solemn-eyed Katya as: “Crap. It leaks all the time and never really cleans stuff the way you want it.”

  Dagger eyes at dad.

  Kurt had flinched—finally some emotion. “I’ll get a new one, Katie.”

  “You always say that.”

  Three of the stains were too degraded for DNA analysis. One was a perfect match to Marta Doebbler, another fit Coral Langdon’s genetic makeup, a third matched that of Navy Ensign Darren Ares Hochenbrenner.

  Petra had made it to the scene after hearing about it on her scanner. Hearing it during the debacle at Kurt Doebbler’s house.

  When she got there, Isaac was being treated like a suspect by two Hollywood D’s who didn’t know him well enough. He’d dropped Councilman Gilbert Reyes’s name and that of Deputy Chief Randy Diaz. Finally, someone called Diaz, who drove up in a Corvette dressed in black velvet sweats and two-hundred-dollar running shoes. Just in time for Petra to grab him and brief him.

  “The kid solved it, sir.” She spat out details.

  Diaz said, “Impressive. Think he’ll share credit with the department?”

  “I don’t think credit matters to him,” said Petra. “He’s a good kid, a great kid. I vouch for him absolutely.”

  Diaz smiled. Probably thinking she was in no shape to vouch for anyone.

  “That’s big of you, Detective.”

  “He earned it.”

  Isaac using an illegal gun to kill Thad could be a problem, they agreed.

  Diaz said, “It can be dealt with.” Long, searching look of Petra’s face. “So can your issues, Detective. If everyone’s discreet. There’re going to be some changes in your division. I’d like them to be smooth.”

  “What changes?”

  Diaz put a finger over his lips. Walked over to Isaac.

  The following night, Petra flew to Oakland, and Sunday morning, accompanied by a friendly Oakland D named Arvin Ludd, she began the first of two solid days in the cinder-block trove.

  Finding the best stuff in a double-wide black filing cabinet, a folder marked “Travel.”

  Beautiful penmanship, ol’ Thad. He’d filled three muslin-bound, made-in-France notebooks with detailed accounts of murderous fantasies initiated at age twelve.

  The melding of sex and violence and power, solidified by a chance encounter with a copy of the Teller booklet, found in a Hamburg antiques store.

  “Retzak is me and I am him. I don’t know why people like us are what we are. We just are. I like it.”

  After that: a lifetime of converting fantasy to reality.

  Thad described his failure to murder the German cake-icer, Gudrun Wiegeland, as “an understandable lapse, given my youth and inexperience, plus a modicum—but only that—of anxiety.” At the time of the Wiegeland bludgeoning “with a crowbar borrowed from the base auto-shop,” he’d been a sixteen-year-old Army brat. Two years younger than “Ever Pedestrian Kurt.”

  Perhaps Thad’s anxiety had been higher than he was willing to admit. By his own account, it took another eight years for him to try another murder.

  After a two-year stint in the Army, most of it spent as a layout editor for a military newspaper in Manila, Thad moved to Pittsburgh and enrolled in Carnegie-Mellon as an art and design major. (“Andy Warho
l’s alma mater. They told me he drew shoes for newspapers ads. I am a good deal more conceptual.”) Soon after graduation, he waylaid an eighteen-year-old co-ed named Randi Corey as she enjoyed a late-night campus jog.

  June 28, 1987. The spring semester had ended but Corey had remained for the summer to practice with a gymnastic coach.

  Thad Doebbler had stayed in town to murder her.

  The girl incurred three crushing blows to the back of her skull, and according to a newspaper clipping Thad had mounted in Volume 1 of his chronicles, was “likely to remain in a persistent vegetative state.”

  “When I cracked her open, I did manage to get a look at the gelatin. But not much, the bones wouldn’t give when I tried to pry them apart. Then I heard someone coming and skedaddled. It was two days later that I learned I’d, once again, inexplicably, failed to exert enough pressure to snuff the soul candle. I will not repeat that transgression.”

  Two months later, a fifty-two-year-old university maintenance man, Herbert Lincoln, succumbed to a fatal braining as he walked to his car in an off-campus lot. From what Petra could tell, no connection had been made between the homicide and the attack on Randi Corey.

  Young woman, older man. Some accordance with Otto Retzak’s pattern, but Doebbler had veered from the June 28 routine.

  Still in training. The deviation hadn’t muted his feelings of triumph.

  “I studied him as he leaked, watched the spark leave his eyes and sketched the phases. A wholer sense of completion can’t be imagined.”

  Sandwiched into the book were the drawings.

  Horrible because the bastard really could draw.

  End of Volume 1.

  As Petra put it aside and picked up the next notebook, she made a mental note to try to locate the Pittsburgh detectives who’d worked Corey and Lincoln. Find out if the girl was still alive; her family and Lincoln’s would want to know.

  She flipped the next book open. Arvin Ludd said, “Interesting?”

  “If you like that kind of thing.”

  He smiled, crossed his legs. While Petra worked, he’d mostly mellowed out in Thad Doebbler’s original, mint-condition Eames chair. Now he got up and stretched. “I’m about ready for a coffee fix. Want a latte or something?”

  “Double espresso if they have it.”

  “You got it.” Ludd was boyish, dark, blue-eyed. Well-dressed and laid-back almost to a fault and probably gay. Swinging his car keys, he left the block building.

  Left alone, Petra was hit by the stillness of the room. Silent, cold. Perfect kill-spot. Perfect dungeon.

  Had Doebbler ever brought any victims home? Preliminary luminol tests had found no blood. But she wondered. She’d suggested to Ludd that Oakland P.D. bring cadaver dogs and sonar for the backyard. He’d listened, nodded, hadn’t said yes or no. Hard to read the guy. Maybe he wasn’t gay . . .

  Volume 2.

  Here we go.

  After murdering Herbert Lincoln, Thad had adhered to the June 28 pattern. But not with yearly regularity. Being a salaried employee had constrained him; the crimes had depended upon his travel schedule.

  June 28, 1989: A computer seminar in Los Gatos, California. Thad had flown in from Philadelphia, where’d he’d been temping as a bank teller while seeking employment in the computer animation biz. Shortly after midnight, Barbara Bohannon, the secretary to an Intel executive, was brained in the subterranean parking lot of her hotel. Bohannon’s missing purse led investigators to suspect robbery as a motive.

  Doebbler had emptied the purse and tossed it, keeping the cash and the credit cards and the photos of Bohannon’s husband and three-year-old son. Spending the money; filing the rest under “Souvenirs.”

  His drawing of the woman showed her to be round-faced, fair-haired, pleasant-looking even in death. Wood fibers embedded in her hair said Doebbler hadn’t discovered the magic of plastic.

  June 28, 1991: Back in Philly, another computer conference. A year before, Doebbler had obtained work with an on-line start-up in San Mateo, only to be laid off, no reason given. Selling optioned stock bought him the house in Oakland and some time to try life as a freelance. A sculptor in Lucite.

  At one-fifteen A.M., the body of Melvyn Lassiter, a room-service waiter at the Inn at Penn, was found on a street in West Philadelphia. Crushed skull, missing wallet. Lassiter’s wife reported that Melvyn routinely brought home food from the hotel kitchen. No trace of such near the corpse.

  “Pasta primavera, broiled salmon. Yummy. The Caesar salad was a bit limp, but once I got rid of the soggy croutons, not half-bad.”

  June 28, 1992: Denver, Colorado. Animation conference. Ethel Ferguson, fifty-six, a breeder of standard poodles, was found bludgeoned in a wooded area near her home.

  June 28, 1995: Oceanside, California, Matthias Delano Brown, seaman, USN, brained near the docks. Thad Doebbler has taken a three-day vacation in La Jolla, traveling solo, staying at the La Valencia Hotel. (“Lovely; a well-deserved splurge. I saw dolphins from my window.”)

  Then: sister-in-law Marta.

  Lover Marta.

  Thad accounted the affair in prurient detail, rhapsodizing equally about the release of Marta’s “pent-up, Teutonic sexuality” and the pleasure at demeaning Ever Pedestrian Kurt. (“Henceforth referred to as EPT.”)

  During the three-month adultery, he traveled to L.A. twelve times, telling his brother that he’d gotten an illustration job at a Beverly Hills ad agency.

  “In reality, my job was waiting until EPT had departed for his ever pedestrian employment, then fucking Marta’s brains out—ah, the irony—in her marital bed. She’d start off pretending to be reluctant, but always gave in. She ended up being one hell of a screamer. I decided it would be nice to hear different kinds of screams pouring out of her starting-to-pucker, hausfrau mouth. She was beginning to grow emotional and tiresome.”

  A near-disaster was averted when Kurt returned home shortly after leaving to get a trade journal he’d left near his recliner. “EPT didn’t even bother to come upstairs to say hi to M, just collected his mag and left. He has no social skills, never did. Lucky for M and me, as we were in the throes, connected rather, ahem, deeply. I placed a hand over her mouth and succeeded in not laughing myself.”

  After that, Marta insisted they tryst at motels over the hill, in Hollywood and West Hollywood.

  The “downtown errands” she’d lied about to her friends.

  When Marta announced to Thad that she loved him, was ready to leave Kurt and Katya, he decided to kill her.

  He thought it out, waited until her theater night. Phoned her cell from a nearby booth, telling her he was just around the corner, had planned a surprise: meeting her at her car after the show. He’d booked a room at the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel—a suite, actually. But now, he wasn’t feeling well. Chest pains, probably nothing more than indigestion, but he was going to drive himself over to the Hollywood Presbyterian emergency room just to make sure. He’d call her when he was through.

  She freaked and insisted on taking him. Met him at her car. Before she knew it, he was sitting behind the wheel. Driving away. Looking fine.

  She said, Thought you were sick.

  He laughed, told her they were through.

  She began sobbing, wanted to know why. Begged to know why.

  He parked on a dark side street. Took her in his arms, kissed her. Shoved her away roughly and got out.

  She went after him. Tried to hit him.

  He got hold of her arm, twisted, shoved her to the ground and smashed the back of her skull with the Lucite club he’d concealed in his coat. The specially stitched internal pocket he’d fashioned. Good with his hands, ol’ Thad.

  She whimpered. Stopped.

  “I’d had this woman at will, knew her as intimately as one can know anyone. Yet her jelly was no different to me than any other. Nevertheless, this jaunt solidified my goals; this was the closest I’d come to ecstasy. And to honoring the memory of that sage, O.R. Something worth appreciating. Wor
th celebrating yearly.”

  Feeling her emotions begin to click off, Petra read the rest of it quickly, turned to the back of the notebook, found the postmortem sketches of Marta Doebbler. And the others.

  Something different about his portrait of Marta. Something searching—needy and adoring—in the woman’s eyes.

  Dead, but he’d drawn her eyes full of life.

  That evening, in her room at the Jack London Inn, she took a very long, very hot bath, watched Court TV, and managed to keep a room service cheeseburger down.

  Pleasant room: white walls, blue bedding. Rates higher than the department would normally compensate but she’d found a good deal on the Internet.

  Outside was activity. The hotel was right in the heart of Jack London Square. Another time and place she’d have explored. Tonight she had no intention of leaving until the airport ride tomorrow morning.

  Washing the burger down with a Coke, she went to the mini-bar, studied the cute little bottles of booze and mixers. Contemplated the advisability of a homemade Tanqueray and tonic. Decided against it.

  Her cell phone rattled on the nightstand. Still on vibrator; she hadn’t altered it since the stakeout at Kurt Doebbler’s.

  Another potential career disaster. Busting the door in, rushing Kurt and handcuffing him. Waking the poor daughter, too.

  Exigent circumstances was her excuse.

  Deputy Chief Diaz said that made sense to him.

  Kurt Doebbler, lying pinioned on his living room floor, had threatened to sue.

  He would’ve—might’ve won big—if not for his brother’s bad behavior.

  Blood on the clothing in the closet. Kurt claimed he had no idea Thad was sleeping with Marta, let alone using his house as a crash pad for his yearly murder jaunts.

  Probably telling the truth, the clueless nerd. But the D.A.’s theatrical skepticism and the threat of bad publicity had led Pacific Dynamics to lean on Kurt and he’d backed off.

  No harm, no foul. Petra felt bad for Katya but that was someone else’s business.