Motive

by Jonathan Kellerman

  I said nothing.

  He said, “Okay, it was a waste of time. Any better suggestions, genius?—aw, sorry, you’re the last person I should go off on. It’s just that this is nuts. The last thing I expected.”

  “Same here.”

  “God, I hope it’s not the building. Even compiling a list of employees and staffers would be impossible, people come and go.”

  He turned toward the house. “Meanwhile, I’ve got a freaky food diorama in there. Boneless chicken … and guess where there also isn’t a camera?”

  “The house.”

  “The house for sure, but more to the point, the entrance to the goddamn development. Why they even bother with a gate is beyond me, the people they hire have no experience and anyone can walk through, which is obviously what happened. Probably after dark. Asshole with a picnic basket, he could just carry it in. On foot.”

  I said, “He’d need to get into the house. Was the alarm set?”

  “Marissa doesn’t remember, which probably means it wasn’t. And no signs of break-in, so for all we know, a door was left unlocked. Safe neighborhood and all that.”

  “For someone to be aware of lax security, he’d have to be familiar with the area and/or the property. There’s a guard out there, now. When did he come on duty?”

  “Eight a.m., and no one was in the booth between eight p.m. and then. Logical, huh? I had Sean and Moe canvass the neighbors about intruders, unusual vehicles, anyone walking on the road. Nada.”

  I said, “With properties set this far back and with darkness, you’d have to be looking to spot anyone. Any indication the food was cooked in the house?”

  “Just like Hennepin, the place was left spotless, though he did use plates and cutlery from the house. So he either pre-prepared his munchies or cleaned up compulsively.”

  He swore under his breath. “I came, I saw, I catered.”

  I said, “Marissa said Richard didn’t have a key but Ballou contradicted that. Be good to find out how Richard got hold of it.”

  “As a matter of fact, lad, I can supply that data, because after I got Marissa’s call, I phoned Richard. His story is that when he decided to sell the house, he came over and retrieved one from a secret hiding place he and Ursula had, in case they ever got locked out.” He pointed. “Over there, in the barn. But before you get too excited, Richard’s been in San Diego for two days. And I didn’t just take his word for it, I confirmed with the Manchester Grand Hyatt. His card-key record has him out of his room between seven thirty and ten p.m. last night but his bar and restaurant tabs confirm drinks paid for at eight thirty and dinner at nine fifty.”

  “Dinner with who?”

  “Clients. I called the hotel restaurant and they back him up. Richard and several Asian gentlemen.”

  “Stay-at-home loner traveling on business,” I said. “That’s a switch.”

  “A hundred twenty miles to San Diego ain’t Phnom Penh, but yeah, it’s different and Corey talked about it, he needs to get out more and schmooze now that he doesn’t have Ursula. I’m not saying I can’t be fooled but, Alex, he did not sound overjoyed. More like overwhelmed. Out of his element.”

  “He have any opinion about what happened here?”

  “He thought it was insane. Guess we can reach a consensus there.”

  We checked with the crime scene techs. Short said, “Nothing so far, Lieutenant. It’s been wiped down super-carefully.”

  Milo said, “Any sign of cooking?”

  Tall said, “Not for a long time. I had a place like this, I’d be dishing up barbecue every Sunday.”

  Short said, “You had a place like this, you’d have someone cook for you.”

  “Nope,” said Tall. “Rich doesn’t have to mean lazy.”

  “Who said that?”

  “I just did.”

  “Great,” said Short. “Here I was, thinking I’d learn something today.”

  Back at the cars, I said, “I’d still try to find out if Kathy Hennepin was ever in that office building.”

  Fishing out his phone, he called the Grosses’ accounting firm, got voice mail, hung up. “Too complicated to leave a message. Anything else?”

  “Hennepin’s chef boyfriend—Kleffer—was alibied solidly, but now we’ve got two dinner scenes.”

  “Darius the Elusive returns? Not ever talking to him was sloppy, huh? Maybe I’m slipping.”

  He grabbed my hand, shook it vigorously. “Thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “I slip, I could fall. Sometimes you supply a net.”

  CHAPTER

  10

  The following morning Milo called and asked if I’d take another look at the Hennepin murder book. I said, “Sure,” and six minutes later, Sean Binchy was at the door delivering the blue folder.

  The request, just a formality. I supposed that defined friendship.

  I went to my office and read after Robin had gone to her studio, concentrating on linking Katherine Hennepin to Ursula Corey any way I could.

  The only thing they seemed to share was death followed by creepy culinary displays. I gave the files another try. By the fourth go-round, I might as well have been reading Sanskrit.

  When you hit a wall, take another route. I refocused by stepping away from the details.

  Milo’s initial reaction to the dinner scene at Ursula’s was to take it personally. Understandable response to surprise and frustration. But what if he was at least partially right and the killings were a power play against authority?

  Making fools of the cops by setting up crime scenes designed to misdirect, because detectives play the odds. We all do.

  Spot an eighty-year-old woman hobbling your way down a dark city street and your blood pressure, pulse, and respiration are unlikely to spike.

  Switch the scene to a husky young male swaggering toward you and your sympathetic nervous system jams into high gear.

  Sure, it’s profiling and sure, it’s imperfect. Get close enough to that old woman and realize she’s a guy in drag whipping out a gun and you’ve lost out to limited thinking. But for the most part, things are what they seem and we all bank on that.

  Try living randomly and see how far it gets you.

  When it comes to police work, professional judgments about a crime are often formed early, sometimes during the first moments of viewing a crime scene. That can lead to tunnel vision and rushes to judgment. But more often than not, seasoned detectives’ expectations are met because patterns do exist and ignoring patterns is stupid and reckless.

  A bright detective keeps a sliver of mind open. Milo’s one of the brightest but his assumptions had just been churned to sludge.

  He wouldn’t be forgiving himself anytime soon, but I was coming to believe that he deserved a pass. Because the slaughter of Katherine Hennepin was a textbook example of an overkill slice-job by someone the victim knew well. And the assassination of Ursula Corey did bear the hallmarks of a for-hire hit prompted by money or passion or both.

  A pair of textbook cases that had skidded way off the page. A couple of obvious prime suspects who’d alibied out.

  Was blowing probability to bits the big thrill for the monster who’d choreographed, directed, and starred in all this violence?

  Were the killings little more than stage shows? Dinner for two, the props?

  But why these two women? The victims mattered. The victims always matter.

  Full circle …

  I brewed coffee, drank too much of it, walked around the house and out to the garden and back, developing a killer headache that proved oddly reassuring.

  Dinner for two. Pleased at his first tableau and repeating it? Because something about setting up a cozy culinary scene made his penis hard and flooded his shallow mind with pulsating memories?

  Or did it all reduce to an ad for himself? Just another look-at-me vanity production.

  Murder as bragging.

  If so, how many other women would be sacrificed to a metastatic ego?

&n
bsp; Were we dealing with someone who’d never matured properly due to abuse or neglect? Or one of those mutants who defy explanation?

  If I was right about his wanting to humiliate law enforcement, he’d probably had run-ins with the cops and come out on the losing end.

  An underachiever who’d overestimated his own intelligence, convinced himself his failures were someone else’s fault.

  Yet, for all that, a man sufficiently clever/​smooth/​innocuous to worm his way into Katherine Hennepin’s apartment.

  To stalk Ursula Corey in a basement parking lot without her suspecting anything until it was too late.

  Shooting her in the face fit an ego run amok.

  Look at me look at me look at me.

  No shortage of attention whores in L.A. Showbiz and haute couture and politics wouldn’t exist without them. But presidents and movie stars and supermodels get to flaunt themselves publicly. Our boy wasn’t able to.

  Or he’d tried and failed.

  So he’d retracted like a venomous mollusk, concealed by a shell of anonymity?

  A guy you wouldn’t worry about if you saw him walking toward you.

  If you noticed him at all.

  Profound, Delaware. You are hereby christened the Grand Duke of Generic Psychological Guesswork.

  After photocopying Katherine Hennepin’s enlarged DMV photo, I showered, but didn’t shave, put on a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers, and drove to Century City.

  Leaving the Seville in the pay lot of the office building directly across the street, I climbed the broad steps leading to the structure where Ursula Corey had died.

  Rather than enter the lobby, I stood around, slightly left of center, studying the foot traffic in and out.

  No spew of humanity, just a thin but steady parade of people looking purposeful.

  I did my best to look aimless, figured clothes that didn’t fit in would help. No one noticed or cared. The flow parted around me and resumed; I might as well have been a traffic cone.

  Invisible man. Was that the way he felt all the time?

  Maybe a smidge of odd behavior would help. I lowered my head, bobbed up and down, pretended to study at the ground, a loner caught up in a private world.

  When that failed to raise a reaction, I looked up and altered my facial expression: sneering at the universe.

  That caught the eye of a few people and made them frown and widen the berth they gave me. But no slowing of pace. Now I was a traffic cone soiled by dog shit.

  Finally, a pair of young brunettes in short skirts muttered something that sounded cruel as they stilettoed past.

  Then: more invisibility.

  I supposed it made sense. Kids are taught not to stare and people are repelled by abnormality.

  But maybe it was more than that. Because despite all the so-called social networks and the transitory clans they breed (the yoga community, the yogurt community, the Yogi Berra community), ultimately, we all drive solo. And that can lead to self-absorption.

  More so in California where nice weather and cinematic promises of happy endings can erode any but the most passionate or paranoid person’s sense of threat.

  I’d just proven to myself how tough it was to get anyone to pay attention. Had that helped the killer take Ursula Corey?

  Decked out in bling, she’d marched happily to her Jaguar, secure in the knowledge that she was rich and charismatic and sexy and therefore owned the world. Gladdened further by what she’d just accomplished: willing a whole bunch of shiny stuff to her daughters, how delighted they were when she told them, maybe the three of them would go out to dinner tonight to celebrate, something spontaneous, she’d pop it on them when she got back to Calabasas.

  The last thing on her mind …

  Easy pickings.

  Satisfied there was nothing more to be learned here, I’d turned to leave when a fingertip poked my shoulder hard enough to hurt.

  “Can I help you, pal?”

  Rotating, I faced Alfred Bayless, wearing the same black blazer, gray pants, and white turtleneck and taking up a whole bunch of my personal space. Up close, the building’s security chief smelled of Aqua Velva and ire. His nostrils flared. His pupils were dilated. Then he recognized me.

  “Oh. Sorry, Doc. Noticed you hanging around but couldn’t see who you were from a distance. What’s going on?”

  “I was doing some observation.”

  “Of what?”

  “How people react to an outlier. You’re the first person to pay me serious notice.”

  He frowned. “What, you’re testing the system? Well, guess what, I saw you right away on the monitor, figured I’d watch you a bit, make sure you were actually a loony or a bum and not some rich dude in cheap clothes waiting for a big-shot lawyer, this is L.A., right? I mean no offense about the clothes.”

  “It had nothing to do with your system,” I said. “I wanted to see—”

  “Because maybe the fool who shot that lady hung out here? I could’ve saved you some time, Doctor. People don’t see a damn thing. They’re sheep.” He smiled coldly. “So nothing’s come up, huh?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Sturgis must be growing an ulcer.”

  A trio of well-fed men in hand-stitched suits left the building. One of them, a silver-haired man in all black, eyed Bayless. Bayless had already spotted him.

  Hard looks and curt salutes all around.

  Bayless’s mouth turned down as he watched them pass from view.

  I said, “Looks like you’re the exception.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You just got noticed.”

  “That’s ’cause I’m so handsome,” said Bayless. “No—off the record? Those guys are top brass. The one in the black silk Brioni manages big projects for the folks who own the building. The others work for him, they all flew in this morning for a security meeting.”

  “Big-time fun.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Any progress?”

  “In terms of getting some actual security?” Bayless laughed. “The plan is they go back to the über-boss and he consults personally with God and then there’s a meeting about having a meeting and then it’s shelved and reopened and maybe another set of meetings and who knows, Doctor, anything’s possible … so nothing at all on Ms. Corey?”

  “Wish there was.”

  “Well,” he said, “tell Sturgis I haven’t forgotten him. They may not be giving me cameras but I did manage to squeeze a couple of new hires out of them. Minimum-wage kids, no experience, but I have them patrolling the parking tiers.”

  “I’ll relay the message.”

  Bayless ran a finger under the hem of his turtleneck. “I keep thinking about that poor woman. Ran the tapes a bunch of times myself. Level with me, Doc: Did you come here because you think we’re high risk for a repeat?”

  “No, just trying to figure out the bad guy’s approach.” I pulled out Katherine Hennepin’s photo. “Ever see her here?”

  He studied the image. “Nope. Who is she?”

  “Another victim. She got killed somewhere else.”

  Bayless’s eyes widened. “Same offender?”

  “Could be.”

  “You think she was here?”

  “Nothing links her to here,” I said. “I’m trying to eliminate the possibility.”

  “No links at all?”

  “Zero.”

  “You’re a careful guy, Doctor, I heard that about Sturgis, too. Mr. Compulsive, figures he’d have someone like you doing psych work.”

  I smiled.

  He gave the photo another look. Longer. No stranger to meticulousness, himself.

  “Nope, never saw her. That’s all I need, huh? Maniac lurking in the ductwork. Like a case back in New York, ’round forty years ago, when I was a kid. Lady violinist got raped and murdered in the Metropolitan Opera. Right in the building, place was a maze. My dad worked a shoe-shine stand in Lincoln Center, he was always talking about it until they solved it. Perp was a st
agehand, met her in the elevator.”

  He wiped sweat from his forehead. “Scared the hell out of me, Doc. I grew up in Harlem, dope shootings was one thing but sick stuff where the rich folk went? There was nothing to aspire to? That’s when I decided to be law enforcement. Take some control of the situation.”

  He smiled. “I’m gabbing, need to get back to work.”

  I said, “Okay with you if I go inside for a sec?”

  The smile disintegrated. “Free country, can’t stop you, but what for?”

  “Just to get a feel.”

  “I’m getting an off feeling, Doc. One moment you’re telling me it’s unlikely to have anything to do with the building. Now you’re saying you need a feel.”

  “Frustration does that,” I said.

  “Does what?”

  “Leads me to take the extra step.”

  Bayless rocked on his feet. His hands were huge, gnarled, curled into fists. “I guess I can relate to that, but do me a favor and don’t make a big deal out of it, okay? They might be sheep but eventually someone’s going to report a problem and problems have a way of finding their way to me.”

  CHAPTER

  11

  I entered the lobby right after Bayless, hung back as he stepped into the lunchtime throng. Making sure he was nowhere in sight, I headed for the directory, used my phone to photograph the names of tenants sharing the seventh floor with Grant Fellinger’s law firm.

  Not much to shoot; another group of lawyers and a financial management company.

  For all the people leaving for a midday meal, the line at the ground-floor snack bar was thin. I waited until no one was in line, went over and bought coffee, only yards from Bayless’s office. Overpaying by two bucks, I said, “Keep the change,” and showed Katherine Hennepin’s picture to the pimply kid working the counter.

  A guy in a T-shirt and jeans flashing a photo deserved an explanation but the kid just looked and said, “Nope. She a shoplifter?”

  “Get a lot of them?”

  The kid smiled slyly. “Like you don’t know. Being a narc?”