Jonathan Kellerman_Petra Connor 01 (3 page)

In a strange way she made me feel good, that she thought I could do it. Even though I knew she was probably kidding. I remember that nipple, the way she stuck it out at me, like, Here, take it, suck on it. Her mouth was wide open and her teeth were huge and white.

She was probably joking on me or just needed money bad and was ready to do it with anybody. Most of the prosties are junkies or crackheads.

The way those two rangers laughed was a little like the way the prostie laughed.

Is there such a thing as a
sex laugh
?

Being treated like a kid can be good or bad. When you go into a store with money, even if you’re in line ahead of adults, the adults get served first. A bigger problem is the Boulevard, and all the smaller streets full of weirdos and perverts out to rape kids. Once I found a magazine in an alley and it showed pictures of perverts doing it with kids—putting dicks up their butts or in their mouths. Some kids were crying; others looked sleepy. You don’t see the perverts’ faces, just their hairy legs and their dicks. For a long time, it gave me nightmares, those kids, the way their eyes looked. But it also made me careful.

I’ve had guys pull up in cars when I’m walking, even in bright sunlight, waving money or candy bars or even their dicks. I ignore them, and if they don’t butt out, I run. Used to be when I was in a bad mood because of no dinner or a night full of bad dreams, I’d flip them off before I’d run. But a month ago one of them tried to run me down with his car. I got away from him, but now I keep my finger to myself.

There’s no telling what’ll cause problems. A week ago, two guys got into a car accident on Gower, just a small dent in the front car, but the guy got out with a baseball bat and smashed the other guy’s windshield. Then he went for the other guy, who ran away.

You’ve got maniacs yelling and screaming at everyone and no one, gunshots all the time at night. I’ve even seen guys walking around during the day with bulges in their pockets that could be guns.

The only dead person I saw was one of the old shopping cart guys lying in an alley, his mouth open like he was sleeping, but his skin had turned gray and flies went in and out between his lips. Nearby was the Dumpster I was going to dive, but I just got out of there, no more appetite. That night, I woke up really hungry, thinking I was stupid to let it get to me. He was old anyway.

When I get enough food, I’m full of energy. Super-fast. When I run, I feel jet-propelled—no gravity, no limits.

Sometimes I get into a running rhythm and it’s like a music beat in my head, ba-boom, ba-boom, like nothing can stop me. When that happens I
force
myself to slow down, because it’s dangerous to forget who you are.

I also slow down anytime I’m about to go into the park. Way in advance. I always look around to make sure no one’s watching me, then I head in, relaxed, like I live in one of the huge houses at the foot of the park.

One of the books Moron ripped up was by a French scientist named Jacques Cousteau, on octopus and squid. One chapter talked about how octopi can match their colors to their backgrounds. I’m no octopus, but I know how to blend in.

I take things, but that doesn’t make me a thief.

I found the same octopus book in the library, borrowed it, brought it back.

I took the presidents book and kept it.

But no one had checked it out for nine months; that’s what the card in back said.

Back in Watson the library was pathetic, just a store next to the VFW hall that nobody used, and it was mostly closed. The lady behind the desk always looked at me like I was going to take something, and the funny thing was I never was.

At the Hillhurst library, there’s also an old one, but she mostly stays in her office and the one who actually checks books out is young, pretty, and Mexican, with really long hair. She smiled at me once, but I ignored her and the smile dropped from her face like I’d torn it off.

I can’t get a library card because I have no address. My technique is I go in there looking like a kid from King Middle School with homework to do, sit down by myself at a table, and read and write for a while, usually math problems. Then I go back to the shelves.

I’ll return the presidents book one day.

Even if I kept it forever, no one would miss it. Probably.

An
advantage
of looking like a harmless little kid is sometimes you can go into a store and take stuff without being noticed. I know it’s a sin, but without food, you die, and suicide’s a sin too.

Also—people aren’t scared of kids, at least not white kids, so if you ask someone for spare change, the worst they usually do is shine you on. I mean, what are they going to say to me? Get a job, junior?

One thing I learned back in Watson: Make people nervous and you’re the one who gets hurt.

So maybe God helped me by making me small for my age. I would like to grow eventually, though.

Mom, before she got sadder, would sometimes hold me under the chin and say, “Look at this. Like an angel. A damn
cherub.
”

I
hated
that; it sounded so
gay.

Some of those kids being raped in the magazine looked like angels.

There’s no way to know what’s safe. I avoid all people, and the park’s perfect for that—4,100 acres of mostly peace and quiet.

Thank you, crazy Mr. Griffith.

The way he tried to kill his wife was by shooting her in the eye.

CHAPTER

In eight months, Petra had worked twenty-one
other homicides, some fairly sloppy. But nothing like this. Not even the Hernandez wedding.

This woman looked shredded. Washed in blood.
Dipped
in it, like fruit in chocolate. The front of her dress was a mass of gore, glossy gray tubes of entrail popping out from slashes in the fabric. Silky fabric, not great in terms of latents. The blood would be a good cover, too—try lifting anything from skin. Maybe the jewelry, if the killer had touched it.

She and Stu arrived in darkness, encountering grim faces, radio static, a blinking symphony of red lights. They took reports from the rangers who’d found the body, waited for sunrise to have a careful look at the victim.

The blood had dried red-brown, streaking the skin and the surrounding asphalt, running down the parking lot in rivulets, some of the spatters still tacky.

Petra stood by the corpse, sketching the surrounding terrain and the body, tabulating the wounds she could see. At least seventeen cuts, and that was only the front.

Bending and getting as close as she could without messing anything up, she examined torn flesh; the lower lip almost completely severed, the left eye reduced to ruby pulp. All the damage on the left side.

If you could see your squeamish kid now, Dad.

Twenty-one previous bodies notwithstanding, viewing this one in sunlight jolted her with nausea. Then something worse hit her: the pain of sympathy.

Poor thing.
Poor, poor thing, what led you to this?

Outwardly, she maintained. No one watching would have seen anything but trim efficiency. She’d been told she looked efficient. An accusation thrown at her by Nick, implying competence wasn’t sexy. Along with all the other garbage he’d dumped on her. Why hadn’t she realized what was going on?

She liked being thought of as businesslike. Had found a business she liked.

A month ago she’d gone to a Melrose salon, ordered the reluctant stylist to lop off six inches of black hair, and ended up with a short ebony minimal-care wedge cut.

Stu had noticed right away. “Very becoming.”

She thought it framed her lean, pale face pretty well.

Her clothes were picked for nothing but practicality now. Good pantsuits bought on sale at Loehmann’s and Robinsons-May that she took home and tailored herself so that they fit her long frame perfectly. Mostly black, like today. A couple of navys, one chocolate-brown, one charcoal.

She wore MAC lipstick, deep red with a brown tint, a little eye shadow, and mascara. No foundation; her skin was white and smooth as notepaper. No jewelry. Nothing a suspect could yank.

The victim wore foundation.

Petra could see it clearly where the crimson hadn’t settled. Traces of blush, powder, mascara, applied a little heavier than Petra’s, to the eye that remained intact.

The damaged eye was a sightless black-cherry hole, the eyeball collapsed to folded cellophane, some of the jellylike humor leaking out and specking the nose.

Nice nose, where it hadn’t been slashed.

The right eye was wide, blue, filmed over. That dull
dead
look. You couldn’t fake it—there was nothing like it.

Flight of the soul? Leaving behind what? A casing, no more alive than a snake’s molt?

She continued studying the corpse with an artist’s precision, noticed a small but deep cut on the left cheek that she’d missed. Eighteen. She couldn’t flip the body till the crime-scene photographer was finished and the coroner gave the okay. The definitive wound count would be the pathologist’s, once he had the corpse stretched out on his steel table.

She added the cheek wound to her drawing. Might as well be careful—the coroner’s office was a zoo; doctors made mistakes.

Stu was over with the coroner—an older man named Leavitt—both of them serious but relaxed. None of that tasteless joke stuff you saw on cop movies. The real detectives she’d met were mostly regular guys, relatively bright, patient, tenacious, very little in common with cinema sleuths.

She tried to look past the blood, get a sense of the person beneath the carnage.

The woman appeared young, and Petra was pretty sure she’d been good-looking. Even savaged like that, dumped in the parking lot like refuse, you could see the fineness of her features. Not tall, but her legs were long and shapely, exposed to mid-thigh, her waist narrow in the short black silk dress. Big bust—maybe silicone. Nowadays when Petra saw a slender woman with a healthy chest, she assumed surgery.

No sign of any bizarre leakage in the torso, though with all that blood, who knew. What would happen to silicone breasts when slashed? What did silicone look like, anyway? Eight months in Homicide, the issue had never come up.

Panty hose ripped, but it looked like asphalt wear. No obvious sign of sexual assault or posing, no visible semen around the ruined mouth or the legs.

Big hair. Honey-blond, good dye job, a few dark roots starting to show, but nice, expertly done. The dress was a jacquard with hand stitching, and the way it was pulled up and bunched around the shoulders, Petra could read the label. Armani Exchange.

The shiny things Petra hoped would yield prints were a diamond tennis bracelet on the left wrist with nice-size cut stones, a sapphire-and-diamond cocktail ring, a gold Lady Rolex, small diamond studs in the ears.

No wedding band.

No purse, either, so forget instant identification on this one. How’d she end up here? Out on a date? Big hair, minidress—a callgirl lured onto the streets by an extra bonus?

The purse gone, but the jewelry hadn’t been taken. The watch alone had to be three grand. So not a mugging. Unless the mugger was an even-stupider-than-usual street fool who’d taken the purse and panicked.

No, that made no sense. All these wounds didn’t spell panic or robbery. This piece of dirt had taken his time.

Snatching the purse to fake robbery, not thinking about the jewelry?

She pictured someone ripping away out of rage. Deep wounds, no defense cuts, but defense cuts were rarer than most people thought, and a decent-size man wouldn’t have had much trouble subduing a woman this slender.

Still, it might indicate someone she knew.

The wound overkill sure did.

Had the blond woman been caught off guard?

Petra’s brain flooded with fast-motion images. She quelled them. It was too soon to theorize.

God, it looked ferocious. A predator’s attack. The massive frontal disemboweling wound was her guess for the fatal one, but most of the punishment had been concentrated on the face.

Gutting the woman, then trying to wipe away her beauty? Such intense hatred; an
explosion
of hatred.

Something
personal.
The more Petra thought about it, the more that made sense. What kind of relationship had led to
this
? Husband? Boyfriend? Some reasonable facsimile of a
lover
?

A beast let loose.

Petra unclenched her hands, jammed them into the pockets of her pantsuit. DKNY, Saks overstock, lightweight crêpe, true black. Comfortable, so she’d worn it to the Freshwater stakeout.

The blond woman’s dress had just a touch of blue in it. Blue-black rinsed in rusty water.

Two women in black; the mourning had begun.

Stu continued to confer with Leavitt, and Petra stayed by the corpse, a self-appointed guardian.

Protecting a molt?

As a little girl in Arizona, on summer digs with her father and her brother Dick, she’d found plenty of shedded skins, the lacy donations of snakes and lizards, collected them, tried to braid them, fashion lanyards. They’d turned to dust in her hands, and she’d started to think of reptiles as fragile, too, and somehow less frightening.

But they continued to poison her dreams for years. As did scorpions, wildcats, owls, horned toads, flying beetles, black widows, the seemingly endless stream of creatures that came in off the interstate.

Poor Dad, sentenced to hour-long nightly routines—stories and dumb jokes and obsessive-compulsive checking rituals, all so his youngest child would sleep and allow him some single-parent quiet time.

When he finally got some solitude, what did he do with it?

Knowing Dad, any spare time was spent grading papers or working on the textbook that never got finished. A tall glass of Chivas for fortification. She knew he kept a bottle in his nightstand and that it was emptied often, though she never saw him really drunk.

Professor Kenneth Connor, physical anthropologist of medium repute, now fossilized by Alzheimer’s, dead prematurely, twenty months ago. She remembered the day; had been chasing a stolen Mercedes all the way down to Mexico when the station patched through the hospital call. Cerebral accident. Fancy name for stroke. The neurologist suggesting Dad’s brain had been weakened by placque.