Jonathan Kellerman_Petra Connor 02 (4 page)

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-scratchy 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

I
t 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?”

“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.

5. 2001: 12:01 a.m. Jewell Janis Blank, 14, single white female, runaway, found in Griffith Park, near Fern Dell, by rangers. Depressed skull fracture.

6. 2002: 12:28 a.m. Curtis Marc Hoffey, 20, single white male, known gay hustler, found in alley, Highland near Sunset. Depressed skull fracture.

Petra looked up. “There doesn't seem to be any pattern victim-wise.”

“I know,” said Isaac, “but still.”

“I have a friend, a psychologist, who says people are walking prisms. We see with our brains, not our eyes. And what we see depends on context.”

Now
she
was pontificating. Isaac sat back. He looked crushed.

“My point is,” she said, “that it all depends on how you look at it. You've raised some interesting points—more than interesting . . . provocative.” She pointed to the list, ran her finger down the names. “These people are all over the place in terms of sex, age . . . social class. We've got urban and semirural dumpsites. If this is some kind of serial thing, there'd most likely be a sexual angle, and I can't see what a sixty-three-year-old man and a fourteen-year-old girl would have in common as sexual targets.”

“All that's true,” said Isaac. “But don't you think the other factors are too blatant to be ignored?”

Petra's head began hurting. “You've obviously put a lot of time into this and I'm not dismissing it, but—”

“Why,” he interrupted, “does there have to be a sexual angle?”

“That's the way it tends to shake out.”

“The FBI profile. Yes, yes, I know about all of that. Their basic thesis is that what they call organized killers—really just a dumbed-down version of what psychologists call psychopaths—are motivated by a combination of sexuality and violence. I'm sure that typically there's some truth to that. But as you said, Detective, reality depends on which prism you're using. The FBI interviewed imprisoned killers and compiled data banks. But data are only as good as the sample, and who says killers who get caught are similar to those who don't? Maybe the FBI's bad guys got caught because they were psychologically rigid. Maybe it was their predictability that tripped them up.”

His voice had climbed. Heat in the brown eyes made them something quite other than liquid. “All I'm saying is that sometimes exceptions are more important than rules.”

“What motive are you proposing for these killings?” said Petra.

Long pause. “I don't know.”

Neither of them spoke. Isaac slumped. “Okay, thanks for your time.” He scooped up the list and stashed it in the shiny brown briefcase he carried around. Petra had seen detectives smile disparagingly at the case. She'd heard the comments behind Isaac's back.
Brainiac. Boy wonder. Petra's little day-care project.
When she felt assertive, she silenced the noise with an icy stare.

Now she found herself feeling protective of the kid but annoyed. The last thing she needed was some theory that got her dredging up six years of cold cases. Not with four victims down at the Paradiso, one of them a girl she couldn't even identify.

On the other hand, Isaac was smarter than she was, much smarter. Dismissing him out of hand could turn out to be one of those
big
mistakes. And what if he went over her head to Schoelkopf—to Councilman Reyes. If that happened and he turned out to be right . . .

Headlines danced in her head.
Young Wizard Uncovers Unsolved Killings.
The text:
LAPD detective failed to investigate . . .

Isaac got to his feet. “Sorry for wasting your time. Is there something I can do for you? On your main case?”

“My main case?”

“The Paradiso. I've heard it's been tough going.”

“Have you?” she said. Hearing the chill in her voice, she coerced her lips to form a smile of her own. Stratospheric I.Q. or not, he was a kid. An overly enthusiastic, pain-in-the-butt politically
connected
kid. “It's been a tough one,” she agreed. “All those kids mowed down, no one willing to talk. What could you do for me?”

“I don't know,” he said. “Maybe look at the data.” Now he was blushing again. “That was totally presumptuous of me. You're the professional, what do I know? Sorry, I won't bother you again—”

“Do you know anything about pink Kmart sneakers?”

“Pardon?”

She told him about the unidentified girl.

His posture relaxed. Thinking—analyzing—did that to him. “You're thinking she might've been the intended victim and the others were innocent bystanders?”

“At this point, Isaac, I'm not thinking anything. I just think it's odd that no one's come forth to I.D. her.”

“Hmm . . . yes, that would imply some kind of . . . turmoil in her background. . . . It sounds as if you took the shoe-thing as far as you could. . . . I'll give it some thought. I'm sure I won't come up with anything, but I'll give it a try.”

“I'd appreciate it,” she said. Not meaning a word but keeping the damn smile on high-beam.

Nearly nine
P.M.
The kid was working late, too. And not getting paid for it.

She said, “How about some dinner—a burger, whatever.”

“Thanks, but I need to get home. My mother made dinner and it's a big deal to her if we don't all show up.”

“Okay,” she said. “Maybe another time.” The genius still lived with his folks . . . the Union District, she recalled. Probably some shabby little apartment. Huge contrast to the green lawns and towering trees at USC. Getting all that attention as boy-genius. Working here, his own desk in the detectives' room. No reason not to stay late.

“Make me a copy of that list,” she said.

“You're not dismissing it?”

“Let me think about it some more.”

Biiiiig smile. “Will do. Have a nice evening, Detective Connor.”

“You, too.”
Professor Gomez.

He left and Petra's mind shifted back to the Paradiso slaughter.

Gun as “weapon of choice.” At least in that way it was typical.

Which, for some reason, made her feel worse.