Read Online The Golem of Hollywood by Jonathan Kellerman - Free Book Online Page B

For ten minutes he sat staring at the gate, a forbidding sheet of rust-finished steel, while she phoned the department to verify his badge number.
    A motor ground; the gate shunted aside on recessed tracks. Lowering his brights, he wound up a crushed-stone driveway through tussocks and cacti toward yet another mid-century modern, well maintained, an asymmetric white cuboid forced into the terrain.
    She was waiting by the front door in an emerald flannel bathrobe, awoman in her mid-fifties with scowl lines that broadcast across ten feet of darkness. He prepared to be told off.
    Instead she introduced herself as Claire Mason, pressed a half-gallon mug of bitter tea on him, and escorted him through a tight, short entry hall into a living room with a buffed concrete floor and forward-sloping windows, like the prow of a spaceship as it plowed over an urban lightscape. Abstract Expressionist art crazed the walls. The furniture had been designed for skinny people with no children.
    She batted away his questions with her own: Was she in danger? Should she be on the lookout for anything in particular? Should she call a neighborhood watch meeting? She was the president. She had moved out here to get away from all that.
    He said, “Do you happen to know anything about the house up the road? Number 446?”
    â€œWhat about it?”
    â€œWho lives there?”
    â€œNobody.”
    â€œDo you know who owns it?”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œThis is really interesting,” he said of the tea, which tasted like it had been brewed from guano. “What is it?”
    â€œStinging nettle,” she said. “It prevents bladder infections. I own a gun. I don’t keep it loaded, but listening to you I’m thinking I might have to start.”
    â€œI really don’t think that’ll be necessary.”
    Eventually he quelled her agitation and steered the conversation around to the security cameras. Through the kitchen—onyx, more cement—to a converted pantry, replete with canned goods and alarm panels and a shortwave radio. A bank of monitors cycled through various exterior angles. The chair cushion showed the two-humped indentation of long, fond hours kept.
    â€œVery impressive,” he said.
    â€œI can access it on my phone and iPad, too,” she said, settling in.
    In her needy preening, he recognized the paradox at the heart of any paranoiac: the validation that persecution provided.
    â€œHow long before the footage deletes?” he asked.
    â€œForty-eight hours.”
    â€œCan you give me the road, yesterday, about five p.m. on?”
    She brought up a window broken into eight panes, each showing a virtually identical blank strip. She clicked the counter, entered the time, set the playback to 8×, and hit the space bar.
    Except for a change from full color to night-vision green, the windows remained static.
    It was like the worst art film ever made.
    â€œCan you speed it up a hair?” he asked.
    She increased to 16×.
    A shape zapped across the screen.
    â€œWhat was that?” he asked.
    â€œCoyote.”
    â€œAre you sure? Can you go back?”
    She rolled her eyes, rewound, set playback to 1×.
    Sure enough: a shaggy, scrawny animal, slinking along with its tongue out.
    â€œI’m amazed you could tell,” he said.
    Claire Mason smiled dreamily at the screen. “Practice, practice, practice.”
    â€”
    U P AT THE MURDER HOUSE , he sat in the Honda, listening to the tick and clank of the overworked engine as it cooled. Every visit was taking years off its life. Between the Discover card and the advance on his salary, he supposed he could spring for a rental.
    Anyone coming here by car would have to pass Claire Mason’s cameras. But he hadn’t seen tire tracks anywhere on the property, no crushed vegetation.
    On foot? Hiking in, circumventing the road, head in a sagging Trader Joe’s bag?
    A helicopter?
    Jetpack?
    Magic