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Authors: Jonathan Kellerman
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level of skill.”
“What would you need?”
“The strength and confidence to perform two major incisions with a really sharp blade and a strong enough stomach to snip the intestines free. A butcher could do it. A deer hunter could do it. So could anyone with a warped mind and the wrong kind of knowledge. Which you can get off the Internet, if so inclined. In any event, I didn’t need to dissect the liver to know it was seriously cirrhotic. Most of the darn thing was fatty and gray, not a pretty thing to behold. But as I said, even with her being a lush, a .26 could’ve seriously affected her judgment, reaction time, coordination, and strength. A cinch to overpower. Ask Dr. Delaware next time you speak to him. He can probably give you some behavioral parameters.”
I said, “I’m here, Clarice.”
“Oh, hi. You concur?”
“Completely.”
“Great,” she said. “It’s nice when there’s peace in the valley. Milo, I’ll do my best to get the autopsy done by tomorrow. I’ll be travelingso one of my people will do the actual cutting, but I’ll keep an eye on it.”
“Thanks.”
“That said, don’t be expecting any profound conclusions. She died from a broken neck, was well dead before he cut her up.”
“How long is well dead?”
“Enough time for the blood to settle, which is minutes, not hours. I’m picturing your creep sitting there, waiting, that was a big part of his fun. What do you think, Alex?”
“Makes sense.”
“Oh, if my teenagers could hear this. Mommy’s not always wrong. Bye, guys.”
CHAPTER
10
F or three days, I heard nothing from Milo. On the fourth morning, he came to the house, vinyl attaché in hand, wearing a black poly suit with lapels from two decades ago and a pumpkinorange tie and muttering, “Yeah, yeah, happy Halloween.” He flicked a pocket flap that buttoned. “Vintage. Live long enough, everything comes back.”
Hard to read his emotions. He cruised past me into the kitchen, did his usual surveillance. Robin and I had been going out to dinner regularly so the fridge was light on leftovers. He made do with beer, bread, mayo, hot sauce, barbecue sauce, steak sauce, mustard, ground horseradish sauce, and three long-forgotten lamb sausages yanked from the back of the freezer that he microwaved into submission.
After several gulps of haphazard sandwich, he took a long swig of Grolsch. “Good morning, boys and girls, can you spell futility?”
Another long swallow of beer. “No one local uses that type of pizza box and all the alleged Well-Start bullies have alibis. None ofthem looked good, anyway. The female is pushing sixty, was babysitting her grandkid, the physical fitness guy was on a nighttime mountain bike ride in Griffith Park vouched for by members of his cycling club, the supposedly big strong guy is big but not strong—close to four hundred and uses a cane and an inhaler and the night of the murder he was at his grandmother’s birthday party, verified by the waiter who served his table. The last guy wears Coke-bottle glasses and weighs in at maybe a hundred twenty and he was at the E.R. with one of his kids. Some sort of allergic reaction to shrimp, the nurse and the on-call resident say neither he nor his wife ever left the kid’s side and she was hospitalized overnight.”
He swigged, put the bottle down. “I resisted the temptation to ask if Daddy had pre-screened the kid so she could get treated. They all claimed to be blindsided by the lawsuit, refused to talk about details. I tried to reach someone at Well-Start’s corporate headquarters, big surprise, they stonewalled. I put Sean on it ’cause he’s got a high tolerance for failure and boredom and dealing with robotic turd-brains.”
He constructed another teetering sandwich, polished it off. “Autopsy results came in early this morning. Like Clarice said, no surprises.”
He ripped a slice of bread in half, balled it up, consumed. “Where’s Robin?”
“Working out
“What would you need?”
“The strength and confidence to perform two major incisions with a really sharp blade and a strong enough stomach to snip the intestines free. A butcher could do it. A deer hunter could do it. So could anyone with a warped mind and the wrong kind of knowledge. Which you can get off the Internet, if so inclined. In any event, I didn’t need to dissect the liver to know it was seriously cirrhotic. Most of the darn thing was fatty and gray, not a pretty thing to behold. But as I said, even with her being a lush, a .26 could’ve seriously affected her judgment, reaction time, coordination, and strength. A cinch to overpower. Ask Dr. Delaware next time you speak to him. He can probably give you some behavioral parameters.”
I said, “I’m here, Clarice.”
“Oh, hi. You concur?”
“Completely.”
“Great,” she said. “It’s nice when there’s peace in the valley. Milo, I’ll do my best to get the autopsy done by tomorrow. I’ll be travelingso one of my people will do the actual cutting, but I’ll keep an eye on it.”
“Thanks.”
“That said, don’t be expecting any profound conclusions. She died from a broken neck, was well dead before he cut her up.”
“How long is well dead?”
“Enough time for the blood to settle, which is minutes, not hours. I’m picturing your creep sitting there, waiting, that was a big part of his fun. What do you think, Alex?”
“Makes sense.”
“Oh, if my teenagers could hear this. Mommy’s not always wrong. Bye, guys.”
CHAPTER
10
F or three days, I heard nothing from Milo. On the fourth morning, he came to the house, vinyl attaché in hand, wearing a black poly suit with lapels from two decades ago and a pumpkinorange tie and muttering, “Yeah, yeah, happy Halloween.” He flicked a pocket flap that buttoned. “Vintage. Live long enough, everything comes back.”
Hard to read his emotions. He cruised past me into the kitchen, did his usual surveillance. Robin and I had been going out to dinner regularly so the fridge was light on leftovers. He made do with beer, bread, mayo, hot sauce, barbecue sauce, steak sauce, mustard, ground horseradish sauce, and three long-forgotten lamb sausages yanked from the back of the freezer that he microwaved into submission.
After several gulps of haphazard sandwich, he took a long swig of Grolsch. “Good morning, boys and girls, can you spell futility?”
Another long swallow of beer. “No one local uses that type of pizza box and all the alleged Well-Start bullies have alibis. None ofthem looked good, anyway. The female is pushing sixty, was babysitting her grandkid, the physical fitness guy was on a nighttime mountain bike ride in Griffith Park vouched for by members of his cycling club, the supposedly big strong guy is big but not strong—close to four hundred and uses a cane and an inhaler and the night of the murder he was at his grandmother’s birthday party, verified by the waiter who served his table. The last guy wears Coke-bottle glasses and weighs in at maybe a hundred twenty and he was at the E.R. with one of his kids. Some sort of allergic reaction to shrimp, the nurse and the on-call resident say neither he nor his wife ever left the kid’s side and she was hospitalized overnight.”
He swigged, put the bottle down. “I resisted the temptation to ask if Daddy had pre-screened the kid so she could get treated. They all claimed to be blindsided by the lawsuit, refused to talk about details. I tried to reach someone at Well-Start’s corporate headquarters, big surprise, they stonewalled. I put Sean on it ’cause he’s got a high tolerance for failure and boredom and dealing with robotic turd-brains.”
He constructed another teetering sandwich, polished it off. “Autopsy results came in early this morning. Like Clarice said, no surprises.”
He ripped a slice of bread in half, balled it up, consumed. “Where’s Robin?”
“Working out
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