Probably night-shifters who’d arrived early.
But if that was the case, why so few?
No big puzzle: The staff obviously preferred the western lot. Probably better lighting, anyone who arrived early nabbed a space there.
12:08.
He’d give it another five minutes, then he’d return to where he’d left his father’s Toyota parked along Vermont. He’d forgotten to lock it. What had Dad left inside… not much, Dad was neat.
A set of work clothes folded on the backseat. Probably some papers in the glove compartment. Hopefully, nothing worth stealing.
Would the car even be there?
If it wasn’t, how would he explain it to his parents?
The five minutes passed. Reluctant to face reality, he lingered.
At twelve-nineteen, feeling like the idiot he was, he slipped out from his hiding spot and began walking south.
Voices from Sunset made him stop. Female voices.
Three women… small women, young-sounding women, passed the chained cement parking structure and entered the dirt lot.
Isaac hurried back to his spot, watched them.
White uniforms, dark hair pulled into ponytails. Tiny women… Filipinas? They chattered gaily. Paused ten feet into the lot. One nurse veered into the light, the other two crossed into the darkened area.
No danger there. Doebbler wouldn’t go for a pair, would want his prey alone.
The lit-up nurse started up her minivan and drove away. A set of headlights went on in the dark side and a zippy little sports car- a yellow Mazda RX- sped out, making that distinctive rotary sound.
Leaving one nurse.
He waited for more headlights.
Darkness.
Silence.
Had he missed something- a rear exit? As he stepped closer to the sidewalk, a low, mulish sound cut into the night.
The futile whine of an engine refusing to turn over.
A car door opened. Shut.
Then: a scream.
Reaching into his pocket, Isaac ran. The gun caught in the generous fleece of his sweatpants and refused to pull free.
He picked up his pace, shouted “Stop!” Screamed it louder.
Ripped frantically at his pocket. The gun was hopelessly tangled.
He reached the lot, sprinted across black dirt. Unable to see anything, homing in on the site of the scream.
Then he saw.
A man- a very tall man, wearing a long white coat, a doctor’s coat- standing over a tiny, prone woman.
She lay on her stomach. One of the man’s feet pressed down in the center of her back. Pinning her like a butterfly on a board.
She struggled in the dirt, arms and legs effecting an earthbound breaststroke. Cried out again.
The man reached into his coat, drew out something the size and girth of a baseball bat. Not wood… translucent.
A thick rod of clear plastic.
Slick, dense. That would explain the lack of fibers in the wounds. Stop analyzing idiot, and do something!
Isaac raced toward the tall man. Out of his mouth came a strange voice, hoarse, bellowing. “Stop motherfucker or I’ll shoot your ass!”
The man in the white coat maintained his foothold on the tiny, dark-haired woman. Pretty woman, Isaac could see her terrified face now. Young, maybe even younger than him. Not Filipina, Latina.
Or maybe she was Italian- stop!
He was three feet away, still struggling with the gun.
The tall man must’ve pressed down harder on the girl’s cheek, because her features compressed and her mouth was forced shut. Eating dust; she choked, coughed.
Isaac ripped at the pocket fuckingidiotfuckingclown
The man faced him, translucent truncheon held diagonally across his chest. Very tall, broad-shouldered, powerful. Plaid shirt and jeans and sneakers under the white coat.
Those shoes would leave marks in the dirt but Thad Doebbler was a careful man, an artist; he would be sure to clean them up when he was through.
Handsome man, with the confidence that tall, handsome men acquire easily. Undeterred by Isaac’s goofy presence. He knew he could handle a fool like this.
“Hey,” he said.
Isaac said, “P-Kasso.”
Doebbler’s grin died. The cudgel caught filmy moonlight and gleamed.
Isaac’s battle with his pocket continued. All told, seconds of struggle, but it felt like years.
Suppressing panic, he stopped. Analyzed. Felt around. Some metal piece on the gun, maybe a rough spot on the barrel, was snagged on fleece threads, the key was to free it with a circular movement rather than fight and twist it tighter.
Thad Doebbler, his foot still on the girl’s back, stepped forward with his free leg. Long leg, big stride, the motion brought him within two feet of Isaac’s head. Striking distance.
He lifted the weapon and Isaac danced back, while yanking his pants upward. Tight around the crotch. He’d given himself a fucking wedgie and Thad Doebbler laughed.
See me now, Petra. Idiotclownidiotclown.
The little dark girl moaned in pain.
Thad Doebbler closed another few inches of the space between him and Isaac.
Isaac said, “Let her go or I’ll shoot you. I mean it.”
Thad Doebbler regarded Isaac with amusement. “With what? Your little dick?”
Isaac yanked the gun free. Stepped within the downward arc of Thad Doebbler’s murderous arm. Dodged the crushing blow by inches and managed to maintain his balance as he aimed upward.
For the handsome face.
He pressed the trigger.
Shut his eyes involuntarily and kept pressing.
CHAPTER 55
MONDAY, JULY 1, UPPER ROCKRIDGE DISTRICT, OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA, RESIDENCE OF THORNTON “THAD” DOEBBLER
A historian, Thad.
A renaissance man, of sorts. Website designer, graphic artist, alternative comix illustrator, computer animator.
Sculptor in Lucite and polymer resins and space-age plastics.
Abstract stuff, not to Petra’s taste. But she was forced to admit that his work showed talent. Serpentine twists of translucent rods imbedded with polychrome fiber-optic filaments, good eye for balance and composition.
Last year he’d exhibited across the bay in San Francisco, at a Post Street gallery. Two to three grand per piece and three had sold.
P-Kasso.
Him and Omar. Her year for artists.
Bundles of spare Lucite rods in various sizes were stacked neatly in Doebbler’s garage.
The largest size conformed to the June 28 skull compressions.
When she’d met him at his brother’s, he’d claimed his home base as San Francisco. But his digs were in Oakland, nice part of town, a cute little mock Tudor on a hill, landscaped prettily. No bay view, but a tree-framed rectangle of the Oakland hills was visible from the second-floor bedroom.
Nothing in the bedroom but clothing, a few true-crime paperbacks, and a TV on a card table. The rest of the house was similarly spartan.
Attached to the garage, out back, was a four-hundred-square-foot windowless cinder-block add-on secured by a bolted steel door. Thad Doebbler’s track-lit studio.
Thad Doebbler’s museum.
A man of parts, Thad. More useful to Petra, a damned egomaniac and compulsive chronicler of his own dark side.
Twenty-four years of dark side.
The guy had kept every playbill, airline ticket, and receipt cataloged compulsively. Within moments, Petra was able to verify his quarterly flights to L.A. But Petra already knew that Uncle Thad stayed with older brother Kurt and niece Katya in the house on Rosita.
Bunking down in a spare bedroom next to Katya’s, where he kept a few pairs of pants, three shirts, a leather jacket, and a black Italian sports coat. Nothing of obvious forensic value, until the techies managed to scrape tiny little stains from two of the shirts and a jeans leg that had somehow managed to survive laundering and pressing.
Maybe it was Kurt Doebbler’s inefficient, balky Kenmore washing machine, a contraption characterized by solemn-eyed Katya as: “Crap. It leaks all the time and never really cleans stuff the way you want it.”