Dagger eyes at dad.
Kurt had flinched- finally some emotion. “I’ll get a new one, Katie.”
“You always say that.”
Three of the stains were too degraded for DNA analysis. One was a perfect match to Marta Doebbler, another fit Coral Langdon’s genetic makeup, a third matched that of Navy Ensign Darren Ares Hochenbrenner.
Petra had made it to the scene after hearing about it on her scanner. Hearing it during the debacle at Kurt Doebbler’s house.
When she got there, Isaac was being treated like a suspect by two Hollywood D’s who didn’t know him well enough. He’d dropped Councilman Gilbert Reyes’s name and that of Deputy Chief Randy Diaz. Finally, someone called Diaz, who drove up in a Corvette dressed in black velvet sweats and two-hundred-dollar running shoes. Just in time for Petra to grab him and brief him.
“The kid solved it, sir.” She spat out details.
Diaz said, “Impressive. Think he’ll share credit with the department?”
“I don’t think credit matters to him,” said Petra. “He’s a good kid, a great kid. I vouch for him absolutely.”
Diaz smiled. Probably thinking she was in no shape to vouch for anyone.
“That’s big of you, Detective.”
“He earned it.”
Isaac using an illegal gun to kill Thad could be a problem, they agreed.
Diaz said, “It can be dealt with.” Long, searching look of Petra’s face. “So can your issues, Detective. If everyone’s discreet. There’re going to be some changes in your division. I’d like them to be smooth.”
“What changes?”
Diaz put a finger over his lips. Walked over to Isaac.
The following night, Petra flew to Oakland, and Sunday morning, accompanied by a friendly Oakland D named Arvin Ludd, she began the first of two solid days in the cinder-block trove.
Finding the best stuff in a double-wide black filing cabinet, a folder marked “Travel.”
Beautiful penmanship, ol’ Thad. He’d filled three muslin-bound, made-in-France notebooks with detailed accounts of murderous fantasies initiated at age twelve.
The melding of sex and violence and power, solidified by a chance encounter with a copy of the Teller booklet, found in a Hamburg antiques store.
“Retzak is me and I am him. I don’t know why people like us are what we are. We just are. I like it.”
After that: a lifetime of converting fantasy to reality.
Thad described his failure to murder the German cake-icer, Gudrun Wiegeland, as “an understandable lapse, given my youth and inexperience, plus a modicum- but only that- of anxiety.” At the time of the Wiegeland bludgeoning “with a crowbar borrowed from the base auto-shop,” he’d been a sixteen-year-old Army brat. Two years younger than “Ever Pedestrian Kurt.”
Perhaps Thad’s anxiety had been higher than he was willing to admit. By his own account, it took another eight years for him to try another murder.
After a two-year stint in the Army, most of it spent as a layout editor for a military newspaper in Manila, Thad moved to Pittsburgh and enrolled in Carnegie-Mellon as an art and design major. (“Andy Warhol’s alma mater. They told me he drew shoes for newspapers ads. I am a good deal more conceptual.”) Soon after graduation, he waylaid an eighteen-year-old co-ed named Randi Corey as she enjoyed a late-night campus jog.
June 28, 1987. The spring semester had ended but Corey had remained for the summer to practice with a gymnastic coach.
Thad Doebbler had stayed in town to murder her.
The girl incurred three crushing blows to the back of her skull, and according to a newspaper clipping Thad had mounted in Volume 1 of his chronicles, was “likely to remain in a persistent vegetative state.”
“When I cracked her open, I did manage to get a look at the gelatin. But not much, the bones wouldn’t give when I tried to pry them apart. Then I heard someone coming and skedaddled. It was two days later that I learned I’d, once again, inexplicably, failed to exert enough pressure to snuff the soul candle. I will not repeat that transgression.”
Two months later, a fifty-two-year-old university maintenance man, Herbert Lincoln, succumbed to a fatal braining as he walked to his car in an off-campus lot. From what Petra could tell, no connection had been made between the homicide and the attack on Randi Corey.
Young woman, older man. Some accordance with Otto Retzak’s pattern, but Doebbler had veered from the June 28 routine.
Still in training. The deviation hadn’t muted his feelings of triumph.
“I studied him as he leaked, watched the spark leave his eyes and sketched the phases. A wholer sense of completion can’t be imagined.”
Sandwiched into the book were the drawings.
Horrible because the bastard really could draw.
End of Volume 1.
As Petra put it aside and picked up the next notebook, she made a mental note to try to locate the Pittsburgh detectives who’d worked Corey and Lincoln. Find out if the girl was still alive; her family and Lincoln’s would want to know.
She flipped the next book open. Arvin Ludd said, “Interesting?”
“If you like that kind of thing.”
He smiled, crossed his legs. While Petra worked, he’d mostly mellowed out in Thad Doebbler’s original, mint-condition Eames chair. Now he got up and stretched. “I’m about ready for a coffee fix. Want a latte or something?”
“Double espresso if they have it.”
“You got it.” Ludd was boyish, dark, blue-eyed. Well-dressed and laid-back almost to a fault and probably gay. Swinging his car keys, he left the block building.
Left alone, Petra was hit by the stillness of the room. Silent, cold. Perfect kill-spot. Perfect dungeon.
Had Doebbler ever brought any victims home? Preliminary luminol tests had found no blood. But she wondered. She’d suggested to Ludd that Oakland P.D. bring cadaver dogs and sonar for the backyard. He’d listened, nodded, hadn’t said yes or no. Hard to read the guy. Maybe he wasn’t gay…
Volume 2.
Here we go.
After murdering Herbert Lincoln, Thad had adhered to the June 28 pattern. But not with yearly regularity. Being a salaried employee had constrained him; the crimes had depended upon his travel schedule.
June 28, 1989: A computer seminar in Los Gatos, California. Thad had flown in from Philadelphia, where’d he’d been temping as a bank teller while seeking employment in the computer animation biz. Shortly after midnight, Barbara Bohannon, the secretary to an Intel executive, was brained in the subterranean parking lot of her hotel. Bohannon’s missing purse led investigators to suspect robbery as a motive.
Doebbler had emptied the purse and tossed it, keeping the cash and the credit cards and the photos of Bohannon’s husband and three-year-old son. Spending the money; filing the rest under “Souvenirs.”
His drawing of the woman showed her to be round-faced, fair-haired, pleasant-looking even in death. Wood fibers embedded in her hair said Doebbler hadn’t discovered the magic of plastic.
June 28, 1991: Back in Philly, another computer conference. A year before, Doebbler had obtained work with an on-line start-up in San Mateo, only to be laid off, no reason given. Selling optioned stock bought him the house in Oakland and some time to try life as a freelance. A sculptor in Lucite.
At one-fifteen A.M., the body of Melvyn Lassiter, a room-service waiter at the Inn at Penn, was found on a street in West Philadelphia. Crushed skull, missing wallet. Lassiter’s wife reported that Melvyn routinely brought home food from the hotel kitchen. No trace of such near the corpse.
“Pasta primavera, broiled salmon. Yummy. The Caesar salad was a bit limp, but once I got rid of the soggy croutons, not half-bad.”