Jonathan Kellerman: Billy Straight

The only dead person I saw was one of the old shopping cart guys lying in an alley, his mouth open like he was sleeping, but his skin had turned gray and flies went in and out between his lips. Nearby was the Dumpster I was going to dive, but I just got out of there, no more appetite. That night, I woke up really hungry, thinking I was stupid to let it get to me. He was old anyway.

When I get enough food, I’m full of energy. Super-fast. When I run, I feel jet-propelled-no gravity, no limits.

Sometimes I get into a running rhythm and it’s like a music beat in my head, ba-boom, ba-boom, like nothing can stop me. When that happens I force myself to slow down, because it’s dangerous to forget who you are.

I also slow down anytime I’m about to go into the park. Way in advance. I always look around to make sure no one’s watching me, then I head in, relaxed, like I live in one of the huge houses at the foot of the park.

One of the books Moron ripped up was by a French scientist named Jacques Cousteau, on octopus and squid. One chapter talked about how octopi can match their colors to their backgrounds. I’m no octopus, but I know how to blend in.

I take things, but that doesn’t make me a thief.

I found the same octopus book in the library, borrowed it, brought it back.

I took the presidents book and kept it.

But no one had checked it out for nine months; that’s what the card in back said.

Back in Watson the library was pathetic, just a store next to the VFW hall that nobody used, and it was mostly closed. The lady behind the desk always looked at me like I was going to take something, and the funny thing was I never was.

At the Hillhurst library, there’s also an old one, but she mostly stays in her office and the one who actually checks books out is young, pretty, and Mexican, with really long hair. She smiled at me once, but I ignored her and the smile dropped from her face like I’d torn it off.

I can’t get a library card because I have no address. My technique is I go in there looking like a kid from King Middle School with homework to do, sit down by myself at a table, and read and write for a while, usually math problems. Then I go back to the shelves.

I’ll return the presidents book one day.

Even if I kept it forever, no one would miss it. Probably.

An advantage of looking like a harmless little kid is sometimes you can go into a store and take stuff without being noticed. I know it’s a sin, but without food, you die, and suicide’s a sin too.

Also-people aren’t scared of kids, at least not white kids, so if you ask someone for spare change, the worst they usually do is shine you on. I mean, what are they going to say to me? Get a job, junior?

One thing I learned back in Watson: Make people nervous and you’re the one who gets hurt.

So maybe God helped me by making me small for my age. I would like to grow eventually, though.

Mom, before she got sadder, would sometimes hold me under the chin and say, “Look at this. Like an angel. A damn cherub. ”

I hated that; it sounded so gay.

Some of those kids being raped in the magazine looked like angels.

There’s no way to know what’s safe. I avoid all people, and the park’s perfect for that-4,100 acres of mostly peace and quiet.

Thank you, crazy Mr. Griffith.

The way he tried to kill his wife was by shooting her in the eye.

In eight months, Petra had worked twenty-one other homicides, some fairly sloppy. But nothing like this. Not even the Hernandez wedding.

This woman looked shredded. Washed in blood. Dipped in it, like fruit in chocolate. The front of her dress was a mass of gore, glossy gray tubes of entrail popping out from slashes in the fabric. Silky fabric, not great in terms of latents. The blood would be a good cover, too-try lifting anything from skin. Maybe the jewelry, if the killer had touched it.

She and Stu arrived in darkness, encountering grim faces, radio static, a blinking symphony of red lights. They took reports from the rangers who’d found the body, waited for sunrise to have a careful look at the victim.

The blood had dried red-brown, streaking the skin and the surrounding asphalt, running down the parking lot in rivulets, some of the spatters still tacky.

Petra stood by the corpse, sketching the surrounding terrain and the body, tabulating the wounds she could see. At least seventeen cuts, and that was only the front.

Bending and getting as close as she could without messing anything up, she examined torn flesh; the lower lip almost completely severed, the left eye reduced to ruby pulp. All the damage on the left side.

If you could see your squeamish kid now, Dad.

Twenty-one previous bodies notwithstanding, viewing this one in sunlight jolted her with nausea. Then something worse hit her: the pain of sympathy.

Poor thing. Poor, poor thing, what led you to this?

Outwardly, she maintained. No one watching would have seen anything but trim efficiency. She’d been told she looked efficient. An accusation thrown at her by Nick, implying competence wasn’t sexy. Along with all the other garbage he’d dumped on her. Why hadn’t she realized what was going on?

She liked being thought of as businesslike. Had found a business she liked.

A month ago she’d gone to a Melrose salon, ordered the reluctant stylist to lop off six inches of black hair, and ended up with a short ebony minimal-care wedge cut.

Stu had noticed right away. “Very becoming.”

She thought it framed her lean, pale face pretty well.

Her clothes were picked for nothing but practicality now. Good pantsuits bought on sale at Loehmann’s and Robinsons-May that she took home and tailored herself so that they fit her long frame perfectly. Mostly black, like today. A couple of navys, one chocolate-brown, one charcoal.

She wore MAC lipstick, deep red with a brown tint, a little eye shadow, and mascara. No foundation; her skin was white and smooth as notepaper. No jewelry. Nothing a suspect could yank.

The victim wore foundation.

Petra could see it clearly where the crimson hadn’t settled. Traces of blush, powder, mascara, applied a little heavier than Petra’s, to the eye that remained intact.

The damaged eye was a sightless black-cherry hole, the eyeball collapsed to folded cellophane, some of the jellylike humor leaking out and specking the nose.

Nice nose, where it hadn’t been slashed.

The right eye was wide, blue, filmed over. That dull dead look. You couldn’t fake it-there was nothing like it.

Flight of the soul? Leaving behind what? A casing, no more alive than a snake’s molt?

She continued studying the corpse with an artist’s precision, noticed a small but deep cut on the left cheek that she’d missed. Eighteen. She couldn’t flip the body till the crime-scene photographer was finished and the coroner gave the okay. The definitive wound count would be the pathologist’s, once he had the corpse stretched out on his steel table.

She added the cheek wound to her drawing. Might as well be careful-the coroner’s office was a zoo; doctors made mistakes.

Stu was over with the coroner-an older man named Leavitt-both of them serious but relaxed. None of that tasteless joke stuff you saw on cop movies. The real detectives she’d met were mostly regular guys, relatively bright, patient, tenacious, very little in common with cinema sleuths.

She tried to look past the blood, get a sense of the person beneath the carnage.

The woman appeared young, and Petra was pretty sure she’d been good-looking. Even savaged like that, dumped in the parking lot like refuse, you could see the fineness of her features. Not tall, but her legs were long and shapely, exposed to mid-thigh, her waist narrow in the short black silk dress. Big bust-maybe silicone. Nowadays when Petra saw a slender woman with a healthy chest, she assumed surgery.