Jonathan Kellerman - Billy Straight

No sign of any bizarre leakage in the torso, though with all that blood, who knew. What would happen to silicone breasts when slashed? What did silicone look like, anyway? Eight months in Homicide, the issue had never come up.

Panty hose ripped, but it looked like asphalt wear. No obvious sign of sexual assault or posing, no visible semen around the ruined mouth or the legs.

Big hair. Honey-blond, good dye job, a few dark roots starting to show, but nice, expertly done. The dress was a jacquard with hand stitching, and the way it was pulled up and bunched around the shoulders, Petra could read the label. Armani Exchange.

The shiny things Petra hoped would yield prints were a diamond tennis bracelet on the left wrist with nice-size cut stones, a sapphire-and-diamond cocktail ring, a gold Lady Rolex, small diamond studs in the ears.

No wedding band.

No purse, either, so forget instant identification on this one. How’d she end up here? Out on a date? Big hair, minidress-a callgirl lured onto the streets by an extra bonus?

The purse gone, but the jewelry hadn’t been taken. The watch alone had to be three grand. So not a mugging. Unless the mugger was an even-stupider-than-usual street fool who’d taken the purse and panicked.

No, that made no sense. All these wounds didn’t spell panic or robbery. This piece of dirt had taken his time.

Snatching the purse to fake robbery, not thinking about the jewelry?

She pictured someone ripping away out of rage. Deep wounds, no defense cuts, but defense cuts were rarer than most people thought, and a decent-size man wouldn’t have had much trouble subduing a woman this slender.

Still, it might indicate someone she knew.

The wound overkill sure did.

Had the blond woman been caught off guard?

Petra’s brain flooded with fast-motion images. She quelled them. It was too soon to theorize.

God, it looked ferocious. A predator’s attack. The massive frontal disemboweling wound was her guess for the fatal one, but most of the punishment had been concentrated on the face.

Gutting the woman, then trying to wipe away her beauty? Such intense hatred; an explosion of hatred.

Something personal. The more Petra thought about it, the more that made sense. What kind of relationship had led to this? Husband? Boyfriend? Some reasonable facsimile of a lover?

A beast let loose.

Petra unclenched her hands, jammed them into the pockets of her pantsuit. DKNY, Saks overstock, lightweight crepe, true black. Comfortable, so she’d worn it to the Freshwater stakeout.

The blond woman’s dress had just a touch of blue in it. Blue-black rinsed in rusty water.

Two women in black; the mourning had begun.

Stu continued to confer with Leavitt, and Petra stayed by the corpse, a self-appointed guardian.

Protecting a molt?

As a little girl in Arizona, on summer digs with her father and her brother Dick, she’d found plenty of shedded skins, the lacy donations of snakes and lizards, collected them, tried to braid them, fashion lanyards. They’d turned to dust in her hands, and she’d started to think of reptiles as fragile, too, and somehow less frightening.

But they continued to poison her dreams for years. As did scorpions, wildcats, owls, horned toads, flying beetles, black widows, the seemingly endless stream of creatures that came in off the interstate.

Poor Dad, sentenced to hour-long nightly routines-stories and dumb jokes and obsessive-compulsive checking rituals, all so his youngest child would sleep and allow him some single-parent quiet time.

When he finally got some solitude, what did he do with it?

Knowing Dad, any spare time was spent grading papers or working on the textbook that never got finished. A tall glass of Chivas for fortification. She knew he kept a bottle in his nightstand and that it was emptied often, though she never saw him really drunk.

Professor Kenneth Connor, physical anthropologist of medium repute, now fossilized by Alzheimer’s, dead prematurely, twenty months ago. She remembered the day; had been chasing a stolen Mercedes all the way down to Mexico when the station patched through the hospital call. Cerebral accident. Fancy name for stroke. The neurologist suggesting Dad’s brain had been weakened by placque.

Dad had specialized in invertebrate genetics but collected shells, skins, skulls, shards, and other bits of organic antiquity, their tiny, highway-bordering house outside of Phoenix crammed with detritus and relics, smelling like a neglected museum. A kind man, a caring father. Petra’s mother had died birthing her, but never once had Dad showed any resentment, though she was certain he must have felt something. She’d certainly punished herself, turning into a wild, angry teenager, setting up confrontations till Dad had been forced to send her to boarding school and she could luxuriate as a victim.

His will specified cremation, and she and her brothers had complied, tossing his ashes over a mesa in the dead of night.

Each one of them waiting for the other to say something.

Finally, Bruce broke the silence. “It’s over, he’s at peace. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

Dad, the tissue collector, reduced to gray particles. Maybe one day, millions of years in the future, some archaeologist would find a Kenneth Connor molecule and hypothesize about what life had been like back in the twentieth century.

Now here was this lump of dead flesh, right next to her, fresh and pathetic.

Petra guessed the woman’s age at twenty-five to thirty. The tight jawline said not too much older; no tuck scars behind the ears that she could see.

Good cheekbones, judging by the right side. The entire left side was crimson mush. Probably a right-handed killer, the head rolling to the right as he cut her.

Except for Freshwater, her twenty-one previous cases were the typical stuff: bar shootings, one-jab knifings, beatings. Stupid men killing other stupid men.

The ugliest had been the Hernandez wedding, a Saturday affair in a VFW hall near the border of Rampart Division, the groom killing the bride’s father at the reception, using a brand-new pearloid-handled cake knife to slit the older man from sternum to groin, just filleting him as his new eighteen-year-old wife and a hundred other people watched in horror.

Some honeymoon.

Petra and Stu found the groom hiding out in Baldwin Park, served the warrant, brought him in. A nineteen-year-old gardener’s assistant, the knife hidden in a fertilizer sack in the back of his boss’s truck, the idiot.

Look, Dad, I solved it, no heebie-jeebies.

She imagined her father’s surprised smile at the trajectory of his shuddering, phobic baby.

Efficient.

She swallowed morning air. Sweet; you could smell the pines. Suddenly, she was tired of waiting around, itching to do something, learn something.

Finally Stu walked away from Dr. Leavitt and passed behind the tape into the outer region of the parking lot, where the police and coroner vehicles had grouped. Being his usual methodical self, telling the techs what to do, what not to do, what to take back for analysis. The coroner drove away, and the morgue attendants stayed behind, listening to rap music in their van, the bass thumping.

Everyone waiting for the photographer and K-9 units to arrive so the body could be taken away and the dogs could check out the wooded area above the parking lot.

Stu talked to a uniform, barely moving his lips, profile noble, framed by sunlight.

Chief Bishop. If he didn’t get a big movie role first.

Two weeks into their partnership, he’d taken out his wallet to pay for lunch at Musso and Frank and she’d seen the SAG card, next to a frequent-flyer Visa.

“You’re an actor?”

His Celtic skin reddened and he closed the wallet. “Purely by accident. They came to the station a few years ago, filming a Murder Street on the Boulevard, wanting real cops as extras. They bugged me till I finally agreed.”