Jonathan Kellerman - The Murderer's Daughter

The waitress said, “We’re pouring passion fruit tonight.”

“Passion is fine.”

Decent-enough grub but the generic room was thinly populated. Mostly business types, trios and quartets, pretending to talk to one another but really focused on phones and tablets and personal agendas.

One solo: a thin-haired and slightly puffy but strangely handsome, fortyish man in a dark-blue shirt and gray slacks reading the Times and drinking a beer in a nearby booth. Handsome enough to draw forth extra-helpful smiles from the waitress. He reacted politely before returning to the sports pages.

Between Grace’s soup and salad, her eyes met his. Brief smiles were exchanged. Friendly but mildly conspiratorial?

Grace knew that look.

Perfect setting, a hotel that catered to out-of-towners.

Not tonight, dear.

Moments later, Grace’s suppositions were shaken by the appearance of a cute blonde wearing a big diamond on her left ring finger.

Kisses and smiles all around. Hubby finished his beer and the couple left, her hand tapping his butt a couple of times.

Was she slipping? No, he’d definitely given her the eye. Blondie had no idea what lay ahead of her.

Grace ate her steak too quickly to taste much, went back to her room and double-bolted the door.

She fell asleep almost immediately, with barely enough time for self-instruction:

Tonight: no dreams.

Successfully blank and reasonably refreshed, she awoke at six a.m., ready to work.

No message from Wayne, no surprise. Way too early for him to try to worm his way into social service records. Assuming he wouldn’t change his mind.

A bleeding heart, Ramona had called him, and Grace hoped his cardiac muscles remained mushy. But he might balk at wading into a mess. Or simply change his mind. So Grace had to consider reneging a possibility.

With or without him, she’d keep going.

The way it always had been, always would be.

Using another prepaid phone, she checked her service for messages.

Three new possible patients. They’d have to wait until Dr. Blades got her house in order. But the cry for help from a former patient, a woman named Leona who’d lost an arm five years ago after being set ablaze by a lunatic boyfriend, required immediate attention.

She reached the woman at home in San Diego. The crisis was an attack flashback, the first in three years, and you didn’t need to be a master therapist to figure out why: Leona had met a new man and allowed herself to hope, only to experience him drunk and verbally aggressive.

“I thought, Dr. Blades, that he was going to attack me. He claims he’d never do it but I don’t know.”

You sure as hell don’t.

Grace said, “You did the right thing by calling.”

“Really? I’m a little... ashamed. I didn’t want to bother you. Make you think I was falling apart.”

“Just the opposite, Leona. Asking for help is a sign of strength.”

“Oh. Okay. Yes, I know you’ve told me that but until now I didn’t need help.”

Things change, honey.

“True,” said Grace. “Now you do and I’m here for you and you acted accordingly. That’s flexibility, Leona. That’s why you’ve adjusted so well and will continue to do so. How about starting at the beginning...”

You did need to be a master therapist to take care of a crisis long-distance while sitting in a generic hotel room, worried about your own survival.

Grace spent eighty minutes on the phone and Leona hung up sounding reasonably mended. Well enough not to ask for a face-to-face. Grace would’ve despised having to put her off.

Free of professional responsibility for the moment, she took a long hot bath, toweled off, and subjected her clothes to the sniff test. No stale aroma, she’d never been an odoriferous girl. At least another day of use.

She found what she was looking for on the Internet, packed everything up, and settled her hotel bill. Gassing the Jeep at a nearby filling station, she checked the oil and tires and used a squeegee to clean the windows.

At the nearest Staples she headed for the self-service machines. The neck-tattooed stoner behind the counter didn’t look up when she paid cash.

Back in the Jeep, she removed five cards from a neat stack of fifty and placed them in her purse. The rest she stashed in the glove compartment.

The stiff, polished beige paper she’d selected had a nice feel to it. Bold embossed lettering implied confidence.

In the lower left corner of the card was a random P.O.B. that claimed to be situated in Fresno. In the lower right, Grace had listed a phone number that connected to a seldom-answered landline in a basement psych lab at Harvard. An extension phone grad students had stashed in a drawer years ago so they could ignore it and sleep off hangovers.

Starting up the Jeep, she tuned the satellite radio to light classical and caught the beginning of the fourth Bach cello suite, Yo-Yo Ma at his best.

Nothing like being in the company of genius on a road trip.

The three hundred and eighty miles between L.A. and Berkeley could be covered in one adrenalized day. But between having to stick to speed limits and bathroom and food breaks, Grace figured she wouldn’t arrive until late afternoon or early evening.

Too late to learn anything about Alamo Adjustments.

There was also the fatigue factor to consider: A pumped-up sympathetic nervous system would mask her body’s natural tendency to slow down. She wouldn’t be at her best.

So a two-day trip it would be, taking the inland route and spending the night near the halfway mark — Fresno or its environs. Up early tomorrow, she’d arrive at the university town well before noon, have plenty of time to find her bearings.

She drove to a 7-Eleven, stocked up on more snacks, and sat in the parking lot reviewing the mental ledger she’d already gone over twice after deciding to take the trip.

If Mr. Beef was still looking for her — quite likely — being away from her home and her office would make her vulnerable to break-ins.

On the other hand, there was nothing in either location that could benefit the enemy and stuff was replaceable.

She wasn’t.

Then there was the matter of payoff: Merely checking out a neighborhood where a defunct business once sat could very well prove futile. Worse, she’d come up empty on Alamo Adjustments and if the enemy lived nearby, risk giving herself away.

The enemy; time to put a face on her quarry.

She imagined him: a tall, glib, probably still attractive man of thirty-seven or thirty-eight. A charmer with secrets worth killing for and, if he wasn’t as smart as he thought he was, possibly a criminal record.

If he was smart, he’d coasted for over two decades, maybe living a respectable life but definitely wreaking havoc on the sly.

If he’d attained public respectability, his secrets were well worth killing for.

Grace had passed through Santa Barbara, was nearing Solvang, still with no word from Wayne. He’d said to give him two or three days but she figured that was just a hedge and her faith in his follow-through diminished with each freeway exit. Because let’s face it, it was a simple matter of calling the right person. Either he could or he couldn’t, would or wouldn’t.

She turned up the music, checked the tripometer. Two hundred ninety miles to go at sixty-five per. Her foot itched to exert more force on the gas but she’d already spotted three highway patrol cars. Still, she was feeling energized, chipper, maybe she would pull off a one-day trek. Find an appropriately bland business hotel in the good part of Oakland that bordered Berkeley, spend a quiet night, be up early to hunt.