Jonathan Kellerman - The Murderer's Daughter

Amy Chan shrugged. “That’s the last time I saw him, Sarah. I figured it was some kind of unpleasant issue, maybe something in Asia. Not my business, so I forgot about it.”

“What did this other guy look like?”

“Nothing scary — kind of good-looking, actually. Long blond hair, beard, around Andrew’s age. Well dressed but in kind of a rich hippie mode, kind of über-Berkeley. And unlike Andrew, the contact between them didn’t seem to bother him. Just the opposite, he seemed super mellow.”

The noise level had suddenly risen on the plaza. More young women with kids.

Amy Chan said, “That’s it, Sarah. I guess all we can do is wait and hope for the best.”

“Guess so,” said Grace. “Thanks for taking the time, Amy. Meanwhile I’ve got some anxiety-prone middle schoolers to deal with in Atherton.”

Chan smiled. “A few more years and they’ll be my concern.”

Grace drove away from the museum and cruised downhill until she reached the upper edge of campus. Backing into a Staff Only parking space at the rear of what looked like a physical plant, she deep-breathed and tried to settle down.

Amy Chan likely viewed their conversation as unproductive but Grace had learned plenty. A chance meeting between brothers had, indeed, uncorked a whole bunch of darkness eventually leading to Andrew’s demise.

Had his reaction to spotting the piece-of-work now known as Dion Larue been surprise after a long absence? Or dread after repelling Larue’s attempts to reestablish contact?

Grace had unearthed Andrew’s Stanford link easily enough. No reason Big Brother couldn’t have done the same.

The emotions Chan described were telling: Andrew shaken, Venom Boy enjoying the experience.

Getting in a dig by addressing Andrew by his cult name.

Thai. Not quite, Amy. Hello, Ty. A bit of naughtiness, that.

Two years ago was well past the murders of the McCoys, the Wetters, and the Van Cortlandts. And while Andrew’s shock at seeing his brother didn’t eliminate the possibility that years before he’d collaborated in the killings, Grace was shifting to his being innocent. Because nothing about him implied cruelty and the man Chan had described meshed with her own impressions.

Meaning Big Brother had engaged in solo slaughter, which fit perfectly with the already high-level teenage psychopath she’d witnessed at the ranch. With the bullying scamster Mr. One-Eye had described.

If that wasn’t enough, the anagram said it all. Arundel Roi comes to life as Dion Larue.

She pictured whoever he’d been ten years ago driving to Oklahoma, torching poor little Lily and her family, dumping their truck and returning, sated, to California.

Though the same question persisted: Why eliminate his sister but allow his brother to survive?

Maybe because Lilith was deaf and deemed defective while Ty had earned a Stanford Ph.D. and was seen as potentially useful.

Structural engineer, big projects in Asia. Dion Larue fancied himself a developer but he was small-time — scamming the city of Berkeley in order to rehab a dump. Perhaps he’d seen Andrew as a ticket to bigger and better.

Andrew turning him down could’ve caused all sorts of untoward reactions.

Which brought her back to Larue’s murder of the Van Cortlandts. Why would he think that would’ve curried favor with Andrew?

Because like all psychopaths he was grandiose, and convinced of his own personal magnetism, assumed worship on the part of others.

You know all that money you got to inherit young, bro? Guess who did that for you.

Samael/Dion would’ve appreciated that kind of “favor,” but Ty/Andrew had been sickened and horrified. Traumatized sufficiently to seek professional help.

And that had turned him into a huge liability.

Turned Grace into collateral damage.

She realized she’d been concentrating hard enough to lose contact with her surroundings and looked around. Still no trolls, ogres, or hulking thugs. But an unmistakable chill of threat was tracing up and down her spine.

Act, don’t react.

She got out of there, fast.

Returning to city center, she drove along Telegraph, found metered parking, and scored an out-of-the-way table at a different Internet café. A sign warned that the toll for logging on was food, not just a beverage, so she bought an iced tea and a mozzarella and allegedly heirloom tomato panini, left the sandwich swaddled in its oil-spotted, recycled paper wrapping.

She began by assuming Beldrim Benn’s age to be the same as Roger Wetter Junior’s, or close to it, and a fellow student at Berkeley High. Calculating the year of Benn’s high school graduation, she plugged in his name and keywords and waited as the café’s overtaxed bandwidth finally kicked in.

Nothing from the school itself, but the rarely accessed personal website ( You Are Visitor 0032 ) of an optician in Stowe, Vermont, popped up. The star of that obscure show was now a paunchy and slope-shouldered fellow named Avery Sloat, who adored his family and his golden retriever and his LensMaster franchise but whose most treasured moments seemed to be his years on Berkeley High’s Yellow Jackets varsity wrestling team.

As proof of that, Sloat had posted a low-resolution group photo of said grapplers in their red-and-gold athletic togs, circling his own image in white just in case you missed it.

Grace tried to enlarge the shot but couldn’t, made do with getting close to the screen and matching faces with the small-print roster at the bottom.

Roger Wetter Junior had not been on the team. No surprise, she supposed. A pretty boy like him wouldn’t risk injury nor would he be interested in a fair fight. But there was B. A. Benn, second row to the right, a surly-looking, pimply, shaggy-haired middleweight.

Above Benn, in the top row, there was only space for five boys because each was massive; the heavyweight division, bursting out of their XXXXL jerseys.

Any one of whom was large enough to be the bastard she’d run off the road.

Andrew’s likely killer.

She studied the photo. One meat-mountain was Samoan, another black, the remaining three, white kids. One of whom was the younger manifestation of the man who’d stood behind Dion Larue in the New Mexico photo.

Hands vibrating, she stilled an index finger and found the name in the roster.

W. T. Sporn.

Uncommon surname, a stroke of good luck. She typed away.

Unlike Beldrim Benn, Walter Travis Sporn’s criminal history, though relatively petty, had attracted the attention of local papers in San Mateo and Redwood City. No infractions for the past fifteen years, but before then, a nice lucid pattern. No way Sporn’s clean record since then meant he’d reformed. More likely, he’d gotten better at avoiding responsibility. From ages eighteen through twenty-two, Sporn had been busted three times for drunk and disorderly, twice for battery, once for assault. From what Grace could glean from the short, dispassionate Crime Blotter accounts, everything stemmed from bust-ups at bars. No follow-up on how Sporn’s cases had been disposed but Grace doubted he’d served much serious jail time; in a world teeming with violence, bashing a few faces was no big deal.

Maybe he’d evaded arrest by submitting to the leadership of a far brighter villain.

Any self-congratulation at I.D.’ing Sporn faded as she realized she was no closer to finding him or Larue.

Time to try Wayne again, hopefully he’d learned something and wasn’t just being protective. But still no answer or message at his private line. Finishing her tea, she took her sandwich with her and handed it to an emaciated homeless woman who was astonished by the unsolicited generosity.