Jonathan Kellerman - Blood Test

“Some old character with a metal detector found them a little after one a.m. He’s a rich guy, a retired dentist, has a big house off Benedict but likes to roam around in the dark prospecting. His gizmo picked up the coins in the father’s pockets — the two of them weren’t buried very deep. The rain had washed away some of the dirt and he could see part of a head in the moonlight. Poor fellow was shaking.”

He looked downward, dispiritedly.

“Another detective picked up the squeal but when they identified the bodies he remembered my involvement and called me. He was scheduled for vacation anyway and more than happy to hand it over. I’ve been there since three.”

“No sign of Woody and Nona?”

Milo shook his head.

“ Nada. We combed the immediate area. The place we found them is just before the road climbs toward the Valley. Most of Benedict’s pretty well built up but there’s a small gully on the west side that the developers haven’t gotten to. It’s concave, kind of like a saucer in the ground, covered with brush and layered with about a foot of dead leaves. Easy to miss if you drive by quickly ‘cause it’s blocked from the road by big eucalyptus. We used the grid approach, went over it foot by foot. Funny thing is, we did dig up another body, but this one was all bones. From the shape of the pelvis, the M.E. says a woman. Been there for at least a couple of years.”

He was concentrating on details to avoid dealing with the emotional impact of the murders. Taking a large gulp of coffee, he rubbed his eyes and shivered.

“I’m soaked. Lemme peel out of this.”

He pulled off the raincoat and draped it over a chair.

“Let’s hear it for sunny goddamn California,” he snarled. “I feel like I’ve been marinating in a rice paddy.”

“Want a warm shirt?”

“Nah.” He rubbed his hands together, drank more coffee, and got up for a refill.

“Not a sign of the kids,” he reiterated upon returning to the table. “Several possibilities present themselves: one, they weren’t with the parents and escaped what went down. When they got back to the motel, they saw the blood and ran scared.”

“Why wouldn’t the family stick together if they were returning home?” I asked.

“Maybe she took him for an ice cream. While the parents packed.”

“No way, Milo. He was too sick for that.”

“Yeah, I keep forgetting that. Must be unconscious repression, huh?”

“Must be.”

“Okay, hypothesis two, then. They weren’t together because the sister snatched the kid. You told me Bev said she didn’t like the parents. Could be it came to a head.”

“Anything Bev has to say about her needs to be taken with a shaker of salt, Milo. Nona made it with a man she once loved. Down deep she hates the girl’s guts.”

“You told me yourself the kid was pissed the time you met her, how she lit into Melendez-Lynch. And the picture we get of her after talking to Rambo and Carmichael is one strange little girl.”

“That’s true. She sounds like she’s got plenty of problems. But why would she abduct her brother? All indications are that she was self-centered, cut off from family feelings. She and Woody didn’t have a close relationship. She rarely visited and when she did it was at night when he was asleep. Her not being there with the others makes sense. But not the rest of it.”

“Gee, you’re fun to be with,” said Milo. “I’ll call you next time I need a yes man.”

His face opened in a giant yawn. When he’d taken in enough air he continued. “Everything you say is logical, pal, but I’ve gotta touch all bases. I called Houten in La Vista just before I came here. Woke the poor devil up and told him to scour the town for her and the kid. He was pretty broken up hearing about the parents, said he’d already searched carefully the first time I asked, but agreed to do it again.”

“Including the Touch’s place?”

“Especially there. Melendez-Lynch may have been right from the beginning. Even if Houten comes up empty they’re sweet suspects. I’m heading down there today to check them out. Especially the two that visited the Swopes. A couple of my guys are going to the hospital to interview anyone who took care of the Swopes. With special emphasis on squeezing that asshole Valcroix.”

I told him about Seth Fiacre’s assessment of the Touch as a reclusive group that shunned the limelight and tacked on Mal’s account of the greening of Norman Matthews.

“They don’t seek converts,” I pointed out. “They seclude themselves. What motivation would there be for them to get involved with outsiders?”

Milo seemed to ignore the question and expressed surprise at Noble Matthias’s identity.

“Matthews is the guru? I always wondered what happened to him. I remember the case. It went down in Beverly Hills so we weren’t involved. They locked the husband up in Atascadero and six months later he mixed himself a Draino cocktail.” He smiled mirthlessly. “We used to call Matthews the ‘Shyster to the Stars.’ What do you know?”

He yawned again and drank more coffee.

“Motivation?” he repeated. “Maybe they thought they’d convinced the parents to treat the kid their way, there was a change of heart and things got out of control.”

“That’s pretty far out of control,” I said.

“Don’t forget what I told you in the motel room. About the world getting crazier and crazier. Besides, maybe the cultists were camera-shy when your professor friend studied them but not anymore. Weirdos change, like anyone else. Jim Jones was everyone’s hero until he turned into Idi Amin.”

“It’s a good point.”

“Of course it is. I’m a pro-fesh-you-nole.” He laughed, a good warm sound soon replaced by silence made cold by unspoken words.

“There’s another possibility,” I said, finally.

“Now that you’ve mentioned it, yes.” His green eyes darkened with melancholia. “The kids are buried somewhere else. Whoever did it got scared before he could finish dumping them at Benedict and took off. There are coyotes and all sorts of creepy crawlies out there. You could see a pair of eyes and easily get spooked.”

I’d been heartsick and numb since learning of the killings, my attention vacillating between Milo’s words and the images they evoked. But now the full impact of what he was saying slammed straight into me and I mustered up a wall of denial to block it out.

“You’re still going to look for him, aren’t you?”

He looked up at the urgency in my voice.

“We’re canvassing Benedict from Sunset up into the Valley, Alex, doing door-to-doors on the chance someone saw something. But it was dark so an eyewitness is unlikely. We’re also going to cruise the other canyons — Malibu, Topanga, Coldwater, Laurel, right here in the Glen. About a thousand man hours and unlikely to be productive.”

I got back on the subject of the parents’ murders because grim as it was, it was preferable to fantasizing about Woody’s fate.

“Were they shot right there, in Benedict?” I asked.

“Not likely. There was no blood on the ground and we couldn’t find any spent shells. The rain introduces a little uncertainty, but each of them had half a dozen bullet holes. That much shooting would make a lot of noise and there’d have to be some shells left behind. They were killed somewhere else, Alex, and then dumped. No footprints or tiretracks, but that you can definitely put down to the rain.”

He ripped viciously at the French bread with small, sharp teeth, and chewed noisily.

“More coffee?” I offered.

“No thanks. My nerves are scraped raw as it is.” He leaned forward, thick, spatulate fingers splayed on the table. “Alex, I’m sorry. I know you cared about the kid.”