Jonathan Kellerman - Guilt

“I don’t see a problem with that, Heather.”

“You promise she won’t get hassled?”

“She doesn’t need to get involved at all if you know everything she does.”

“I do, I was in the driver’s seat, had a better view.”

“Then I don’t see any need for her to be interviewed.”

“I need to be interviewed?”

“At the most Lieutenant Sturgis will follow up with a phone call and have you repeat what you just said to me so he can have an official statement.”

“That’s it? You promise?”

“I do.”

“I don’t mind talking, it’s just Amelie-I care about her.”

“So you want me to pass this along to Lieutenant Sturgis?”

“I guess.”

“I need you to be sure.”

“Fine, I’m sure.”

“Is there anything else you want to say about the car that checked you out?”

“Not a car, an SUV, that’s all I know, I don’t know brands.”

“Can you recall any details?”

“It wasn’t the same as my dad’s SUV, his is a Porsche, this was bigger. Higher up.”

“What about color?”

“Dark, can’t tell you a color.”

“Unusually high? Like it had been raised?”

“Hmm,” she said. “Maybe … yes, I’d say so. I definitely felt we were being looked down on-oh, yeah, it had shiny rims.”

“Did you see who was inside?”

“No, it was dark and honestly, we didn’t want to know, we just got out of there.”

“What did the SUV do?”

“It didn’t follow us,” she said. “Maybe it stayed there, I don’t know. Which would be weird, when the next morning …”

“Someone checking out the park.”

“I mean you can see right through the fence, it’s not wood, it’s just chain link. Do you think I’m making a big deal out of nothing?”

“One pass might be someone driving by, Heather. Coming back a second time’s more troublesome. Whatever the intention, you were right to leave.”

“Oh, man … city full of freaks. I don’t know if I’ll ever step foot in the park again.”

“What time did this happen?”

“Late,” she said. “Like one a.m. I know ’cause I called my parents at twelve forty-five, they were just about to leave, I figured we had half an hour more. But after the SUV freaked us out, I drove her to her car and went home.”

“Any chance you saw even part of the SUV’s license plate?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Anything else you remember?”

“No,” she said. “Oh, one more thing: The police guy can call me but use my personal cell, not the landline where they pick up.”

I copied down the number.

Howard Goldfeder emerged from his office. “How we doing?”

“We’re doing great, Daddy.”

He said, “Doctor?” As if his daughter hadn’t spoken.

I said, “She’s terrific.”

Goldfeder said, “I could’ve told you that.”

Heather smiled, hiding it from him but allowing me a glimpse of her satisfaction.

Milo cursed. “Geniuses. They give a witness info then let her leave the scene before I have a chance to talk to her.”

“It could work in your favor,” I said. “Hard to keep secrets with that level of professionalism, so Maxine Cleveland’s squeeze play may be exposed. You ever touch base with that reporter?”

“We keep missing each other, wink wink. Meanwhile, no one’s reported my vic missing.”

“Maybe she hasn’t been gone long enough.”

“Always the optimist,” he said. “The prelim from the coroner just came in. She’s had good dental care, maybe orthodontia. Her blood’s clean, no booze, drugs, or disease, and her body’s free of needle marks, scars, iffy tattoos, or any other sign of a rough life. Dr. Rosenblatt said she looked like someone who shouldn’t have ended up on his table. And yeah, I know that’s politically incorrect but truth is truth, right?” He pounded his hand with his fist. “Someone has to be looking for her.”

He gulped a big chunk out of the egg bagel I’d just turned down. A bag that had once held a dozen mixed leaned against his computer. The crumbs of the jalapeno and the onion that he’d finished littered his desktop. “In terms of LeMasters, it’s all I can do not to call her and leak but when the air turns brown and the fan gets filthy, you know who the brass will be chasing down.”

“Want me to call her?”

“Oh, yeah, that would be subtle. So little Heather and her girlfriend got spooked by a dark SUV-not a Porsche-no info on the tags, no view of the driver. That narrows it to half the vehicles on the Westside.”

“Even without more info, it’s interesting, no?”

“Somebody casing the park? Hell, yeah.”

The egg bagel disappeared down his gullet. He washed it down with cold coffee from the big detective room. We were in his office, the tiny space humid from poor ventilation and discouragement. I’d arrived just before noon, honoring his early-morning request for a “sit-down.” He’d sounded anxious. I’d been there for a quarter hour, still had no idea exactly what he wanted.

He brushed crumbs into his wastebasket. “One pass by the SUV might not mean much but coming back a second time’s a bit more ominous. But ominous doesn’t mean it’s connected to my murders, there are all kinds of night-crawlers out at that hour. And showing himself that openly doesn’t fit an offender who picks up his casings, leaves nothing serious behind.”

“Or he used a revolver and got lucky.”

“Hey,” he said, “you’re supposed to see the good in everyone. Yeah, that’s possible but the overall picture’s organized, you said so yourself. Someone like that’s planning a shoot-and-dump, he’s gonna advertise his presence the night before to a coupla jumpy girls?”

“True,” I said.

“Don’t do that.”

“What?”

“Agree so readily. It scares me.”

“Keep living, you’ll have plenty of opportunity for terror.”

He grinned, stretched, pushed lank black hair off his mottled forehead, sank as low as the chair would allow. “This guy’s an exhibitionist, right? Showing off his work, look how clever I am. Having a grand old time.”

“He could be bragging,” I said. “Or his message is something not so obvious. Specific to his mode of thinking.”

“He’s crazy?”

“Not to the point where he can’t function, but his mind’s probably a scary place. Whatever his motive, it’s personal.”

“Woman and child, a family thing? Yeah, I know we talked about that but I’m having my doubts, Alex. I just can’t see a father processing his own kid’s bones then strewing them like garbage. Speaking of which, Liz Wilkinson called me just before you got here, totally beating herself up. Apparently, there’s a technique for cleaning bones that she missed.”

He pulled two sheets of paper out of his printer. One contained a pair of split-frame photos: on the left, half a dozen small, glossy, hard-shelled brown insects, to the right a single, spiky, caterpillar-type creature.

The second sheet was an order blank for “high-grade, mite-free dermestid beetles” from a lab supply company in Chicago.

I said, “Flesh-eating bugs?”

“Flesh, hair, wool carpeting, any sort of animal matter, wet, dry, or in between. Not bone and teeth, because the little buggers’ jaws can’t handle anything that hard, but anything short of that. The adults like to snack, but it’s the larvae-the ones with the whiskers-that are the serious gourmets. Set ’em loose and they can munch a bear skull sparkling clean within twenty-four hours, inflict no damage on the skeleton. Which is exactly why taxidermists and museums and scientists use ’em to spruce up specimens. Liz called it anthro for dummies, said two babies in a row probably clouded her judgment.”