Jonathan Kellerman - Dr. Death

Page after page of crime-scene description-Fusco's summaries and analyses as well as some of the original police reports. The agent's prose was more erudite than the typically stilted cop-write, but still far from Shakespeare. He seemed to like dwelling on the nasty stuff, or maybe that was my fatigue and the cold talking.

I stuck with it, found myself entering a state of hyper-awareness as I sucked up page after page of small print, photographs, crime-scene Polaroids. Autopsy shots. The beautiful, hideous, lurid hues of the human body imploded, debased, exploited like a rain forest. Sternum-cracking, face-peeling, skin-flaying, all in the name of truth. The framing of flesh-tunnels in three-by-five universes, blossoming orchids of ruptured viscera, rivers of hemoglobin syrup.

Dead faces. The look. Extraction of the soul.

A realization strobed my brain: Mate would've liked this.

Had he sensed what was happening to him?

I returned my eyes to the pictures. Women-things that had once been women-propped up against trees. A page of abdominal close-ups, gashes and gapes on skin transmuted to plum-colored shapes sketched on gray paper. Precisely excised wounds. The geometry.

The chill found my chest. Inhaling and letting the breath out slowly, I studied the shapes and tried to recall the death shots of Mate that Milo had showed me up on Mulholland.

Craving equivalence between all of this and the concentric squares engraved in Mate's flabby white belly.

Some concordance, I supposed, but once again Milo was right. Lots of killers like to carve.

Skin art…

Where was Donny Salcido Mate, self-proclaimed

Rembrandt of the flesh? The Anatomy Lesson. Let us carve and learn.

Let us carve Daddy? 'Cause we hate Daddy but want to be him? The art of death… Why couldn't it be him? It should be him.

Then I thought of Guillerma Mate, the way she'd stood at the closet of that dingy little motel room, frozen, as I asked about her only child. Maybe faith was its own reward, but still, hers had to be a lonely life: a single mom, abandoned by her husband, disappointed by her only child.

She prayed regularly, offered thanks.

Casting her eye upon some grand world to come, or had she truly found peace? Her bus trip to L.A. said she hadn't.

Richard and his kids, Guillerma and her boy.

Alone, everyone alone.

THREE HOURS INTO Thursday.

Three twenty-two A.M. and I'd finished every word in Fusco's omnibus. No thunderous conclusions. Then I went over the photos a second time and saw it.

Crime-scene shot from a Washington State unsolved- one of the four victims murdered during Michael Burke's term as a medical student. Four killings Fusco saw as consistent with Burke's technique because the victims had been left propped against or near trees.

The girl was a twenty-year-old waitress named Marissa Bonpaine, last seen serving shrimp cocktail at a stand in the Pike Place Market in Seattle, found a week later splayed in front of a fir in a remote part of the Olympic National Forest. No footprints near the scene; the buildup of pine needles and decaying leaves on the forest floor was a potentially fertile nest for forensic data, but nothing had been found. Add eleven days of rain to that, and the scene was as clean as the operating room the killer had intended it to be.

Marissa Bonpaine had been savaged in a manner I now found uncomfortably familiar: throat slash, abdominal mutilations, sexual posturing. A single, deep trapezoidal wound just above the pubic bone could be considered geometrical, though the edges were rough. Death from shock and blood loss.

No blunt-force head wound. I supposed Fusco would attribute that to the killer's escalating confidence and the seclusion of the spot: wanting Bonpaine conscious, wanting her to watch, to suffer. Taking his time.

I checked the girl's physical dimensions. Four-eleven, one hundred one. Tiny, easy to subdue without knocking her out.

What caught my eye wasn't any of that; after three hours of wading in gore and sadism, I'd grown sadly habituated.

I'd noticed something glinting against the brown cushion of forest detritus, several feet to the right of Marissa Bonpaine's frail left hand. Something shiny enough to catch the miserly light filtering through the dense conifer ceiling and bounce it back. I flipped pages till I found the police report.

A hiker had found the body. Forest rangers and law enforcement personnel from three departments had conducted a two-hundred-yard grid search and listed their findings under "Crime Scene Inventory." One hundred eighty-three retrieved items, mostly trash-empty cans and bottles, broken sunglasses, a can opener, rotted paper, cigarette butts-tobacco and cannabis-animal skeletons, solid lead buckshot, two copper-jacketed bullets ballistically analyzed but deemed unimportant because Marissa Bonpaine's body bore no gunshot wounds. Three pairs of insect-infested hiking boots and other discarded clothing had been studied by the crime lab and dated well before the murder.

Halfway down the list, there it was:

C.S.I. Item #76: Child's toy hypodermic, manu. Tommi-Toy, Taiwan, orig. component of U-Be-the-Doctor

Kit, imported 1989-95. Location: ground, 1.4m from victim's I. hand, no prints, no organic residue.

No residue might have indicated recent placement, but the rain might have just washed any residue away. I read the rest of the Bonpaine documents. No sign anyone had considered the toy. A review of all the other Washington cases revealed no other medical toys.

Marissa Bonpaine was the last of the Washington victims. Her body had been found July 2, but the abduction was believed to have occurred around June 17. More page-flipping. Michael Burke had received his MD on June 12.

Graduation party?

I'm a doctor, here's my needle!

I'm the doctor!

Stethoscope, hypodermic. One broken, the other intact. I knew what Milo would say. Cute, but so what?

Maybe he was right-he'd been too damn right, so far-and the injector was nothing more than a piece of trash left by some kid who'd hiked through the forest with his parents.

Still, it made me wonder.

A message… always messages.

To Marissa: I'm the doctor.

To Mate: I'm the doctor and you're not.

I reread Fusco's notes. No mention of the toy.

Maybe I'd mention it to Milo. If he and I had the chance to talk soon.

I flipped back to the front of the first volume, the various incarnations of Michael Burke, studied every feature of every photo. A song danced through my head-Getting to know you, getting to know all about you-but Burke remained a stranger.

High-IQ psychopath, lust-killer, master euthanist. Comforter of terminally ill women, brutalizer of healthy females. Compartmentalizing. It helped in murder as well as politics.

Maybe in real estate, as well. The world of distressed properties.

Milo had his prime witness and I had two toys. Still, the wounds fit. And Milo had asked me to study the files. You're out of business, I'm in.

When we'd questioned Alice Zoghbie, we'd asked her about confederates, and she'd just about admitted they existed but refused to go further, pooh-poohed the chance anyone close to Mate could have savaged him.

Eldon was brilliant. He wouldn't have trusted just anyone.

But Mate would've loved the idea of the MD sidekick. Another boost to his respectability-supervising an internship in cellular cessation.

Zoghbie was worth another try. She'd worshiped Mate, would want to punish his murderer. Now I had a name to throw her, a general physical description, could observe her reaction. What risk was there? I'd call her later this morning. Worst case, she'd tell me to go to hell.

Best case, I'd learn something, maybe make some progress revealing a new suspect.