Jonathan Kellerman - Twisted

“Around the same time she started to dress and walk sexier?”

“Exactly the same time,” said Pastern. “You’re a woman. You know I’m right.”

“You’re making a good case, Emily.”

“Maybe Kurt found out. Maybe that’s why he did it. It sure wasn’t for any romantic reasons of his own. He’s never remarried and if he’s been hooked up with another woman, I haven’t heard.”

“Would you have heard?” said Petra. “With his being distant and all that?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Pastern. “Our kids still go to the same school. West Valley Prep. It’s still suburbia, Petra.”

Petra watched as she wiped her lips daintily. Drama queen or not, Pastern had given her something to work with. She asked her if there was anything else she wanted to say and when Pastern shook her head, thanked her, fished a ten out of her purse and stood.

Sophia grumbled.

Pastern patted her calm and reached for her own purse. “No, it’s on me.”

“Against regulations,” said Petra, smiling. Little Miss By-the-Book. Ha.

“You’re sure? Okay, then, nice to meet you, hope you get him.”

As Petra started to leave, Pastern said, “Why’d you ask me if Kurt and Marta had a dog?”

“Just curious,” said Petra. “Trying to get a feel for them as people.”

“ He’s a cold person,” said Pastern. “ She was a nice person. I’ll tell you who did love dogs: Katya. She was always over playing with Daisy. Her needs were so obvious. But Kurt wouldn’t hear of it.”

“Too messy.”

“He’s compulsive.” Pastern frowned. “Real life isn’t like that.”

“Sure isn’t,” said Petra. “What color is Daisy?”

“A deep beautiful mahogany red. She’s show-quality.”

No match to the hairs on Coral Langdon. So much for the complex transfer scenario Petra had formulated. From daughter to dad to…

She said, “I’ll bet she is. Any idea how Katya’s doing?”

“My daughter, who’s in the same grade but not the same class, says she’s very quiet, keeps to herself. What else would you expect? Growing up with someone like that. Besides that, a girl needs a mother. It’s basic psychology, right?”

Petra flashed a plastic smile, muttered something. Escaped.

Petra drove east on Ventura Boulevard to Laurel Canyon, took that winding, leafy route back to the city. She loved Laurel, with its mix of ramshackle, radical, and royal. Great place to live in the unlikely event she ever had money.

She zipped past what was left of the old Houdini estate. Some magic would be nice right around now. Something to help her figure out if Emily Pastern’s suspicions were righteous.

Marta’s infidelity, Kurt a revenge murderer.

If so, he’d planned meticulously, lured his wife out of the theater, maybe using Katya as the bait. Then he’d exploited his daughter again for an alibi.

From everything she’d seen, now buttressed by Pastern’s comments, Kurt was a cold fish. One of those technically minded guys who saw everything as an equation.

You humiliate me, I kill you?

No reason it couldn’t have happened that way. She ran the scenario through her head: Kurt calls Marta from the phone booth, then heads over to the theater parking lot to wait. Marta shows up, they drive off- he drives. Then he pulls over around the block. Tells her the real reason he’s there. He knows about all those trips to the city.

Maybe there’s a confrontation, right there. Or perhaps Marta, caught off-guard, tries to smooth things out. Kurt’s beyond appeasement; he’s brought a weapon.

Or perhaps he’d planted it in the trunk of Marta’s car. Or had used something already there- a jack, a tire iron.

No, the coroner’s report said something wider, smoother.

Marta tries to escape, runs from the car. He grabs her.

Spins her, gets behind her. A tall guy like Kurt would have had plenty of leverage for a crushing occipital blow.

She goes down, he continues bashing her brains out. Doing it on the street. You act like a slut, you die like a slut.

Had he intended on leaving her there, remembered that the bleeding thing on the sidewalk had once been his wife and relented? Propped her back in the car? Or had that just been an attempt to conceal the body in order to give him more time to get home, crawl into bed, and enjoy murderer’s dreams?

Marta hadn’t been found until morning. Kurt, getting Katya ready for school, would’ve had plenty of time to be “surprised.”

As she passed the Canyon Market, Petra thought of a third possibility. Positioning Marta behind the wheel had been a different kind of message: You drove into the city to meet your lover. Now sit in the driver’s seat in that same damn car with your brains leaking out.

Destroying her humanity, her soul. Would a tech type like Kurt Doebbler believe in the soul? Or would he view people as nothing more than the sum of their cells?

I pulverize your gray matter, I reduce you to nothing.

Pastern had called Kurt compulsive. Maybe that cold, flat demeanor masked volcanic rage.

He does Marta, gets away with it. Decides he likes it.

Decides to commemorate the date.

What were anniversaries but time souvenirs? And psycho killers loved to keep mementos.

Nice little profile she was developing. The only problem was, lots of stuff didn’t fit. Like the dog hairs on Coral Langdon when Kurt hated animals. And Kurt, as charmless a man as Petra had ever encountered, seemed the last guy Coral would have stopped to have a pooch chat with.

Did he have acting skills no one knew about?

She decided she’d made too much out of the hairs. Langdon was a dog person, ran into other dog people, picked up foreign hairs.

But what of the phony cable visit to Geraldo Solis’s house? How did Doebbler synch with that?

Maybe Kurt had worked in the cable business before becoming a missile designer- some sort of student job? Even so, if he’d wanted to commemorate his wife’s murder, why not choose a victim similar to Marta? At the very least a woman, not a grumpy old ex-Marine like Solis.

Unless Solis had somehow been involved with the Doebblers… could he have been Marta’s lover in the city? Then why wait a year to get him?

Solis was a cantankerous old loner, thirty years Marta’s senior. People made strange choices but it just didn’t fit.

She ran through the rest of the victim list. Langdon, Hochenbrenner, the young black sailor. Jewell Blank and Curtis Hoffey, two street kids.

What was the damned pattern ?

By the time she made it to Sunset, her head throbbed and she decided she’d been fixing air sandwiches.

As she reached Fairfax and Sixth, her phone beeped. Mac Dilbeck’s mobile.

“Just heard, Petra. Sorry.”

“I really couldn’t expect different, Mac.”

“Only because they’ve got their heads tucked so tightly up their posteriors they can’t see the light of wisdom.”

“Thanks, Mac.”

“I should be thanking you,” he said. “For clearing the case. Saving us the paperwork and the city a trial. Some types deserve killing and he fit the bill, right?”

“Right.”

“What’s Eric’s situation?”

“Meetings at Parker.”

“When the dust clears, he’ll be okay. It was righteous.”

“It sure was.”

“I’m also calling to fill you in on Sandra Leon. The gods from Olympus allowed me to sit in on her interview. She wouldn’t talk to them no matter what they did so finally they left to confer. ” He snorted. “So while they’re gone, I do the old grandfatherly bit and guess what? She starts to open up.”