Jonathan Kellerman - Gone

Another sib defying Brad.

A child’s impulsiveness together with a grown man’s hormones could be a dangerous combination. As Milo had pointed out, Billy had begun living on his own right around the time of Tori Giacomo’s murder and the Gaidelases’ disappearance.

Perfect opportunity for Billy and Peaty to take their friendship to a new level? If the two of them had become a murder team, Peaty was certain to have been the dominant one.

Some leadership. An outwardly creepy alcoholic voyeur and a dullard man-boy didn’t add up to the kind of planning and care that had stripped Michaela’s dumpsite of forensic detail, concealed Tori Giacomo’s body long enough to reduce it to scattered bones.

Then there was the matter of the whispering phone call from Ventura County. No way Billy could’ve pulled that off.

Iago-prompt, courtesy of the phone lines. It had worked.

I’d hypothesized about a cruel side to the Gaidelases but there was another pair of performance buffs worth considering.

Nora Dowd was an eccentric dilettante and a failure as an actress, but she’d been skillful enough to fool her brother about breaking off with Dylan Meserve. Toss in a young lover with a penchant for rough sex and mind games and it cooked up interesting.

Maybe Brad had found no sign of struggle in Nora’s house because there’d been none. Travel brochures in a nightstand drawer and missing clothes plus Dylan Meserve’s skip on his rent weeks ago said a long-planned trip. Albert Beamish hadn’t seen anyone living with Nora but someone entering and exiting the house after dark would have escaped his notice.

A woman who thought private flying was a nifty idea.

Her passport hadn’t been used recently and Meserve had never applied for one. But he’d grown up on the streets of New York, could’ve known how to obtain fake paper. Getting through passport control at LAX might be a challenge. But jetting from Santa Monica to a landing strip in some south-of-the-border village with payoff cash would be another story.

Brochures in a drawer, no real attempt to conceal. Because Nora was confident no one would broach her privacy?

When I stopped for a red light at Melrose, I took a closer look at the resorts she’d researched.

Pretty places in South America. Maybe for more than the climate.

I drove home as fast as Sunset would allow, barely took the time to look for Hauser’s brown Audi. Moments after logging on to the Internet I learned that Belize, Brazil, and Ecuador all had extradition treaties with the U.S. and that nearly all the countries without treaties were in Africa and Asia.

Hiding out in Rwanda, Burkina Faso, or Uganda wouldn’t be much fun, and I couldn’t see Nora taking well to the feminine couture of Saudi Arabia.

I studied the brochures again. Each resort was in a remote jungle area.

To be extradited you had to be found.

I pictured the scene: May-December couple checks into a luxury suite, enjoys the beach, the bar, the pool. Nighttime’s the right time for al fresco candlelight dinners, maybe a couple’s massage. Long, hot, incandescent days allow plenty of time to search for a leafy suburb hospitable to affluent foreigners.

Nazi war criminals had hidden for decades in Latin America, living like nobility. Why not a couple of low-profile thrill killers?

Still, if Nora and Dylan had escaped for the long run, why leave brochures anywhere to be discovered?

Unless the packets were a misdirect.

I looked up jet leasing, air charter, and time-share companies in Southern California, compiled a surprisingly long list, spent the next two hours claiming to be Bradley Dowd experiencing a “family emergency” and in dire need of finding his sister and his nephew, Dylan. Lots of turndowns and the few outfits who checked their passenger logs had no listing of Nora or Meserve. Which proved nothing if the couple had assumed new identities.

For Milo to get subpoenas of the records, he’d need evidence of criminal behavior and all Dowd and Meserve had done was disappear.

Unless Dylan’s misdemeanor conviction could be used against him.

Milo would be tied up right now with “boring police stuff.” I called him anyway and described Billy Dowd’s behavior.

He said, “Interesting. Just got Michaela’s full autopsy results. Also interesting.”

We met at nine p.m., at a pizza joint on Colorado Boulevard in the heart of Pasadena ’s Old Town. Hipsters and young business types feasted on thin crust and pitchers of beer.

Milo had been scoping out BNB buildings in the eastern suburbs for evidence of Peaty’s unofficial storage, asked if I could meet him. When I left the house at eight fifteen, the phone rang but I ignored it.

When I arrived, he was at a front booth, apart from the action, working on an eighteen-inch disk crusted with unidentifiable foodstuffs, his own pitcher half full and frosted. He’d doodled a happy face on the glass. The features had melted to something morose and psychiatrically promising.

Before I could sit, he hoisted his battered attaché case, took out a coroner’s file, and placed it across his lap. “When you’re ready. Don’t ruin your dinner.” Munch munch.

“I ate already.”

“Not very social of you.” He massaged the pitcher, erased the face. “Wanna glass?”

I said, “No, thanks,” but he went and got one anyway, left the file on his chair.

At the front were routine forms signed by Deputy Coroner A.C. Yee, M.D. In the photos what had once been Michaela Brand was a department-store manikin taken apart in stages. See enough autopsy shots and you learn to reduce the human body to its components, try to forget it’s ever been divine. Think too much and you never sleep.

Milo returned and poured me a beer. “She died of strangulation and all the cuts were postmortem. What’s interesting are Numbers Six and Twelve.”

Six was a close-up of the right side of the neck. The wound was an inch or so long, slightly puffed at the center, as if something had been inserted in the slot and left there long enough to create a small pouch. The coroner had circled the lesion and written a reference number above the ruler segment used for scale. I paged to the summary, found the notation.

Postmortem incision, superior border of the sternoclavicular notch, evidence of tissue-spreading and surface exploration of the right jugular vein.

Twelve was a front view of a smooth, full-breasted female chest. Michaela’s implants spread as if deflated.

Dr. Yee had pointed to the spots where they’d been stitched up and noted, “Good healing.” In the smooth plain between the mounds were five small wounds. No pouching. Yee’s measurements made them shallow, a couple were barely beneath the skin.

I returned to the description of the neck lesion. “ ‘Surface exploration.’ Playing around with the vein?”

“Maybe a special type of play,” said Milo. “Yee wouldn’t put it in writing but he said the cut reminded him of what an embalmer might do at the start of a body prep. The location was exactly what you’d choose if you wanted to expose the jugular and the carotid artery for drainage. After that, you spread the wound to expose the vessels and insert cannulas in both of ’em. Blood drains out of the vein while preservative’s pumped into the artery.”

“But that didn’t happen here,” I said.

“No, only a scratch on the vein.”

“A would-be embalmer who lost his nerve?”

“Or changed his mind. Or lacked the equipment and knowledge to follow through. Yee said there was an ‘immature’ quality to the murder. The neck stuff and the chest lacerations he called dinky and ambivalent. He wouldn’t put that in writing, either. Said it was for a shrink to decide.”