Джонатан Келлерман - The Golem of Paris

He looked up Ballard, got an obituary.

He looked up Theresa Krikorian. Got another.

He could understand why cops would shy away from the case: it had already claimed two of them.

Dan Ballard had suffered a golf course heart attack.

Theresa Krikorian’s family had established a fund in her memory, cancer research.

Killed in the line of duty could mean a lot of things.

Too many desk lunches. Too much nicotine.

Jacob drank to their memories, plunged back into the short lives of Marquessa Duvall and Thomas White Jr.

Single working mother, her Culver City address a good nine miles from the dump site. Based on the absence of spatter or pooling, it appeared that the murders had gone down elsewhere, the bodies transferred to the alley.

On the questions of where elsewhere and why transferred, the file was mute.

Ballard described Marquessa’s job as “hostess.” Attach the right modifier and you came up with any number of activities ranging from banal to seedy.

Restaurant hostess? Hospitality hostess? Game show hostess?

I’ll take Double Homicides for eight, Alex.

Maybe hostess meant hooker — a bit of respectful whitewashing on the D’s part. Jacob hoped not. Euphemisms did no favors to anyone, least of all the victim. Anyway, Ballard’s writing showed the hallmarks of a linear thinker.

Jacob returned to the close-up of Marquessa’s face. Death didn’t improve one’s appearance, and it was hard to look good with an extra hole in your face. But he could tell how beautiful she’d been. Lips, a coy invitation; waved hair, lush and streaked like macassar ebony.

He found himself searching for his reflection in her eyes. They were that big and dark and naïve.

And wrong. He couldn’t pinpoint it.

He compared close-ups of both victims. Wide, wide open. Like there were invisible toothpicks stuck between the lids.

He dug out the autopsy report, which put Marquessa Duvall’s time of death between ten p.m. and two a.m. — at least three hours prior to discovery.

Cause of death: gunshot wound to the head.

Lacerations to the right forearm and bruising of the right thigh.

No indication of sexual assault.

On a separate pathology page, he saw an enlarged facial diagram, arrows pointing to the eyes. A text box explained.

Victim’s upper and lower eyelids

Jacob took a strong pull of bourbon before forcing himself to continue.

Victim’s upper and lower eyelids were removed bilaterally with a sharp instrument. The precision of the cut and lack of cutaneous bleeding suggests mutilation took place postmortem. Search of the crime scene failed to recover the excised tissue.

The boy had been identically savaged.

Jacob went to the kitchen and stuck his head inside the fridge, lungs prickling. He had seen and could not unsee; and he felt sick all over again, imagining the trauma he’d unleashed on Bina, the horrors caroming around her hobbled brain.

The phone rang. The caller ID announced, “Lev, Samuel.”

Jacob glanced at the microwave. Five-thirty a.m. For his father to call on a Saturday meant it was bad. Not many things overrode the Sabbath. Human life was one of them.

“Lev, Samuel.”

If there was a true emergency, Rosario would have let him know.

The machine answered on the fourth ring. His father’s voice came on.

“Jacob.” He sounded calm. “Son. Please pick up.”

Jacob wanted to. He missed his father, missed his complex, sometimes tortured logic. Sam was a Talmudist to the core, able to mine value from any idea, regardless of how bizarre it seemed on the surface. Jacob admired him for that.

He hated him for it.

“I don’t want you to worry,” Sam said, “but I got a call from the facility—”

Jacob disconnected the line.

He texted Rosario.

ok?

Her response came quickly. doc says shes fine

So why had Sam called?

As if she sensed the question, Rosario added two more lines.

i spoke to ur dad

he wants to talk to u

Good for him.

thanks he typed. keep me updated

of course

Sleep was now out of the question. Jacob took a quick shower, drank a cup of coffee, and officially kicked off his weekend.

He drove to the alley where the bodies had been left.

It was a wretched place to end up. The gentrification that had touched Hollywood’s periphery had yet to soak this far into its flesh. He walked a grubby tenth of a mile, shooting video and photos on his phone.

The north side comprised the hind ends of a liquor store, a medical supplier, an art gallery, an ethnic market, an ethnic bakery, a sheet metal supplier, a glazier, a psychic. All were shuttered at that hour and presumably had been between ten p.m. and two a.m. on a Sunday night.

To his astonishment, he discovered the same collection of fifty-gallon cans — identical brand and color, at least, lined up behind the bakery, giving off an obscene vibe, lids ajar, black bags bulging, like deep-sea fish coughing up their own swim bladders.

Jacob wondered which one the killer had used to prop up his handiwork.

He supposed he could ask the psychic.

Throw in another $75 and she’d solve the case for him.

He made a second pass, concentrating on the residential buildings along the alley’s south side, counting some four dozen windows with an unobstructed view.

Ballard hadn’t recorded a canvass. One of the missing pages, maybe.

Jacob headed around to Eleanor Avenue. It was late enough to begin knocking on doors, early enough that he didn’t expect to get a lot of answers. Starting with the El Centro Capri Apartments, he worked his way down the block, buzzing the manager’s unit and, if he got no answer, playing call box directories.

There were nine addresses in all: six multifamilies, two detached homes, as well as an auto body shop fronting to Gower. By lunchtime he’d gained access to four of the apartment complexes. None of the occupants of the rear units had been living there at the time of the murder, though they didn’t seem surprised to learn that one had taken place.

Nobody recognized Marquessa Duvall.

Nobody recognized her son.

Santa Monica was now open for business. He talked to bosses, employees, anyone who’d stick around to listen.

Zip.

He hadn’t eaten solid food in over thirty hours. He headed for the bakery, concluding a futile interview of the counterwoman by buying a pair of mushroom pirozhki . Beneath a corkboard papered with fliers for piano and violin lessons, he sat on a bench, balancing the file on his thigh so he could read as he ate.

The pastries were earthy and filling, made of humble ingredients brought together out of necessity but elevated by human ingenuity; exemplars of the cuisine of poverty that had recently become trendy, and therefore expensive, and therefore self-defeating.

“Delicious,” he told the counterwoman.

She nodded brusquely.

Neither Ballard nor Krikorian put much stock in the idea of a crime of passion. The scene was too well thought out — at once clinical and grandiose.

That in itself didn’t necessarily indicate a stranger murder. Marquessa had had a number of boyfriends. Ballard had questioned, swabbed, polygraphed, eliminating them one by one, including the boy’s biological father. Thomas White Sr. had the best alibi possible: he was in county lockup, serving out a nine-month sentence for possession.

Theresa Krikorian began the tedious task of sorting through known sex offenders. She hadn’t gotten very far. In 2007, the California registry was in its infancy, and it wasn’t at all clear that it would survive challenges to its constitutionality.