J. Kerley - The Death File - A gripping serial killer thriller with a shocking twist

Come on, you screwy little bastard. You’re supposed to be so goddamn smart … put it together …

“IT DIDN’T DO A LOT OF GOOD, DID IT?”

The girl left the chair to sit beside Kubiac, her arm around his shoulders as she spoke into his ear so softly that Cottrell could catch nothing. Kubiac stood and pushed the dark mop of hair from his blazing eyes.

“I’ll be outside,” he snapped at the lawyer. “Talk to her from now on.”

“But Adam, you were the one who called me to—”

“Talk to HER!”

Kubiac glared at the lawyer and zipped his forefinger over his lips, Done talking. He strode through the door and slammed it shut. Cottrell winced. Seconds later heard a tapping at his floor-to-ceiling glass window and opened the blinds. Kubiac stood outside, his middle finger aloft in Cottrell’s face.

Cottrell sighed and turned away, conscious of Kubiac’s eyes burning into his back. He could have closed the blinds, but the goofy kid would probably have driven his fucking car through the window. He re-sat in his desk chair and looked at the woman. “How much has Adam told you?”

The lovely woman offered a hint of smile. “Everything. He trusts me.”

Cottrell nodded. “Then you know that when Adam turns eighteen he comes into his father’s legacy.” His eyes lifted to the woman’s eyes and held. “I hope he starts to think about it.”

The woman shot a glance at Kubiac, then returned her eyes to the lawyer. “He thinks about it a lot. I’m sorry if we took up your time, Mr Cottrell. Adam really wanted to come here.”

“He needed to vent. He’s angry.”

“Very.”

“I’m sorry,” Cottrell said, standing and holding out a hand. “But I didn’t get your name, Miss …”

The girl offered her hand over the desk. “Zoe Isbergen,” she said. They glanced toward the window as Kubiac spit against it, thick and viscous.

“And your relationship with Adam, Miss Isbergen?” Cottrell said with a lift of his eyebrow.

A wisp of smile. “Complex.”

It was eight minutes past midnight when Tasha Novarro pulled into the Dobbins Point Overlook in South Mountain Park, its sixteen thousand-plus desert acres and jagged peaks making it the largest municipal park in the continental US. The Overlook, far above the desert floor and up a winding grade, was always crowded during park hours, but the park had been closed since seven p.m. No problem for Novarro: South Mountain was under the jurisdiction of the Phoenix Police Department, the cop at the entrance long used to Novarro’s nighttime visits and waving her through the gate.

The Dobbins Point Overlook was Novarro’s own little parcel of Paradise, her sole company the spectral saguaros silhouetted in the light of a gibbous moon. Behind and above her, on the peak, stood a vast array of communications antennae with red lights blinking against the liquid sky.

When Novarro was young, she’d thought the lights themselves formed the communications, a version of the heliographs she’d read about in a book borrowed from the library, the lights flashing semaphoric messages to towers miles away. Only later did she learn that the structures communicated via invisible transmission of short-wave energy called microwaves and the lights were only there to ward off aircraft.

Novarro preferred her earlier interpretation.

She shut off her engine and stepped from the cruiser, looking north across a crucible of light: Phoenix the blazing nexus, Glendale to the west, Mesa to the east, Scottsdale northeast. Headlights shimmered down the geometric maze of streets as a jet dropped from below the moon to land at Sky Harbor International Airport, five miles distant and one of the few airports located in the heart of a major metropolis.

A woman killed , Novarro thought, staring into the vortex of light. She’d spent the last three days interviewing friends, neighbors, and business associates of Leslie Meridien, PhD. A pleasant and outgoing woman, by all reports, no apparent enemies.

No one had an answer, no one understood.

“ Leslie was more than a psychologist ,” a friend had wept. “ She was a force for good .”

The killing had been brutal but efficient. Efficient murders were not the norm, Novarro knew from seven years in uniform and eight months in Homicide. The vast majority of killings were messy affairs, anger- or turf-driven, with slashing blades or emptied bullet clips, ball bats or shotgun blasts, people killed for being in the wrong bed or on the wrong corner.

Meridien’s murder was different. It was dispassionate, ice cold. And all of the victim’s patient files were gone, taken in a manner that baffled high-level computer types.

Merle Castle put it in a box he knew: breaking and entering, probably committed by Hispanics. But a television and watch had been left behind … Overlooked? Not by anyone professional enough to kill so efficiently. It was a wrong note, hell, a wrong chord.

Novarro paced the desolate parking lot for a full hour and came to two conclusions: One, that a highly competent professional had broken into Meridien’s cloud account and erased it, and – given high competence as a standard – two, a similar professionalism was likely employed in Meridien’s murder and what she believed was a staged robbery.

There were fierce and desperate people in the valley who would kill for a week’s worth of heroin, pulling a trigger and running. Move up a level and several thousand dollars bought a backseat strangling and a body dumped in the desert.

This was a higher level still.

Her mind reeling with questions, Novarro returned to her vehicle and descended the mountain, angling down Central Avenue and aiming for her downtown home.

Novarro had owned a house in midtown for eight months, making the down payment two days after getting her detective’s shield and the raise accompanying the new badge. The neighborhood was sketchy, but only four blocks from the Roosevelt Historic District, its gentrification effects moving like a slow-motion tsunami toward Novarro’s block.

It was the first home ownership in Tasha Novarro’s family. She’d grown up in a double-wide trailer at the edge of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community between Mesa and Scottsdale, her mother there mostly, her father never. Though it was Novarro, her younger brother, and mother, rarely were there just the three of them in residence; a ragged procession of relatives constantly passing through the house, sometimes for hours, sometimes months. The fragile emotional conditions at the house led Novarro’s Aunt Chyla to proclaim the domicile “a boxed set of thunderstorms.”

Novarro sought refuge in school, her dedication to study leading to a pre-law scholarship at Arizona State University. Her contribution would have been forty-five hundred dollars saved from working nights and weekends at a Ranch Market in northeast Phoenix, but one of her distant cousins – a handsome thirty-year-old charmer needing a place to stay following a forgery stint in prison – boogied off to points unknown after two months, taking her virginity and checkbook and emptying her account before he disappeared.

Left with only grades and ambition she went to the police academy because it was an arm of the law and was free.

And maybe, someday …

Novarro swung around the corner and onto her street, driving to midblock and pulling into her driveway. It was a small house and the windows were grated out of necessity, but she’d spent almost a thousand dollars and dozens of hours landscaping the yard, hard brown dirt and sand when she’d purchased it, beaten down by three large dogs. Now the driveway was bordered with bright flowers, a desert willow embellishing one corner of the boxy structure, a palo verde the other. The backyard held a lime tree that had somehow survived the canine onslaught. It wasn’t much, but everyone said it was the prettiest house on the street.