Fresh pizza!
Lotta taste!
Ooh la la!
Yum yum!
Bon appetit!
The box was pristine, not a speck of grease or finger-smudge. I bent down to sniff, picked up no pizza aroma. But the decomp had filled my nose; it would be a while before I’d be smelling anything but death.
If this were another type of crime scene, some detective might be making ghoulish jokes about free lunch.
The detective in charge of this scene was a lieutenant who’d seen hundreds of murders, maybe thousands, yet chose to stay outside for a while.
I let loose more mental pictures. Some fiend in a geeky delivery hat ringing the doorbell then managing to talk himself inside.
Watching as the prey went for her purse? Waiting for precisely the right moment before coming up behind her and clamping both his hands on the sides of her head.
Quick blitz of rotation. The spinal cord would separate and that would be it.
Doing it correctly required strength and confidence.
That and the obvious transfer evidence—not even a shoe impression—screamed experience. If there’d been a similar murder in L.A., I hadn’t heard about it.
Despite all that meticulousness, the hair around the woman’s temples might be a good place to look for transfer DNA. Psychopaths don’t sweat much, but you never know.
I examined the room again.
Speaking of purses, hers was nowhere in sight.
Robbery as an afterthought? More likely souvenir-taking was part of the plan.
Edging away from the body, I wondered if the woman’s last thoughts had been of crusty dough, mozzarella, a comfy barefoot dinner.
The doorbell ring the last music she’d ever hear.
I stayed in the apartment awhile longer, straining for insight.
The terrible competence of the neck-twist made me wonder about someone with martial arts training.
The embroidered towel bothered me.
Vita
.
Had he brought that one but taken the rest from her linen closet?
Yum. Bon appetit. To life
.
The decomp reek intensified and my eyes watered and blurred and the necklace of guts morphed into a snake.
Drab constrictor, fat and languid after a big meal.
I could stand around and pretend that this was anything comprehensible, or hurry outside and try to suppress the tide of nausea rising in my own guts.
Not a tough choice.
M
ilo hadn’t moved from his position on the landing. His eyes were back on Planet Earth, watching the street below. Five uniforms were moving from door to door. From the quick pace of the canvass, plenty of no-one-home.
The street was in a working-class neighborhood in the southeastern corner of West L.A. Division. Three blocks east would’ve made it someone else’s problem. Mixed zoning allowed single-family dwellings and duplexes like the one where the woman had been degraded.
Psychopaths are stodgy creatures of routine and I wondered if the killer’s comfort zone was so narrow that he lived within the sawhorses.
I caught my breath and worked on settling my stomach while Milo pretended not to notice.
“Yeah, I know,” he finally said. He was apologizing for the second time when a coroner’s van drove up and a dark-haired woman in comfortable clothes got out and hurried up the stairs. “Morning, Milo.”
“Morning, Gloria. All yours.”
“Oh, boy,” she said. “We talking freaky-bad?”
“I could say I’ve seen worse, kid, but I’d be lying.”
“Coming from you that gives me the creeps, Milo.”
“Because I’m old?”
“Tsk.” She patted his shoulder. “Because you’re the voice of experience.”
“Some experiences I can do without.”
People can get used to just about anything. But if your psyche’s in good repair, the fix is often temporary.
Soon after receiving my doctorate, I worked as a psychologist on a pediatric cancer ward. It took a month to stop dreaming about sick kids but I was eventually able to do my job with apparent professionalism. Then I left to go into private practice and found myself, years later, on that same ward. Seeing the children with new eyes mocked all the adaptation I thought I’d accomplished and made me want to cry. I went home and dreamed for a long time.
Homicide detectives get “used” to a regular diet of soul-obliteration. Typically bright and sensitive, they soldier on, but the essence of the job lurks beneath the surface like a land mine. Some D’s transfer out. Others stay and find hobbies. Religion works for some, sin for others. Some, like Milo, turn griping into an art form and never pretend it’s just another job.
The woman on the towels was different for him and for me. A permanent image bank had lodged in my brain and I knew the same went for him.
Neither of us talked as Gloria worked inside.
Finally, I said, “You marked the pizza box. It bothers you.”
“Everything about this bothers me.”
“No brand name on the box. Any indies around here deliver?”
He drew out his cell phone, clicked, and produced a page. Phone numbers he’d already downloaded filled the screen and when he scrolled, the listings kept coming.
“Twenty-eight indies in a ten-mile radius and I also checked Domino’s and Papa John’s and Two Guys. No one dispatched anyone to this address last night and nobody uses that particular box.”
“If she didn’t actually call out, why would she let him in?”
“Good question.”
“Who discovered her?”
“Landlord, responding to a complaint she made a few days ago. Hissing toilet, they had an appointment. When she didn’t answer, he got annoyed, started to leave. Then he thought better of it because she liked things fixed, used his key.”
“Where is he now?”
He pointed across the street. “Recuperating with some firewater down in that Tudor-ish place.”
I found the house. Greenest lawn on the block, beds of flowers. Topiary bushes.
“Anything about him bother you?”
“Not so far. Why?”
“His landscaping says he’s a perfectionist.”
“That’s a negative?”
“This case, maybe.”
“Well,” he said, “so far he’s just the landlord. Want to know about her?”
“Sure.”
“Her name’s Vita Berlin, she’s fifty-six, single, lives on some kind of disability.”
“Vita,” I said. “The towel was hers.”
“
The
towel? This bastard used every damn towel she had in her linen closet.”
“
Vita
means ‘life’ in Latin and Italian. I thought it might be a sick joke.”
“Cute. Anyway, I’m waiting for Mr. Belleveaux—the landlord—to calm down so I can question him and find out more about her. What I’ve learned from prelim snooping in her bedroom and bathroom is if she’s got kids she doesn’t keep their pictures around and if she had a computer, it was ripped off. Same for a cell phone. My guess is she had neither, the place has a static feel to it. Like she moved in years ago, didn’t add any newfangled stuff.”
“I didn’t see her purse.”
“On her nightstand.”
“You taped off the bedroom, didn’t want me in there?”
“I sure do, but that’ll wait until the techies are through. Can’t afford to jeopardize any aspect of this.”
“The front room was okay?”
“I knew you’d be careful.”
His logic seemed strained. Insufficient sleep and a bad surprise can do that.
I said, “Any indication she was heading to the bedroom before he jumped her?”
“No, it’s pristine. Why?”
I gave him the delivery tip scenario.
“Going for her purse,” he said. “Well, I don’t know how you’d prove that, Alex. Main thing is he confined himself to the front, didn’t move her into the bedroom for anything sexual.”
I said, “Those towels make me think of a stage. Or a picture frame.”
“Meaning?”
“Showing off his work.”
“Okay … what else to tell you … her wardrobe’s mostly sweats and sneakers, lots of books in her bedroom. Romances and the kinds of mysteries where people talk like Noël Coward twits and the cops are bumbling cretins.”
I wondered out loud about a killer with martial arts skills and when he didn’t respond, went on to describe the kill-scene still bouncing around my brain.
He said, “Sure, why not.”
Agreeable but distracted. Neither of us focusing on the big question.
Why would anyone do something like this to another human being?
Gloria exited the apartment, looking older and paler.
Milo said, “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “No, I’m lying, that was horrible.” Her forehead was moist. She dabbed it with a tissue. “My God, it’s grotesque.”
“Any off-the-cuff impressions?”
“Nothing you probably haven’t figured out yourself. Broken neck’s my bet for COD, the cutting looks postmortem. The incisions look clean so maybe some training in meat-cutting or a paramedical field but I wouldn’t put much stock in that, all kinds of folk can learn to slice. That pizza box mean anything to you?”
“Don’t know,” said Milo. “No one admits delivering here.”
“A scam to get himself in?” she said. “Why would she open the door for a fake pizza guy?”
“Good question, Gloria.”
She shook her head. “I called for transport. Want me to ask for a priority autopsy?”
“Thanks.”
“You might actually get it because Dr. J seems to like you. Also with something this weird, she’s bound to be curious.”
A year ago, Milo had solved the murder of a coroner’s investigator. Since then Dr. Clarice Jernigan, a senior pathologist, had reciprocated with personalized attention when Milo asked for it.
He said, “Must be my charm and good looks.”
Gloria grinned and patted his shoulder again. “Anything else, guys? I’m on half-shift due to budgetary constraints, figure to finish my paperwork by one then go cleanse my head with a couple martinis. Give or take.”
Milo said, “Make it a double for me.”
I said, “Was significant blood pooled inside the body cavity?”
Her look said I was being a spoilsport. “A lot of it was coagulated but yes, that’s where most of it was. You figured that out because the scene was so clean?”
I nodded, “It was either that or he found out a way to take it with him.”
Milo said, “Buckets of blood, lovely.” To Gloria: “One more question: You recall anything remotely like this in your case files?”
“Nope,” she said. “But we just cover the county and they say it’s a globalized world, right? You could be looking at a traveler.”
Milo glared and trudged down the stairs.
Gloria said, “Whoa, someone’s in a mood.”
I said, “It’s likely to stay that way for a while.”
Don’t miss these thrilling suspense novels from Jonathan Kellerman!
The Murder Book
L.A. psychologist-detective Alex Delaware has received a strange, anonymous package in the mail. Inside is an album filled with gruesome crime-scene photos. When his old friend and colleague, homicide detective Milo Sturgis, views the compendium of death, he is immediately shaken by one of the images: a young woman tortured, strangled, and dumped near a freeway ramp. The murder was one of Milo’s first cases as a rookie homicide cop: a vicious killing that he failed to solve-and has haunted him ever since. Now, two decades later, someone has chosen to stir up the past. As Alex and Milo set out to uncover what really happened twenty years ago, their relentless investigation reaches deep into L.A.’s nerve centers of power and wealth-past and present. While peeling back layer after layer of ugly secrets, they discover that the murder of one forgotten girl has chilling ramifications that extend far beyond the tragic loss of a single life.
Flesh and Blood
Lauren Teague is a beautiful, defiant, borderline delinquent teenager when her parents bring her to Dr. Alex Delaware’s office. Lauren angrily resists Alex’s help—and the psychologist is forced to chalk Lauren up as one of the inevitable failures of his profession. Years later, when Alex and Lauren come face-to-face in a shocking encounter, both doctor and patient are stricken with shame. But the ultimate horror takes place when, soon after, Lauren’s brutalized corpse is found dumped in an alley. Alex disregards the advice of his trusted friend, LAPD detective Milo Sturgis, and jeopardizes his relationship with his longtime lover, Robin Castagna, in order to pursue Lauren’s killer. As he investigates his young patient’s troubled past, Alex enters the shadowy worlds of fringe psychological experimentation and the sex industry—and then into mortal danger, when lust and big money collide in an unforgiving Los Angeles.
Dr. Death
A brutalized corpse discovered in a remote region of the Hollywood Hills plunges psychologist-detective Alex Delaware into a landscape of rage and madness as he struggles to solve this most baffling of homicides.
To some, Eldon Mate was evil personified. Others saw the former physician as a saint. But one thing was clear: Dr. Death had snuffed out the lives of dozens of human beings and now someone had turned
him
into a victim. When Mate is found mutilated in a rented van, harnessed to his own killing machine, Delaware is asked to aid his old friend, homicide cop Milo Sturgis, in the hunt for the death doctor’s executioner. But Alex harbors secrets of his own that threaten to derail the partners’ friendship as well as the increasingly complex investigation. With page-turning suspense and vivid portraits of L.A.’s darkest side, perennial bestseller Jonathan Kellerman’s latest tale of psychopathology taken to the extreme delivers an unforgettable journey into the most sinister corners of the human mind.
Monster
A second-rate actor is found mutilated in a car trunk. Then a psychologist at a Los Angeles hospital for the criminally insane is murdered in a similar grisly fashion. Suddenly the incoherent ramblings of an inmate at the presumably secure institution begin to make chilling sense—they are, in fact, horrifying predictions. Yet how can a barely functional psychotic locked behind asylum walls possibly know such vivid details of crimes committed in the outside world? Drawn into a labyrinth of secrets, revenge, sex, and manipulation, Dr. Alex Delaware and Detective Milo Sturgis set out to unlock this enigma and put an end to the brutal killings—before the madman predicts their own demise. . . .
Billy Straight
A resourceful runaway alone in the wilds of Los Angeles, twelve-year-old Billy Straight suddenly witnesses a brutal stabbing in Griffith Park. Fleeing into the night, Billy cannot shake the horrific memory of the savage violence, nor the pursuit of a cold-blooded killer. For wherever Billy turns—from Hollywood Boulevard to the boardwalks of Venice—he is haunted by the
chuck chuck
sound of a knife sinking into flesh. As LAPD homicide detective Petra Connor desperately searches for the murderer, as the media swarms mercilessly around the story, the vicious madman stalks closer to his prey. Only Petra can save Billy. But it will take all her cunning to uncover a child lost in a fierce urban labyrinth—where a killer seems right at home. . . .
Survival of the Fittest
The daughter of a diplomat disappears on a school field trip—lured into the Santa Monica mountains and killed in cold blood. Her father denies the possibility of a political motive. There are no signs of struggle, no evidence of sexual assault, leaving psychologist Alex Delaware and his friend LAPD homicide detective Milo Sturgis to pose the disturbing question:
Why
?
Working together with Daniel Sharavi, a brilliant Israeli police inspector, Delaware and Sturgis soon find themselves ensnared in one of the darkest, most menacing cases of their careers. And when death strikes again, it is Alex who must go undercover, alone, to expose an unthinkable conspiracy of self-righteous brutality and total contempt for human life.
The Clinic
Professor Hope Devane’s male-bashing pop-psych bestseller created a storm of controversy on the talk-show circuit. Now she is dead, brutally slashed on a quiet street in one of L.A.’s safest neighborhoods. The LAPD’s investigation has gone cold, and homicide detective Milo Sturgis turns to his friend Dr. Alex Delaware for a psychological profile of the victim—and a portrait of a killer.
Hope Devane had very different public and private faces. The killer could be any one of the millions who read her book, or someone from the personal life she kept so carefully separate. As Alex and Milo dig deeper into her shadowy past, they will set an elaborate trap for her killer . . . and reveal the unspeakable act that triggered a dark chain of violence.
The Web
Psychologist-detective Dr. Alex Delaware finds terror in the heart of paradise in this relentlessly sinister novel by America’s premier writer of psychological suspense. Three months in paradise, all expenses paid. It’s an invitation Alex Delaware can’t refuse. Dr. Woodrow Wilson Moreland, a revered scientist and philanthropist on the tiny Pacific island of Aruk, has invited Alex to his home to help him organize his papers for publication—a light workload leaving Alex plenty of time to enjoy a romantic interlude with Robin Castagna.
Quickly, however, secretive houseguests, frightening nocturnal visitors, and the elusive Dr. Moreland himself dim the pleasures of deep blue water and white sand.
The cases Moreland chooses to share—a patient driven to madness by a cruel, unspeakable act; a man who succumbed forty years ago to radiation poisoning after a nuclear blast; a young woman, brutally murdered, whose mutilated body was found on the beach just six months before—seem unconnected. And yet Alex can’t help wondering what the good doctor is trying to tell him . . . and what Moreland’s real reason for inviting him to Aruk is.
As Alex probes—with a little long-distance help from his friend LAPD detective Milo Sturgis—he comes to believe the answer lies hidden somewhere on Moreland’s vast estate. Yet when he finally discovers the truth, the revelation will be more shocking than he could have imagined. And it will come too late to stem the tide of violence that threatens guilty and innocent alike on the lovely lost island of Aruk.
Once again, with his brilliant characterizations and rapid-fire pace, Jonathan Kellerman has redefined the boundaries of suspense, probing real-life horrors and innermost fears in a novel that transfixes from first page to last.
Self-Defense
Dr. Alex Delaware doesn’t see many private patients anymore, but the young woman called Lucy is an exception. So is her dream. Lucy Lowell is referred to Alex by Los Angeles police detective Milo Sturgis. A juror at the agonizing trial of a serial killer, Lucy survived the trauma only to be tormented by a recurring nightmare: a young child in the forest at night, watching a strange and furtive act.
Now Lucy’s dream is starting to disrupt her waking life, and Alex is concerned. The power of the dream, its grip on Lucy’s emotions, suggests to him that it may be more than a nightmare. It may be the repressed childhood memory of something very real. Something like murder.
Bad Love
It came in a plain brown wrapper, no return address—an audiocassette recording of a horrifying, soul-lacerating scream, followed by the sound of a childlike voice chanting: “Bad love. Bad love. Don’t give me the bad love.” For Alex Delaware the tape is the first intimation that he is about to enter a living nightmare. Others soon follow: disquieting laughter echoing over a phone line that suddenly goes dead, a chilling act of trespass and vandalism. He has become the target of a carefully orchestrated campaign of vague threats and intimidation rapidly building to a crescendo as harassment turns to terror, mischief to madness.
With the help of his friend LAPD detective Milo Sturgis, Alex uncovers a series of violent deaths that may follow a diabolical pattern. And if he fails to decipher the twisted logic of the stalker’s mind games, Alex will be the next to die.
The Devil’s Waltz
The doctors call it Munchausen by proxy, the terrifying disease that causes parents to induce illness in their own children. Now, in his most frightening case, Dr. Alex Delaware may have to prove that a child’s own mother or father is making her sick.
Twenty-one-month-old Cassie Jones is bright, energetic, the picture of health. Yet her parents rush her to the emergency room night after night with medical symptoms no doctor can explain. Cassie’s parents seem sympathetic and deeply concerned. Her favorite nurse is a model of devotion. Yet when child psychologist Alex Delaware is called in to investigate, instinct tells him that one of them may be a monster.
Then a physician at the hospital is brutally murdered. A shadowy death is revealed. And Alex and his friend LAPD detective Milo Sturgis have only hours to uncover the link between these shocking events and the fate of an innocent child.
Private Eyes
The voice belongs to a woman, but Dr. Alex Delaware remembers a little girl. It is eleven years since seven-year-old Melissa Dickinson dialed the hospital help line for comfort—and found it in therapy with Alex Delaware. Now the lovely young heiress is desperately calling for the psychologist’s help once more. Only this time it looks like Melissa’s deepest childhood nightmare is really coming true.
Twenty years ago, Gina Dickinson, Melissa’s mother, suffered a grisly assault that left the budding actress irreparably scarred and emotionally crippled. Now her acid-wielding assailant is out of prison and back in L.A.—and Melissa is terrified that the monster has returned to hurt Gina again. But before Alex Delaware can even begin to soothe his former patient’s fears, Gina, a recluse for twenty years, disappears. And now, unless Delaware turns crack detective to uncover the truth, Gina Dickinson will be just one more victim of a cold fury that has already spawned madness . . . and murder.
Time Bomb
By the time psychologist Dr. Alex Delaware reached the school the damage was done: A sniper had opened fire on a crowded playground, but was gunned down before any children were hurt.
While the TV news crews feasted on the scene and Alex began his therapy sessions with the traumatized children, he couldn’t escape the image of a slight teenager clutching an oversized rifle. What was the identity behind the name and face: a would-be assassin, or just another victim beneath an indifferent California sky? Intrigued by a request from the sniper’s father to conduct a “psychological autopsy” of his child, Alex begins to uncover a strange pattern—it is a trail of blood. In the dead sniper’s past was a dark and vicious plot. And in Alex Delaware’s future is the stuff of grown-up nightmares: the face of real human evil.
Silent Partner
At a party for a controversial Los Angeles sex therapist, Alex encounters a face from his own past—Sharon Ramson, an exquisite, alluring lover who left him abruptly more that a decade earlier. Sharon now hints that she desperately needs help, but Alex evades her. The next day she is dead, an apparent suicide.
Driven by guilt and sadness, Alex plunges into the maze of Sharon’s life—a journey that will take him through the pleasure palaces of California’s ultra-rich, into the alleyways of the mind, where childhood terrors still hold sway.
The Butcher’s Theater
They call the ancient hills of Jerusalem the butcher’s theater. Here, upon this bloodstained stage, a faceless killer performs his violent specialty. The first to die brutally is a girl. She is drained of blood, then carefully bathed and shrouded in white. Precisely one week later, a second victim is found.
From the sacred Wailing Wall to monasteries where dark secrets are cloistered, from black-clad Bedouin enclaves to labyrinthine midnight alleys, veteran police inspector Daniel Sharavi and his crack team plunge deep into a city simmering with religious and political passions to hunt for a murderer whose insatiable taste for bloodshed could destroy the delicate balance on which Jerusalem’s very survival depends.
Over the Edge
When six young prostitutes are found strangled in Los Angeles, an investigation begins that takes the reader on a wild ride involving powerful families and close friends. Child psychologist Alex Delaware has received a garbled, middle-of-the-night crisis call from an ex-patient. As Dr. Delaware becomes involved, he stumbles on a deep secret, one that has existed for over forty years. Along with detective Milo Sturgis, Delaware is about to find himself on a journey into an unforgettably brutal world of madness and murderous passion.
Blood Test
It is a case unlike any psychologist Dr. Alex Delaware has ever encountered. Five-year-old Woody Swope is ill, but the real problem is his parents. They refuse to agree to the one treatment that could save this boy’s life.