Isaac’s battle with his pocket continued. All told, seconds of struggle, but it felt like years.
Suppressing panic, he stopped. Analyzed. Felt around. Some metal piece on the gun, maybe a rough spot on the barrel, was snagged on fleece threads, the key was to free it with a circular movement rather than fight and twist it tighter.
Thad Doebbler, his foot still on the girl’s back, stepped forward with his free leg. Long leg, big stride, the motion brought him within two feet of Isaac’s head. Striking distance.
He lifted the weapon and Isaac danced back, while yanking his pants upward. Tight around the crotch. He’d given himself a fucking wedgie and Thad Doebbler laughed.
See me now, Petra. Idiotclownidiotclown.
The little dark girl moaned in pain.
Thad Doebbler closed another few inches of the space between him and Isaac.
Isaac said, “Let her go or I’ll shoot you. I mean it.”
Thad Doebbler regarded Isaac with amusement. “With what? Your little dick?”
Isaac yanked the gun free. Stepped within the downward arc of Thad Doebbler’s murderous arm. Dodged the crushing blow by inches and managed to maintain his balance as he aimed upward.
For the handsome face.
He pressed the trigger.
Shut his eyes involuntarily and kept pressing.
CHAPTER 55
MONDAY, JULY 1, UPPER ROCKRIDGE DISTRICT, OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA, RESIDENCE OF THORNTON “THAD” DOEBBLER
A historian, Thad.
A renaissance man, of sorts. Website designer, graphic artist, alternative comix illustrator, computer animator.
Sculptor in Lucite and polymer resins and space-age plastics.
Abstract stuff, not to Petra’s taste. But she was forced to admit that his work showed talent. Serpentine twists of translucent rods imbedded with polychrome fiber-optic filaments, good eye for balance and composition.
Last year he’d exhibited across the bay in San Francisco, at a Post Street gallery. Two to three grand per piece and three had sold.
P-Kasso.
Him and Omar. Her year for artists.
Bundles of spare Lucite rods in various sizes were stacked neatly in Doebbler’s garage.
The largest size conformed to the June 28 skull compressions.
When she’d met him at his brother’s, he’d claimed his home base as San Francisco. But his digs were in Oakland, nice part of town, a cute little mock Tudor on a hill, landscaped prettily. No bay view, but a tree-framed rectangle of the Oakland hills was visible from the second-floor bedroom.
Nothing in the bedroom but clothing, a few true-crime paperbacks, and a TV on a card table. The rest of the house was similarly spartan.
Attached to the garage, out back, was a four-hundred-square-foot windowless cinder-block add-on secured by a bolted steel door. Thad Doebbler’s track-lit studio.
Thad Doebbler’s museum.
A man of parts, Thad. More useful to Petra, a damned egomaniac and compulsive chronicler of his own dark side.
Twenty-four years of dark side.
The guy had kept every playbill, airline ticket, and receipt cataloged compulsively. Within moments, Petra was able to verify his quarterly flights to L.A. But Petra already knew that Uncle Thad stayed with older brother Kurt and niece Katya in the house on Rosita.
Bunking down in a spare bedroom next to Katya’s, where he kept a few pairs of pants, three shirts, a leather jacket, and a black Italian sports coat. Nothing of obvious forensic value, until the techies managed to scrape tiny little stains from two of the shirts and a jeans leg that had somehow managed to survive laundering and pressing.
Maybe it was Kurt Doebbler’s inefficient, balky Kenmore washing machine, a contraption characterized by solemn-eyed Katya as: “Crap. It leaks all the time and never really cleans stuff the way you want it.”
Dagger eyes at dad.
Kurt had flinched- finally some emotion. “I’ll get a new one, Katie.”
“You always say that.”
Three of the stains were too degraded for DNA analysis. One was a perfect match to Marta Doebbler, another fit Coral Langdon’s genetic makeup, a third matched that of Navy Ensign Darren Ares Hochenbrenner.
Petra had made it to the scene after hearing about it on her scanner. Hearing it during the debacle at Kurt Doebbler’s house.
When she got there, Isaac was being treated like a suspect by two Hollywood D’s who didn’t know him well enough. He’d dropped Councilman Gilbert Reyes’s name and that of Deputy Chief Randy Diaz. Finally, someone called Diaz, who drove up in a Corvette dressed in black velvet sweats and two-hundred-dollar running shoes. Just in time for Petra to grab him and brief him.
“The kid solved it, sir.” She spat out details.
Diaz said, “Impressive. Think he’ll share credit with the department?”
“I don’t think credit matters to him,” said Petra. “He’s a good kid, a great kid. I vouch for him absolutely.”
Diaz smiled. Probably thinking she was in no shape to vouch for anyone.
“That’s big of you, Detective.”
“He earned it.”
Isaac using an illegal gun to kill Thad could be a problem, they agreed.
Diaz said, “It can be dealt with.” Long, searching look of Petra’s face. “So can your issues, Detective. If everyone’s discreet. There’re going to be some changes in your division. I’d like them to be smooth.”
“What changes?”
Diaz put a finger over his lips. Walked over to Isaac.
The following night, Petra flew to Oakland, and Sunday morning, accompanied by a friendly Oakland D named Arvin Ludd, she began the first of two solid days in the cinder-block trove.
Finding the best stuff in a double-wide black filing cabinet, a folder marked “Travel.”
Beautiful penmanship, ol’ Thad. He’d filled three muslin-bound, made-in-France notebooks with detailed accounts of murderous fantasies initiated at age twelve.
The melding of sex and violence and power, solidified by a chance encounter with a copy of the Teller booklet, found in a Hamburg antiques store.
“Retzak is me and I am him. I don’t know why people like us are what we are. We just are. I like it.”
After that: a lifetime of converting fantasy to reality.
Thad described his failure to murder the German cake-icer, Gudrun Wiegeland, as “an understandable lapse, given my youth and inexperience, plus a modicum- but only that- of anxiety.” At the time of the Wiegeland bludgeoning “with a crowbar borrowed from the base auto-shop,” he’d been a sixteen-year-old Army brat. Two years younger than “Ever Pedestrian Kurt.”
Perhaps Thad’s anxiety had been higher than he was willing to admit. By his own account, it took another eight years for him to try another murder.
After a two-year stint in the Army, most of it spent as a layout editor for a military newspaper in Manila, Thad moved to Pittsburgh and enrolled in Carnegie-Mellon as an art and design major. (“Andy Warhol’s alma mater. They told me he drew shoes for newspapers ads. I am a good deal more conceptual.”) Soon after graduation, he waylaid an eighteen-year-old co-ed named Randi Corey as she enjoyed a late-night campus jog.
June 28, 1987. The spring semester had ended but Corey had remained for the summer to practice with a gymnastic coach.
Thad Doebbler had stayed in town to murder her.
The girl incurred three crushing blows to the back of her skull, and according to a newspaper clipping Thad had mounted in Volume 1 of his chronicles, was “likely to remain in a persistent vegetative state.”
“When I cracked her open, I did manage to get a look at the gelatin. But not much, the bones wouldn’t give when I tried to pry them apart. Then I heard someone coming and skedaddled. It was two days later that I learned I’d, once again, inexplicably, failed to exert enough pressure to snuff the soul candle. I will not repeat that transgression.”