Two months later, a fifty-two-year-old university maintenance man, Herbert Lincoln, succumbed to a fatal braining as he walked to his car in an off-campus lot. From what Petra could tell, no connection had been made between the homicide and the attack on Randi Corey.
Young woman, older man. Some accordance with Otto Retzak’s pattern, but Doebbler had veered from the June 28 routine.
Still in training. The deviation hadn’t muted his feelings of triumph.
“I studied him as he leaked, watched the spark leave his eyes and sketched the phases. A wholer sense of completion can’t be imagined.”
Sandwiched into the book were the drawings.
Horrible because the bastard really could draw.
End of Volume 1.
As Petra put it aside and picked up the next notebook, she made a mental note to try to locate the Pittsburgh detectives who’d worked Corey and Lincoln. Find out if the girl was still alive; her family and Lincoln’s would want to know.
She flipped the next book open. Arvin Ludd said, “Interesting?”
“If you like that kind of thing.”
He smiled, crossed his legs. While Petra worked, he’d mostly mellowed out in Thad Doebbler’s original, mint-condition Eames chair. Now he got up and stretched. “I’m about ready for a coffee fix. Want a latte or something?”
“Double espresso if they have it.”
“You got it.” Ludd was boyish, dark, blue-eyed. Well-dressed and laid-back almost to a fault and probably gay. Swinging his car keys, he left the block building.
Left alone, Petra was hit by the stillness of the room. Silent, cold. Perfect kill-spot. Perfect dungeon.
Had Doebbler ever brought any victims home? Preliminary luminol tests had found no blood. But she wondered. She’d suggested to Ludd that Oakland P.D. bring cadaver dogs and sonar for the backyard. He’d listened, nodded, hadn’t said yes or no. Hard to read the guy. Maybe he wasn’t gay…
Volume 2.
Here we go.
After murdering Herbert Lincoln, Thad had adhered to the June 28 pattern. But not with yearly regularity. Being a salaried employee had constrained him; the crimes had depended upon his travel schedule.
June 28, 1989: A computer seminar in Los Gatos, California. Thad had flown in from Philadelphia, where’d he’d been temping as a bank teller while seeking employment in the computer animation biz. Shortly after midnight, Barbara Bohannon, the secretary to an Intel executive, was brained in the subterranean parking lot of her hotel. Bohannon’s missing purse led investigators to suspect robbery as a motive.
Doebbler had emptied the purse and tossed it, keeping the cash and the credit cards and the photos of Bohannon’s husband and three-year-old son. Spending the money; filing the rest under “Souvenirs.”
His drawing of the woman showed her to be round-faced, fair-haired, pleasant-looking even in death. Wood fibers embedded in her hair said Doebbler hadn’t discovered the magic of plastic.
June 28, 1991: Back in Philly, another computer conference. A year before, Doebbler had obtained work with an on-line start-up in San Mateo, only to be laid off, no reason given. Selling optioned stock bought him the house in Oakland and some time to try life as a freelance. A sculptor in Lucite.
At one-fifteen A.M., the body of Melvyn Lassiter, a room-service waiter at the Inn at Penn, was found on a street in West Philadelphia. Crushed skull, missing wallet. Lassiter’s wife reported that Melvyn routinely brought home food from the hotel kitchen. No trace of such near the corpse.
“Pasta primavera, broiled salmon. Yummy. The Caesar salad was a bit limp, but once I got rid of the soggy croutons, not half-bad.”
June 28, 1992: Denver, Colorado. Animation conference. Ethel Ferguson, fifty-six, a breeder of standard poodles, was found bludgeoned in a wooded area near her home.
June 28, 1995: Oceanside, California, Matthias Delano Brown, seaman, USN, brained near the docks. Thad Doebbler has taken a three-day vacation in La Jolla, traveling solo, staying at the La Valencia Hotel. (“Lovely; a well-deserved splurge. I saw dolphins from my window.”)
Then: sister-in-law Marta.
Lover Marta.
Thad accounted the affair in prurient detail, rhapsodizing equally about the release of Marta’s “pent-up, Teutonic sexuality” and the pleasure at demeaning Ever Pedestrian Kurt. (“Henceforth referred to as EPT.”)
During the three-month adultery, he traveled to L.A. twelve times, telling his brother that he’d gotten an illustration job at a Beverly Hills ad agency.
“In reality, my job was waiting until EPT had departed for his ever pedestrian employment, then fucking Marta’s brains out- ah, the irony- in her marital bed. She’d start off pretending to be reluctant, but always gave in. She ended up being one hell of a screamer. I decided it would be nice to hear different kinds of screams pouring out of her starting-to-pucker, hausfrau mouth. She was beginning to grow emotional and tiresome.”
A near-disaster was averted when Kurt returned home shortly after leaving to get a trade journal he’d left near his recliner. “EPT didn’t even bother to come upstairs to say hi to M, just collected his mag and left. He has no social skills, never did. Lucky for M and me, as we were in the throes, connected rather, ahem, deeply. I placed a hand over her mouth and succeeded in not laughing myself.”
After that, Marta insisted they tryst at motels over the hill, in Hollywood and West Hollywood.
The “downtown errands” she’d lied about to her friends.
When Marta announced to Thad that she loved him, was ready to leave Kurt and Katya, he decided to kill her.
He thought it out, waited until her theater night. Phoned her cell from a nearby booth, telling her he was just around the corner, had planned a surprise: meeting her at her car after the show. He’d booked a room at the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel- a suite, actually. But now, he wasn’t feeling well. Chest pains, probably nothing more than indigestion, but he was going to drive himself over to the Hollywood Presbyterian emergency room just to make sure. He’d call her when he was through.
She freaked and insisted on taking him. Met him at her car. Before she knew it, he was sitting behind the wheel. Driving away. Looking fine.
She said, Thought you were sick.
He laughed, told her they were through.
She began sobbing, wanted to know why. Begged to know why.
He parked on a dark side street. Took her in his arms, kissed her. Shoved her away roughly and got out.
She went after him. Tried to hit him.
He got hold of her arm, twisted, shoved her to the ground and smashed the back of her skull with the Lucite club he’d concealed in his coat. The specially stitched internal pocket he’d fashioned. Good with his hands, ol’ Thad.
She whimpered. Stopped.
“I’d had this woman at will, knew her as intimately as one can know anyone. Yet her jelly was no different to me than any other. Nevertheless, this jaunt solidified my goals; this was the closest I’d come to ecstasy. And to honoring the memory of that sage, O.R. Something worth appreciating. Worth celebrating yearly.”
Feeling her emotions begin to click off, Petra read the rest of it quickly, turned to the back of the notebook, found the postmortem sketches of Marta Doebbler. And the others.
Something different about his portrait of Marta. Something searching- needy and adoring- in the woman’s eyes.
Dead, but he’d drawn her eyes full of life.
That evening, in her room at the Jack London Inn, she took a very long, very hot bath, watched Court TV, and managed to keep a room service cheeseburger down.
Pleasant room: white walls, blue bedding. Rates higher than the department would normally compensate but she’d found a good deal on the Internet.