“What convinced her to quit?”
“Who knows? One day she just called up Mother and announced that there was no future for popular music. As if she’d made the choice. What a loon.”
“And soon after that, Brad was gone.”
“Guess she no longer needed him...now that we’re talking about it, I realize how bad it must’ve been for him. Used and discarded. If he was bothered, he didn’t show it. Just the opposite, he was always calm, nothing got to him. That’s not normal, either, is it? Would you be my psychological consultant?”
“Get a contract and we’ll talk. What about Captain Dowd?”
“What about him?”
“Was he involved in the band?”
“He wasn’t involved in anything I ever saw. Which wasn’t that different from most fathers in the neighborhood. But they were gone because of work. Captain Dowd lived off inheritance, never held down a job.”
“How’d he spend his time?”
“Golf, tennis, collecting cars and wine and whatever. Lots of vacations abroad. Or, as my mother called them, ‘grand tours.’ ”
“Where?”
“Europe, I guess.”
“Did he travel with his wife?”
“Sometimes,” she said, “but mostly it was by himself. That was the official story.”
“Unofficially?”
She played with her glass. “Let’s put it this way: once I overheard Father joking to a golf buddy about how the captain had joined the navy to be close to boys in tight blue uniforms.”
“He traveled with young men?”
“More like traveled to find young men.”
“The rumor mill,” I said.
“Keeps the grass green,” she said.
“Captain Dowd being gay was public knowledge?”
“If my father knew, everyone did. He seemed like a nice enough man— the captain. But not much of a presence. Maybe that’s why Amelia flirted with everyone.”
“Including Brad,” I said.
“I guess they were all crazy,” she said. “Does that explain what happened?”
“It’s a start.”
“That’s not much of an answer.”
“I’m still figuring out the questions.”
Amber eyes hardened and I thought she’d come back with a sharp retort. Instead, she stood and smoothed the front of her trousers. “Gotta run.”
I thanked her again for her time.
She said, “I know you were snowing me about keeping an open mind, but I’d like to call you if a hot property comes up. Something really worth your while, it’s a terrific time in the market for someone in your position. How about a phone number?”
I gave her a card, paid for the drinks, and walked her to her silver Mercedes roadster.
She got in, started up the car, lowered the top. “I’ll probably never do a book, hate writing. Maybe a cable movie.”
“Good luck.”
“It’s strange,” she said, “after you called, I tried to make sense of it— looking back for something that could’ve predicted it.”
“Come up with anything?”
“This is probably irrelevant— I’m sure I’m reading all kinds of crazy things into insignificant stuff. But if what they’re saying about what happened to those people is true...the gory details, I mean...”
“They’re true.”
She drew a compact from her purse, checked her face in the mirror, tamped her hair, put on a pair of sunglasses. “Mrs. D had this routine she’d go through. When we goofed off during rehearsal, which was often, and she lost her patience but was trying not to show it because she wanted to be one of the gang. Like Mama Cowsill or Shirley Jones.”
“Cool mom,” I said.
“As if that’s ever possible...anyway, what she’d do is start clapping her hands to quiet us down, then she’d make like she was the Red Queen— from Alice in Wonderland. The first few times she announced it. ‘I am the Red Queen and I will be obeyed!’ Eventually we caught on. Whenever she clapped it was going to be a Red Queen routine. Which consisted of her spouting lines like ‘I’m five times richer and cleverer than you,’ or ‘What use is a child with no meaning?’ I took it for just another of her eccentricities, but maybe...”
She went silent.
“Maybe what?”
“This will probably sound literal to you. After spouting all this Lewis Carroll stuff, she’d scrunch up her eyebrows and cackle and raise a finger in the air and start waving it around. Like she was testing the wind. If we still weren’t paying attention— which we usually weren’t— she’d let out this honking noise, could’ve been a man’s it was so deep. Then she’d make goofy eyes and shake her chest like a stripper gone berserk. She was big up there, it was ridiculous.”
Running her hands over her own narrow torso.
“Finally, if we still weren’t toeing the line, then she’d lower her hand like this, and run it across her throat and place both hands on her hips and scream, ‘Off with your heads!’ It was silly but creepy, I hated when she did it. Nora and Billy didn’t seem to care.”
“And Brad?”
“That’s the thing,” she said. “Brad used to smile. One of those private smiles. Like it was a private joke between him and Amelia. You know about his hobby, right? He was really into it back then. Had all kinds of knives, used to carry knives around. I never saw him hurt anyone and he was never threatening. At least not to me. So it probably means nothing— Amelia with her hand over her throat.”
I said nothing.
Elise Van Syoc said, “Right?”
CHAPTER 48
I drove over the hill thinking about what family had meant to the Dowd kids.
Boundaries were to be blurred, people were to be used, performance was all.
Brad had been abandoned, taken in reluctantly, exploited, expelled. Brought back to be pressed into service by a woman who resented him and lusted for him.
Years later, after her death, he’d wormed his way back into the family and attained the power role. Knowing he’d never belonged, never would.
By that time, he’d murdered Juliet Dutchey. Maybe other women yet to be discovered.
Reserving his boyhood hobby for three victims.
Back when Milo and I had been theorizing, he’d wondered out loud about Cathy and Andy Gaidelas being parental symbols.
You guys still believe in the Oedipal thing?
More than I did a few weeks ago.
Why Meserve?
The only time I’d seen Brad express overt anger was when he talked about Meserve.
Young, slick manipulator.
Brad seeing himself two decades younger?
Despite the smooth manner, the clothes, the cars— the image— did it all boil down to self-hatred?
A body hanging in a jail cell said maybe.
Used and discarded...it didn’t explain the extent of the horror. It never does. I wondered why I kept trying.
I reached Mulholland, coasted down past dream houses and other encumbrances, unable to let go.
Brad had been the ultimate actor. Protecting Billy and Nora, bedding her, stealing from both of them.
Pressing his own cousin into murderous service, then setting him up to be executed.
Coming on to another cousin— a female cop— at the same time he was being investigated by her colleagues in a showgirl’s disappearance.
Why not? Why would blood ties mean anything to him?
Marcia Peaty had no problem seeing Brad as evil but she was certain Cousin Reynold had just been a penny-ante loser.
Ex-cop, but way off. She’d be dealing with that for a long time. If she were my patient, I’d work at getting her to see she was human, nothing less, nothing more.
When you got down to it, rules and exceptions were hard to separate.
Church deacons sneak into dark houses and strangle families. Diplomats and CEOs and other respectable types embark on sex tours of Thailand.
Anyone can be fooled.
But for arrogance, Brad and Nora might’ve plied their hobby for years.
How long would it have taken before he looted the trust fund completely and decided Nora was no longer useful?
The jet card and the island off Belize said not long.
Did Nora— numbed, callous, perpetually stoned— have any idea her life had been saved?
What kind of life lay ahead for her? Initial severe depression, for sure, once the reality of prison life set in. If she was deep enough to suffer. If she coped and set up a prison theater, things could get rosier. Casting, directing. Experiencing. A few years down the line, she might even merit one of those rehab-miracle puff-pieces in the Times.
Or maybe I had too much faith in the system and Nora would never see the inside of a penitentiary cell.
Back on McCadden Place, walking her stuffed dog.
Stavros Menas was wasting no opportunity to shout that she was just another of Brad’s victims.
Milo and I had heard her joking about Meserve’s head but both of us could be made to look foolish on the stand and L.A. juries distrusted cops and shrinks. The disks showed her having consensual sex with Brad and Meserve but nothing more. No forensic evidence tied her directly to the killings and nowadays juries expected nifty science.
Menas would rack up billable hours trying to get everything ruled inadmissible. Maybe he’d put Nora on the stand and she’d finally get a starring role.
One way or the other, he’d earn his million.
The lawyers vying for stewardship of Billy Dowd’s diminished life would also do fine.
Still no callback from the judge who’d warehoused Billy and sentenced him to eating soft food with plastic utensils.
The time I’d visited, he’d called me his friend, put his his head on my shoulder, and wet my shirt with his tears.
What use is a child with no meaning?
Amelia Dowd had no idea what crop she’d cultivated.
I wondered what Captain William Dowd Junior had known as he’d ambled abroad on grand tours.
Both of them perishing in a car crash. Big Cadillac veering off the road and over a cliff on Route 1, on the way to the Pebble Beach auto show.
No suspicion it hadn’t been an accident.
But Brad had been in town the week they’d set out and Brad knew cars. Milo had raised that with the D.A. The prosecutors agreed it was interesting theoretically but the evidence was long gone, Brad was dead, time to concentrate on building a case against a living defendant.
Time for me to...?
Robin’s truck was parked in front of the house. I expected to find her in a back room, drawing or reading or napping. She was waiting for me in the living room, sitting on the big couch with her legs tucked under her. A sleeveless, sky-colored dress set off her hair. Her eyes were clear and her feet were bare.
“Learn anything?” she said.
“That maybe I should’ve taken up accounting.”
She got up, took me by the hand, led me toward the kitchen.
“Sorry, not hungry,” I said.
“I wouldn’t expect you to be.” We continued into the service porch.
A plastic pet crate sat in front of the washer-dryer. Not Spike’s crate, she’d junked that. Not in the spot Spike’s crate had occupied. Off slightly to the left.
Robin kneeled, unlatched the grate, drew out a wrinkly fawn-colored thing.
Flat face, rabbit ears, moist black nose. Huge brown eyes met Robin’s, then aimed at me.
“You can name her,” she said.
“Her?”
“I figure you deserved that. No more macho competition. She’s from a championship line with great disposition.”
She rubbed the puppy’s belly, handed her over.
Warm as toast, almost small enough to fit in one hand. I tickled a fuzzy, blunt chin. A pink tongue shot out and the puppy craned the way bulldogs do. One of the rabbit ears flopped over.
“It’ll take a couple of weeks before they stay up,” said Robin.
Spike had been a lead-boned package of muscle and grit. This one was buttery-soft.
“How old?” I said.
“Ten weeks.”
“Runt of the litter?”
“The breeder promises she’ll fill in.”
The puppy began licking my fingers. I brought her closer to my face and she tongue-bathed my chin. She smelled of dog shampoo and that innate perfume that helps puppies get nurtured.
I scratched her chin again. She jutted her mandible in response. Licked my fingers some more, made a throaty sound closer to feline than canine.
“Love at first sight,” said Robin. She petted the puppy but the puppy pressed closer to me.
Robin laughed. “I’m really in for it.”
“That so?” I asked the puppy. “Or is it just infatuation?”
The puppy stared at me, followed every syllable with those huge brown eyes.
Lowering her head, she nuzzled my cheek, purred some more, butted until her knobby little cranium was buried under my chin. Squirming, she finally found a position she liked.
Closed her eyes, fell asleep. Snored softly.
“Mellow,” I said.
“We could use a bit of that, don’t you think?”
“We could,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Sure,” she said, tousling my hair. “Now, who’s getting up tonight for housebreaking?”
The End
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jonathan Kellerman is one of the world’s most popular authors. He has brought his expertise as a clinical psychologist to two dozen bestselling crime novels, including the Alex Delaware series, The Butcher’s Theater, Billy Straight, The Conspiracy Club, and Twisted. With his wife, the novelist Faye Kellerman, he co-authored the bestseller Double Homicide. He is the author of numerous essays, short stories, scientific articles, two children’s books, and three volumes of psychology, including Savage Spawn: Reflections on Violent Children. He has won the Goldwyn, Edgar, and Anthony awards, and has been nominated for a Shamus Award. Jonathan and Faye Kellerman live in California and New Mexico. Their four children include the novelist Jesse Kellerman. Visit the author’s website at www.jonathankellerman.com.
Gone is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2006 by Jonathan Kellerman
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN-13: 978-0-345-49089-6
eISBN-10: 0-345-49089-4
www.ballantinebooks.com
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
&nb
sp; CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
Gone Page 40
