Dr. Death Read online

  Dr. Death

  Alex Delaware [14]

  Kellerman, Jonathan

  Ballantine Books (2000)

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  Tags: Alex Delaware

  Alex Delawarettt

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  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.

  Dr. Death

  Alex Delaware – Book 14

  By Jonathan Kellerman

  THIS ONE'S FOR

  DR. JERRY DASH

  1

  IRONY CAN BE a rich dessert, so when the contents of the van were publicized, some people gorged. The ones who'd believed Eldon H. Mate to be the Angel of Death.

  Those who'd considered him Mercy Personified grieved.

  I viewed it through a different lens, had my own worries.

  • • •

  Mate was murdered in the very early hours of a sour-smelling, fog-laden Monday in September. No earthquakes or wars interceded by sundown, so the death merited a lead story on the evening news. Newspaper headlines in the Times and the Daily News followed on Tuesday. TV dropped the story within twenty-four hours, but recaps ran in the Wednesday papers. In total, four days of coverage, the maximum in short-attention-span L.A. unless the corpse is that of a princess or the killer can afford lawyers who yearn for Oscars.

  No easy solve on this one; no breaks of any kind. Milo had been doing his job long enough not to expect otherwise.

  He'd had an easy summer, catching a quartet of lovingly stupid homicides during July and August— one domestic violence taken to the horrible extreme and three brain-dead drunks shooting other inebriates in squalid Westside bars. Four murderers hanging around long enough to be caught. It kept his solve rate high, made it a bit— but not much— easier to be the only openly gay detective in LAPD.

  "Knew I was due," he said. It was the Sunday after the murder when he phoned me at the house. Mate's corpse had been cold for six days and the press had moved on.

  That suited Milo just fine. Like any artist, he craved solitude. He'd played his part by not giving the press anything to work with. Orders from the brass. One thing he and the brass could agree on: reporters were almost always the enemy.

  What the papers had printed was squeezed out of clip-file biographies, the inevitable ethical debates, old photos, old quotes. Beyond the fact that Mate had been hooked up to his own killing machine, only the sketchiest details had been released:

  Van parked on a remote section of Mulholland Drive, discovery by hikers just after dawn.

  DR. DEATH MURDERED.

  I knew more because Milo told me.

  The call came in at eight P.M. just as Robin and I had finished dinner. I was out the door, holding on to the straining leash of Spike, our little French bulldog. Pooch and I both looking forward to a night walk up the glen. Spike loved the dark because pointing at scurrying sounds let him pretend he was a noble hunter. I enjoyed getting out because I worked with people all day and solitude was always welcome.

  Robin answered the phone, caught me in time, ended up doing dog-duty as I returned to my study.

  "Mate's yours?" I said, surprised because he hadn't told me sooner. Suddenly edgy because that added a whole new layer of complexity to my week.

  "Who else merits such blessing?"

  I laughed softly, feeling my shoulders humping, rings of tension around my neck. The moment I'd heard about Mate I'd worried. Deliberated for a long time, finally made a call that hadn't been returned. I'd dropped the issue because there'd been no good reason not to. It really wasn't any of my business. Now, with Milo involved, all that had changed.

  I kept the worries to myself. His call had nothing to do with my problem. Coincidence— one of those nasty little overlaps. Or maybe there really are only a hundred people in the world.

  His reason for getting in touch was simple: the dreaded W word: whodunit. A case with enough psychopathology to make me potentially useful.

  Also, I was his friend, one of the few people left in whom he could confide.

  The psychopathology part was fine with me. What bothered me was the friendship component. Things I knew but didn't tell him. Couldn't tell him.

  2

  I AGREED TO meet him at the crime scene the following Monday at 7:45 A.M. When he's at the West L.A. station, we usually travel together, but he was already scheduled for a 6:15 meeting downtown at Parker Center, so I drove myself.

  "Sunrise prayer session?" I said. "Milking the cows with guys in suits?"

  "Cleaning the stable while guys in suits rate my performance. Gonna have to find a clean tie."

  "Is the topic Mate?"

  "What else. They'll demand to know why I haven't accomplished squat, I'll nod a lot, say 'Yassuh, yassuh,' shuffle off."

  • • •

  Mate had been butchered fairly close to my home, and I set out at seven-thirty. The first leg of the trip was ten minutes north on Beverly Glen, the Seville fairly sailing because I was going against traffic, ignoring the angry faces of commuters incarcerated by the southbound crush.

  Economic recovery and the customary graft had spurred unremitting roadwork in L.A., and hellish traffic was the result. This month it was the bottom of the glen: smug men in orange CalTrans vests installing new storm drains just in time for the next drought, the usual municipal division of labor: one guy working for every five standing around. Feeling like a pre-Bastille Royalist, I sped past the queue of Porsches and Jaguars forced to idle with clunkers and pickups. Democracy by oppression, everyone coerced into bumper-nudging intimacy.

  At Mulholland, I turned left and drove four miles west, past seismically strained dream houses and empty lots that said optimism wasn't for everyone. The road coiled, scything through weeds, brush, saplings, other kindling, twisted upward sharply and changed to packed, ocher soil as the asphalt continued east and was renamed Encino Hills Drive.

  Up here, at the top of the city, Mulholland had become a dirt road. I'd hiked here as a grad student, thrilling at the sight of antlered bucks, foxes, falcons, catching my breath at the furtive shifting of high grass that could be cougars. But that had been years ago, and the suddenness of the transformation from highway to impasse caught me by surprise. I hit the brakes hard, steered onto the rise, parked below the table of sallow dirt.

  Milo was already there, his copper-colored unmarked pulled up in front of a warning sign posted by the county: seven miles of unfinished road followed, no vehicles permitted. A locked gate said that L.A. motorists couldn't be trusted.

  He hitched his pants, loped forward, took my hand in both of his giant mitts.

  "Alex."

  "Big guy."

  He had on a fuzzy-looking green tweed jacket, brown twill pants, white shirt with a twisted collar, string tie with a big, misshapen turquoise clasp. The tie looked like tourist junk. A new fashion statement; I knew he'd put it on to needle the brass at this morning's meeting.
r />   "Going cowboy?"

  "My Georgia O'Keeffe period."

  "Natty."

  He gave a low, rumbling laugh, pushed a lick of dry black hair off his brow, squinted off to the right. Focusing on a spot that told me exactly where the van had been found.

  Not up the dirt road, where untrimmed live oaks would have provided cover. Right here, on the turnoff, out in the open.

  I said, "No attempt to conceal."

  He shrugged and jammed his hands in his pockets. He looked tired, washed-out, worn down by violence and small print.

  Or maybe it was just the time of year. September can be a rotten month in L.A., throat-constrictingly hot or clammy cold, shadowed by a grimy marine layer that turns the city into a pile of soiled laundry. When September mornings start out dreary they ooze into sooty afternoons and sickly nights. Sometimes blue peeks through the clouds for a nanosecond. Sometimes the sky sweats and a leaky-roof drizzle glazes windshields. For the past few years resident experts have been blaming it on El Niño, but I don't recall it ever being any different.

  September light is bad for the complexion. Milo's didn't need any further erosion. The gray morning light fed his pallor and deepened the pockmarks that peppered his cheeks and ran down his neck. White sideburns below still-thick black hair turned his temples into a zebra-striped stunt. He'd gone back to drinking moderately and his weight had stabilized—240 was my guess— much of it settling around his middle. His legs remained skinny stilts, comprising a good share of his seventy-five inches. His jowls, always monumental, had given way around the edges. We were about the same age— he was nine months older— so I supposed my jawline had surrendered a bit, too. I didn't spend much time looking in the mirror.

  He walked to the kill-spot and I followed. Faint chevrons of tire tracks corrugated the yellow soil. Nearby lay a scrap of yellow cordon tape, dusty, utterly still. A week of dead air, nothing had moved.

  "We took casts of the tracks," he said, flicking a hand at them. "Not that it matters. We knew where the van came from. Rental sticker. Avis, Tarzana branch. Brown Ford Econoline with a nice big cargo area. Mate rented it last Friday, got the weekend rate."

  "Preparing for another mercy mission?" I said.

  "That's what he uses vans for. But so far no beneficiary's come forth claiming Mate stood him up."

  "I'm surprised the companies still rent to him."

  "They probably don't. The paperwork was made out to someone else. Woman named Alice Zoghbie, president of the Socrates Club— right-to-die outfit headquartered in Glendale. She's out of the country, attending some sort of humanist convention in Amsterdam— left Saturday."

  "She rented the van and split the next day?" I said.

  "Apparently. Called her home, which also doubles as the Socrates office, got voice mail. Had Glendale PD drive by. No one home. Zoghbie's message says she's due back in a week. She's on my to-do list." He tapped the pocket where his notepad nestled.

  "I wonder why Mate never bought a van," I said.

  "From what I've seen so far, he was cheap. I tossed his apartment the day after the murder, not much in the way of creature comforts. His personal car's an old Chevy that has seen better days. Before he went automotive he used budget motels."

  I nodded. "Bodies left on the bed for the cleaning crew to find next morning. Too many traumatized maids turned into bad publicity. I saw him on TV once, getting defensive about it. Saying Christ had been born in a barn full of goat dung, so setting doesn't matter. But it does, doesn't it?"

  He looked at me. "You've been following Mate's career?"

  "Didn't have to," I said, keeping my voice even. "He wasn't exactly media-shy. Any tracks of other cars nearby?"

  He shook his head.

  "So," I said, "you're wondering if the killer drove up with Mate."

  "Or parked farther down the road than we checked. Or left no tracks— that happens plenty, you know how seldom forensic stuff actually helps. No one's reported seeing any other vehicles. Then again, no one noticed the damn van, and it sat here for hours."

  "What about shoe prints?"

  "Just the people who found the van."

  "What's the time-of-death estimate?" I said.

  "Early morning, one to four A.M." He shot his cuff and looked at his Timex. The watch crystal was scarred and filmed. "Mate was discovered just after sunrise— six-fifteen or so."

  "The papers said the people who found him were hikers," I said. "Must've been early risers."

  "Coupla yuppies walking with their dog, came up from the Valley for a constitutional before hitting the office. They were headed up the dirt road and noticed the van."

  "Any other passersby?" I pointed down the road, toward Encino Hills Drive. "I used to come up here, remember a housing development being built. By now it's probably well-populated. That hour, you'd think a car or two would drive by."

  "Yeah, it's populated," he said. "High-priced development. Guess the affluent get to sleep in."

  "Some of the affluent got that way by working. What about a broker up early to catch the market, a surgeon ready to operate?"

  "It's conceivable someone drove past and saw something, but if they did they're not admitting it. Our initial canvass produced zip by way of neighborly help. How many cars have you seen while we stood here?"

  The road had been silent.

  "I got here ten minutes before you," he said. "One truck. Period. A gardener. And even if someone did drive by, there'd be no reason to notice the van. No streetlights, so before sunrise it would've been pure black. And if someone did happen to spot it, no reason to give it a thought, let alone stop. There was county construction going on up here till a few months ago, some kind of drain line. CalTrans crews left trucks overnight all the time. Another parked vehicle wouldn't stand out."

  "It stood out to the yuppies," I said.

  "Stood out to their dog. One of those attentive retrievers. They were ready to walk right past the van but the dog kept nosing around, barking, wouldn't leave it alone. Finally, they had a look inside. So much for walking for health, huh? That kind of thing could put you off exercise for a long time."

  "Bad?"

  "Not what I'd want as an aerobic stimulant. Dr. Mate was trussed up to his own machine."

  "The Humanitron," I said. Mate's label for his death apparatus. Silent passage for Happy Travelers.

  Milo's smile was crooked, hard to read. "You hear about that thing, all the people he used it on, you expect it to be some high-tech gizmo. It's a piece of junk, Alex. Looks like a loser in a junior-high science fair. Mismatched screws, all wobbly. Like Mate cobbled it from spare parts."

  "It worked," I said.

  "Oh yeah. It worked fine. Fifty times. Which is a good place to start, right? Fifty families. Maybe someone didn't approve of Mate's brand of travel agency. Potentially, we're talking hundreds of suspects. Problem one is we've been having a hard time reaching them. Seems lots of Mate's chosen were from out-of-state— good luck locating the survivors. The department's lent me two brand-new Detective-I's to do phone work and other scut. So far people don't want to talk to them about old Eldon, and the few who do think the guy was a saint— 'Grandma's doctors watched her writhe in agony and wouldn't do a damn thing. Dr. Mate was the only one willing to help.' Alibi-talk or true belief? I'd need face-to-faces with all of them, maybe you there to psychoanalyze, and so far it's been telephonic. We're making our way through the list."

  "Trussed to the machine," I said. "What makes you think homicide? Maybe it was voluntary. Mate decided it was his own time to skid off the mortal coil, and practiced what he preached."

  "Wait, there's more. He was hooked up, all right— I.V. in each arm, one bottle full of the tranquilizer he uses— thiopental— the other with the potassium chloride for the heart attack. And his thumb was touching this little trip-wire doohickey that gets the flow going. Coroner said the potassium had kicked in for at least a few minutes, so Mate would've been dead from that, if he wasn't dead alread
y. But he was. The gizmo was all for show, Alex. What dispatched him was no mercy killing: he got slammed on the head hard enough to crack his skull and cause a subdural hematoma, then someone cut him up, none too neatly. 'Ensanguination due to extensive genital mutilation.' "

  "He was castrated?" I said.

  "And more. Bled out. Coroner says the head wound was serious, nice columnar indentation, meaning a length of pipe or something like that. It would've caused big-time damage if Mate had lived— maybe even killed him. But it wasn't immediately fatal. The rear of the van was soaked with blood, and the spatter says arterial spurts, meaning Mate's heart was pumping away when the killer worked on him."

  He rubbed his face. "He was vivisected, Alex."

  "Lord," I said.