Twisted

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 Hochenbre

Petra had made it to the scene after hearing about it on her sca

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 ru

“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.”

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 co

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 Boha

Doebbler had emptied the purse and tossed it, keeping the cash and the credit cards and the photos of Boha

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.