Dr. Death

In the third box, Milo found over a hundred pieces of jewelry in plastic sandwich bags, most of it junk, a few vintage costume pieces. Some of the baubles could be traced back to dead people, others couldn't.

The fourth and largest carton held a styrofoam cooler. Layered within were parcels wrapped in butcher paper and preserved by dry ice. The attendant at the storage facility remembered Dr. Pasteur coming by every week or so. Nice man. Big mustache, one of those old-fashioned mustaches you see in silent movies. Pasteur had only spoken to offer pleasantries, talk about athletics, hiking, hunting. It had been a while since his last visit, and most of the dry ice had melted. The largest carton had started to reek. Milo left it up to the coroner to unwrap the packages.

In a corner of the storage locker were several rifles and handguns, each oiled and in perfect working order, boxes of bullets, one set of Japanese surgical tools, another made in the USA.

The papers presented it this way:

Victim in Police Shooting Believed Responsible for Eldon Mate's Murder

MALIBU. County Sheriff and Los Angeles Police sources report that a physician shot in a police-involved shooting in Malibu is the prime suspect in the murder of "death doctor" Eldon Mate.

Paul Nelson Ulrich, 40, was shot several times last week in circumstances that remain under investigation. Evidence recovered at the scene and in other locations, including surgical tools believed to be the murder weapons in the Mate case, indicate Ulrich acted alone.

No motive for the slaying of the man known as "Dr. Death" has been put forth by authorities yet, though the same sources indicate that Ulrich, a licensed physician in New York State under the name of Michael Ferris Burke, may have been mentally ill.

November found me thinking about how wrong I'd been on so many accounts. No doubt Rushton/Burke/Ulrich would've been amused by all my wrong guesses, but teaching me humility would've ranked low on his pleasure list.

I called Tanya Stratton once, got no answer, tried her sister. Kris Lamplear was more forthcoming. She didn't recognize my voice. No reason to, we'd exchanged only a few words when we'd met and she'd assumed I was a detective.

"How'd you know to call me, Doctor?"

"I consult to the police, was trying to follow up with Tanya. She hasn't called back. You're listed as next of kin."

"No, Tanya won't talk to you. Won't talk to anyone. She's pretty freaked out by all those things they're saying about Paul."

"She'd have to be," I said.

"It's-unbelievable. To be honest, I'm freaked, too. Been keeping it from my kids. They met him… I never liked him, but I never thought… Anyway, Tanya has a therapist. A social worker who helped her back when she was sick-last year. The main thing is she's still in remission. Just had a great checkup."

"Good to hear that."

"You bet. I just don't want the stress to… Anyway, thanks for trying. The police have really been okay through all this. Don't worry about Tanya. She'll go her own way, she always does."

November got busy, lots of new referrals, my service seemed to be ringing in constantly. I booked myself solid, reserved lunchtime for making calls.

Calls that didn't get answered. Messages left for Richard, Stacy, Judy Manitow. A try at Joe Safer's office elicited a written note from the attorney's secretary:

Dear Dr. Delaware:

Mr. Safer deeply appreciates your time. There are no new developments with regard to your common interests. Should Mr. Safer have anything to report, he'll definitely call.

I thought a lot about the trip to Lancaster, composed a mental list of reasons not to go, wrote it all down.

I sometimes prescribe that kind of thing for patients, but it rarely works for me. Putting it down on paper made me antsier, less and less capable of putting it to rest. Maybe it's a brain abnormality-some kind of chemical imbalance, Lord knows everything else gets blamed on that. Or perhaps it's just what my midwestern mother used to call "pigheadedness to the nth."

Whatever the diagnosis, I wasn't sleeping well. Mornings presented me with headaches, and I found myself getting a

By the twenty-third of November, I'd finished a host of court-assigned assessments-none referred by Judy Mani-tow. Placing the rest in the to-do box, I awoke on a particularly glorious morning and set out for the high desert.

Lancaster is sixty-five miles north of L.A. on three freeways: the 405, the 5, then over to the 14, where four lanes compress to three, then two, cutting through the Antelope Valley and feeding into the Mojave.

Just over an hour's ride, if you stick to the speed limit, the first half mostly arid foothills sparsely decorated with gas stations, truck stops, billboards, the red-tile roofs of low-cost housing developments. The rest of it's nothing but dirt and gravel till you hit Palmdale.

Motels in Palmdale, too, but that wouldn't have mattered for Joa

She'd made the trip late at night, when the view from the car window would have been flat-black.

Nothing to look at, lots of time to think.

I pictured her, bloated, aching, a passenger in her own hearse, as someone else-probably Eric, it was Eric I couldn't stop thinking about-burned fuel on the empty road.

Riding.

Staring out at the black, knowing the expanse of nothingness would be among her final images.

Had she allowed herself to suffer doubt? Been mindlessly resolute?

Had the two of them talked?

What do you say to your mother when she's asked you to help her leave you?

Why had she set up her own execution?

I spotted a county sign advertising a regional airport in Palmdale. The strip where Richard's helicopter had landed on all those trips to oversee his construction projects.

He'd never been able to get Joa

Prolonging the agony so she could send him a message.

You condemn me. I spit in your face.

The Happy Trails Motel was easy to find. Just a quick turn onto Avenue J, then a half-mile drive past Tenth Street West. Lots of open space out here, but not due to any ecological wisdom. Vacant lots, whiskered by weeds, alternated with the kind of downscale businesses that doom small-town proprietors to anxiety in the age of mergers and acquisitions.

Bob's Battery Repair, Desert Clearance Furniture, Cleanrite Janitorial Supply, Yvo

I passed one new-looking strip mall, the usual beige texture coat and phony tile, some of the storefronts still vacant, a FOR LEASE sign prominent at the front of the commodious parking lot. One of Richard's projects? If I was right about Joa

The Happy Trails Motel was a single-story, U-shaped collection of a dozen or so rooms with a front office on the left-hand tip of the U and a dead neon sign that pleaded VACANCY. Red doors on each room, only two of them fronted by cars. The building had blue-gray walls and a low white gravel roof. Over the gravel, I saw coils of barbed wire. An alley ran along the west side of the motel and I drove around back to see what the wire was all about.

The coils sat atop a grape-stake fence that separated the motel from its rear neighbor: a trailer park. Old, sagging mobile homes, laundry on lines, TV ante

Returning to the street, I parked. Nothing crisp about the air here. High eighties, arid, dusty, and heavy as unresolved tension. I entered the office. No reception counter, just a card table in a corner, behind which sat an old man, hairless, corpulent, with very red lips and wet, subjugated eyes. He wore a baggy gray T-shirt and striped pants. In front of him was a stack of paperback spy novels. Off to the side sat a collection of medicine bottles, along with a loose eyedropper and an empty pill counter. The room was small, murky, paneled with pine boards long gone black. The air smelled like every kid's first booster shot. A comb dispenser hung on the rear wall, along with another small vending machine that sold maps and a third that offered condoms and the message Be Healthy!