Dr. Death by Jonathan Kellerman

Three twenty-two A.M. and I’d finished every word in Fusco’s omnibus. No thunderous conclusions. Then I went over the photos a second time and saw it.

Crime-scene shot from a Washington State unsolved— one of the four victims murdered during Michael Burke’s term as a medical student. Four killings Fusco saw as consistent with Burke’s technique because the victims had been left propped against or near trees.

The girl was a twenty-year-old waitress named Marissa Bonpaine, last seen serving shrimp cocktail at a stand in the Pike Place Market in Seattle, found a week later splayed in front of a fir in a remote part of the Olympic National Forest. No footprints near the scene; the buildup of pine needles and decaying leaves on the forest floor was a potentially fertile nest for forensic data, but nothing had been found. Add eleven days of rain to that, and the scene was as clean as the operating room the killer had intended it to be.

Marissa Bonpaine had been savaged in a manner I now found uncomfortably familiar: throat slash, abdominal mutilations, sexual posturing. A single, deep trapezoidal wound just above the pubic bone could be considered geometrical, though the edges were rough. Death from shock and blood loss.

No blunt-force head wound. I supposed Fusco would attribute that to the killer’s escalating confidence and the seclusion of the spot: wanting Bonpaine conscious, wanting her to watch, to suffer. Taking his time.

I checked the girl’s physical dimensions. Four-eleven, one hundred one. Tiny, easy to subdue without knocking her out.

What caught my eye wasn’t any of that; after three hours of wading in gore and sadism, I’d grown sadly habituated.

I’d noticed something glinting against the brown cushion of forest detritus, several feet to the right of Marissa Bonpaine’s frail left hand. Something shiny enough to catch the miserly light filtering through the dense conifer ceiling and bounce it back. I flipped pages till I found the police report.

A hiker had found the body. Forest rangers and law enforcement personnel from three departments had conducted a two-hundred-yard grid search and listed their findings under “Crime Scene Inventory.” One hundred eighty-three retrieved items, mostly trash—empty cans and bottles, broken sunglasses, a can opener, rotted paper, cigarette butts—tobacco and cannabis—animal skeletons, solid lead buckshot, two copper-jacketed bullets ballistically analyzed but deemed unimportant because Marissa Bonpaine’s body bore no gunshot wounds. Three pairs of insect-infested hiking boots and other discarded clothing had been studied by the crime lab and dated well before the murder.

Halfway down the list, there it was:

C.S.I. Item #76: Child’s toy hypodermic, manu. Tommi-Toy, Taiwan, orig. component of U-Be-the-Doctor

Kit, imported 1989-95. Location: ground, 1.4m from victim’s I. hand, no prints, no organic residue.

No residue might have indicated recent placement, but the rain might have just washed any residue away. I read the rest of the Bonpaine documents. No sign anyone had considered the toy. A review of all the other Washington cases revealed no other medical toys.

Marissa Bonpaine was the last of the Washington victims. Her body had been found July 2, but the abduction was believed to have occurred around June 17. More page-flipping. Michael Burke had received his MD on June 12.

Graduation party?

I’m a doctor, here’s my needle!

I’m the doctor!

Stethoscope, hypodermic. One broken, the other intact. I knew what Milo would say. Cute, but so what?

Maybe he was right—he’d been too damn right, so far—and the injector was nothing more than a piece of trash left by some kid who’d hiked through the forest with his parents.

Still, it made me wonder.

A message … always messages.

To Marissa: I’m the doctor.

To Mate: I’m the doctor and you’re not.

I reread Fusco’s notes. No mention of the toy.

Maybe I’d mention it to Milo. If he and I had the chance to talk soon.

I flipped back to the front of the first volume, the various incarnations of Michael Burke, studied every feature of every photo. A song danced through my head—Getting to know you, getting to know all about you—but Burke remained a stranger.

High-IQ psychopath, lust-killer, master euthanist. Comforter of terminally ill women, brutalizer of healthy females. Compartmentalizing. It helped in murder as well as politics.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *