Make some money.
No crime in that, right? But she wouldn’t hear of it, wanted to do important work. With people who were really needy.”
She shook her head.
“Saving the bugs,” she said, almost inaudibly. “She thought she was dealing with those potato thingies, but a scorpion got into the jar.”
Her description of Becky as a stickler for the rules didn’t fit with Jean Jeffers’ recollections. A mother’s vision could be overly rosy, but she’d been frank about Becky’s chronic attraction to losers.
Had Becky finally been attracted to the ultimate loser? How loose had things gotten between her and Hewitt?
And what twisted dynamic bound the two of them to G?
Bad love.
Blaming the victim bothered me, but revenge seemed to be the fuel that powered the killer’s engine, and I had to wonder if Becky had been a target of something other than random psychosis.
I drove home straining to make sense of it. No strange vehicles within a hundred yards of the gate, and last night’s anxiety seemed silly.
Robin was working, looking preoccupied and content, and the dog was chewing a nylon bone.
“Milo just called from Santa Barbara,” she said. “The number’s on the kitchen counter.”
I went into the house, found an 805 exchange that wasn’t Sally Grayson’s, and punched it. A voice answered, “Records.”
“Dr. Delaware returning Detective Sturgis’s call.”
“One minute.”
I waited five.
“Sturgis.”
“Hi. Just got through talking to Becky’s mother. Becky never mentioned anyone by name, but she did talk about helping a poor unfortunate psychotic who could very well have been Hewitt.”
“No mention of Gritz?”
“Nor of Silk or Merino. One thing that was interesting, though: she said Becky liked to mend broken wings and had a penchant for losers–guys who involved her in dead-end relationships. If you think of Hewitt as the ultimate loser, it supports what we suspected about things getting unprofessional between them. Having said all that, I don’t know that it leads us anywhere.”
“Well, we’re not doing much better here. No school records at Katarina’s house, so either she never kept them or the killer made off with them. We do have confirmation that Myra Evans was Myra Paprock, but it’s a no-go on Rodney Shipler. His tax records show him working for the L.A. Unified School District for thirty years–right after he got out of the Army. Never up here–and I verified it with the S.B.
district. No connection at all to the de Bosch school.”
“What about summer vacations?” I said. “School personnel sometimes take part-time jobs during the off-season.”
“Summers he worked in L.A.”
“How long was he in the Army?”
“Fifteen years–staff sergeant, most of it over in the Philippines.
Honorable discharge, no blots on his record.”
“He made somebody mad.”
“It doesn’t look like it was someone at the school. In fact, we can’t find any records of anything fishy happening out at the school. No fires or felonies or anything anybody would want to avenge, Alex. Just a few complaints about noise from Bancroft and one vehicular accident that did occur when Myra Evans was teaching there–May of seventy-three–but it was clearly an accident. One of the students stole a school truck and took a joyride. Made it up to the Riviera district and spun off a mountain road. He died, Santa Barbara PD investigated, found no foul play.”
“How old was the student?”
“Fifteen.”
“Vehicular accident off a mountain road,” I said. “Grant Stoumen was hit by a car and Mitchell Lerner was pushed off a mountain.”
“That’s a little abstract, Alex.” l “Maybe not, if matching things–achieving consistency–is part of the killer’s fantasy.”
Pause. “You’d know more about that than I would, but why focus on the school when we’ve got a victim with no connection to it? No obvious connection to de Bosch, period.”
“Shipler could have been connected to the symposium.”
“How? A janitor with a side interest in psychology, or did he sweep up afterward?”
“Maybe it’s the race angle somehow. Shipler was black and de Bosch was a covert bigot.”
“Why would someone pissed off about racism beat a black man to death?”
“I don’t know. .. but I’m sure de Bosch is at the core of this. The school, the conference–all of it. Merino told Harrison the conference set off something in him–maybe it was seeing de Bosch lauded publicly, when he knew the truth to be otherwise.”