The same attempt to use what was at hand, to master and dominate the victim.
Bad love.
Myra Evans Paprock.
Rodney Shipler.
Katarina.
Only at those three scenes had the words been left behind.
Three bloody, undisguised murders. No attempt made to present them as anything else.
Stoumen, Lerner, and Rosenblatt, on the other hand, had been dispatched as phony accidents.
Two classes of victims. .. two kinds of revenge?
Butchery for the laypeople, falls for the therapists.
But Katarina had been a therapist. ..
Then I realized that at the time of Mr. Silk’s trauma–sometime before seventy-nine, probably closer to seventy-three, the year Delmar Parker had gone off the mountain–she hadn’t yet graduated. In her early twenties, still a grad student.
Two patterns. .. part of some elaborate rage-lust fantasy that a sane mind could never hope to understand?
And where did Becky Basille fit in?
Two killers. ..
I remembered the clean, bustling street where Harvey Rosenblatt had landed: French restaurants, flower boxes, and limos.
How long had it taken the poor man to realize what the swift, sharp shove at the small of his back meant?
I hoped he hadn’t. Hoped, against logic, that he’d felt nothing but the Icarus-pleasure of pure flight.
A fall, always a fall.
Delmar Parker. Had to be.
Avenging an abused child?
Surely if de Bosch had been abusive, someone would remem Why hadn’t anyone spoken out after all these years?
But no big puzzle there: without proof, who would believe them? And why rake up the dirt around a dead man’s grave if it meant stirring up one’s own childhood demons?
Still, someone had to know what happened to the boy in the stolen truck, and why it had set off a killer.
I sat there for a long time, staring at tiny, microfilmed words.
Corrective School alumni. .. how to get hold of them. Then I thought of one.
Someone I’d never met, a name I’d never even learned.
A problem child whose treatment had given Katarina the leash to put around my neck.
I returned the microfilm spools and rushed to the pay phones in the library’s lobby, trying to figure out who to call.
Western Pediatric, the late seventies. ..
The hospital had undergone a massive financial and professional overhaul during the past year. So many people gone.
But one notable one had returned.
Reuben Eagle had been chief resident when I’d started as a staff psychologist.
He’d taken a professorship at the U’s med school, a gifted teacher, specializing in medical education. The new Western Peds board had just wooed him back as general pediatrics division head. I’d just seen his picture in the hospital newsletter: the same tortoiseshell spectacles, the light brown hair thinner, grayer, the lean, ruddy outdoorsman’s face adorned by a trimmed, graying beard.
His secretary said he was out on the wards and I asked her to page him.
He answered a few moments later, saying, “Rube Eagle,” in a soft, pleasant voice.
“Rube, it’s Alex Delaware.”
“Alex–wow, this is a surprise.”
“How’re things going?”
“Not bad, how about you?”
“Hanging in. Listen, Rube, I need a small favor. I’m trying to locate one of Henry Bork’s daughters and I was wondering if you had any idea how to reach her.”
“Which daughter? Henry and Mo had a bunch–three or four, I think.”
“The youngest. She had learning problems, was sent to a remedial school in Santa Barbara around seventy-six or seventyseven. She’d be around twenty-eight or twenty-nine now.”
“That would have to be Meredith,” he said. “Her I remember because one year Henry had the interns’ party at his house and she was there–very good-looking, a real flirt. I thought she was older and ended up talking to her. Then someone warned me and I split fast.”
“Warned you about her age?”
“That and her problems. Supposedly a wild kid. I remember hearing something about institutionalization. Apparently she really put Henry and Mo through it-did you know he died?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Ben Wardley, too. And Milt Chenier. .. how come you’re looking for Meredith?”
“Long story, Rube. It has to do with the school she was sent “What about it?”
“Things may have happened there.”