Jonathan Kellerman – Monster

In life, Dada had been tall, dark, and handsome. The killer stripped off his clothes, bisected him cleanly at the waist with a tooth-edged weapon, dropped each segment in a heavy-duty black plastic lawn bag, fastened the sacks, stashed them in the Volkswagen, drove to the dump spot, most probably late at night, and escaped without notice. Cause of death was loss of blood from a deep, wide throat slash.

Lack of gore in the bags and in the car said the butchery had been accomplished somewhere else. The coroner was fairly certain Dada was already dead when cut in half.

“Long legs,” Milo said, the first time he talked to me about the case. “So maybe cutting him solved a storage problem. Or it was part of the thrill.”

“Or both,” I said.

He frowned. “Dada’s eyes were taken out, too, but no other mutilation. Any ideas?”

“The killer drove Dada’s car to the dump spot,” I said, “so he could’ve left on foot and lives close by. Or he took the bus and you could interview drivers, see if any unusual passengers got on that night.”

“I’ve already talked to the bus drivers. No memory of any conspicuously weird passengers. Same for taxi drivers. No late-night pickups in the neighborhood, period.”

“By ‘unusual’ I didn’t mean weird,” I said. “The killer probably isn’t bizarre-looking. I’d guess just the opposite: composed, a good planner, middle-class. Even so, having just dumped the VW, he might’ve been a little worked up. Who rides the bus at that hour? Mostly night-shift busboys and office cleaners, a few derelicts. Someone middle-class might be conspicuous.”

“Makes sense,” he said, “but there was no one who stuck in any of the drivers’ memories.”

“Okay, then. The third possibility: there was another car ready to take the killer away. Extremely careful planning. Or an accomplice.”

Milo rubbed his face, like washing without water. We were at his desk in the

Robbery-Homicide room at the West L.A. station, facing the bright orange lockers, drinking coffee. A few other detectives were typing and snacking. I had a child-custody court appearance downtown in two hours, had stopped by for lunch, but

Milo had wanted to talk about Dada rather than eat.

“The accomplice bit is interesting,” he said. “So is the local angle-okay, time to do some footwork, see if some joker who learned freelance meat-cutting at San

Quentin is out on parole. Get to know more about the poor kid, too-see if he got himself in trouble.”

Three months later, Milo’s footwork had unearthed the minutiae of Richard Dada’s life but had gotten him no closer to solving the case.

At the half-year mark, the file got pushed to the back of the drawer.

I knew Milo’s nerves were rubbed raw by that. His specialty was clearing cold cases, not creating them. He had the highest solve rate of any homicide D in West L.A., maybe the entire department for this year. That didn’t make him any more popular; as the only openly gay detective on the force, he’d never be invited to blue-buddy barbecues. But it did provide insurance, and I knew he regarded failure as professionally threatening.

As a personal sin, too; one of the last things he’d said before filing the murder book was “This one deserves more. Some felonious cretin getting bashed with a pool cue is one thing, but this… The way the kid was sliced-the spine was sheared straight through, Alex. Coroner says probably a band saw. Someone cut him, neat and clean, the way they section meat.”

“Any other forensic evidence?” I said. “Nope. No foreign hairs, no fluid exchange…. As far as I’ve been able to tell, Dada wasn’t in any kind of trouble, no drug connections, bad friends, criminal history. Just one of those stupid kids who wanted to be rich and famous. Days and weekends he worked at a kiddie gym.

Nights he did guess what.”

“Waited tables.”

His index finger scored imaginary chalk marks. “Bar and grill in Toluca Lake.

Closest he got to delivering lines was probably ‘What kind of dressing would you like with that?’ ” We were in a bar, ourselves. A nice one at the rear of the Luxe