JONATHAN KELLERMAN. THE CLINIC

“Class snobbery?”

“Maybe coming in rubbing my knuckles on the ground while scarfing a banana was the wrong approach.”

I laughed. “You should have dropped your master’s degree into the conversation.”

“Oh, sure, that would really impress a bunch of Ph.D.’s. So what do you think of the wounds? Does that groin stab make it sexual?”

“If it was intentional, it would show definite sexual hostility.”

“Oh, it was intentional all right. Three clean cuts, no error wounds, no hacking around. He got her exactly where he wanted: heart, groin, back.”

“When you put it that way, it sounds orchestrated,” I said. “A definite sequence.”

“How so?”

“Stabbing her in the heart first could be romantic, in a sick sense. Breaking someone’s heart, maybe some kind of revenge. Though I guess he could have chosen the heart in order to kill her quickly. But wouldn’t a throat slash have been a better bet for that?”

“Definitely. The heart’s not that easy to hit, you can nick ribs, miss completely. Most quick-kill knife jobs are throat slashes. What about the other wounds?”

“The groin,” I said, thinking of Hope’s composure and impeccable clothes. Every hair in place. Left bleeding on the street. . . . “The groin could be an extension of the heart wound—love gone wrong, the sexual element. . . . If so, the back would be the coup de grce: back stabbing. The symbol of betrayal.”

“To stab her in the back,” he said, “he had to take the time to flip her over and place her on her stomach. That’s why I got interested when you said orchestrated. Think of it, you’re standing there on the street, just killed someone. You take the time to do something like that? To me it says crime of passion but carried out in a calculated manner.”

“Cold rage,” I said. “Criminal intimacy—someone she knew?”

“Which is exactly why I’m interested in Hubby.”

“But for someone like her, intimacy could mean something totally different. Her book tour took her out in front of millions of people. She could have triggered rage in any of them. Even a delusional rage. Someone who didn’t like the way she signed a book, someone who watched her on TV and related to it pathologically. Fame’s like stripping in a dark theater, Milo. You never know who’s out there.”

He was silent for a few moments.

“Gee, thanks for expanding my suspect list to infinity. . . . Here’s something that never made it into the papers: Her routine was to take a half-hour to one-hour walk every night, around the same time. Ten-thirty, eleven. Usually she walked with her dog—a Rottweiler—but that day it came down with serious stomach problems and spent the night at the vet’s. Convenient, huh?”

“Poisoned?”

“I called the vet this morning and he said he never worked the dog up ’cause it got better by morning, but the symptoms could have been consistent with eating something nasty. On the other hand, he said dogs eat garbage all the time.”

“Did this one?”

“Not that he knew. And it’s too late now to run tests. Something else Paz and Fellows never thought to ask about.”

“Poisoning the dog,” I said. “Someone watching her for a while, learning her habits.”

“Or someone who already knew them. Wouldn’t a husband fit perfectly into this love-sex-revenge orchestration thing? Someone who’d been cuckolded?”

“Had this husband been cuckolded?”

“Don’t know. But assume yes. And if Seacrest was smarter than the average betrayed husband, colder, what better way to deflect suspicion than make it look like a street crime?”

“But we’re talking a middle-aged history professor with no record of domestic violence. No violence, period.”

“There’s always a first time,” he said.

“Any idea how he dealt with her fame?”

“No. Like I said, he’s not helpful.”

“It could have been a rough spot in their relationship: He was older, possibly more prominent academically til she wrote the book. And maybe he didn’t take well to being discussed on TV. Though on the tapes I saw she talked about him fondly.”

“Yeah,” he said. “ “Philip’s attuned to a woman’s needs but he’s the rare exception.’ A little patronizing, maybe?”

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