As a younger man, Brophy had a temper. He has spent half of his life in various county jails and state penitentiaries, saw things, did things. He knows the feel and the smell of fresh blood.
Stumbling to his feet, he lurches to the back door of the Snake Pit and tries to pull it open, but the door is locked. He knocks, no one answers.
The shortest way out of the alley means retracing the steps of the newcomer: walk out to Lodi Place, hook north to Fountain and find someone who’ll listen.
Brophy has already wet his pants twice tonight—first while sleeping drunk and now, upon touching Baby Boy Lee’s blood. Fear grips him and he heads the other way, tripping through the long block that takes him to the other end of the alley. Finding no one on the street at this hour, he makes his way to an all-night liquor store on the corner of Fountain and El Centro.
Once inside the store, Brophy shouts at the Lebanese clerk who sits reading behind a Plexiglass window, the same man who one hour ago sold him three bottles of Red Phoenix. Brophy waves his arms, tries to get across what he has just seen. The clerk regards Brophy as exactly what he is—a babbling wino—and orders him to leave.
When Brophy begins pounding on the Plexiglass, the clerk considers reaching for the nail-studded baseball bat he keeps beneath the counter. Sleepy and weary of confrontation, he dials 911.
Brophy leaves the liquor store and walks agitatedly up and down Fountain Avenue. When a squad car from Hollywood Division arrives, Officers Keith Montez and Cathy Ruggles assume Brophy is their problem and handcuff him immediately.
Somehow he manages to communicate with the Hollywood Blues and they drive their black and white to the mouth of the alley. High-intensity LAPD-issue flashlights bathe Baby Boy Lee’s corpse in a heartless, white glare.
The big man’s mouth gapes and his eyes are rolled back. His banana-yellow Stevie Ray Vaughan t-shirt is dyed crimson and a red pool has seeped beneath his corpse. Later, it will be ascertained that the killer gutted the big man with a classic street-fighter’s move: long-bladed knife thrust under the sternum followed by a single upward motion that slices through intestine and diaphragm and nicks the right ventricle of Baby Boy’s already seriously enlarged heart.
Baby Boy is long past help and the cops don’t even attempt it.
Don’t miss these thrilling suspense novels from Jonathan Kellerman!
The Murder Book
L.A. psychologist-detective Alex Delaware has received a strange, anonymous package in the mail. Inside is an album filled with gruesome crime-scene photos. When his old friend and colleague, homicide detective Milo Sturgis, views the compendium of death, he is immediately shaken by one of the images: a young woman tortured, strangled, and dumped near a freeway ramp. The murder was one of Milo’s first cases as a rookie homicide cop: a vicious killing that he failed to solve-and has haunted him ever since. Now, two decades later, someone has chosen to stir up the past. As Alex and Milo set out to uncover what really happened twenty years ago, their relentless investigation reaches deep into L.A.’s nerve centers of power and wealth-past and present. While peeling back layer after layer of ugly secrets, they discover that the murder of one forgotten girl has chilling ramifications that extend far beyond the tragic loss of a single life.
Flesh and Blood
Lauren Teague is a beautiful, defiant, borderline delinquent teenager when her parents bring her to Dr. Alex Delaware’s office. Lauren angrily resists Alex’s help—and the psychologist is forced to chalk Lauren up as one of the inevitable failures of his profession. Years later, when Alex and Lauren come face-to-face in a shocking encounter, both doctor and patient are stricken with shame. But the ultimate horror takes place when, soon after, Lauren’s brutalized corpse is found dumped in an alley. Alex disregards the advice of his trusted friend, LAPD detective Milo Sturgis, and jeopardizes his relationship with his longtime lover, Robin Castagna, in order to pursue Lauren’s killer. As he investigates his young patient’s troubled past, Alex enters the shadowy worlds of fringe psychological experimentation and the sex industry—and then into mortal danger, when lust and big money collide in an unforgiving Los Angeles.