The Clinic Read Free Page A

typical.”
    “True.” He rubbed his eyes. “Braining her in the bedroom would have been moremarital. But it happens.” Twirling the cigar. “Live long enough, everything happens.”
    “Where exactly were the bicycle tracks?”
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    “Just north of the body but I wouldn’t make much of those. Lab guys say they could have been anywhere from one to ten days old. A neighbor kid, a student, a fitness freak, anyone. And no one I talked to when I did the door-to-door noticed an unusual biker that whole week.”
    “What’s an unusual biker?”
    “Someone who didn’t fit in.”
    “Someone nonwhite?”
    “Whatever works.”
    “Quiet neighborhood like this,” I said, “it’s surprising no one saw or heard anything at elevenP.M. ”
    “Coroner said it’s possible she didn’t scream. No defense wounds, no tentatives, so she probably didn’t struggle much.”
    “True.” I’d read the autopsy findings. Read the entire file, starting with Paz and Fellows’s initial report and ending with the pathologist’s dictated drone and the packet of postmortem photos.
    How many such pictures had I seen over the years? It never got easier.
    “No scream,” I said, “because of the heart wound?”
    “Coroner said it could have collapsed the heart, put her into instant shock.”
    He snapped thick fingers softly, then ran his hand over his face, as if washing without water.
    What I could see of his profile was heavy as a walrus’s, pocked and fatigued.
    He smoked some more. I thought again of the preautopsy photos, Hope Devane’s body ice-white under the coroner’s lights. Three deep purple stab wounds in close-up: chest, crotch, just above the left kidney.
    The forensic scenario was that she’d been taken by surprise and dispatched quickly by the blow that exploded her heart, then slashed a second time above the vagina, and finally laid facedown on the sidewalk and stabbed in the back.
    “A husband doing that,” I said. “I know you’ve seen worse but it seems so calculated.”
    “This husband’s an intellectual, right? A thinker.” Smoke escaped the car in wisps, decaying instantly at the touch of night air. “Truth is, Alex, I want it to be Seacrest for selfish reasons.
    ’Cause if it’s not him, it’s a goddamn logisticalnightmare. ”
    “Too many suspects.”
    “Oh yeah,” he said, almost singing it. “Lots of people who could’ve hated her.”
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CHAPTER
2
    A self-help book changed Hope Devane’s life.
    Wolves and Sheepwasn’t the first thing she published: a psychology monograph and three dozen journal articles had earned her a full professorship at thirty-eight, two years before her death.
    Tenure had given her job security and the freedom to enter the public eye with a book the tenure committee wouldn’t have liked.
    Wolvesmade the best-seller lists for a month, earning her center ring in the media circus and more money than she could have accumulated in ten years as a professor.
    She was suited to the public eye, blessed with the kind of refined, blond good looks that played well on the small screen. That, and a soft, modulated voice that came across confident and reasonable over the radio, meant she had no trouble getting publicity bookings. And she made the most of each one. For despiteWolves ’s subtitle,Why Men Inevitably Hurt Women and What Women Can Do to Avoid It, and its indicting tone, her public persona was that of an intelligent, articulate, thoughtful,pleasant woman entering the public arena with reluctance but performing graciously.
    I knew all that but had little understanding of the person she’d been.
    Milo had left me three LAPD evidence boxes to review: her resume, audio- and videotapes, some newspaper coverage, the book. All passed along by Paz and Fellows. They’d never studied any of it.
    He’d told me about inheriting the case the night before, sitting across the table from Robin and me at a seafood place in Santa Monica. The bar was crowded but half the