Kellerman, Jonathan - Monster by Kellerman Jonathan

Author:Kellerman, Jonathan [Kellerman, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 1999-10-18T04:00:00+00:00

She never did.

Last edition of the Intelligencer.

Chapter 23

Returning to the main reference room, I pulled up San Francisco, Bakersfield, and Fresno microfiche on the Ardullo slayings. Nothing that hadn't been covered down in L.A.

In the Modesto Bee I found an obituary for Terri Mclntyre Ardullo. Her death was described as "untimely," no mention of homicide. The bio was brief: Girl Scout, volunteer for the Red Cross, honor student at Modesto High, member of the Spanish Club and the Shakespeare Society, B.A. from UC Davis.

She'd been survived by her parents, Wayne and Felice Mclntyre, and sisters Barbara Mclntyre and Lynn Blount. A Wayne Mclntyre was listed in Modesto. Feeling like a creep, I dialed and told the elderly woman who answered that I was conducting a search for relatives of the Argent family of Pennsylvania, in anticipation of the first Argent reunion, to be held in Scranton.

"Argent?" she said. "Then why us?"

"Your name came up on our computer list."

"Did it? Well, I'm afraid your computer got it wrong. We're not related to any Argents. Sorry."

No anger, no defensiveness.

No idea what had interested Claire about Peake.

I pictured him in his room, grimacing, twitching, rocking autistically. Nerve endings firing randomly as Lord knew what impulses coalesced and scrambled among the folds of beclouded frontal lobes.

The door opens, a woman enters, smiling, eager to help. A new doctor. The first person to show any interest in him in sixteen years.

She kneels down beside him, talks soothingly. Wanting to help him… help he doesn't want. Help that makes him angry.

Put her in a box. Bad eyes.

I went searching in Miami newspapers for items about the Crimminses. Obituaries were the daily special: the Herald informed me that Carson and Sybil Crimmins had died together twelve years ago, in a yacht explosion off the coast of south Florida. An unnamed crew member had perished as well. Carson was listed as a "real estate developer," Sybil as a "former entertainer." No pictures.

Next came a Las Vegas Sun reference to Carson Crimmins, Jr.'s, death in a motocross accident, two years later, near Pimm, Nevada. Nothing on the younger brother, Derrick. Too bad; he'd talked on record once. Maybe he'd be willing to reminisce, if I found him.

Former Intelligencer publisher Orton Hatzler was memorialized in a back-page paragraph of the Santa Monica Evening Outlook. He'd died in that beach town of "natural causes" at the age of eighty-seven. Just a few miles from my house. Memorial services at the Seaside Presbyterian Church, donations to the American Heart Association, in lieu of flowers. The surviving widow: Wanda Hatzler.

Maybe she still lived in Santa Monica. But if I found her, what would I ask about? I'd uncovered a financial battle between the Ardullo and Crimmins clans, had played Sherlock with a single photograph that suggested another type of competition. But nothing suggested that the slaughter of the Ardullos had resulted from anything other than one madman's blood feast.

I thought of the suddenness of the attack. Asian cultures had a word for that kind of unprovoked savagery: "amok.

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