TWISTED（ISBN=） 英文原版

Hollywood homicide detective Petra Connor takes center stage in
bestseller Kellerman’s elaborate, suspenseful, albeit improbable,
thriller. Connor, who assisted Kellerman’s main series detective,
psychologist Alex Delaware, in 2003’s A Cold Heart, proves an
engaging protagonist, fully capable of carrying a story on her own.
She’s investigating a seemingly random drive-by shooting that
claimed four teenage victims when a precocious 22-year-old graduate
student intern, Isaac Gomez, presents her with evidence that a
serial killer has struck on the same day, June 28, every year for
the past six years. Though his proof relies entirely on a
statistical analysis he’s performed, his unquestioned brilliance
prompts Connor to do a little extracurricular digging that turns up
suggestive clues supporting Gomez’s theory. Meanwhile, after
doggedly pursuing even the slightest lead in the drive-by shooting
case, Connor suspects that one of the victims, perhaps the one who
wasn’t claimed by any next-of-kin, was deliberately targeted. While
Connor finds the socially immature Gomez to be a challenging
assistant, he displays considerable cool in the climactic showdown
with the June 28 killer. Despite a last minute plot twist that
comes out of left field, this is vintage Kellerman, sure to please
his legions of fans.

Hollywood homicide detective Petra Connor takes center stage in
bestseller Kellerman’s elaborate, suspenseful, albeit improbable,
thriller. Connor, who assisted Kellerman’s main series detective,
psychologist Alex Delaware, in 2003’s A Cold Heart, proves an
engaging protagonist, fully capable of carrying a story on her own.
She’s investigating a seemingly random drive-by shooting that
claimed four teenage victims when a precocious 22-year-old graduate
student intern, Isaac Gomez, presents her with evidence that a
serial killer has struck on the same day, June 28, every year for
the past six years. Though his proof relies entirely on a
statistical analysis he’s performed, his unquestioned brilliance
prompts Connor to do a little extracurricular digging that turns up
suggestive clues supporting Gomez’s theory. Meanwhile, after
doggedly pursuing even the slightest lead in the drive-by shooting
case, Connor suspects that one of the victims, perhaps the one who
wasn’t claimed by any next-of-kin, was deliberately targeted. While
Connor finds the socially immature Gomez to be a challenging
assistant, he displays considerable cool in the climactic showdown
with the June 28 killer. Despite a last minute plot twist that
comes out of left field, this is vintage Kellerman, sure to please
his legions of fans.

Following her debut as Milo Sturgi’s fellow officer in the
Delaware/Sturgis mystery A Cold Heart (2003), L.A. Detective Petra
Connor emerges on her own. Unfortunately, if Kellerman is testing
the waters for a new series character, Petra, though tough enough
and with the usual screwed-up love life, is nothing special. The
best thing here is 22-year-old Isaac Gomez, a nerdy whiz kid who is
investigating patterns in unsolved L.A. homicides for his doctoral
dissertation. Although Petra is supposed to be working on the death
of an unidentified teen in a drive-by shooting, when Isaac
confronts her with several cold cases that have compelling links,
she can’t help but feel they deserve some attention, too. While
Petra does most of the footwork, Isaac pulls up the background on
his laptop and makes a few trips to the library, where an unusually
randy librarian helps him out in both the physical and intellectual
senses. The idea of a prodigy torn between his hardworking family
and the excitement of police work is what supplies the energy here.
Perhaps Kellerman should consider a series based on Isaac rather
than Petra.
——Stephanie Zvirin

“Grabs the reader’s attention and never lets go.”
——Associated Press

“[Kellerman] keeps the creepiness coming until the big-twist
finish.”
——People

“Turn the page and you’re hooked.”
——The New York Times Book Review

CHAPTER 1

May brought azure skies and California optimism to Hollywood. Petra
Connor worked nights and slept through the blue. She had her own
reason to be cheerful: solving two whodunit murders.

The first was a dead body at a wedding. The Ito-Park wedding, main
ballroom of the Roosevelt Hotel, Japanese-American bride,
Korean-American groom, a couple of law students who’d met at the U.
Her father, a Glendale-born surgeon; his, an immigrant appliance
dealer, barely able to speak English. Petra wondered about culture
clash.

The body was one of the bride’s cousins, a thirty-two-year-old CPA
named Baldwin Yoshimura, found midway through the reception, in an
unlocked stall of the hotel men’s room, his neck twisted so hard,
he looked like something out of The Exorcist. It took strong hands
to do that, the coroner pronounced, but that was where the medical
wisdom terminated.

Petra, working with no partner once again, talked to every friend
and relative and finally unearthed the fact that Baldwin Yoshimura
had been a serious lothario who’d made no distinction between
married and unmarried conquests. As she continued to probe, she
encountered nervous glances on the bride’s side. Finally, a third
cousin named Wendy Sakura blurted out the truth: Baldwin had been
fooling with his brother Darwin’s wife. The slut.

Darwin, a relative black sheep for this highly educated clan, was a
martial arts instructor who worked at a studio in Woodland Hills.
Petra forced herself to wake up during daylight, dropped in at the
dojo, watched him put an advanced judo class through its paces.
Stocky little guy, shaved head, pleasant demeanor. When the class
was over, he approached Petra, arms extended for cuffing, saying,
“I did it. Arrest me.”

Back at the station, he refused a lawyer, couldn’t wait to spill:
Suspicious for some time, he’d followed his wife and his brother as
they left the wedding and entered an unused banquet room. After
passing behind a partition, said wife gave said sib enthusiastic
head. Darwin allowed her to finish, waited until Baldwin went to
the john, confronted his brother, did the deed.

“What about your wife?”said Petra.

“What about her?”

“You didn’t hurt her.”

“She’s a woman,”said Darwin Yoshimura. “She’s weak. Baldwin
should’ve known better.”

The second whodunit started off as bloodstains in Los Feliz and
ended up with d.b. out in Angeles Crest National Forest. This
victim was a grocer named Bedros Kashigian. The blood was found in
the parking lot behind his market on Edgemont. Kashigian and his
five-year-old Cadillac were missing.

Two days later, forest rangers found the Caddy pulled to the side
of the road in the forest, Kashigian’s body slumped behind the
wheel. Dried blood had streamed out of his left ear, run onto his
face and shirt, but no obvious wounds. Maggot analysis said he’d
been dead the entire two days, or close to it. Meaning, instead of
driving home from work, he’d made his way thirty miles east. Or had
been taken there.

As far as Petra could tell, the grocer was a solid citizen,
married, three kids, nice house, no outstanding debts. But a solid
week of investigating Kashigian’s activities gave rise to the fact
that he’d been involved in a brawl two days before his
disappearance.

Barroom melee at a place on Alvarado. Latino clientele, but
Kashigian had a thing for one of the Salvadoran waitresses and went
there frequently to nurse beer-and-shots before retiring to her
room above the saloon. The fracas got going when two drunks started
pounding each other. Kashigian got caught in the middle and ended
up being punched in the head. Only once, according to the
bartender. An errant bare fist and Kashigian had left the bar on
his feet.

Kashigian’s widow, dealing with her loss as well as the new insight
that Bedros had been cheating on her, said hubby had complained of
a headache, attributing it to banging his head against a bread
rack. Couple of aspirins, he’d seemed fine.

Petra phoned the coroner, an unconscionably cheerful guy named
Rosenberg, and asked if a single, bare-knuckle blow to the head
could be fatal two days after the fact. Rosenberg said he doubted
it.

A scan of Bedros Kashigian’s insurance records showed hefty whole
life and first-to-die policies as well as medical claims paid five
years ago, when the grocer had been involved in a nine-car pileup
on the 5 North that had shattered his skull and caused intracranial
bleeding. Brought into the E.R. unconscious, Kashigian had been
wheeled into surgery where a half-dollar-sized piece of skull had
been sawed off so his brain could be cleaned up. That section,
labeled a “roundel” by Rosenberg, had been reattached using sutures
and screws.

After hearing about the accident, Rosenberg had changed his
mind.

“The roundel was anchored by scar tissue,”he told Petra. “And the
darn thing grew back thinner than the rest of the skull.
Unfortunately for your guy, that’s exactly where he took the punch.
The rest of his head could have withstood the impact but the thin
spot couldn’t. It shattered, drove bone slivers into his brain,
caused a slow bleed, and finally boom.”

“Boom,”said Petra. “There you go again, blinding me with
jargon.”

The coroner laughed. Petra laughed. Neither of them wanting to
think about Bedros Kashigian’s monumental bad luck.

“A single punch,”she said.

“Boom,”said Rosenberg.

“Tell me this, Doctor R., could he have driven to the forest out of
confusion?”

“Let me think about that. With shards of bone slicing into his gray
matter, a slow bleed, yeah, he could’ve been hazy,
disoriented.”

Which didn’t explain why Angeles Crest, specifically.

She asked Captain Schoelkopf if she should pursue homicide charges
against the guy who’d landed the punch.

“Who is he?”

“Don’t know yet.”

“A bar fight.”Schoelkopf flashed her the are-you-retarded? look.
“Write it up as an accidental death.”

Lacking the will—or the desire—to argue, she complied, then went to
inform the widow. Who told her Angeles Crest was where she and
Bedros used to go to make out when they were teenagers.

“At least he left me some good insurance,” said the woman. “The
main thing is my kids stay in private school.”

Within days after closing both files, the loneliness set in. Petra
had made the mistake of getting intimate with a partner, and now
she was working and living solo.

The object of her affections was a strange, taciturn detective
named Eric Stahl with a military background as an Army special
services officer and a history that had unfurled slowly. The first
time Petra had seen his black suit, pale skin, and flat, dark eyes
she’d thought undertaker. She’d disliked him instinctively and the
feeling appeared mutual. Somehow things had changed.

They’d started working together on the Cold Heart homicides,
coordinating with Milo Sturgis in West L.A. to put away a scumbag
psychopath who got off on dispatching creative types. Closing that
one hadn’t come easy; Eric had nearly died of stab wounds. Sitting,
waiting, in the E.R. waiting room, Petra had met his parents,
learned why he didn’t talk or emote or act remotely human.

He’d once had a family—wife and two kids—but had lost everything.
Heather, Danny, and Dawn. Taken from him cruelly. He’d resigned his
military commission, spent a year doped up on antidepressants, then
applied to the LAPD, where connections got him a Detective I
appointment, Hollywood Division, where Schoelkopf had foisted him
on Petra.

Whatever Schoelkopf knew he’d kept to himself. Uninformed, Petra
tried to get along, but faced with a partner with all the warmth of
ceramic tile, she soon gave up. The two of them ended up splitting
chores, minimizing the time they spent together. Long, cold, silent
stakeouts.

Then came a night full of terror. Even now, Petra wondered if Eric
had been trying to commit Suicide by Perp. She’d never brought it
up. Had no reason to.

She had not been the only woman in his life. During the Cold Heart
investigation, he’d met an exotic dancer, a bubble-headed blonde
with a perfect body named Kyra Montego aka Kathy Magary. Kyra was
there in the waiting room, too, stuffed into too-small duds,
sniffling into her hankie, examining her nails, unable to read the
dumbest magazine out of anxiety or what Petra suspected was
attention span disorder. Petra outlasted the bimbo, and when Eric
woke up, it was her hand holding his, her eyes locking with his
bruised, brown irises.

During the months of recuperation, Kyra kept dropping in at Eric’s
rented bungalow in Studio City, bearing takeout soup and plastic
utensils. Offering plastic boobs and batting eyelashes and Lord
knew what else.

Petra dealt with that by cooking for Eric. Growing up with five
brothers and a widowed father in Arizona, she’d learned to be
pretty handy around the kitchen. During the brief time her marriage
lasted, she’d played at gourmet. Now a nighthawk divorcée, she
rarely bothered to switch on the oven. But healing Eric with
home-cooked goodies had seemed terribly urgent.

In the end, the bimbo was out of the picture and Petra was squarely
in it. She and Eric went from awkwardness to reluctant
self-disclosure to friendship to closeness. When they finally made
love, he went at it with the fervor of a deprived animal. When they
finally settled into regular sex, she found him the best lover
she’d ever encountered, tender when she needed him to be,
accommodatingly athletic when that w…