K Is for Killer

Sue Grafton

"K" IS FOR

KILLER

SUE GRAFTON

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY NEW YORK

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Grafton, Sue.

"K" is for killer / Sue Grafton. — 1st ed. p. cm. I. Tide.

PS3557.R13K2 1994 94-1242

813'.54—dc20 CIP

ISBN 0-8050-1936-7

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First Edition—1994

Printed in the United States of America All first editions are printed on acid-free paper.

13579 10 8642

For Mary Lawrence Young and crew . . .

Richard, Lori, and Taylor, Lawrence, and Mary Taylor, and, of course, the dogs . . . Sadie and Halley, Toto and Emmy Oz, Bob, Dee, Lily, and Tog, and cats . . .

Yukio, Ace, Karmin, and Kit, and beloved Charmin, much missed.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of the following people: Steven Humphrey; Susan Aharonian, treatment supervisor, and JoAnn Fults, Cater Water Treatment Plant; Larry Gillespie, Santa Barbara County coroner; Lieutenant Terry Bristol, Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Office; Detective Tom Miller, Santa Barbara Police Department; Jody Knoell, Wells Fargo Bank; Michael Creek, KMGQ; Hildy Hoffman, secretary to the mayor and council, city of Santa Barbara; Tokie Shynk, R.N., and the CCU nursing staff, Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital; Bobbie Kline, R.N., B.S., director of emergency room, Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital; and Craig Wertz, Kleen Pools, Santa Barbara.

The statutory definition of homicide is the "unlawful killing of one human being by another." Sometimes the phrase "with malice" is employed, the concept serving to distinguish murder from the numerous other occasions in which people deprive each other of life —wars and executions coming foremost to mind. "Malice" in the law doesn't necessarily convey hatred or even ill will but refers instead to a conscious desire to inflict serious injury or cause death. In the main, criminal homicide is an intimate, personal affair insofar as most homicide victims are killed by close relatives, friends, or acquaintances. Reason enough to keep your distance, if you're asking me.

In Santa Teresa, California, approximately eighty-five percent of all criminal homicides are resolved, meaning that the assailant is identified, apprehended, and the question of guilt or innocence is adjudicated by the courts. The victims of unsolved homicides I think of as the unruly dead: persons who reside in a limbo of their own, some state between life and death, restless, dissatisfied, longing for release. It's a fanciful notion for someone not generally given to flights of imagination, but I think of these souls locked in an uneasy relationship with those who have killed them. I've talked to homicide investigators who've been caught up in similar reveries, haunted by certain victims who seem to linger among us, persistent in their desire for vindication. In the hazy zone where wakefulness fades into sleep, in that leaden moment just before the mind sinks below consciousness, I can sometimes hear them murmuring. They mourn themselves. They sing a lullaby of the murdered. They whisper the names of their attackers, those men and women who still walk the earth, unidentified, unaccused, unpunished, unrepentant. On such nights, I do not sleep well. I lie awake listening, hoping to catch a syllable, a phrase, straining to discern in that roll call of conspirators the name of one killer. Lorna Kepler's murder ended up affecting me that way, though I didn't learn the facts of her death until months afterward.