Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Motive is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2015 by Jonathan Kellerman

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kellerman, Jonathan.
Motive: an Alex Delaware novel/Jonathan Kellerman.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-345-54137-6
eBook ISBN 978-0-345-54138-3
1. Delaware, Alex (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Forensic psychologists—Fiction.
3. Sturgis, Milo (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 4. Police—California—Los Angeles—Fiction.
5. Serial murder investigation—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3561.E3865M68 2015
813′.54—dc23        2014038686

Jacket design: Scott Biel
Jacket image: © Roc Canals Photography/Moment Select/Getty Images

v3.1

CHAPTER

1

My closest friend, a homicide lieutenant, refuses to add up how many murders he’s investigated, claiming nostalgia is for losers. My rough guess is three hundred.

Most of those have been a sickening mix of tragic and mundane.

A pair of drunks pounding the life out of each other while equally besotted witnesses stand around hooting.

An errant knife-flick or gunshot putting the period on a domestic spat.

Gangbangers, some of them too young to shave, wielding firearms ranging from explode-in-your hand .22s to military-grade assault weapons, as they blast away through the open windows of scruffy compact cars.

It’s the “different” ones that bring Milo Sturgis to my door.

Katherine Hennepin’s homicide easily qualified but he’d never mentioned her to me. Now he stood in my living room at nine a.m. wearing a dust-colored windbreaker and brown poly pants from another era, his olive vinyl attaché dangling from one massive paw. Pale, pockmarked, paunchy, black hair limp and in need of trimming, he sagged like a rhino who’d lost out to the alpha male.

“Doctor,” he grumbled. He uses my title when amused or depressed. That covers a lot of ground.

I said, “Morning.”

“Apparently it is.” He trudged past me into the kitchen. “Sorry.”

“For what?”

“Offering you a tall glass of warm skunky beer.” Stopping short of the fridge, he sank into a chair, rubbed his face, clicked his teeth, and avoided eye contact while unlatching the green case. Out came a blue binder identical to so many others I’d seen.

Hennepin, K. B. had been opened two months ago.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, still looking away. “Didn’t think I needed to bug you, ’cause it was obvious.” He growled. “Don’t take any stock tips from me.”

He waited. I read.