Terminal (A Lomax & Biggs Mystery Book 5) (4 page)

“Married, two kids in college.”

“I’m looking for something a little more personal.”

“You mean did he screw around? My last job, the doc had an affair. You can’t keep that on the down low from the woman who answers your phone and opens your mail. But not Dr. Kraus. He was a good man.”

“I’m sure he was,” Terry said, “and we’re very sorry for your loss.”

She looked away. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she said, pounding her desk with the flat of her fist. “I should never have buzzed him in.”

“Michele,” I said, “he came here to shoot Dr. Kraus. If you got in his way, he’d have shot you too.”

She nodded. She knew I was right. It’s just another one of those things you learn growing up on the streets of East LA.

CHAPTER 5

“YOU READY TO
go?” Terry asked when we’d finished talking to Michele.

“Almost,” I said. “I’ve just got to make a quick stop at Doug Heller’s office.”

“Good idea. He probably can tell us a few things about the victim. I’ll go with you, partner.”

“Nice try,” I said, “but I can handle this on my own… partner.”

Terry shrugged and headed for the car, and I walked back down the same hallway I raced through an hour ago. Doug’s waiting room was empty, but Nadine was still at the front desk.

She looked up at me, the radiant smile gone, her face drawn in pain. “Mike,” she said, “I wasn’t sure you’d come back. Dr. Heller is in his office.”

Doug was sitting at his desk. When it comes to death, especially something as violent and senseless as the murder of Kristian Kraus, doctors are no different from the rest of us. Doug was shaken to the core.

I sat down across from him. “Was he a friend?” I asked.

“More of a colleague, but one I liked. Hell, everybody liked him. Most docs deal with pain and suffering. If we’re any good, we can make you feel better. Kris helped people make babies.”

“Can you think of any reason why anyone would want to kill him?” I asked for the second time in the space of a few minutes.

He shook his head. “I’ve been sitting here trying to come up with an answer, and the only thing I can come up with is that maybe the killer got the wrong doctor.”

“He asked for Dr. Kraus by name before he shot him.”

“Why, Mike, why?”

“I don’t know, but I’m going to find out. I’ve got a long day ahead of me. I’m going to ask for a rain check on that prostate exam.”

He smiled. “No problem,” he said. “Especially now that I realize it’s not your prostate that’s going to kill you. You’re more likely to die in a shootout at your doctor’s office.”

“Thanks.” I stood up.

“Not so fast,” he said. “I still want Brenda to draw some blood before you go.”

“You mind telling me why?”

“I will, but as your primary physician, there’s something I have to say first. Next time you hear gunshots, don’t go running towards them.”

“Sorry, Doc, but that’s my job.”

“And that, Detective Lomax, is exactly why I’m running these blood tests. Now if you don’t tell me how to do my job, I won’t tell you how to do yours.”

Ten minutes later, I was back in the car with Terry.

It was unseasonably warm for the middle of October, and I had made the mistake of not wearing my jacket.

“What’s going on?” he said, pointing to the telltale Band-Aid taped over the vein in my left arm.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said. “With anybody. So don’t say anything to Diana about driving me to Doug’s office.”

“You never told her you were going back for a follow-up?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because she’d start worrying, and there’s nothing to worry about.”

“Well, you better tell her soon, because it’s going to be all over the news that LAPD Detective Mike Lomax was in the doctor’s office with his ass hanging out when the shooting went down.”

He was right. I had to talk to Diana. But first Terry and I had to break the news to two women that they were now widows.

CHAPTER 6

BY THE TIME
we arrived at Kristian Kraus’s Mediterranean villa in Hollywood Hills, the street was crowded with TV news vans, camera crews, and reporters, all in search of juicy new details to feed a homicide-hungry public.

A maid let us in, walked us through the house and then out the back door. We followed a red brick path through a garden until we got to a small white bungalow.

“It’s Mrs. Kraus’s studio,” the maid said. “She came back here to get as far away from the TV people as possible.”

Nina Kraus opened the door and invited us in. She was in her mid-forties, wearing paint-spattered jeans and a man’s shirt, with her blond curly hair tied up in a pink bandana. Her face was California tan, but her blue eyes were red from crying. The walls were covered with an eclectic mix of landscapes, portraits, and still lifes.

Terry and I extended our condolences and apologized for not getting to the house before the press arrived.

That set her off. “One of those bastards rang my doorbell,” she said. “That’s how I found out. He asked me how I felt about my husband being murdered. I thought it was some kind of a joke. But then another TV truck drove up. They’re vultures.”

She took a moment to regain her composure. “Who killed him?” she asked.

I gave her Calvin Bernstein’s name.

“Was he a patient?”

“Michelle said she’d never seen him before. His name wasn’t in her files.”

“Then why? Why did he want to kill Kris?”

“We were hoping you could tell us,” I said.

She shook her head.

“Did your husband have any enemies?”

Another head shake.

“Did he get any threats? Any ominous phone calls or texts?”

She didn’t respond, and I remembered how I had clammed up just a few hours ago when Doug was bombarding me with stupid questions about dizzy spells, shortness of breath, or steroids.

“We have the killer,” I said. “But we don’t have a motive. Anything you can tell us about your husband might help us.”

“Last year he got more than seven hundred Christmas cards,” she said. “That’s how much people loved him. Couples came to him, desperate, praying for a miracle, and for so many of them, Kris was the answer to their prayers.”

I stood there unable to ask the next question. Joanie and I had been one of those couples. Only we didn’t get what we came for.

Terry stepped in. “Mrs. Kraus, I’m sure your husband was a brilliant doctor, but not everyone can have a baby. Did any of them blame him?”

“I know what you’re thinking, but no. Oh, sure, some of them were disappointed, but everyone knew that Kris tried his best. What they didn’t know…” She stopped as the thought washed over her. “What they didn’t know was how devastated he was when he couldn’t help them get what they wanted most.”

She started to sob. Fresh tears rolled down her cheeks, and she wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her shirt. It must have belonged to her husband, because the moment it touched her face, she made the connection, turned away from us, and wept uncontrollably into the frayed blue fabric.

Terry and I stood there, silent witnesses to her grief. We’d seen it hundreds of times before, and for me it is always the galvanizing moment when my commitment is no longer to the dead body inside the chalk outline. It’s to the living. It’s when my Inner Cop pledges to find the killer and bring him to justice.

But this time was different. I’d met the killer. We’d talked. “Tell Janice I love her,” he’d said. Then Calvin Bernstein had provided his own justice.

His suicide may have gotten him off the hook, but not me or my partner. It just changed the nature of what Terry and I had to do for Nina Kraus—make sense of a totally senseless act.

CHAPTER 7

CAMERAS CLICKED, AND
reporters shoved microphones in our faces as soon as Terry and I stepped out of the house and onto Kraus’s front lawn.

We learned long ago that saying “no comment” is a waste of breath. It only encourages the news hounds to bark out their questions even louder, so we pushed our way through the crowd without saying a word.

“Do you agree with Mrs. Kraus?” Terry asked once we were back in the car.

“That the press are vultures?” I said.

“That’s a given, but that’s not the question. I’m talking about the doc. She made it sound like win or lose in the baby lottery, everyone thought he was a saint. You knew him. Do you feel that way?”

“Look, if you’re asking did I send him Christmas cards, no. Besides, I’ll bet most of those have pictures of happy families with healthy kids on them. We weren’t that lucky.”

“Sorry, Mike. I didn’t mean to make you dredge this up.”

“That’s all right. The dredging started the second I saw Kraus lying in a pool of blood on his office floor,” I said, letting my mind drift back to a moment in time that will live with me forever.

Kraus’s office had been crowded that day. It was par for the
course. He was always running late. But this time, as soon as we signed in, a nurse took us straight to an exam room. Two minutes later, Kraus walked in, sat down across from us, took Joanie’s hand, and gave her the bad news. It’s not easy to tell a woman who’s there to get pregnant that she has to have her ovaries removed, but I doubt if anyone could have handled it better
.

“I think Nina Kraus got it right,” I said. “The man was dedicated to helping couples realize their dream. I met a lot of patients sitting around in that waiting room, and I never met anyone who didn’t like him.”

“Calvin Bernstein didn’t.”

“Bernstein didn’t even know him. You heard what Michelle said. He had to double-check to make sure he was talking to Kraus before he—shit,” I said, smacking my hand on the dashboard.

“What?”

“I’ve been looking at this whole thing ass backwards.”

We were on a winding street in the Hills, and Terry pulled the car to the side of the road and stopped. “Talk to me.”

“I keep running these scenarios through my head—what could Kraus have done that would make Bernstein want to kill him? It couldn’t have been any worse than what happened to me and Joanie, and then it dawned on me—I’ve been thinking like a patient. Bernstein wasn’t. Which means he wasn’t there for revenge. I know this is coming out of left field, but maybe he was there because he had a job to do—kill Kraus. Think about it, Terry—who kills someone that they have no connection to?”

“You’re saying Bernstein was a hit man?”

I almost laughed. “
Hit man
is way too generous. A professional contract killer has two goals. Pop the target and get away clean. Not this guy. First he decides that the best place to kill Kraus is in a crowded office building in the middle of a busy day. Then he brings along a gun that would fit in better at a turkey shoot. He whacks his victim with one shot, but does he toss the gun and
run like hell? No. He sticks around and fires two more blasts into a dead man.

“When I cornered him, the first thing he said was, ‘I had no choice. I had to do it. I’m sorry.’ That’s about as far from a pro as you can get. So, no—I can’t call Cal Bernstein a hit man. I think he was probably a desperate soul who got paid to do somebody else’s dirty work, and then was so filled with remorse after he’d done it that he blew his brains out.”

Terry turned in his seat and looked me straight in the eye.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Tell me how dumb I sound.”

“Actually,” Terry said, “you sound like the smartest cop in this car. I had the same dumb idea about twenty minutes ago, but I didn’t have the brains or the balls to tell you what I was thinking.”

CHAPTER 8

THE BERNSTEINS LIVED
in a small stucco house in a working-class neighborhood in Van Nuys. There was a ten-year-old Toyota Matrix in the driveway.

“She’s home,” Terry said, ringing the bell.

A petite woman came to the screen door. “Yes?”

“Mrs. Bernstein,” I said, holding out my ID. “Detectives Lomax and Biggs from the Los Angeles Police Department.”

She knew why we were there before I said another word.

“It’s Cal, isn’t it?” she said, sobbing as she opened the door. “He’s dead, right?”

“Yes ma’am,” I said. “We are very sorry for your loss.”

“I knew it was coming,” she said, her face streaked with tears, “but you’re never ready.”

“
You knew
?” I said.

Her head snapped up. “
Did I know my husband was dying of a brain tumor
? What kind of stupid question is that?” she said, her jaw clenched, her eyes drilling me with unbridled rage. “I don’t need the police anymore. Just tell me where he is. I have to make arrangements.”

“Ma’am,” Terry said. “I think we better go inside and sit down. There’s something we have to tell you.”

I’d run Janice Bernstein’s name through the computer before we got there, so I knew she was only fifty-two, but she looked
ten years older. Her hair was limp and gray, her brown eyes sleep-deprived, and the stress lines on her face had been etched in long before we arrived.

Breaking the news about a death is always difficult, but telling a woman that her husband murdered a total stranger and then blew his head off with a shotgun was as heart-wrenching an experience as I had ever gone through. And then I capped it off with Cal’s final words.

It took twenty minutes before she could pull herself together and answer our questions coherently.

She had never heard of Kristian Kraus.

“Cal liked his doctors. Was he a brain surgeon? An oncologist?” she asked, trying to connect at least some of the dots.

“He was a fertility doctor,” I said.

A faint smile. “Cal and I never had a problem in that department. We have two grown children, and then we called it quits. I don’t think we even knew a—oh, my God, I just saw something about this on TV. They didn’t have any details yet. Cal did that?”

“I’m afraid so, ma’am.”

Another crying jag.

She had no idea why her husband would kill the doctor, but she could understand why he’d kill himself.

“Cal had an inoperable brain tumor,” she said. “He’d been fighting it with radiation for six months, but it was a losing battle. Once he knew the clock was running out, he said he might have to bypass the end game. The last few weeks can be devastating. Severe pain, seizures, complete loss of body functions—there’s a long ugly list, and he told me not to think less of him if he took the easy way out. I thought he might kill himself, but with pills—with me by his side, holding his hand. Death with dignity—it’s what they taught him at LWD.”