Free Rage by Jonathan Kellerman

restaurant was on a quiet block, sandwiched
between a photocopy service and a one-story office building. Both dark for the
weekend. The sky was black and, two blocks up, traffic on Pico was anemic.
L.A.’s never really been a nightlife city, and this part of Westwood hibernated
when the mall wasn’t bustling.
    The
mall.
    Eight
years after he had brutalized Kristal Malley, Rand wanted to talk about the
crime, two blocks from a mall.
    I’m
a good person.
    If it
was absolution he was after, I wasn’t a priest.
    Maybe
the distinction between therapy and confession was petty. Maybe he knew the
difference. Maybe he just wanted to talk. Like the judge who’d sent him away.
    I
wondered how Tom Laskin was doing. Wondered about all of them.
    I
stood there, careful to stay in the reflected glare of the boot sign, watching
for the man Randolph Duchay had become.
    He’d
been a big kid, so he was probably a large man. Unless eight years of
institutional food and God knew what other indignities had stunted his growth.
    I
thought of the way he’d struggled to make out the word “pizza.”
    The
word was two feet of tricolor neon.
    Five
minutes passed. Ten, fifteen.
    I
took a stroll up the block, watching my back for no reason except that a
murderer might be looking for me.
    What
did he want ?
    Returning
to Newark Pizza, I cracked the door, in case I’d missed him. I hadn’t. This
time the black guys checked me out and the cook I’d talked to got an unpleasant
look on his face.
    I
went back outside, positioned myself ten feet up from the restaurant, waited five
minutes more.
    Nothing.
I drove home.
    * * *
    My
message machine was blank. I wondered if I should call Milo and ask him to
check the specifics of Rand Duchay’s release. Solicit a detective’s guess as to
what Rand had wanted and why he hadn’t shown.
    A quarter
century of homicide work had implanted a doomsday chip in Milo’s brain, and I
had a pretty good idea of how he’d respond.
    Once
a scumbag, always a scumbag, Alex. Why mess with it?
    I
made myself a tuna sandwich and drank some decaf, set the house alarm, and
settled on my office couch with two months’ worth of psych journals. Somewhere
out in the darkness a coyote ululated— a warbling, shrieking a cappella solo,
part scavenger’s protest, part predator’s triumph.
    The
Glen’s teeming with the creatures. They dine on the haute garbage that fills
Westside trash cans, and some are as sleek and fearless as house pets.
    I
used to have a little French bulldog and worried about letting him out in the
yard alone. Now he was living in Seattle and life was simpler.
    I
cleared my throat. The sound echoed; the house was full of echoes.
    The
howl-sonata repeated itself. Enlarged to a duet, then grew to a coyote chorus.
    A
pack of them, exulting in the kill.
    Food-chain
violence. That made sense and I found the noise comforting.
    * * *
    I
read until two a.m., fell asleep on the couch, managed to drag myself to bed at
three. By seven I was up, awake without being rested. The last thing I wanted
to do was run. I dressed for it anyway, was heading for the door when Allison
called from Greenwich.
    “Good
morning, handsome.”
    “Morning,
gorgeous.”
    “I’m
glad I caught you.” She sounded a little down. Lonely? Or maybe that was me.
    “How’s
life with Grandma?”
    “You
know Gra— ” She laughed. “You don’t know her, do you? This morning, despite the
fact that it’s freezing, she insisted we take a walk around the grounds and
look for ‘unique leaves.’ Ninety-one and she’s forging through snow like a
trapper. She studied botany at Smith, claims she would’ve gotten a Ph.D. if she
hadn’t ‘been swept into matrimony’ at twenty.”
    “Find
anything?” I said.
    “After
clawing through a four-foot snowbank, I managed to produce one brown shriveled
thing she found ‘interesting.’ My fingers were numb and that was with gloves
on. Gram, of course, eschews hand-coverings except at lunches in the