Free The Golem of Hollywood by Jonathan Kellerman

carpet?
    Alakazam!
    Oddly, the house looked less bleak than it had during the day, its menace effaced by a wide field of stars. Wind carried the snicks and clicks and hoots of animal life, abundant and invisible, creatures that come out at night.
    He took his flashlight from the glove box, but didn’t need it to find his way to the front door. He didn’t need it inside, either. Moonlight mixed with city glow flooded the open air.
    It felt significant to him that the place was both totally isolated and totally exposed.
    You’d expect a body dump to be chosen with secrecy in mind. The staging reeked of exhibitionism, though, and those two facts in combination hinted at a desire for a specific audience.
    Who owned this place?
    Who knew about it?
    He checked the sat phone for a missed call from Hammett. Frowned. No reception. These things were supposed to work anywhere.
    He walked around, waving the phone, one bar dancing in and out. He managed to pin it down outside the master. He waited for a message icon to appear, but there was nothing.
    The air was surprisingly free of death funk, and on the whole, he noticed that he felt less creeped out than he would have thought. Jacob was no mystic, but he did believe that people were drawn toward spaces thatreflected their personalities, and that the soul of a residence and the soul inhabiting it grew progressively overlapped over time.
    Here, he sensed a kind of serenity, verging on Zen calm. It would be a good place to write, or draw, or sculpt—an atelier in the sky, ideal for the rare artist who could afford it.
    Or someone with money, posturing as an artist.
    In Jacob’s experience, the vast majority of bad guys took the path of least resistance. That was what made them bad guys: an overwhelming need to do whatever they wanted while expending as little energy as possible. Most criminality was a pathological form of laziness.
    This guy, though. He had a sense of style. Repulsive, but distinct. Maybe he truly was different, or thought he was. There was a second variety of criminal, less common but flashier. The Rippers, the Ed Geins, the BTKs. They went the extra mile to make the papers. A notable subtype being the Hitlers and the Stalins and the Pol Pots.
    Both types were dangerous. The first because they were careless, the second because they were careful.
    Jacob wandered into the studio and stood before the east-facing window, thinking about the house he’d grown up in, the corner of the garage taken over by twenty-five-pound boxes of clay, jars of paint and glaze, a small electric kiln, a drying rack hidden behind a drop cloth. The wonky three-legged stool she sat on. No potter’s wheel. Bina Lev had worked freehand.
    He had a vague notion of a youthful flirtation with the avant-garde. No physical evidence of that period remained, though, and by the time he got old enough to conceive of his mother as an individual with ambitions, hers had imploded. The woman he knew strictly produced ritual objects—goblets for holding the Sabbath wine, menorahs, spice boxes for the
havdalah
ceremony. She hauled them to weekend fairs, sold them on consignment at local Judaica stores. You couldn’t exactly call it pragmatic, her choice to forsake art for craft. It wasn’t like she made anymoney. And there was bitter irony for Jacob in learning that these items were now considered collectible in some circles, owing to their scarcity.
    The Internet would have served her well. Poor timing.
    Poor timing, all around.
    Shortly after her funeral, Sam, nearly comatose with grief, decided to put the house up for sale. It was a simple enough matter getting rid of the furniture, but he begged off cleaning out the garage. Jacob stepped in. He was used to feeling like the sole adult.
    He bought a roll of contractor bags and went about the business with methodical rage, half-finished candelabra thrown in indiscriminately alongside unopened cases of Amaco Low Fire