The second book in the Petra Connor series, 2004

Special thanks to: John Ahouse, Rick Albee, P.I., Det. Miguel Porras, Terri Porras, and Susan Wilcox.

May brought azure skies and California optimism to Hollywood. Petra Connor worked nights and slept through the blue. She had her own reason to be cheerful: solving two whodunit murders.

The first was a dead body at a wedding. The Ito-Park wedding, main ballroom of the Roosevelt Hotel, Japanese-American bride, Korean-American groom, a couple of law students who’d met at the U. Her father, a Glendale-born surgeon; his, an immigrant appliance dealer, barely able to speak English. Petra wondered about culture clash.

The body was one of the bride’s cousins, a thirty-two-year-old CPA named Baldwin Yoshimura, found midway through the reception, in an unlocked stall of the hotel men’s room, his neck twisted so hard, he looked like something out of The Exorcist. It took strong hands to do that, the coroner pronounced, but that was where the medical wisdom terminated.

Petra, working with no partner once again, talked to every friend and relative and finally unearthed the fact that Baldwin Yoshimura had been a serious lothario who’d made no distinction between married and unmarried conquests. As she continued to probe, she encountered nervous glances on the bride’s side. Finally, a third cousin named Wendy Sakura blurted out the truth: Baldwin had been fooling with his brother Darwin’s wife. The slut.

Darwin, a relative black sheep for this highly educated clan, was a martial arts instructor who worked at a studio in Woodland Hills. Petra forced herself to wake up during daylight, dropped in at the dojo, watched him put an advanced judo class through its paces. Stocky little guy, shaved head, pleasant demeanor. When the class was over, he approached Petra, arms extended for cuffing, saying, “I did it. Arrest me.”

Back at the station, he refused a lawyer, couldn’t wait to spill: Suspicious for some time, he’d followed his wife and his brother as they left the wedding and entered an unused banquet room. After passing behind a partition, said wife gave said sib enthusiastic head. Darwin allowed her to finish, waited until Baldwin went to the john, confronted his brother, did the deed.

“What about your wife?” said Petra.

“What about her?”

“You didn’t hurt her.”

“She’s a woman,” said Darwin Yoshimura. “She’s weak. Baldwin should’ve known better.”

The second whodunit started off as bloodstains in Los Feliz and ended up with d.b. out in Angeles Crest National Forest. This victim was a grocer named Bedros Kashigian. The blood was found in the parking lot behind his market on Edgemont. Kashigian and his five-year-old Cadillac were missing.

Two days later, forest rangers found the Caddy pulled to the side of the road in the forest, Kashigian’s body slumped behind the wheel. Dried blood had streamed out of his left ear, run onto his face and shirt, but no obvious wounds. Maggot analysis said he’d been dead the entire two days, or close to it. Meaning, instead of driving home from work, he’d made his way thirty miles east. Or had been taken there.

As far as Petra could tell, the grocer was a solid citizen, married, three kids, nice house, no outstanding debts. But a solid week of investigating Kashigian’s activities gave rise to the fact that he’d been involved in a brawl two days before his disappearance.

Barroom melee at a place on Alvarado. Latino clientele, but Kashigian had a thing for one of the Salvadoran waitresses and went there frequently to nurse beer-and-shots before retiring to her room above the saloon. The fracas got going when two drunks started pounding each other. Kashigian got caught in the middle and ended up being punched in the head. Only once, according to the bartender. An errant bare fist and Kashigian had left the bar on his feet.

Kashigian’s widow, dealing with her loss as well as the new insight that Bedros had been cheating on her, said hubby had complained of a headache, attributing it to banging his head against a bread rack. Couple of aspirins, he’d seemed fine.

Petra phoned the coroner, an unconscionably cheerful guy named Rosenberg, and asked if a single, bare-knuckle blow to the head could be fatal two days after the fact. Rosenberg said he doubted it.

A scan of Bedros Kashigian’s insurance records showed hefty whole life and first-to-die policies as well as medical claims paid five years ago, when the grocer had been involved in a nine-car pileup on the 5 North that had shattered his skull and caused intracranial bleeding. Brought into the E.R. unconscious, Kashigian had been wheeled into surgery where a half-dollar-sized piece of skull had been sawed off so his brain could be cleaned up. That section, labeled a “roundel” by Rosenberg, had been reattached using sutures and screws.

After hearing about the accident, Rosenberg had changed his mind.

“The roundel was anchored by scar tissue,” he told Petra. “And the darn thing grew back thinner than the rest of the skull. Unfortunately for your guy, that’s exactly where he took the punch. The rest of his head could have withstood the impact but the thin spot couldn’t. It shattered, drove bone slivers into his brain, caused a slow bleed, and finally boom.”

“Boom,” said Petra. “There you go again, blinding me with jargon.”

The coroner laughed. Petra laughed. Neither of them wanting to think about Bedros Kashigian’s monumental bad luck.

“A single punch,” she said.

“Boom,” said Rosenberg.

“Tell me this, Doctor R., could he have driven to the forest out of confusion?”

“Let me think about that. With shards of bone slicing into his gray matter, a slow bleed, yeah, he could’ve been hazy, disoriented.”

Which didn’t explain why Angeles Crest, specifically.

She asked Captain Schoelkopf if she should pursue homicide charges against the guy who’d landed the punch.

“Who is he?”

“Don’t know yet.”

“A bar fight.” Schoelkopf flashed her the are-you-retarded? look. “Write it up as an accidental death.”

Lacking the will- or the desire- to argue, she complied, then went to inform the widow. Who told her Angeles Crest was where she and Bedros used to go to make out when they were teenagers.

“At least he left me some good insurance,” said the woman. “The main thing is my kids stay in private school.”

Within days after closing both files, the loneliness set in. Petra had made the mistake of getting intimate with a partner, and now she was working and living solo.

The object of her affections was a strange, taciturn detective named Eric Stahl with a military background as an Army special services officer and a history that had unfurled slowly. The first time Petra had seen his black suit, pale skin, and flat, dark eyes she’d thought undertaker. She’d disliked him instinctively and the feeling appeared mutual. Somehow things had changed.

They’d started working together on the Cold Heart homicides, coordinating with Milo Sturgis in West L.A. to put away a scumbag psychopath who got off on dispatching creative types. Closing that one hadn’t come easy; Eric had nearly died of stab wounds. Sitting, waiting, in the E.R. waiting room, Petra had met his parents, learned why he didn’t talk or emote or act remotely human.