Jonathan Kellerman_Petra Connor 02 Read Online Free PDF

double life: Burton’s beaux-arts buildings and emerald playing fields by day, by night the burp of gunfire and screams and static-scratchy salsa outside the window of the closet-sized bedroom he shared with his brothers.
    At night, he thought a lot about the differences among people. Rich and poor, light and dark. Crime, why people did bad things. Was there a fairness to life? Did God take a personal interest in everyone’s life?
    Sometimes, he wondered about his mother. Was hers a double life, too? Maybe one day they’d talk about it.
    By age fourteen, he smiled and spoke like a Burton student and had zipped through Burton’s high school math curriculum, all of sophomore biology, and two years of advanced placement history. Four years of high school were compressed to two. At fifteen, he graduated with full honors and was accepted as a “special circumstances” student at the University of Southern California.
    It was in college that he decided to become a doctor, and he earned a 4.0 as a bio major with a minor in math. USC wanted to hold on to him, and by the time he graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, at barely nineteen, he’d been accepted to the Keck School of Medicine.
    His parents celebrated, but Isaac wasn’t sure.
    Four more years of lectures with no respite in between. Everything had moved so fast. Deep down, he knew he wasn’t mature enough for the responsibility of tending to other human beings.
    He requested and received a deferral, needing a break—something leisurely, less structured.
    For Isaac that meant a Ph.D. in epidemiology and biostatistics. By age twenty-one, he’d fulfilled all his course requirements, earned a master’s degree, and began work on his doctoral dissertation.
    â€œDiscriminating and Predictive Patterns of Solved and Unsolved Homicides in Los Angeles Between 1991 and 2001.”
    As he sat and composed his hypothesis, hunched in a remote corner of the Doheny Library subbasement, memories of gunshots and screams and salsa filled his head.
    Though care had been taken by the university to shield its boy-wonder from publicity, news of Isaac’s triumphs reached the desk of City Councilman Gilbert Reyes, who promptly issued a press release in which he took credit for everything the young man had accomplished.
    Upon the strong advice of his faculty adviser, Isaac attended a luncheon where he sat next to Reyes; shook the hands of big, loud people; contradicted nothing the councilman said.
    Photo opportunities were Reyes’s meat; pictures appeared in the Spanish language mailings his campaign distributed prior to the next election. Isaac, looking like a shell-shocked Boy Scout, was labeled
“El Prodigio.”
    The experience left him vaguely unsettled, but when the time came to request access to LAPD files for his research, Isaac knew who to call. Within two days, he had an authorized long-term visitors’ badge, a jerry-built “internship,” guaranteed access to inactive homicide files—and anything else he came across in the basement archives. His desk would be at Hollywood Division, because Gilbert Reyes was a serious buddy of Deputy Chief Randy Diaz, the new Hollywood Division overboss.
    Isaac showed up at Hollywood bright and early on an April Monday and met with an unpleasant police captain named Schoelkopf, who looked like Stalin.
    Schoelkopf regarded Isaac as if he were a suspect, didn’t even pretend to pay attention as Isaac rattled off his hypotheses, nor did he listen as Isaac offered profound thanks for the desk. Instead, his eyes focused on a distant place and he chewed his big black mustache as if it was lunch. When Isaac stopped talking, a cold smile stretched the facial pelt.
    â€œYeah, fine,” said the captain. “Ask for Connor. She’ll take real good care of you.”

CHAPTER
    5
    I t was nothing Petra would have ever noticed. Even if it had stared her in the