The Golem of Hollywood by Jonathan Kellerman Read Free Book Online

was indeed responsive.
    Commander Michael Mallick had a handsome wife and two handsome daughters.
    He was an alumnus of Pepperdine University, class of ’72.
    The final standings of several amateur golf tournaments suggested that he ought to consider taking up tennis.
    File photos had him talking to reporters, announcing the arrest of a local terrorist cell plotting to bomb the office of a state congressman.
    So maybe Jacob was after a Jewish terrorist, after all.
    The idea embarrassed him. His people. Collective responsibility.
    How long did you have to be on your own before they ceased to be your people?
    Anyhow, how would Mallick know who the bad guy was?
    And if he did know, why hadn’t he told Jacob?
    Questions are good.
    But for a cop, answers were better, and Jacob had the unsettling thought that Mallick preferred to have him spinning his wheels.
    A sensitive matter.
    Protecting someone?
    Maybe the whole thing really was revenge from Mendoza. Make Jacob look dumb, lower his clearance rate, keep him subservient.
    He shook his head. He was getting paranoid.
    He looked up Officer Chris Hammett in the PD directory. He dialed him on his personal cell. It wouldn’t go through. His home phone worked fine, though, and he used it to leave the officer a message—a small act of defiance, little better than a tantrum. They hadn’t explicitly forbade him from making calls on the landline, and moreover he assumed that they were listening in, as well.
    He searched for
Dr. Divya V. Das
.
    A native of Mumbai, a graduate of Madras Medical College. Her Facebook page was set to private. She’d done her doctorate at Columbia University.
    The
V
stood for
Vanhishikha
.
    He could squander the rest of the day on the Internet, reading about other people, and get no closer to closing his case. Murders weren’t solved by technology. They were solved by people, and persistence, and enough caffeine to disable a yeti.
    The sat phone’s directory listed Michael Mallick, Divya Das, Subach, and Schott.
    All the numbers you’ll need are preprogrammed.
    In other words, no consults allowed. Jacob felt his headache returning.
    As far as he could tell, the camera was a normal camera.
    He opened the pleather binder.
    Blank pages, his job to fill them.
    But not empty, not completely. A tooth of paper peeked up from the rear slit pocket.
    A check made out to him, written on departmental Special Account, signed by M. Mallick.
    Ninety-seven thousand ninety-two dollars.
    One year’s salary, before taxes.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    B adly needing air, he stuffed the Discover card and the sat phone in his pockets and walked the four blocks to the 7-Eleven on Robertson and Airdrome.
    Except for a year in Israel, another in Cambridge, and a brief, unsuccessful bid by Stacy to graft him to West Hollywood, Jacob had always lived within the same one-mile radius. Pico-Robertson was the hub of west L.A.’s Orthodox Jewish community. His current home was on the second floor of a dingbat, three blocks from the dingbat he’d lived in after college.
    He sometimes felt like a dog tugging on its chain. He never did tug that hard, though; breaking free required energy he didn’t have.
    In a sense, he was ripe for hush-hush undercover work. He lived an undercover life, walking familiar streets wearing a stranger’s face. Sometimes a childhood acquaintance would buttonhole him, wanting to catch up. He’d smile and oblige and move on, knowing what they’d be saying about him at lunch on Saturday.
    You’ll never guess who I ran into.
    He’s a what?
    He married who?
    Divorced?
    Twice?
    Oh.
    We should have him over.
    We should fix him up.
    Steadily his childhood friends had filled their expected positions of prominence. Doctors, lawyers, dentists, people engaged in ambiguous “finance” activities. They married each other. They took out mortgages. They had robust, adorable children.
    For this reason, it didn’t