Authors: Jonathan Kellerman
CHAPTER
16
T
hin chart.
It didn’t take Milo long to finish reading it, and when he did his jaw was tight and his shoulders were bunched.
He thrust it at me.
Mary Lou Koppel had written out a detailed intake for her treatment of Gavin Quick, but her subsequent notes were sketchy.
The intake said enough.
Gavin hadn’t come to her because of posttraumatic stress due to his accident. He’d been assigned to therapy by an Orange County judge. Alternative sentencing after being convicted four months ago of stalking a Tustin woman named Beth Gallegos.
Gallegos had been an occupational therapist at St. John’s Hospital, where she’d treated Gavin after his injury. According to Koppel’s notes, Gavin had become pathologically attached to her, leading Gallegos to transfer his care to another therapist. Gavin persisted in his attempts to date her, phoning her at home, sometimes two dozen times a night, then extending his attempts to early-morning wake-up calls in which he wept and proclaimed his love for her.
He wrote Beth Gallegos long amorous notes and mailed them with gifts of jewelry and perfume. For every day of one manic week, he had two dozen roses delivered to St. John’s.
When Beth Gallegos quit and took a job at a rehabilitation clinic in Long Beach, Gavin managed to find her, and his overtures resumed.
Knowing about his head injury, Gallegos was loath to prosecute, but when he showed up at her apartment in the middle of the night, banged on the door, and insisted she let him in, she called the police. Gavin was arrested for disturbing the peace, but the cops told Gallegos if she wanted a more serious charge, she needed to get a restraining order.
She bargained with Gavin’s parents: If he ceased, she’d drop the issue.
Gavin agreed, but a week later the phone calls started up again. Beth Gallegos obtained the order, and when Gavin violated it by waiting in the parking lot at the Long Beach clinic, he was busted for felony stalking.
Because of his accident, he was allowed to plead down to a misdemeanor harassment charge contingent upon seeking psychiatric help. His attorney requested and was granted the opportunity to suggest a therapist. With no objection from the D.A., the court assented, and Gavin was referred to Franco Gull, Ph.D.
Koppel noted that she’d informed the court of the transfer from Gull to her.
Covering the legal bases.
“Pt. has poor insight,”
she wrote, at the end of the intake.
“Fails to see what he did wrong. Possib. Rel. to head injury. Tx will emphasize insight and respect for personal boundaries.”
I gave the file back to Milo.
He was cracking his knuckles, and his thick, black eyebrows dipped toward anger-compressed eyes.
“Nice,” he said. “No one thinks to tell me.”
“The Quicks wouldn’t want Gavin’s memory fouled. Given that and the trauma of Gavin’s murder, I wouldn’t be surprised if they ‘forgot.’ ”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, but the goddamn Orange County D.A.? The goddamn court? Goddamn Dr. Mary Lou? The kid gets killed, and no one thinks to tell me he got weird less than half a year ago and made someone very, very unhappy?”
“The murder didn’t hit the news.”
“I’ve sent teletypes and requests for info on the blonde to every local jurisdiction, including Tustin PD, and Gavin’s name is all over it. No doubt it’s sitting in some goddamn in-basket.”
He tried to crack more knuckles, produced silence. “If the public only knew . . . okay, the kid was a stalker, it’s a whole new game.”
“How would that relate to Koppel’s murder?” I said. “Or Flora Newsome?”
“Hell if I know!” he shouted.
I kept quiet.
“Sorry,” he said. “Koppel probably died because of something she knew about Gavin. What that is, I don’t have a clue, but it’s got to be that. In terms of Newsome, it’s looking like Lorraine was right, and I made too much of the similarities between the cases, not enough of the differences.”
He bagged the file, paged through the rest of the stack, muttered, “Bills, subscription forms, junk,” and replaced it on the desk.
“I actually volunteered for this,” he said.
I thought:
You need the challenge.
Said nothing.
“For now,” he said, “Newsome stays Lorraine’s problem; I’m sticking to my boy Gavin. And all the complications he’s wrought. The crazy little bastard.”
CHAPTER
17
M
ary Lou Koppel’s murder hit the news in the usual way: lots of heat, no light, a bit of filler for the papers, a few paragraphs for the perky scripts read by bright-eyed TV smilers who fancied themselves journalists. Lacking much in the way of forensic details, the newsfolk made much of the victim’s incursion into their territory. The adjectives “savvy” and “media-smart” were bandied about with the usual relish reserved for clichés.
By the next day, the story was dead.
Milo went through channels and asked LAPD’s communications office to get the blond girl’s face some media exposure. The hook he presented was the possibility of a bigger story than two kids getting shot up on Mulholland: the link between those killings and Koppel’s. The PR cops questioned his grounds for that claim, said no way would TV stations run a morgue shot of a genuine dead person, said they were swamped with all kinds of requests for exposure from other detectives, promised they’d look into it.
I got to his office shortly after he did, sat there as he struggled out of his jacket, which seemed to be strangling him. The effort left his tie askew and shirt untucked. He sat on the edge of his desk, read a message slip, punched an extension on his desk phone. “Sean? Come in.”
I said, “Anything new on Koppel?”
“Oh. Hi. Coroner estimates time of death some time last night or early morning. No forced entry, no reports of strange vehicles in the neighborhood.”
“What about the gunshot?”
“The neighbors to the north are in Europe. To the south is a woman in her nineties under the care of a nurse. The nurse hears fine, but they both sleep in the old lady’s room, and there’s a humidifier and an air filter blowing, which blocks out anything short of a nuclear blast.” He laughed. “It’s like the gods are conspiring. You have any fresh insights?”
Before I could answer, a tall, red-haired man in his late twenties knocked on the door frame. He wore a four-button gray suit, dark blue shirt, dark blue tie. Doc Martens on his feet. His hair was cut short, and freckles speckled his brow and cheeks. He was loose-limbed and built like a point guard, had the rounded, baby-faced look you see on some redheads.
“Hey,” said Milo.
“Lieutenant.” Small salute.
“Alex, this is Detective Sean Binchy. Sean, Dr. Alex Delaware, our psych consultant.”
Binchy remained in the doorway and extended his hand. The room was small enough for us to shake that way.
“Sean’s gonna be helping me on Koppel.” To Binchy: “Any news on her family?”
“Both parents are dead, Lieut. I found an aunt in Fairfield, Connecticut, but she hadn’t seen Dr. Koppel in years. Quote-unquote: ‘After Mary Lou moved to California, she wanted nothing to do with any of us.’ She did say the family would probably pay for the funeral, send them the bill.”
“No one’s coming out?”
Sean Binchy shook his head. “They’re pretty much detached from her. Kind of sad. In terms of the ex-husband, he’s here. In L.A. I mean. But he’s not a lawyer. He’s into real estate.” He pulled out a notepad. “Encino. I left a message, but so far he hasn’t gotten back. I thought I’d do more on the neighborhood canvass near Dr. Koppel’s house, then try again.”
“Sounds good,” said Milo.
“Anything else you need, Lieut?”
“No, finishing the canvass is a good idea. Still nothing from the neighbors?”
“Sorry, no,” said Binchy. “Seems like it was a quiet night in Cheviot Hills.”
“Okay, Sean. Thanks.
Sayonara
.”
“See you, Loot. Nice to meet you, Doc.”
When Binchy was gone, Milo said, “His former occupation was, get this: bass player in a ska band. Then he got born-again and decided being a cop was the way he’d serve the Lord. He cut his hair and let his pierces close up and scored in the top ten percent of his academy class. This is the new blue generation.”
“He seems like a nice kid,” I said.
“He’s smart enough, maybe a little on the concrete side—A to B to C. We’ll see if he learns how to be creative.” He grinned. “ ‘Loot.’ Too much TV . . . so far he hasn’t brought up the born-again stuff, but I can’t help feel one day he’s going to try to save me. Bottom line is I can’t juggle Gavin and the blonde and Koppel all by myself, and he’s a good worker ant . . . so, any thoughts since yesterday?”
“Koppel brought Gavin’s chart home, had it at the top of her stack,” I said. “She brushed off two murders in her practice as a statistical quirk, but it bothered her, and she went back to review her notes. The fact that Newsome’s chart
wasn’t
there means she was probably telling the truth about shredding it.”
“Not a lot of notes on Gavin to review.”
“Maybe the intake was enough. In it, she detailed Gavin’s legal problems. What if she tied his murder to the Gallegos stalking? Came up with a suspect, voiced her suspicions to someone, and got killed for her efforts?”
“She voiced her suspicion directly to the bad guy? She’d be stupid enough to confront him?”
“She might have if he was her patient,” I said. “If she suspected someone in her caseload, she’d be reluctant to violate confidentiality and go straight to you.”
“Back to the nut-in-the-waiting-room theory.”
“It’s also possible that she wasn’t sure, just suspicious. So she discussed it with him.”
“Foolhardy,” he said.
“Therapy’s a lopsided relationship. Despite all the talk of a partnership, the patient’s needy and dependent, and the therapist has wisdom to grant. It’s easy to overestimate your personal power. Mary Lou was a strong personality to begin with. And she got caught up in the media game, convinced herself she was an expert on everything. Maybe she got overconfident, felt she could convince him to give himself up.”
“Talk about an ego trip, if she succeeded.”
“Psychologist solves multiple murders,” I said. “Talk about public relations.”
He thought about that for a long time. “One of her patients is a very bad guy.”
“No forced entry,” I said. “Someone she knew and let into the house. It’s worth looking into.”
“I can’t get hold of her patient records.”
“Her partners might know something.”
“They’re shrinks, too, Alex. Same confidentiality restriction.”
“I’m not sure of the legal issues; but if the bad guy isn’t officially their patient, they might be okay talking about him in general terms.”
“Sounds like legal precedent to me,” he said. “What the hell, it’s worth a shot.” He phoned information, got numbers for Drs. Larsen and Gull, and left messages to call him.
I said, “How’s it going with the prints from Koppel’s house?”
“There are so damn many, the print guys are figuring at least a week. One thing they did tell me: not a single print near the body. At least a ten-foot radius had been wiped clean. A psych patient who’s meticulous. Not an overt nutcase, right?”
“Not even close to nuts,” I said.
He flipped open the murder book that had been opened on Mary Lou Koppel. “Ballistics faxed a report this morning. The .22 used to shoot her was similar but not identical to either the Gavin Quick or the Flora Newsome guns. Even discounting Flora, we’ve got two separate weapons for two murders. This is some guy with easy access to cheapies, knows his way around the street.”
“An experienced con,” I said. “The kind Flora Newsome could’ve met on the job.”
“Would a guy like that go into therapy?”
“If he had to. Look at Gavin Quick.”
His eyes widened. “Alternative sentencing. Someone who
had
to get shrunk. And that gives me a way to get around the goddamn confidentiality. Go through court records, see if any judges assigned any other patients to Koppel.”
He slumped. “Huge job.”
“Narrow it down to a year or two and put your worker ant on it.”
“I will,” he said. “I will definitely do that. It’s also time to talk to Mr. and Mrs. Quick again, find out about their boy’s problem, if he harassed anyone else. So far all I get is their answering machine. I called the D.A. who prosecuted Gavin and the defense attorney. No help at all from them, just another case. I also recontacted Gavin’s two friends from the accident, and they had no idea he stalked Beth Gallegos or anyone else. On the intake Koppel did for the court, she said Gavin’s obsession could be related to brain damage. What do you think?”
“Another form of obsessive behavior,” I said. “Sure, it could be consistent with a prefrontal injury. The other thing to consider is that the vindictive boyfriend wasn’t the blonde’s. He’s Beth Gallegos’s beau. What if Gavin broke the terms of his probation and resumed stalking?”
“So the guy stalks Gavin in return, offs him and the blonde? And Koppel?”
“No accounting for passion,” I said.
“Okay,” he said, “let’s visit the object of Gavin’s passion.”
*
Phone work revealed that Beth Gallegos had switched jobs again, from the Long Beach clinic to a private educational therapy firm in Westwood.
“Westwood’s close to Beverly Hills,” I said, as we drove there. “If Gavin was still stalking her, I doubt she’d have chanced it.”
“Let’s find out.”
*
Beth Gallegos was gorgeous. That did nothing to explain Gavin’s obsession—stalking is psychopathology, and plain people are victimized as often as lookers—it was simply a fact.
Petite and black-haired and dusky-skinned, she wore a pale blue uniform cut for blandness that couldn’t conceal her tiny waist, flaring hips, and bountiful breasts. Her eyes were amber, her lashes long and curling. Twenty-seven years old, she wore no makeup and looked eighteen. A clean, fresh eighteen. Her nails were unpolished and clipped short. The black hair, sleek and wavy, was tied back in a ponytail and fastened by a rubber band.
Aiming for low-key. Her perfect-oval face and cameo features and lush body rendered the effort useless.
She was uncomfortable talking to us in the lobby of the educational service, and we took the elevator down to the ground-floor coffee shop. A young waitress approached us with a smile, but even though Milo smiled back, something in his greeting wiped the joy from her face.
Beth Gallegos ordered tea, and Milo and I had Cokes. When the order came, he pressed a bill into the waitress’s palm. She left quickly and never reappeared.
Gallegos had been edgy since we’d shown up, and Milo tried to put her at ease with chitchat about her job. The outfit she worked for was called Comprehensive Rehab and specialized in stroke victims. Her job was to help patients regain fine motor skills. She found the challenge satisfying.
Milo said, “Sounds like it would be.”
Gallegos fumbled with her teacup and avoided our eyes.
“Let’s talk about Gavin Quick,” said Milo. “Have you heard what happened to him?”