Victims

by Jonathan Kellerman

  “Quiet, passive, didn’t say much, didn’t make eye contact. In fact, he was so quiet that even before the therapist—Shacker—came in, I’d started wondering about some sort of mental illness.”

  “Could that be because of his thyroid?”

  “No way,” she said. “If he was a bit hypothyroid like I suspected he might slow down a tad, maybe lose some energy, gain some weight, but nothing significant. He might also feel cold, which is the first thing that tipped me off. He was overdressed for the weather, big heavy fleece-lined coat. I never confirmed my hypothesis, though, because he never came back with any lab results.”

  “Could we expect him to get sicker?”

  “Not if he takes his meds. Even with his old dosage this was no weakling, just the opposite. I checked him out and his muscle tone was really good. Excellent, actually. He had huge muscles. In clothes you couldn’t tell, he looked almost pudgy.”

  “Overdressed because he felt cold.”

  “Or maybe it was a symptom of mental illness, you see that from time to time.”

  Biro said, “Speaking of mental patients, they told me at the clinic that Lem Eccles was your patient.”

  “Was? Something happened to him?”

  “Afraid so,” said Biro. “He’s dead.”

  A beat. “And that’s connected to Huggler?”

  “Could be.”

  “Oh, wow,” said Mendes. “Well, if you’re going to ask me did I see them together, I didn’t.”

  “Could you check your records and see if they happened to be at the clinic on the same day?”

  “I could, if I was at my other office in Montebello where I keep all the clinic records.”

  “Kind of a strange system,” said Biro. “Doctors taking the paperwork with them.”

  “Big pain,” said Mendes, “but they insist upon it. That way they’re not an official clinic, just donate space.”

  “In case La Migra asks.”

  Mendes laughed. “It’s not very subtle, is it? I don’t get involved in any of that. I treat patients, politics isn’t my thing.”

  “You work there on a volunteer basis.”

  She laughed harder. “Did it look like there was any serious money to be made there? Yes, I volunteer. I was a scholarship student at Immaculate Heart and the archdiocese helped with my med school tuition. They ask for a favor, I say sure. So what did this Huggler actually do?”

  “It’s nasty,” said Biro.

  “Then forget I asked, Detective, I trained at County, saw more than enough nasty. I certainly hope you catch him and if I ever see him again, you’ll be the first to know.”

  “Couple more things,” said Raul. “You said Dr. Shacker showed up after Huggler. So Huggler came in by himself?”

  “Technically I guess he did,” said Mendes. “A few minutes later, Shacker showed up, said he’d been parking the car. I got the clear impression they’d arrived together. Now if you don’t mind, I’ve got patients waiting.”

  Parking the car. Small point to her but Raul’s brain was screaming A Vehicle. Ripe for a BOLO.

  He said, “One more question. How come you referred Huggler to North Hollywood Day?”

  “Because Dr. Shacker recommended it. You should get the details from him, he really seemed to care about Huggler. Then again, he’d probably have confidentiality issues. So do I, but murder’s different.”

  Biro filled Petra in.

  She said, “It’s a good bet Shacker spotted Eccles at that clinic. I’ll go back to the uniforms who busted Eccles, see if there’s anything else they remember about Loyal Steward. And seeing as Harrie directed the doctor to North Hollywood Day and he’s an insurance whore and they’re an insurance mill, it’s obvious my charm didn’t work as well with Ostrovine as I thought and he’s still holding back. You up for bad-copping him?”

  “More than up,” said Raul. “Raring to go.”

  On the way to the Valley, he phoned in and reported to Milo.

  Milo said, “Good work, Raul. Onward.”

  I’d just stepped into his office. He wheeled his chair back. “See how supportive I am with the young’uns?”

  “Admirable.”

  “Not that anything they’ve learned adds up to a warm bucket of spit until we locate these freakoids.”

  He summarized.

  I’d been up late, trying to answer some questions of my own. Mentally reviewing my brief talk with James Harrie to see if I’d missed something.

  Understanding why someone like Huggler would welcome Harrie’s caretaking but not getting what was in it for Harrie, because if a man that calculated was able to exact his own brand of vengeance, why raise the risk of discovery by collaborating with someone so deeply disturbed?

  Engaging in twenty-plus years of what was effectively foster-parenting.

  What was in it for the parent?

  The small questions had resolved quickly but the big picture remained clouded and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d made several wrong turns.

  I said, “The pension angle didn’t work out?”

  “The pension board is absolutely certain that no checks are mailed from any government agency to James P. Harrie, same for the welfare office regarding assistance payments to Grant Huggler. I tried out a whole bunch of spelling variations because paperwork gets messed up. Even checked under Shacker’s name, because he’d also been a state employee, maybe Harrie had stolen his benefits as well as his identity. No such luck, those checks are sent to a cousin in Brussels. So maybe we’re dealing with free-enterprise criminals, intent on making it the old-fashioned way.”

  I said, “How much money are we talking about?”

  “Best estimate I could get was someone in Harrie’s situation could pull a pension of three to four grand a month, depending if he claimed stress or disability. No way to know exactly what Huggler’s qualified for, there’s an alphabet soup of welfare goodies for someone who knows how to work the system. Top estimate was two or so a month.”

  “The two of them pool their funds, they can rake in as much as sixty, seventy thousand a year, tax-free. I don’t see them forgoing that, Big Guy, even with Harrie making money as a fake psychologist. He put up serious money for that office, must’ve started with some sort of stash. So the checks are going somewhere. What if Harrie stole I.D.’s other than Shacker’s? For himself and for Huggler?”

  “Someone cross-checks Social Security numbers, they’d get found out.”

  “Big if,” I said. “But okay, what if they went the legal route and changed their names in court? Any switch for Huggler would have to be within the last four years because he was still using his real name when he got arrested behind Wainright’s office.”

  “Send the check to Jack the Ripper and his lil pal the Zodiac? Some computer obliges without a squawk? Wonderful.”

  He called a Superior Court clerk he’d befriended years ago, hung up looking deflated.

  “Guess what? Court orders are no longer required for name changes. All you have to do now is use your new moniker consistently while conducting official business and eventually the new data’s ‘integrated’ into the county data bank.”

  He yanked a drawer open, snatched a panatela, rolled it, still wrapped, between his fingers. “But you’re right, no way they’d pass up that much easy dough.”

  His cell phone played Erik Satie. He barked, “Sturgis!” Then, in an even louder voice: “What!”

  He turned scarlet. “Back up, Sean, give me the details.”

  He listened for a long time, scrawled notes so angrily the paper tore twice. When he clicked off he was breathing fast.

  I said, “What?”

  He shook his head. Attacked the phone with both thumbs.

  The image appeared moments later, a grainy gray peep show on the phone’s tiny screen.

  Tagged at the top with rolling digital time and the I.D. number of a Malibu Sheriff cruiser’s dash-cam.

  Six thirteen a.m. Malibu. Pacific Coast Highway. Mountain
s to the east, so north of the Colony where the beach city turns rural.

  The deputy, Aaron Sanchez, justifying the stop on the fifteen-year-old Acura.

  Not because of the BOLO; the tags matched a recent theft from the Cross Creek shopping center.

  Felony stop. Extreme caution.

  Six fourteen a.m.: Deputy Sanchez calls for backup. Then (on loudspeaker): “Exit the vehicle, now, sir, and place your hands on your head.”

  No response.

  Deputy Sanchez: “Exit the vehicle immediately, sir, and place—”

  Driver’s door opens.

  A man, small, thin, wearing a sweatshirt and jeans, emerges, places his hands on his head.

  Flash of bald spot. Bad comb-over.

  Deputy Sanchez exits his own vehicle, gun out, aimed at the driver.

  “Walk toward me slowly.”

  The man complies.

  “Stop.”

  The man complies.

  “Lie down on the ground.”

  The man appears to comply then whips around, pulling something out of his waistband. Crouching, he points.

  Deputy Sanchez fires five times.

  The man’s small frame absorbs each impact, billowing like a sail.

  He falls.

  Sirens in the distance gain volume.

  Backup, no longer needed.

  The whole thing has taken less than a minute.

  Milo said, “Bastard. They ran the car, found the BOLO, contacted Binchy because his name was on the request.”

  “Was the thing in his hand for real?”

  “Nine-millimeter,” he said. “Unloaded.”

  I said, “Suicide by cop.”

  “Whack-job suicide by cop was the Sheriff’s initial assumption because Harrie getting that hard-core to avoid a license plate theft rap made no sense. And initially, they saw nothing in Harrie’s car to make him squirrelly, just fruits and vegetables and beef jerky and bottled water, probably from one of those stands on the highway. Then they popped the trunk and found a bunch more firearms, ammo, duct tape, rope, handcuffs, knives.”

  I said, “Rape-murder kit.”

  “And stains on the carpet presumptive for blood. What they didn’t find was any sign Harrie was running with an accomplice.”

  I said, “Because Huggler’s waiting back home for Harrie to return from his grocery run. Somewhere north of where Harrie was pulled over.”

  “That’s a lot of territory. What does a kit say to you?”

  “None of our victims showed evidence of restraint and none of the females was assaulted or posed sexually. I’d bet on a separate victim pool.”

  “Games Harrie played solo.”

  “More likely with backup by Huggler.”

  “Jesus.”

  “It fills in a missing piece,” I said. “Harrie taking Huggler under his wing because of altruism never made sense. He was attracted to a disturbed child because of a shared fascination with dominance and violence. Think of their relationship as Huggler’s alternative therapy: The entire time the staffs at V-State and Atascadero were struggling to devise a treatment plan for him, Harrie was sabotaging them by nurturing Huggler’s drives. And coaching Huggler in concealing his bad behavior. When Huggler got transferred, Harrie moved with him. When Huggler finally gained his freedom, he and Harrie embarked on a new life together.”

  “Foundation for a wholesome relationship,” he said. “Too bad Harrie bit it before the two of them could be booked on the talk-show circuit.”

  CHAPTER

  37

  Sean Binchy’s second call pinpointed the coordinates of the shooting.

  James Pittson Harrie had died 3.28 miles above the Colony, leaving 15 or so miles of the beach city and anywhere beyond for a hide-spot.

  Milo said, “Don’t see them scoring a pad on the sand or an ocean-view ranch in the hills. But if they’re still doing the mountain man bit, they could be squatting in some remote place up in the hills.”

  I said, “I’m certain they’re cashing government checks, at some point one or both of them ventures out to get cash. So someone’s seen them. My mind keeps fixing on the beach cities above Malibu. Harrie’s used two phony addresses we know about, the parking lot on Main Street in Ventura when he told the Hollywood cops he was Loyal Steward and the dead mail-drop in Oxnard for his driver’s license. Something in the region attracts him.”

  “What attracts me is nailing Huggler before he does more damage. Once the media latch onto Harrie’s death—and they will, a cop shooting’s always a story—he’s bound to rabbit.”

  “That assumes Huggler’s wired into the media.”

  “Why wouldn’t he be?”

  “Harrie could’ve made himself Huggler’s sole link to the outside world.”

  “No MTV for ol’ Grant, huh?” he said. “Keeps his nose buried in puzzle books until Harrie tells him it’s time to balance the scales with an anatomy lesson? Even so, Alex, when Harrie doesn’t return, Huggler’s gonna get antsy. If fear overtakes him, he might reveal himself and get taken down easy. But if he goes the rage-route, more people are gonna die. And those guns in Harrie’s trunk might not be the total stash. All I need is a lunatic loaded with heavy-duty firepower.”

  Balance the scales.

  Unbalanced.

  My mind raced. Braked hard.

  A warm wave of clarity washed over me. The tickle at the back of my brain, finally gone.

  He said, “You just floated off somewhere.”

  “What you just said about balancing the scales reminded me of something Harrie mentioned when I met with him. He asked me about my work with the police then claimed to have no interest in the darker aspects of life. Called them ‘terrible dyssynchronies.’ Obviously, he was lying and I think he was playing with me by alluding precisely to what’s framed the murders from the onset: achieving equilibrium by symbolically undoing the past. And that might help focus the search for Huggler: Start where it all began.”

  “V-State,” he said. “They’d go back there?”

  “They would if it was part of Harrie’s treatment plan for Huggler.”

  “You just said his treatment was encouraging Huggler’s gutgames.”

  “I did but I was missing something. Harrie really came to see himself as a therapist. Like most psychopaths, he had an inflated belief in his own abilities. No need to actually earn a degree, he was already smarter than the shrinks. So all he had to do was learn enough jargon to impersonate convincingly. And when he went into practice, he started right at the top: high-rent Couch Row. He zeroed in on insurance evaluations because they were lucrative, thin on oversight, and, most important, short term with no clinical demands: Patients wouldn’t spend enough time with him to get suspicious and he wouldn’t be required to actually help anyone.”

  “Vita got suspicious.”

  “Maybe she sensed something,” I said. “Or she was just being Vita. Overall, Harrie got away with it and that had to be a massive ego trip. And that led him to see himself as a master therapist. With a single long-term patient. Yes, the past five years have been about bloodlust and revenge, but they’ve also been part of a regimen Harrie devised for Huggler: achieving synchrony by working through old traumas. And what better way to achieve that than by returning triumphant to the place where control was ripped away?”

  “Neck-snapping and gut-squishing in the name of self-actualization,” he said. “The hospital closed down years ago. What’s there now?”

  “Let’s find out.”

  Milo typed away. Moments later, we had a capsule history, courtesy of a historical preservation group: The original plan had been to maintain the hospital buildings and convert them to a college campus. Shortage of funds caused that to languish until six years ago when a group of private developers had purchased the site in a sweetheart deal and put up a planned community called SeaBird Estates.

  He found the website. “Luxury living for the discerning? Doesn’t sound like our boys would fit in.”

 
; I scrolled. “It also says ‘nestled in sylvan surroundings.’ Enough woodland and our boys could’ve found refuge.”

  He shot to his feet, flung his office door open, paced the corridor a few times, returned.

  Using both hands to sketch an imaginary window, he peered through, an artless mime.

  “Looks like nice weather for a drive, let’s go.”

  CHAPTER

  38

  Fifty minutes to Camarillo, courtesy Milo’s leaden foot.

  The same exit off the 101, the same winding road through old, dense trees.

  The same feeling of arriving at a strange place, untested, unsure, ready to be surprised.

  What had once been an open field of wildflowers was planted with lemon trees, hundreds of them arranged in rows, the ground cleared of stray fruit. The logo of a citrus collective graced several signs on the borders of the grove. The sky was a perfect, improbable, crayon blue.

  Milo sped past the grove. I peered through each row, looking for errant human presence.

  Just a tractor, unmanned, at the far end. The next sign appeared half a mile later, lettered in aqua and topped by a rendering of three intense-looking gulls.

  SEABIRD ESTATES

  A Planned Community

  A few yards up, shoulder-high blue gates were hinged to cream-colored stucco posts. Superficially reassuring but a whole different level of security from V-State’s twenty-foot blood-red barrier.

  Keeping them out was different from keeping them in.

  A guard inside a tiny booth was texting. Milo tooted his horn. The guard looked over but his fingers kept working. He slid a window open. Milo’s badge pretzeled the guard’s lips. “We didn’t call in no problem.”

  “No, you didn’t. Can we come in, please?”

  The guard pondered that. Resuming texting, he stabbed at a button on a built-in console, missed the first time, got it right on the second. The gates swung open.

  The main street was Sea Bird Lane. It snaked up a slope that picked up as it climbed. Condos appeared on both sides of the road. Landscaping consisted of predictably placed date palms, red-leaf plum trees, beds of low-maintenance succulents that clung to each curve like green cashmere.