Alex 18 - Therapy

by Jonathan Kellerman

  “With no advance notice to her patients?”

  “Fear can do that to you.” He eyed the climb. “Okay, pass the pitons and let’s start the climb. How’re your CPR skills?”

  *

  He trudged up first, muttering, “At least there’s a view,” and I followed two steps behind. He was huffing and gasping by the time we got to the top.

  “With . . . this,” he panted, “she . . . doesn’t need . . . a . . . damnhomegym.”

  Up close, the house was beautifully kept, windows sparkling, copper gutters spotless, carved oak door freshly varnished. Plantings of ferns and elephant ear and papyrus and white roses softened the used-brick front. A stone pot of mixed herbs bathed the covered entrance in fragrance. A multitrunk jacaranda formed the centerpiece of the tiny, perfect lawn. Between its branches was an eastern panorama: the L.A. basin and the San Gabriel Mountains beyond. Despite the smog blanket, staggering. As Milo rang the bell, I stared out at miles of terrain and thought what I always think: way too big for one city.

  No one answered. He tried again, knocked, said, “With her car gone, no big surprise, but let’s be thorough.”

  We walked around the left side of the house to a small square of backyard dominated by a lap pool and more thick planting. High ficus hedging on three sides prevented scrutiny by the neighbors. The pool was gray-bottomed and immaculate. A covered patio covered a brick barbecue with a built-in chimney, outdoor furniture, potted flowers. A hummingbird feeder dangled from a crossbeam, and, off in a corner, a miniature fountain—a bamboo spout tipping into a tiny barrel—burbled prettily.

  The rear wall was a bank of French doors. Three sets were blocked by drapes. One wasn’t and Milo went over and peered in.

  “Oh my,” he said.

  I went over to have a look.

  The back room was set up with white leather sofas, glass side tables, an oak-and-granite wet bar, and a five-foot-wide plasma TV with accompanying stereo gizmos. The TV was tuned to a game show. Ecstatic contestants jumped as if on trampolines. Great color and definition.

  Off to the left side, Mary Lou Koppel slumped on one of the sofas, facing us, her back to the screen. Her limbs were splayed, and her head was thrown back, mouth gaping, eyes staring at the vaulted ceiling.

  Staring sightlessly. Something long and silver protruded from her chest, and her color belonged to nothing living.

  All around her, white leather was blotched rusty red.

  *

  We remained outside as Milo called in the techies, the coroner, and two black-and-whites for sentry work. In twenty minutes, the scene was bustling.

  The coroner was an Asian woman who spoke little English and slipped away without conferring. The coroner’s investigator, a heavy, gray-mustachioed man named Arnold Mattingly, emerged and said, “Cho says she’s all yours, Milo.”

  Milo frowned. “She’s gone?”

  “She’s busier than we’ll ever be,” said Mattingly. “Lots of bodies piled up at the morgue.”

  “She give you any prelim?”

  “Looks like stabbed in the chest with a letter opener, shot through the head. I know you like to draw your own DB chart, but if you want a copy of mine, I’ll xerox it.”

  “Thanks, Arnie. Which came first, the stabbing or the shooting?”

  “Not for me to guess, and Cho isn’t talking much today.” Mattingly cupped his hand but kept his voice loud. “Her husband left her.”

  “Shame,” said Milo.

  “Nice lady,” said Mattingly. “It really is. Anyway, you want to know my opinion, there was mucho blood around the knife wound. Copious, as they say. And just a little tiny trickle around the bullet hole, more plasma than red stuff.”

  “Her heart was pumping hard when she got stabbed.”

  “If I was a betting man,” said Mattingly.

  “Small-caliber gun?”

  “From the looks of it. Koppel, she’s that psychologist, right?”

  “You know her, Arnie?”

  “My wife listens to her when she’s on the radio. Says she talks common sense. I say if it’s that common, why do people have to pay her?” He shook his head. “The wife’ll have a fit when I tell her—it’s okay to tell her, right?”

  “Go for it,” said Milo. “Call the networks for all I care. Any other ideas?”

  Mattingly said, “What, this is guess day?”

  “It’s a crappy day. I’m open to suggestions.”

  “Humble civil servant like me.” Mattingly scratched his head. “My guess would be her line of work, maybe she got on the wrong side of some crazy person.” He seemed to notice me for the first time. “That make sense, Doc?”

  “Perfect sense.”

  Mattingly grinned. “That’s what I love about my job. I get to make sense. Then when I get home, I’m an idiot.” He collected his gear and left.

  I said, “Call the networks. Maybe this is the hook you need.”

  *

  It took a while for the techies to finish printing the house, searching for shoe imprints, blood or other body fluids in remote rooms, signs of forced entry or struggle.

  No prints on the letter opener. Nothing else revelatory except for the obvious fact that the opener, antique, bone-handled, with a sterling silver shaft, had come from the desk set in Mary Lou Koppel’s home office.

  When the house cleared, Milo began the demeaning rummage that murder victims undergo.

  A search of the medicine cabinet in Koppel’s private bathroom produced the usual toiletries along with birth control pills, a diaphragm and condoms (“Careful gal”), OTC allergy medicine, a salve for yeast infections, Tylenol, Advil, Pepto-Bismol, and physician samples of the sleeping pill Ambien.

  “All that advice for everyone else, and she has trouble sleeping,” said Milo. “Something on her mind?”

  I shrugged.

  Her bedroom was a cozy, soft-edged study in sage green and salmon. The quilted spread on the bed was tucked tight, the room perfectly composed.

  Milo rifled through a closet filled with red and black. In dresser drawers he found sleepwear that ranged from sensible flannel to skimpy pieces from the Hustler Emporium. He held up a pair of crotchless panties in faux leopard skin.

  “You don’t buy this for yourself. Wonder who her love interest is.”

  At the bottom of the underwear drawer, he found a silver vibrator nestled in a velvet bag.

  “All kinds of love,” he muttered.

  I hadn’t liked Mary Lou Koppel much, but exposing the archaeology of her life was depressing.

  We left the bedroom and headed back to the office so that Milo could sift through her papers. It didn’t take long for things to get interesting.

  *

  Like the rest of the house, the study was tidy. A squared stack of papers sat atop the dainty French revival desk, weighed down by a red crystal paperweight shaped like a rose. Just off center, next to a gilded leather blotter and below the sterling desk set from which the murder weapon had been lifted.

  Milo attacked the drawers first, found Mary Lou Koppel’s financial records and tax forms and a stack of correspondence from people who’d tuned in to her media interviews and had strong opinions, pro and con.

  Those he bundled together and stashed in an evidence envelope.

  He said, “She declared 260 grand a year from treating patients, another 60 from public appearances and investments. Not too shabby.”

  Court documents in a bottom drawer summarized a divorce twenty-two years ago.

  “The husband was some guy named Edward Michael Koppel,” he said, running his finger along lines of print. “At the time the papers were filed he was a law student at the U. . . . irreconcilable differences, splitting of assets . . . the marriage lasted less than two years, no kids . . . onward.”

  He returned to the desktop, removed the rose-shaped paperweight, took hold of the paper stack.

  On top was Gavin Quick’s chart.

  CHAPTER

  16

&nbs
p; Thin 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

  Mary 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.”