Alex 18 - Therapy

by Jonathan Kellerman

  Milo closed his eyes, and sat without moving. For a moment I thought he’d fallen asleep. Then he sat up and stared at me, blankly, as if he’d been dreaming.

  I said, “You still with me?”

  Slow nod.

  “Jerry lied to us about the referral, made up the story about Dr. Silver being his golf partner precisely because he wanted to hide his ties to the group. He suggested it was a sex crime. Another attempt to deflect you.”

  “Dear old Dad,” he said. “Claims to be a metals dealer, but he’s really a pimp.”

  “With Gavin’s stalking problem, Jerry probably figured he was being a great dad by setting him up with Christi. And Gavin seemed happy, bragged to Kayla about his sex life with his new girlfriend. The only trouble was his brain injury continued to skew his thinking. He took down license numbers, including his father’s. Someone found out, and that got him and poor Christi Marsh killed. Mary Lou figured it out, and it scared the hell out of her. Bilking the Department of Corrections is one thing, murder’s another. Maybe she pressured Sonny and Larsen to drop the whole thing. She knew Sonny carried a torch for her, thought she had him under control. But cornered, Sonny wasn’t harmless, at all. And neither was Albin Larsen.”

  “If Bumaya can be believed about Larsen, we’re talking monster.”

  “Monster with a Ph.D.,” I said. “Clever, calculating, dangerous. Mary Lou overvalued her own charisma.”

  “What about Sheila? In the dark about all of it?”

  “Sheila’s got serious emotional problems. She and Jerry have been unavailable to each other for years, but he’s stuck by her for appearances. Now one kid’s out of the house, and the other’s dead. Toss in some panic, and it would be the perfect time for him to split.”

  “Appearances,” said Milo. “The house, the Benz, B.H. school district for the kids. Then Gavin gets his cranium shaken up, and it all falls apart. What about the impalement? The sexual angle? For simple executions, shooting would’ve been enough.”

  “The impalement’s icing on the cake,” I said. “Someone who enjoys killing. Someone who’s done it before.”

  “Ray Degussa,” he said. He got up, walked to the door, looked up and down the empty corridor, said, “It’s quiet,” and sat back down. “So Mary scammed but couldn’t handle murder?”

  “She could’ve rationalized the scam, told herself they were doing good, just padding the bill a bit. Who was the victim anyway? A corrupt prison bureaucracy.”

  “It’s exactly the line of bullshit an asshole like Larsen would’ve fed her.” He frowned. “Problem is, this whole house of cards is predicated upon a scam, and we don’t even know one exists.”

  “I’ll check with Olivia in a few hours.”

  “You really think Mary Lou would be foolish enough to threaten Larsen and the others? Would she be blind to the kind of people she was dealing with?”

  “Believing your own PR can be very dangerous.”

  “What about Gull?”

  “Either he was involved, or he wasn’t.”

  “I wonder why Gavin fired him.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Crazy kid,” he said. “Stupid, crazy kid. Crazy family.”

  “What about the other kid in the family?” I said. “The one who didn’t come home after her brother died. Sometimes it’s the ones who get away who have the most interesting things to say.”

  “Kelly, the law student at BU.”

  “Her first year at law school would be over by now. But she stayed in Boston.”

  “Another item for the old to-do list. Lots of to-dos. I need to sleep.”

  “We both do,” I said.

  He struggled to his feet. The rims of his eyes were scarlet, and his face was gray. “Enough,” he said. “Let’s get the hell outta here.”

  CHAPTER

  37

  The phone woke me up. I’d gone to bed at 3:30 A.M.

  As my eyes cleared, I focused on the clock. Six hours later.

  I grabbed the receiver, fumbled, got hold of it.

  “Found it,” said Olivia Brickerman. “The key was divergent thinking.”

  “Morning,” I said.

  “You sound groggy.”

  “Long night.”

  “Poor baby. Want to brush your teeth and call me back?”

  I laughed. “No, tell me.”

  “The problem,” she said, “was that I was being too limited, concentrating on awards and grants. As if that’s the only way stuff gets funded. Finally, I shifted gears and voila! This thing was legislated, Alex. Tacked on as a rider to a tough felony sentencing law. Assemblyman Reynard Bird, D-Oakland—you know him, used to be a Black Panther?”

  “Sure.”

  “Bird got the rider stuck on the bill as part of the old give-and-take. So now you can send bad guys to prison for long periods, but when they get out, they get free therapy.”

  “Any bad guys?”

  “Any paroled felons who ask for treatment get it. Up to a year of individual and/or group for each bad guy, no restriction on hours, and the funding comes straight from Medi-Cal. That’s why I couldn’t find the money stream. It’s a drop in the ocean of general medical payments.”

  “Sweet deal for felons,” I said. “And for providers.”

  “Sure is, but few providers have taken the state up on it. Either they don’t know about it, or they don’t want criminals crowding their waiting rooms. Probably the former. Bird never publicized it, and usually he’s the first to throw a press conference. I found out his third wife’s a psychologist, and guess what: She’s running two of the biggest programs in Oakland and Berkeley. Almost all the activity’s up north. There’s another program in Redwood City, and some groups in Santa Cruz that are run by an eighty-five-year-old shrink who practiced in L.A. and retired. The one you’re probably interested in is Pacifica Psychological Services, Beverly Hills, California. Right?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “It’s the only program in Southern Cal.”

  “Payment straight out of the Medi-Cal cookie jar,” I said. “What’s the reimbursement level?”

  “Wait, there’s more, darling. We’re talking Medi-Cal plus. The bill authorizes surcharges because of an ‘exigency’ clause. The funds come out of some legislative slush account, but the administration’s through Medi-Cal.”

  “Meaning these are patients your average doctor wouldn’t want to treat, so the state provides an incentive. How much of one?”

  “Double reimbursement,” she said. “Actually a bit more than double. Medi-Cal pays fourteen dollars for group therapy by a Ph.D., fifteen for an MD. Providers under this bill get thirty-five. The same goes for individual therapy. From twenty an hour to forty-five. Seventy bucks for the initial intake and forty-eight for case conferences.”

  “Thirty-five an hour for group,” I said, recalculating my previous estimates. Lots of zeroes. “Not bad.”

  “There’s no fiscal oversight I can find, just bill the state and collect.”

  “Any way to find out how much each program has billed?”

  “Not for me, but Milo could probably do it,” she said. “If he wants to pursue it further, I’d call Sacramento. Ask for Dwight Zevonsky, he’s a good guy who investigates fraud.”

  I copied down the number.

  “What’s the official name of the program?” I said.

  “No name, just Assembly Bill 5678930-CRP-M, Amendment F,” she said. “Subtitled ‘Psychocultural demarginalization of released offenders.’ Which was one of your buzzwords. I found a couple others in the text of the rider. ‘Attitudinal shifting,’ ‘Holistic emphasis.’ The individual programs are free to take on their own names. The one in Beverly Hills is called—”

  “Sentries for Justice.”

  “Yes, just like you said. So, what, this has been done before?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  *

  I found out
the name of Assemblyman Reynard Bird’s third wife and ran her through the Internet.

  Dr. Michelle Harrington-Bird. A tall, Scottish-born redhead in her forties who favored African robes and spoke out frequently about political issues. The assemblyman was in his seventies, a legislative vet known for passionate oration and the ability to fix potholes in his district.

  In one of the many photos I found, Harrington-Bird was posed with a group of fellow psychologists that included Albin Larsen. A bunch of therapists hanging out at a convention. Larsen stood next to Harrington-Bird, goateed, bespectacled, wearing a tweed suit over a sweater-vest and looking like Hollywood’s incarnation of Freud. His body language implied no intimacy with the assemblyman’s current spouse.

  All business. Plenty of incentive for that.

  Harrington-Bird had borrowed Larsen’s terminology for the wording of the bill. No doubt Larsen had impressed her with descriptions of his human rights work in Africa. I wondered what she’d think about his role in African genocide. About two little boys left in their beds with their throats cut.

  I found Larsen and Harrington-Bird paired three more times, as signatories on political ads. After printing what I thought was relevant, I got on the phone.

  *

  Milo said, “Oh, man, Olivia. She should run the world.”

  “She’s overqualified,” I said. “Now we know the funding’s real and that Larsen got in on it early.”

  “Reynard Bird. Wonder how high this will go.”

  “There’s no evidence Bird or his wife colluded on any scam. Larsen knew her professionally, and they hobnobbed politically. He may have used her, too.”

  “She’s into human rights?”

  “She’s into petitions. Protesting U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, et cetera. Larsen signed the same ads.”

  He grunted. “So when did the funding start?”

  “Year and a half ago. Reimbursements began sixteen months ago. Pacifica was in at the outset.”

  “Thirty-five bucks for each con-hour,” he said. “Even more than we estimated.”

  “Huge incentive to keep it going. And to cover up when exposure was threatened. If Mary Lou posed any sort of threat, the obvious solution was to eliminate her.”

  “Bullet and impalement. Speaking of which, here’s my contribution to the database. Through some fancy detective footwork, I located a retired guard supervisor at Quentin who actually knew Raymond Degussa. He’s certain Degussa was responsible for not two but three inmate contract killings and maybe as many as five others. In-house hit man, the gangs hire them to keep their own noses clean. With all that, they just couldn’t get any evidence on the asshole. When Degussa wasn’t offing people, he did all things that make parole boards salivate. Attended church, served as a pastor’s assistant, volunteered to make Christmas toys for ghetto kids, worked as a volunteer library clerk. And get this: He went regularly for counseling. This is a guy who appreciates the value of therapy.”

  “Bet he does.”

  “And here’s the fun part, Alex: This supervisor, God bless him, told me all the hits featured some kind of impaling and a combination MO, which is unusual for prison killings, mostly it’s cut and run. Degussa cut all right—your basic throat and multiple body slashing by shiv. But he followed it up with a coup de grâce through the neck or chest with some sort of pointed object. In a couple of cases, the objects were found: sharpened fountain pen, meat skewer purloined from the prison kitchen. Raymond’s definitely our bad guy.”

  “He has no record of sexual crimes?”

  “His sheet’s what I told you—larceny, drugs, armed robbery. But those are only the things he gets caught for. Who knows what he does in his spare time? Starting tonight, I’m switching Sean Binchy from surveilling Gull to watching Degussa. I’ll be there at the start, to make sure he doesn’t get into trouble. Watching a sweating shrink’s one thing, this bad boy’s another.”

  “Gull’s off the screen?”

  “On the contrary. Now that we know the scam’s real, we’ve got something to use against him. Assuming you still see him as the weakest link.”

  “If you want to lean on someone, he’d be my choice.”

  “I want badly to lean,” he said. “A couple more things. The address Christi Marsh gave is a mail drop, big surprise. She only rented the box for two months, and the clerk has no recollection of her. Did you check the paper this morning?”

  “Not yet.”

  “They finally ran the photo. Page thirty-two, at the bottom, along with three sentences asking anyone with knowledge to call me. No calls yet. On the Quick family front, I tracked down sister Kelly. She stayed in Boston to work at a law firm. But she just took a sudden leave of absence, supposedly sick grandmother in Michigan.”

  “You think she could be well west of Michigan.”

  “I phoned the house but no answer, have a call in to Eileen Paxton just in case she got sisterly, again. How about we get together, sooner rather than later, to talk about Franco Gull. I have a few ideas about the fine art of social pressure.”

  CHAPTER

  38

  Franco Gull had retained the services of a criminal defense lawyer named Armand Moss. Moss had passed the assignment to an associate, a stunning brunette woman of around forty named Myrna Wimmer.

  The meeting was held in Wimmer’s office, a glass-lined room on the top floor of an office building on Wilshire near Barrington. It was a glorious day, and the glass served its purpose.

  Myrna Wimmer wore a burgundy pantsuit and had flawless ivory skin. Her artfully highlighted wedge cut was glossy and efficient. A Yale law degree was displayed like the icon it was. The photos on her credenza said she had a doting husband and five gorgeous kids. She moved like a dancer, her greeting was warm. Slanted gray eyes under artfully shaped brows could’ve melted paint.

  She said, “For the record, Dr. Gull is here of his own volition and is under no obligation to answer any questions, let alone those deemed inappropriate.”

  “Yes, ma’am, anything you say,” said Milo.

  Wimmer regarded him with amusement, turned to Gull, who sat on a club chair near the longest glass wall, feet planted on the carpet, looking drained and thinner. The chair rested on casters, and Gull’s movements made it shudder.

  He had on a black suit, white mock-turtleneck, oxblood calfskin loafers. Little red clocks on his black socks. A folded linen handkerchief was wadded in one big hand. No sweating, yet, but preparing himself? Or maybe his lawyer had provided the hankie.

  Milo took the seat farthest from Gull. I got close.

  “Good morning,” I said. It was 11 A.M., and the view out Myrna Wimmer’s glass walls deserved some serious meditation. I was there for anything but, dressed in my best navy suit, a white pin-collar shirt with French cuffs, and a gold jacquard tie. Last time I’d gone that route someone had mistaken me for a lawyer. The sacrifices we make for the public good.

  Two days had passed since Christina Marsh’s photo had run in the paper. A couple of schizophrenics had phoned Milo, each with oddly congruent stories about alien abductions, each certain Christina was really from Venus. Comic relief; with the schedule he’d been keeping Milo needed it.

  Two nights attempting to surveil Raymond Degussa had gone flat when the bouncer had failed to show up for his club gig. A check at his last-known address revealed it to be eighteen months out-of-date, and now Milo had more to search for.

  Before we’d headed for Myrna Wimmer’s office, he’d shown me mug shots of Degussa and a DMV photo of Bennett Hacker. Degussa’s stats put him at six feet, 198, with multiple tattoos. Long, seamed face, thick neck, strong features, black hair oiled and brushed straight back. In one of the pictures, Degussa wore a thick, drooping mustache. In others he was clean-shaven. Tiny slit eyes projected profound boredom.

  Hacker was six-two, 170, with thinning dishwater hair and a chin that fell far short of assertive. He wore a white shirt and tie, smiled faintly for the motor vehicles camera. />
  According to Medi-Cal investigator Dwight Zevonsky, the PO was a rich man. Both of them were.

  Franco Gull hadn’t responded to my greeting, so I repeated it.

  He said, “Morning.”

  I kept my suit jacket buttoned, kept my posture authoritative. “Pretty outside,” I said. “But that’s irrelevant to you.”

  No answer.

  “All that dissonance must be tough, Franco.”

  Myrna Wimmer said, “Pardon me?”

  “Dissonance. When self-image clashes with harsh reality.” I scooted closer to Gull. He pressed himself against the back of the armchair. The chair rolled back a couple of inches.

  “What is this?” said Wimmer. “I canceled an appointment to hear psychobabble?”

  I addressed Gull. “First off, you need to know that I’m not a police officer, I’m your peer.”

  Franco Gull’s left eye twitched, and he glanced at Wimmer. She said, “What’s going on?”

  Milo said, “Dr. Delaware’s a clinical psychologist. He consults to the department.”

  Gull glared at me. “You never thought to mention that.”

  “No reason to,” I said. “There is now.”

  Wimmer folded her arms across her chest. “Well, this is different.”

  “Any problem with that?” said Milo.

  She held up a finger. “No one talk, I’m thinking.”

  “Maybe it’ll be more pleasant for your client,” said Milo. “No rubber hose, a bit of collegiality.”

  “That remains to be seen.” To me: “What’s your angle—first of all, what’s your name, again?”

  I told her, and she made a show of writing it down. “Okay, now what’s your angle?”

  “Clinical psych.” I turned to Gull. “I’ve been trying to understand how you got into this dismal situation.”