Therapy

CHAPTER 16

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 cliches.

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?”