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.”