“Case conferences. As in getting together, after hours, at the building. How much does Medi-Cal pay for that?”

“Thirty-six bucks for thirty minutes. If these people have hooked on to some supplemental program that adds to the Medi-Cal billing- something Sonny wangled- the fee could be substantially higher. But let’s be conservative and assume the core is group therapy at twenty dollars per patient per session. I saw at least two dozen folding chairs. If they’re running groups of twenty- or claiming to be- each group session would bring in four hundred bucks an hour. Running six groups a day five times a week would bring in twelve thousand dollars. That alone would be six hundred grand a year. Add more patients, toss in additional fees, and it could get interesting. Especially if you’re not really doing any work.”

“Millions,” he said.

“It’s not inconceivable.”

“Each con gets daily group therapy… how many groups could you justify for a single patient?”

“If you’ve set up an immersion model, you could treat him all day.”

“What, like that deal where you sat all day and some guy yelled at you for being weak-willed and wouldn’t let you pee?”

“Est, Synanon,” I said. “There’s plenty of precedent, particularly with substance abuse. A case could be made for immersion for cons, because the aim would be large-scale change on several dimensions. The answer to an inquiring skeptic would be that it was still cheaper than keeping them in prison. And that if it really straightened them out, it was a giant money saver.”

“Mary Lou and her rehab kick,” he said. “Going on the radio- she and Larsen.” He laughed. “The government pays to shrink bad guys. I’m in the wrong business. So are you, for that matter.”

I said, “How many parolees live in Sonny’s halfway houses?”

“Three houses? I’d guess a couple of hundred.”

“Think about the income if everyone got on the rolls.”

“Hundred bucks a week per con- five grand a year. A million bucks for group therapy alone.”

“Plus other charges.”

“The only problem is, Alex, a couple of shrinks doing all that billing would be physically impossible.”

“So they use assistants- peer counselors. And they flat out lie, bill for sessions that never take place.”

“Peer counselors,” he said. “Meaning other cons? Yeah, that’s the rage, ain’t it? Ex-gangbangers become facilitators, junkies go the drug-counseling route. That’s where a guy like Degussa would fit in… scumbags doing therapy. That’s legal?”

“Everything depends how the contract’s written,” I said. “And a guy like Sonny would know how to get a juicy government contract.”

“All those billable hours,” he said. “The place would be jumping. But it’s not.”

“Maybe that discrepancy occurred to Gavin.”

“Brain-damaged ace reporter ferrets out fraud,” he said. He drank juice, put the carton down, wiped his lips with his sleeve. “All you need is a room and some chairs to make a million. Yeah, it’s a fat scam, but Sonny gives away a million a year. Why would he mess with this? The game?”

“Maybe something else,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Making Mary Lou happy.”

“She didn’t end up too happy,” he said.

“Maybe something went wrong.”

“So they were cleaning the carpet. The day after we spoke to Sonny. Who was doing it, scuzzbags like Roland Kristof?”

“Didn’t appear to be,” I said. I gave him the name of the company, and he copied it down.

“A rehab scam,” he said. “But we’re back to the same question: Where does Jerry Quick fit in?”

“That office of his,” I said. “Not much business goes on there.”

“A front.”

“Maybe his real job’s working for Sonny.”

He frowned. “This whole scenario, it makes Quick more than just a sleazy bastard. It means he knows why his son was killed and instead of telling us, he cleans out the room.”

“That could’ve been fear,” I said. “First Gavin, then Mary Lou Koppel. That’s why Quick left town. When you called the office, no one answered. Maybe Quick told Angie to take some time off.”

“He splits… leaves his wife behind… because they don’t get along anyway. He doesn’t give a damn about her.”

“That would also explain the daughter- Kelly- not coming home after Gavin’s death. Quick wants her out of the way.”

“The scam crumbling… if it really exists.”

“A scam would explain Flora Newsome, too. While she was working in the parole office, she learned something she shouldn’t have. Maybe Mary Lou got greedy and wanted a bigger cut. Or Gavin’s getting killed changed her perspective.”

“What, she suddenly developed moral fiber?”

“Money games are one thing, murder’s another. Perhaps Koppel panicked and wanted out. Or she tried to lean on Sonny.”

He got up again, circled the room a couple of times. “There’s another possible angle on Flora, Alex. She could’ve been in on the scam, flagging files of incoming parolees, passing along names.”

“Could be,” I said, thinking about Evelyn Newsome, living on memories, trying to put her life together.

He stared out the kitchen window for a long time. “Career criminal, parole officer, shady metals dealer. And Professor Larsen, the human rights dude. We’ve been focusing on Gull, haven’t paid much attention to Larsen.”

He drained the juice carton, let out a long, windy sigh. “I’ve got an appointment with Jerry Quick’s CPA in Brentwood. Then I’d better start doing detail work on Degussa and Hacker, find out, among other things, if either of them interfaced with Flora’s satellite office.”

He snapped the case shut and saluted. “All this still leaves Crystal, the mystery blonde.”

“Gavin’s girl,” I said. “He confided in her. Or he didn’t, and she just happened to be in the wrong place.”

“So you’ve changed your mind, she wasn’t the primary target.”

“Flexibility is the hallmark of maturity.”

He grinned. “Seeing as your schedule’s open, should you choose to accept the mission…”

“What?”

“Scholarly research. Excavate every goddamn thing you can about Albin Larsen and the others. Look for the kind of easy government money we’re guessing about. State, local, Fed, private. Something with poor oversight that would be easy to pad.”

“Sounds like a typical grant,” I said.

“So young, yet so cynical. So, do we have a deal?”

“A deal implies reciprocity,” I said.

“Virtue, m’lad, is its own reward.”

CHAPTER 32

Virtue took its sweet time paying off.

Jerome Quick’s name pulled up no hits. Neither did Raymond Degussa’s or Bennett A. Hacker’s.

Edward “Sonny” Koppel was a man of means, but his public profile was low: twenty references in all, sixteen noting Koppel’s charitable contributions. Most of those consisted of Koppel’s name on donor lists. When he was identified at all it was as an “investor and philanthropist.” No photos accompanied any of the citations.

Albin Larsen was a good deal more cybervisible. For the last decade, he’d balanced the practice of psychology with delivering lectures on the role of psychology in social activism in his native Sweden as well as in France, Holland, Belgium, Canada, and Kenya. His name popped up sixty-three times.

That kind of travel conflicted with doing long-term therapy; then again, it was easier to maintain a patient load when you weren’t actually seeing your patients.

I began slogging through the hits. Larsen’s connections to Africa went beyond giving speeches; he’d been a U.N. observer in Rwanda during the genocide that had seen eight hundred thousand Tutsis exterminated and had consulted to the subsequent war crimes tribunal.

Some of the citations were repetitive, but the thirty I examined were all more of the same: Larsen doing good works.

Not the profile of a swindler or a murderer. Before reaching the end, I shifted gears and started searching for psychotherapy programs for parolees and other ex-cons, found surprisingly few. No government projects in California, other than a state-funded truck-driving school for recently released felons. That one had earned a bit of scrutiny when one of its graduates, tanked up on meth, had crashed his big rig into a restaurant in Lodi. But I found no sign the grant had been terminated.