A kitchen faucet opened. Then, the hard clash of pans. Moments later, Sheila Quick made her way down the stairs, tentative, unsteady. She stopped on the bottom step, studied the floor, as if unwilling to commit. Her eyes were unfocused, and she gripped the banister for support. She wore a pink housecoat, had aged a decade overnight.
She saw us, said, “Hello” in a slurred voice. She noticed the cigarette in her husband’s hand, and her lips turned down.
Jerome Quick smoked defiantly. “Don’t stand on the bottom like that, come all the way down- be careful, you’re on Valium.” He made no effort to help her.
She remained in place. “Is there anything… new, Detective?”
Milo shook his head. “Sorry to bother you again, Mrs. Qui-”
“No, no, no, you’re helping me- us. You were very… gracious. Last night. It can’t have been easy for you. You were gracious. It wasn’t easy for you or for me.”
Jerry Quick said, “Sheila, go back to bed. You’re-”
“They were nice last night, Jerry. It’s only polite that I-”
“I’m sure they were great, but-”
“Jerry. I. Want. To. Be. Polite.” Sheila Quick came down the stairs and sat down on a side chair. “Hello,” she said, brightly.
“Ma’am,” said Milo, “we have learned that the girl with Gavin wasn’t Kayla Bartell.”
Sheila Quick said, “You said she was blond.”
Jerome Quick said, “There’s a rare commodity in L.A. ”
“I do have a picture,” said Milo. “It’s not a pleasant picture, it’s postmortem, but if you could look at it- if we could identify her, it might speed things along.”
Sheila Quick stared at him. He showed her the death shot.
“She looks so… dead. Poor little thing.” Shaking her head. She snatched the photo from Milo and held it closer. Her fingers trembled, and the corners flapped. “Are you showing pictures like this of Gavin to other people?”
“Sheila,” said Quick.
“No, ma’am,” said Milo. “We know who Gavin is.”
She examined the photo. “Gavin never said he had a new girlfriend.”
“Gavin was twenty,” said Jerome Quick. “He didn’t need to check in about his social life.”
Sheila Quick continued to stare at the picture. Finally, she handed it back.
“Another one,” she said.
“Ma’am?”
“Someone else’s baby is gone.”
CHAPTER 5
Milo received written permission to speak to Gavin’s doctors, and we left. It was nearly 5 P.M., the sky was milky white and poisonous, and both of us were low and hungry. We drove to a deli on Little Santa Monica, had sandwiches and coffee. Mine was roast beef with hot mustard on pumpernickel. Milo opted for a wet, multidecked monster layered with pastrami and coleslaw and pepperoncinis and some things I couldn’t identify, all stuffed into a French roll. When he bit into it, it collapsed. That seemed to give him joy.
He swallowed, and said, “Model family.”
“They’re no ad for domestic life,” I said, “but the father may be right, and it doesn’t matter.”
“Perverted stranger kills his boy. That sure distances it from the family.”
“I don’t see this as a family crime,” I said. “The fact that the family doesn’t know the girl could mean she’s the kind of girl you don’t bring home to Mother. Which may lead us to her being the primary target.”
“Someone with nasty friends.”
“The killer impaled her and took her purse. That could’ve been trophy-taking, but what if he didn’t want her identified quickly?”
“The primary target for sex, killing, or both?”
“Don’t know,” I said. “There was no sexual assault, but to me the impaling still has a sexual quality to it. Gavin was shot once- dispatched. That’s consistent with the killer wanting him out of the way so he could take care of his real business.”
“If Gavin was shot first. No way we can pinpoint that.”
“Logic says he was,” I said. “The girl was alive when the killer impaled her. It’s unlikely Gavin would’ve sat by passively while that happened. Or that the killer would’ve taken the risk of fighting a young, healthy male. He dispatched Gavin, with a single shot, then turned his attention to the girl. Her size, her fear, and the killer’s overwhelming dominance subdued her. Maybe he promised her he wouldn’t hurt her if she didn’t resist. Any signs she fought back?”
He shook his head.
I said, “She watched Gavin get murdered, sat there, terrified, and hoped for the best. The killer used the spear on her, then he shot her, too. To me that says big-time anger. With both kids dead, he had time to inspect his handiwork, fool with the scene. Either Gavin and the girl had already begun a sexually charged tableau, or he set one up. Either because it was a sex crime, or he wanted it to be seen that way.”
He put his sandwich down. “You’re offering me lots of choices.”
“What are friends for?” I said. “Have you come across any other impalement murders?”
“Nothing yet.” He picked up his sandwich, and a huge chunk disappeared in his maw. Think the condom was Gavin’s, or did the killer bring it?”
“It was in his pocket, so it was probably his.”
“So you think exploring Gavin’s psyche is a waste of time? I was thinking his therapist might be helpful. And you know her.”
“I know who she is.”
“From her being on TV.”
Here we go. I hid my mouth behind my coffee cup.
He said, “You make a face when you talk about her.”
“She’s not someone I’d refer to,” I said.
“Why not?”
“I can’t get into the details.”
“Give me the basics.”
Five years ago, an otherwise thoughtful judge had asked me to evaluate a seven-year-old girl caught in a vicious divorce. Both parents were trained marriage counselors. That should have been ample warning.
The mother was a young, passive, pinch-featured, preternaturally anxious woman who’d grown up with violent, alcoholic parents and had shifted from couples work to processing hardened drug addicts at a county-financed clinic in Bellflower. Her ex-husband, twenty years older, was pompous and psychopathic, a newly minted sex therapist and guru of sorts, with an Ivy League Ph.D. and a brand-new job at a yoga institute in Santa Barbara.
The two of them hadn’t spoken in over a year but each insisted upon joint physical custody. The arrangement was to be simple: three days at one home, four at the next. Neither parent saw the problem shuttling a seven-year-old girl ninety miles between her father’s faux-adobe house at the ashram and the mother’s sad, furnished apartment in Glendale. The alleged crux of the conflict was the calendar- who got four days, who got three, and what about holidays? After two months of raging debate, the topic switched to coordinating the conventional diet favored by the mother with the vegan regimen embraced by the father.
The real crux was mutual hatred, two hundred thousand dollars in a jointly owned investment account, and the alleged sexual rapaciousness of the father’s four girlfriends.
When I do custody evaluations, I make it a point to talk to therapists, and these combatants each had one. The father’s was an eighty-year-old Indian swami who spoke heavily accented English and took medication for high blood pressure. I made a trip to Santa Barbara, spent a pleasant two hours with the corpulent, bearded fellow, breathing in incense and learning nothing of substance. The father hadn’t kept an appointment with his avatar in six months.
“Is that okay with you?” I asked the swami.
He shifted out of lotus position and did something impossible with his body, winked, and smiled. “What will be, will be.”
“There’s a song like that.”
“Doris Day,” he said. “Terrific singer.”
The mother’s therapist was Mary Lou Koppel, and she refused to talk to me.