Bad Love (12 page)

He pulled his wet hand away from the dog’s maw, looked at it, wiped it on his jacket.

“Where’d the video come from?” I said. “TV station’s raw footage?”

He nodded.

“How much of it was actually broadcast?”

“Not much at all. This TV station has a twenty-four-hour crime-watch van with a scanner — anything for the ratings, right? They got to the scene first and were the only ones to actually record the whole thing. Their total footage is ten minutes or so, mostly no-action standoff before Hewitt comes out with Adeline. What you just saw is thirty-five seconds.”

“That’s all? It seemed a lot longer.”

“Seemed like a goddamn eternity, but that’s what it was. The part that actually made it to the six o’clock news was
nine
seconds. Five of Hewitt with Adeline, three of Rambo close-ups on the SWAT guys, and one second of Hewitt down. No blood, no screaming, no standing dead man.”

“Wouldn’t sell deodorant,” I said, pushing the image of the teetering corpse out of my head. “Why was the sound off for most of it? Technical difficulties?”

“Yup. Loose cable on their parabolic mike. The sound man caught it midway through.”

“What did the other stations broadcast?”

“Postmortem analysis by the department mouthpiece.”

“So if the screams on my tape were lifted, the source had to be this particular piece of footage.”

“Looks that way.”

“Meaning what? Mr. Silk’s an employee of the TV station?”

“Or a spouse, kid, lover, pal, significant other, whatever. If you give me your patient list, I can try to get hold of the station’s personnel records and cross-check.”

“Be better if you give me the personnel list,” I said. “Let me check it against my patients, so I can preserve confidentiality.”

“Fine. Another list you might try to get is the one for your “bad love’ conference. Anyone who attended. It was a long time ago, but maybe the hospital keeps records.”

“I’ll call tomorrow.”

He got up and touched his throat. “
Now
I’m thirsty.”

We went into the kitchen, opened beers, and sat at the table, drinking and brooding.

The dog positioned himself between us, licking his lips.

Milo said, “He doesn’t get to go for the gusto?”

“Teetotaler.” I got up and slid the water bowl over. The dog ignored it.

“Bullshit. He wants hops and malt,” said Milo. “Looks like he’s closed a few taverns in his day.”

“
There’s
a marketing opportunity for you,” I said. “Brew a hearty lager for quadrupeds. Though I’m not sure you could set your criteria too high for a species that imbibes out of the toilet.”

He laughed. I managed a smile. Both of us trying to forget the videotape. And everything else.

“There’s another possibility,” I said. “Maybe Hewitt’s voice wasn’t lifted from the video footage. Maybe he was taped simultaneously by someone at the mental health center. Someone who happened to have a recorder handy the day of the murder and switched it on during the standoff. There’d probably be machines lying around the center, for therapy.”

“You’re saying there’s a therapist behind this?”

“I was thinking more of a patient. Some paranoids make a fetish of keeping records. I’ve seen some lug tape recorders around with them. Someone who’d been bearing a grudge since seventy-nine could very well be highly paranoid.”

He thought about that. “Nutcase with a pocket Sony, huh? Someone you once treated who ended up at the mental health center?”

“Or just someone who remembered me from the conference and ended up at the center. Someone tying me in with bad love — whatever it means to him. Probably anger at bad therapy. Or therapy he perceived as bad. De Bosch’s theory has to do with bad mothers letting their kids down. Betrayal. If you think of therapists as surrogate parents, the stretch isn’t hard to make.”

He put down his bottle and looked at the ceiling. “So we’ve got a nut, one of your old patients, gone downhill, can’t afford private treatment so he’s getting county help. Happens to be at the center the day Hewitt freaks out and butchers Becky. Recorder in his pocket — keeping tabs on all the people talking behind his back. He hears the screams, presses
RECORD . . .
I guess it’s possible — anything’s
possible
in this city.”

“If we’re dealing with someone who’s been stewing for a long time, witnessing Becky Basille’s murder and the SWAT scene could have set him off. Hearing Hewitt screaming about bad love could have done it, too, if he’d had experiences with de Bosch or a de Boschian therapist.”

He rolled the bottle between his palms. “Maybe. But two nuts with a “bad love’ fixation just
happening
to show up at the same place on the same day is too damned cute for my taste.”

“Mine, too,” I said.

He drank some more.

“What if it wasn’t a coincidence at all, Milo? What if Hewitt and the taper
knew
each other — even shared a common rage about bad love, de Bosch, therapists in general? If the mental health center’s typical, it’s a crowded place, patients waiting for hours. It wouldn’t be that strange for two disturbed people to get together and discover a mutual resentment, would it? If they were paranoid to begin with, they could have played upon each other’s fears and delusions.
Confirming
for each other that the way they saw the world was valid. The taper might even be someone who wouldn’t have been violent under different circumstances. But seeing Hewitt murder
his
therapist and then seeing Hewitt’s face blown off could have pushed him over.”

“So now he’s ready to do his own therapist? So what’s the tape and the call and the fish?”

“Preparing the scene. Or maybe he won’t go any further — I don’t know. And something else: I might not even be his only target. He might have a current therapist who’s in danger.”

“Any idea who it could be? From your patient list?”

“No, that’s the thing. There’s no one who fits. But my patients were all kids. Lots can happen over time.”

He sat back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling.

“Speaking of kids,” he said. “Where does the kid’s voice fit in with your two-nut scenario?”

“I don’t know, dammit. Maybe the taper’s got a kid. Or he’s abducted one — God, I hope not, but that voice stank of coercion, didn’t it? So flat — did
Hewitt
have any children?”

“Nope. The report has him as unmarried, unemployed, un-everything.”

“Be good to know who he hung out with at the center. We could also try to verify that my tape was taken from the video footage. Because if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t have to bother cross-referencing the station personnel list.”

He smiled. “And you wouldn’t have to expose your patient list, right?”

“Right. That would be a major betrayal. I still can’t justify it.”

“You’re sure it’s not any of them?”

“No, I’m not sure, but what am I going to do? Call hundreds of people and ask them if they’ve grown up to be hate-crazed nuts?”

“No Mr. Silk in your past, huh?”

“Only silk I know is in my ties.”

“One thing I can tell you, your tape’s not an
exact
lift off the video. The footage has Hewitt screaming for just over twenty-seven seconds out of the thirty-five, and your segment only lasts sixteen. I had a brief go at it before I came over here — tried running both tapes simultaneously on two machines to see if I could pick out any segments that coincided exactly. I couldn’t — it was tricky, going from machine to machine, on-off, on-off, trying to synchronize. And it’s not like we’re dealing with words, here — doesn’t take long before all the screaming starts to sound the same.”

“What about doing some kind of voiceprint analysis? Trying to get an electronic match.”

“From what I know, you need actual words for a match. And the department doesn’t do voiceprints anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Probably not enough call. What they’re useful for, mostly, is kidnapping ransom calls, and that’s usually the FBI’s game. Also phone scams, bunco stuff, which is low priority with all the buckets of blood. I think one guy at the sheriff’s is still doing them. I’ll find out.”

The dog finally put his head in the bowl and began slurping water. Milo lifted his bottle, said, “Cheers,” and emptied it.

“Why don’t you and I try a little bit of low-tech teamwork right now?” I said. “You take audio, I’ll take video—”

“And I’ll be in Screamland afore ye.”

He took the portable tapedeck into the library and loaded the video. We sat across from one another, listening to screams, trying to shut out the context. Even with two people it was difficult — hard to divide the howls into discrete segments.

We played and rewound, doing it over and over, trying to locate the sixteen seconds of the bad love tape amid the pain and noise of the longer video segment. The dog tolerated only a minute or so before scooting out of the room.

Milo and I stayed and sweated.

After half an hour, a triumph of sorts.

A discrepancy.

A second or two of sing-song, wordless jabber at the tail end of my tape that didn’t materialize anywhere on the soundtrack of the video.

Ya ya ya . . 
. the screamer lowering his volume just a bit — a barely discernible shift not much longer than an eyeblink. But once I pointed it out, it mushroomed, as obvious as a billboard.

“Two separate taping sessions,” I said, as stunned as Milo looked. “Has to be, otherwise why would the shorter tape have something on it that’s missing from the longer segment?”

“Yeah,” he said quietly, and I knew he was angry at himself for not catching it first.

He sprang to his feet and paced. Looked at his Timex. “When’d you say you were going to the airport?”

“Nine.”

“If you’re comfortable leaving the place unguarded, I could go get something done.”

“Sure,” I said, rising. “What?”

“Talk to the clinic director about Hewitt’s social life.”

He collected his things and we walked to the door.

“Okay, I’m off,” he said. “Got the Porsche and the cellular, so you can always reach me if you need to.”

“Thanks for everything, Milo.”

“What’re friends for?”

Ugly answers flashed in my head, but I kept them to myself.

Just as I was preparing to head out for LAX, Dr. Stanley Wolf returned my call. He sounded middle-aged and spoke softly and hesitantly, as if doubting his own credibility.

I thanked him and said I’d called about Dr. Grant Stoumen.

“Yes, I got the message.” He asked several tortuous questions about my credentials. Then: “Were you a student of Grant’s?”

“No, we never met.”

“Oh . . . what do you need to know?”

“I’m being harassed by someone, Dr. Wolf, and I thought Dr. Stoumen might be able to shed some light on it.”

“Harassed?”

“Annoying mail. Phone calls. It may be linked to a conference I co-chaired several years ago. Dr. Stoumen delivered a paper there.”

“A conference? I don’t understand.”

“A symposium on the work of Andres de Bosch entitled “Good Love/Bad Love.’ The term “bad love’ was used in the harassment.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Seventy-nine.”

“De Bosch — the child analyst?”

“Did you know him?”

“No, child analysis is outside of my . . . purview.”

“Did Dr. Stoumen ever talk about de Bosch — or this particular conference?”

“Not to my recollection. Nor did he mention any . . . annoying mail?”

“Maybe “annoying’ is too mild,” I said. “It’s fairly nasty stuff.”

“Uh-hm.” He didn’t sound convinced.

I said, “Last night it went a little further. Someone trespassed on my property. I have a fish pond. They took a fish out, killed it, and left it for me to see.”

“Hmm. How . . . bizarre. And you think this symposium’s the link?”

“I don’t know, but it’s all I’ve got so far. I’m trying to contact anyone who appeared on the dais, to see if they’ve been harassed. So far everyone I’ve tried to reach has moved out of town. Do you happen to know a psychiatrist named Wilbert Harrison or a social worker named Mitchell Lerner?”

“No.”

“They also delivered papers. The co-chairs were de Bosch’s daughter, Katarina, and a New York analyst named Harvey Rosenblatt.”

“I see. . . . Well, as I mentioned I’m not a child analyst. And unfortunately, Grant’s no longer with us, so I’m afraid—”

“Where did his accident take place?”

“Seattle,” he said, with sudden strength in his voice. “At a conference, as a matter of fact. And it wasn’t a simple accident. It was a hit-and-run. Grant was heading out for a late-night walk; he stepped off the curb in front of his hotel and was struck down.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yes, it was terrible.”

“What was the topic of the conference?”

“Something to do with child welfare — the Northwest Symposium on Child Welfare, I believe. Grant was always an advocate for children.”

“Terrible,” I said. “And this was in May?”

“Early June. Grant was on in years — his eyesight and hearing weren’t too good. We prefer to think he never saw it or heard it coming.”

“How old was he?”

“Eighty-nine.”

“Was he still in practice?”

“A few old patients stopped by from time to time, and he kept an office in the suite and insisted on paying his share of the rent. But mostly he traveled. Art exhibitions, concerts. And conferences.”

“His age made him a contemporary of Andres de Bosch,” I said. “Did he ever mention him?”

“If he did, I don’t recall it. Grant knew lots of people. He was in practice for almost sixty years.”

“Did he treat especially disturbed or violent patients?”

“You know I can’t discuss his cases, Dr. Delaware.”

“I’m not asking about specific cases, just the general tenor of his practice.”

“The little that I saw was pretty conventional — children with adjustment problems.”

“Okay, thanks. Is there anyone else who could talk to me about him?”

“Just Dr. Langenbaum, and he knows about as much as I do.”