Jonathan Kellerman - Compulsion

“You see that as grounds for Junior hating Mom bad enough to have her carved?”

“Abused kids can resent the parent who didn’t save them. Moskow said when Tony did visit, Ella never walked him out, so there were issues.”

“He wasn’t worth getting off her chair for but the morning paper was.”

“And that’s when she got it,” I said. “Interesting.”

“Bit of a reach?”

“Maybe not. Getting symbolic can lead to all sorts of dark places.”

“Ol’ Tony’s sitting on a whole lot of primal anger and chronic pain doesn’t improve his disposition?”

I said, “As long as Ella helped him financially, he was able to keep his feelings under control. She turns off the tap, he views it as yet another abandonment. Comes to see her, pleads his case, she says no. He argues. She gets mad. If she really lost her cool and threatened to change the will, leave it all to the Salvation Army, that could’ve done it.”

“She told Barone she didn’t want a copy of the will at home. Maybe to shield it from Tony.”

“A million three for that house,” I said. “More than tempting. If he does have a gambling problem, he could know bad guys who’d take on the job.”

He drove for a while. “It’s as logical as any scenario, but Hochswelder labeled Tony a compulsive gambler based on a secondhand account of a single episode. And he doesn’t like Tony, so anything he says is suspect.”

A block later: “A slovenly fat guy who’s not a decorator or a florist or a choreographer being gay? Impossible.”

I laughed. “You see his sexuality as relevant?”

“You don’t?”

“What do you mean?”

“Something else for Mama to disapprove of,” he said. “Parents can get picky that way.”

Back at the station, he checked in with the plainclothes officer surveilling Tony Mancusi. The subject had left his apartment once to get a burrito and a soda at a stand on Sunset near Hillhurst. Walking distance but Mancusi had taken his car, which he’d used as his dining room, munching in the parking lot.

“Officer Ruiz also observed that subject tossed his junk out the car window onto the ground, rather than use a trash basket ten feet away. Officer Ruiz began a violation roster on the subject. When I pointed out to Officer Ruiz that littering private property was bad behavior but nothing citable, he was conspicuously disappointed.”

“Eager,” I said.

“Twenty-one years old, six months out of the academy. The other two are just as green. I feel like I’m running a day care center, but at least they’re motivated.”

“Mancusi go anywhere after lunch?”

“Right back home and he’s still there. I’d love to have grounds for his phone records.”

Shuffling through the message slips on his desk, he tossed the first four, read the fifth, and said, “Wonders never cease. Sean got creative.”

Binchy, though still on Auto Theft, had continued combing the crime reports for incidents coinciding with the time period the Bentley had been missing. Coming up empty on homicides, rapes, and assaults just as Milo had. But the young detective had gone further and a missing person had surfaced.

Milo phoned him, grunted approval, got the details.

“Katrina Shonsky, twenty-eight-year-old female Caucasian, blond and brown, five four, one hundred ten. Out partying that night with friends, drove home alone, hasn’t been heard from since. Mother reported it three days later. Took this long to make it into the computer.”

“Go Sean,” I said. “You run a good day care, Papa Sturgis.”

Mr. and Mrs. Royal Hedges lived in a vast, loft-like condo on the fourteenth floor of a luxury building on the Wilshire Corridor. Walls of glass opened to a southward view that avoided the ocean and stared down at Inglewood, Baldwin Hills, LAX flight paths. Altitude and a starless night transformed miles of tract housing into a light show.

Royal and Monica Hedges sat on a low, black Roche-Bobois sofa, smoking in unison. The condo’s floors were black granite, the walls white diamond plaster that threw off its own glints, the artwork big and blotchy with an emphasis on gray.

Monica Hedges was somewhere between fifty and sixty. Tiny and blond and skinny to the point of desiccation, she had heavily lined brown eyes, a face stretched past the point of reason, and great legs displayed by a little black dress.

Royal Hedges looked to be seventy, minimum, sported a red-brown toupee nearly good enough to pull off the illusion, and a Vandyke dyed to match. He wore a red silk shirt, white slacks, pink suede loafers without socks. Hid his fourth yawn behind liver-spotted hands and flicked ashes into a chrome tray.

Monica said, “Katrina’s my only child. From my second marriage. Her father’s long gone.”

“Disappeared?” said Milo.

“Dead.” Her tone said no loss.

Her third husband’s body language said this was her ordeal.

She said, “I’m not panicking, Lieutenant, but I am getting a little nervous. Katrina’s done stupid things before, but not like this, a week and counting. I can’t help worrying because that’s what a mother does. Though I fully expect her to walk right in with one of her stupid excuses.”

Royal said, “I’ll be back,” patted her knee, left the room.

“Men and their plumbing,” said Monica Hedges. “He’ll be up and down the whole time. We’ve been married two years, he doesn’t really know Katrina.”

Milo said, “Is there any friend or relative Katrina might’ve gone to visit?”

“You mean her father’s family? Never. Norm Shonsky wasn’t in her life and neither is his clan.”

Airy wave. Showing no curiosity about why someone of Milo’s rank would be doing a house call on a missing person.

At her income level, probably used to service.

“Besides,” she said, “Katrina doesn’t visit. She picks up impulsively and leaves.”

“Where does she go, ma’am?”

Another wave. “Wherever. Mexico, Europe. Once she even made it to Tahiti. That’s what I meant by stupid. She’ll find a cheap flight on the Internet, do no planning whatsoever, and just fly off in gay abandon.”

“By herself.”

Silence.

“Mrs. Hedges?”

“There are men, I suppose,” she said. “If she doesn’t travel with them, she’s certainly capable of finding them along the way. She makes a point of telling me when she comes back.”

“Telling you what?”

“That she behaved in a way I wouldn’t approve. She does it purely to rile me. The exceptions are those times when she neglects to take enough money for expenses and calls me in desperation. When that happens, she’s like someone from the Travel Channel. Going on about the sights, museums, quaint old churches.”

She smoked greedily. “I love my daughter, Lieutenant, but she can be trying.”

“How long has it been since you last saw her?”

Hesitation. “A month give or take. We weren’t fighting, nothing like that. But Katrina had convinced herself she needed to be independent. In other words, no contact with Mother until finances deem otherwise. I’d never have known she was gone if her friend hadn’t called to ask if Katrina was with me.”

“Which friend?”

“A girl named Beth Holloway. Never met her. She was out with Katrina at that club, they split up, she hasn’t heard from Katrina since.”

He read off the Van Nuys address on Katrina Shonsky’s driver’s license. “Is that current, ma’am?”

“It is.”

“Does Katrina live alone?”

“Yes. In a dump.”

“Any current men in her life?”

“Not that I know,” said Monica Hedges. Losing volume by the end of the sentence, as if she doubted her own veracity. “Katrina tends to guard her privacy.”