Jonathan Kellerman - Compulsion

She stretched out in a lounge chair. The same one she’d imagined Nick in. Stretched and yawned and half a bottle of tea and seven berries later, the sun did a number on her head.

When she awoke, the sky was dark and her watch said she’d been out for thirty-five minutes.

Now she’d have to bus back later than she liked, walk those streets where gangbangers sometimes cruised.

Omigod, Emilio hadn’t eaten dinner!

Then why wasn’t he crying?

She hurried inside to the toy room.

No Emilio.

She called his name.

Heard a funny sound – like a bird when its wings were restrained.

From the master bedroom.

Rushing there, she found the door closed.

Opened it.

Nick had pushed boxes out of the way and created a narrow space where Emilio now sat in his stroller. Surrounded on three sides. Like her baby was being walled in.

He saw her and wailed, “Maaamaaa!”

Nick said, “Poor little guy, he woke up cranky.”

She turned to him. Gaped.

Nick was dressed in a lavender satin ball gown, low-cut, something stuffed in the bodice to plump his chest up to cleavage.

Hairy cleavage.

He had on dangling violet-colored earrings, tacky purplish lipstick, real whore-y fake eyelashes. Combined with his short hair and beard stubble it was… it was…

Pivoting and cocking a hip, he wiggled his butt.

At her. Then at Emilio.

“Maaamaaa!”

“Voilà,” said Nick. “Très chic, non?”

Emilio cried louder.

For some crazy reason, Felicia laughed.

She didn’t know why. No matter how many times she’d try to figure it out she would never come up with why.

Because she didn’t think it was funny, not any of it, what she did feel was grossed out and freaked out and -

What came out was laughter.

And that changed everything about Nick.

And he had a gun.

I spent most of the day after at Western Pediatric Medical Center, listening to Felicia Torres, guiding her through the hospital system. Observing Emilio.

The little boy clung to his mother, mute and tense.

Physically okay, according to Dr. Ruben Eagle, an old friend and head of the Outpatient Division. We agreed that Rochelle Kissler, a brilliant young psychologist who’d been my student, would be perfect for the long term.

I introduced both of them to Felicia, stayed with her after they left, and asked if there was anything else she wanted to talk about.

“No… I’m so tired.”

“Is there someone who can stay with you?”

“My mom,” she said. “She lives in Phoenix, but she’ll come if I ask.”

I dialed the number, sat there as she talked.

She hung up, smiling wearily. “She’ll be here tomorrow.”

“Do you need someone till then?”

“No, I’ll be fine… this is so nice of you.”

“We’re all here to help you.”

She began shaking.

“What is it?”

“The way you said that, Dr. Delaware. Being helpful. That’s what he pretended. What kind of sick joke was that?”

I didn’t answer.

“I never trusted him, Doctor. Not from the minute I met him.”

Milo and I decompressed at a bar in Santa Monica. Eleven p.m.; he’d spent his day with Raul Biro and two other Hollywood detectives, going through the house on Altair Terrace.

One of the homes Dale Bright had bought as Nicholas Heubel. The other was a cabin near Palmdale, where he’d confined Felicia Torres in a bathroom. Forced her to imagine what he was doing to Emilio.

Mostly, he’d ignored the child. Letting him cry, then scream. No food or water. Then a quick drop into a shipping carton.

Airholes, to prolong the ordeal.

Milo said, “I know I’m supposed to have a reaction to shooting anyone. But, God help me, Alex, I wish I’d had more bullets.”

Three of five rooms on Altair were filled with mementos. Nice view of the Hollywood sign from a corner of the deck. White Lexus in the garage.

The Bentley had been moved from the LAPD motor lab to the same department-sanctioned tow yard where Kat Shonsky’s car had been ignored.

I said, “Maybe the chief can use it as his official ride.”

Milo said, “Harness a couple of thoroughbreds to the front bumper, be perfect.”

Ansell “Dale” Bright’s medicine cabinet yielded nothing stronger than aspirin and over-the-counter sinus remedies.

Under the sink was a polished black-walnut box filled with ampules of synthetic testosterone. Its bird’s-eye maple mate held plastic-sealed hypodermic needles.

“Pumping himself up?” said Milo. “To go with a dress?”

I threw up my hands.

He finished his Martini and told me about the passports under half a dozen aliases, the trove of documents that traced Bright’s path from New York to London, then Paris, Lisbon, back to England, Ireland, Scotland. Final stop: Zurich.

Trammel Dabson was another pilfered identity. Same DOB as Bright and the unfortunate Nicholas Heubel.

The original owner of the identity, an infant buried in the Morton Hall Cemetery in Edinburgh.

Bright had done a gravestone rubbing, mounted it in a scrapbook.

One of fifteen scrapbooks.

Chronicle of a life lived in costume.

The souvenirs weren’t limited to paper. In a small basement cut into the hillside behind the house, Milo discovered a trio of footlockers filled with firearms, knives, two acetylene blowtorches, stout rope, surgical gloves and tools, scalpels, probes, tissue spreaders, vials of poison.

Newspaper clippings from foreign papers created another chronology.

Unsolved murder of the landlord of a rooming house in the Eleventh Arrondissement of Paris.

Disappearance of an Oxford publican with a famously nasty disposition.

An article in Portuguese yet to be translated. But the grainy snapshot of a heavyset woman and the recurrent word “assasinato” said plenty.

The Brentwood house had served as a front and yielded nothing of forensic value. Upscale address for the social life Bright-as-Heubel had hoped to live as a financial advisor. Soraya Hamidpour had a client “from the industry” ready to move in.

Access to Bright’s computer was easy. No encryption and his password was “Bright Guy.”

His hard drive contained mostly financial files – algorithms for trading, performance histories, linkups to bourses around the world – and a scatter of sadistic pornography.

In a separate folder were five drafts of a prospectus “Nicholas St. Heubel, III” had composed and dated two years previous. Plans to start Hydro-Worth, a hedge fund emphasizing oil commodity trading. Bright had appended a puffed-up bio, lied about attending Eton, Harvard, and Wharton, termed himself “a brilliant tactician and financial soothsayer.”

The boast had some basis in fact. Upon arrival in London from New York, he’d used fake credentials to get a job at a brokerage house in London. Learned to trade futures well enough to earn enormous performance bonuses and a letter of commendation from the managing director.

Within eighteen months, he’d quit, was investing for himself. Nine years after inheriting $1.36 million, his savings had grown to $7.1 million.

Not counting the Swiss bank account, which would take a while to access.

Something else from Switzerland: Mounted at the back of one of the scrapbooks was an elegantly handwritten receipt from a clinic in Lugano. Nothing itemized; the franc conversion translated to fifty-five thousand American dollars.

“Maybe a drug problem, one of those high-end rehab places,” said Milo. “But except for the macho-juice, we didn’t find anything iffy.”