Jonathan Kellerman - Therapy

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.”

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.

Everything else I came up with was academic- a smattering of social scientists espousing theories and playing with numbers. When treatments for criminals did exist they tended to be outside the therapy mainstream. A group in Baldwin Park promoted meditation and “attitudinal healing” for ex-cons, and one in Laguna trumpeted the power of arts and crafts. Martial arts, tai chi specifically, was the treatment of choice for an organization in San Diego, and there was no shortage of religious groups touting techniques of moral change.

I phoned the State Department of Health, endured nearly an hour of voice mail and on-hold stupor before speaking to a jaded woman who informed me that she hadn’t heard of any treatment groups for parolees but that if one existed, they wouldn’t know about it, the Department of Corrections would. Another forty minutes of telephonic torment by the Corrections switchboard, as I was shunted from menu to menu. I started pressing “ 0” like a man possessed, finally reached an operator and was told that the office was closed.

Four-fifteen. My tax dollars working overtime.

I returned to the last dozen citations on Albin Larsen. A few more speeches, then a joint statement issued by Larsen and a U.N. commissioner named Alphonse Almogardi, in Lagos, Nigeria, promising that the United Nations would do everything in its power to bring the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide to justice.

Links attached to that one connected me to an African public affairs website. The big story took place in Kigali, the Rwandan capital: a June 2002 march by thirty-five hundred genocide survivors branding the International Criminal Tribunal a farce. During the eight years since the tribunal’s establishment, only seven war crimes trials had been convened, all of low-level military officers. As the years ground on, witnesses died or disappeared. Those who persisted had endured threats and harassment. Accused butchers grew wealthy as their defense attorneys kicked back shares of tribunal-financed legal fees.

More damaging was the accusation that the tribunal judges were actively conspiring to delay the trials of big-ticket mass murderers because of fears that hearings in open court would reveal the complicity of U.N. personnel in the genocide.

From the safety of her office in Dublin, a tribunal registrar named Maria Robertson responded by scolding the survivors for their “incendiary language” and cautioned against “instigating a cycle of violence.” Speaking in Lagos, consultant Professor Albin Larsen stressed the complexity of the situation and advised patience.

The nineteenth hit also emanated from the Nigerian capital, and it gave me pause: description of a program called Sentries for Justice, aimed at helping steer young African men away from lives of crime.

The group, staffed by European volunteers, functioned by “offering synergistic alternatives to prison that engender efficacious rehabilitation and attitudinal shifting through a holistic emphasis upon the interplay between socially altruistic behavior and communal social norms set into place during the pre-Colonial era but disrupted by colonialism.” Services offered included parenting education, jobs skills training, drug and alcohol counseling, crisis intervention, and something called “cultural demarginalization.” Synergy was illustrated by the use of Sentries buses, driven by Sentries alumni, for transporting criminal detainees to court. Most of the volunteers had Scandinavian names, and Albin Larsen was listed as a senior consultant.

I printed the citation, and moved to the last few hits. More speeches by Larsen, then the final reference, posted three weeks ago: calendar of events at a Santa Monica bookstore named The Pen Is Mightier. A Harvard professor named George Issa Qumdis was scheduled to deliver a speech on the Middle East, and Albin Larsen would be there to introduce him.

The speech was tonight, in four hours. Professor Larsen was a busy man.

I scanned the Sentries for Justice citation for buzzwords and keyed them into several search engines. “Syngerstic alternatives,” “efficacious rehabilitation,” “attitudinal shifting” “demarginalization” and the like pulled up lots of academic verbiage but nothing useful.