Therapy

CHAPTER 37

The phone woke me up. I’d gone to bed at 3:30 A.M.

As my eyes cleared, I focused on the clock. Six hours later.

I grabbed the receiver, fumbled, got hold of it.

“Found it,” said Olivia Brickerman. “The key was divergent thinking.”

“Morning,” I said.

“You sound groggy.”

“Long night.”

“Poor baby. Want to brush your teeth and call me back?”

I laughed. “No, tell me.”

“The problem,” she said, “was that I was being too limited, concentrating on awards and grants. As if that’s the only way stuff gets funded. Finally, I shifted gears and voila! This thing was legislated, Alex. Tacked on as a rider to a tough felony sentencing law. Assemblyman Reynard Bird, D-Oakland- you know him, used to be a Black Panther?”

“Sure.”

“Bird got the rider stuck on the bill as part of the old give-and-take. So now you can send bad guys to prison for long periods, but when they get out, they get free therapy.”

“Any bad guys?”

“Any paroled felons who ask for treatment get it. Up to a year of individual and/or group for each bad guy, no restriction on hours, and the funding comes straight from Medi-Cal. That’s why I couldn’t find the money stream. It’s a drop in the ocean of general medical payments.”

“Sweet deal for felons,” I said. “And for providers.”

“Sure is, but few providers have taken the state up on it. Either they don’t know about it, or they don’t want criminals crowding their waiting rooms. Probably the former. Bird never publicized it, and usually he’s the first to throw a press conference. I found out his third wife’s a psychologist, and guess what: She’s running two of the biggest programs in Oakland and Berkeley. Almost all the activity’s up north. There’s another program in Redwood City, and some groups in Santa Cruz that are run by an eighty-five-year-old shrink who practiced in L.A. and retired. The one you’re probably interested in is Pacifica Psychological Services, Beverly Hills, California. Right?”

“How’d you know?”

“It’s the only program in Southern Cal.”

“Payment straight out of the Medi-Cal cookie jar,” I said. “What’s the reimbursement level?”

“Wait, there’s more, darling. We’re talking Medi-Cal plus. The bill authorizes surcharges because of an ‘exigency’ clause. The funds come out of some legislative slush account, but the administration’s through Medi-Cal.”

“Meaning these are patients your average doctor wouldn’t want to treat, so the state provides an incentive. How much of one?”

“Double reimbursement,” she said. “Actually a bit more than double. Medi-Cal pays fourteen dollars for group therapy by a Ph.D., fifteen for an MD. Providers under this bill get thirty-five. The same goes for individual therapy. From twenty an hour to forty-five. Seventy bucks for the initial intake and forty-eight for case conferences.”

“Thirty-five an hour for group,” I said, recalculating my previous estimates. Lots of zeroes. “Not bad.”

“There’s no fiscal oversight I can find, just bill the state and collect.”

“Any way to find out how much each program has billed?”

“Not for me, but Milo could probably do it,” she said. “If he wants to pursue it further, I’d call Sacramento. Ask for Dwight Zevonsky, he’s a good guy who investigates fraud.”

I copied down the number.

“What’s the official name of the program?” I said.

“No name, just Assembly Bill 5678930-CRP-M, Amendment F,” she said. “Subtitled ‘Psychocultural demarginalization of released offenders.’ Which was one of your buzzwords. I found a couple others in the text of the rider. ‘Attitudinal shifting,’ ‘Holistic emphasis.’ The individual programs are free to take on their own names. The one in Beverly Hills is called-”

“Sentries for Justice.”

“Yes, just like you said. So, what, this has been done before?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said.

“Where?”

“You don’t want to know.”

I found out the name of Assemblyman Reynard Bird’s third wife and ran her through the Internet.

Dr. Michelle Harrington-Bird. A tall, Scottish-born redhead in her forties who favored African robes and spoke out frequently about political issues. The assemblyman was in his seventies, a legislative vet known for passionate oration and the ability to fix potholes in his district.

In one of the many photos I found, Harrington-Bird was posed with a group of fellow psychologists that included Albin Larsen. A bunch of therapists hanging out at a convention. Larsen stood next to Harrington-Bird, goateed, bespectacled, wearing a tweed suit over a sweater-vest and looking like Hollywood’s incarnation of Freud. His body language implied no intimacy with the assemblyman’s current spouse.

All business. Plenty of incentive for that.

Harrington-Bird had borrowed Larsen’s terminology for the wording of the bill. No doubt Larsen had impressed her with descriptions of his human rights work in Africa. I wondered what she’d think about his role in African genocide. About two little boys left in their beds with their throats cut.

I found Larsen and Harrington-Bird paired three more times, as signatories on political ads. After printing what I thought was relevant, I got on the phone.

Milo said, “Oh, man, Olivia. She should run the world.”

“She’s overqualified,” I said. “Now we know the funding’s real and that Larsen got in on it early.”

“Reynard Bird. Wonder how high this will go.”

“There’s no evidence Bird or his wife colluded on any scam. Larsen knew her professionally, and they hobnobbed politically. He may have used her, too.”

“She’s into human rights?”

“She’s into petitions. Protesting U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, et cetera. Larsen signed the same ads.”

He grunted. “So when did the funding start?”

“Year and a half ago. Reimbursements began sixteen months ago. Pacifica was in at the outset.”

“Thirty-five bucks for each con-hour,” he said. “Even more than we estimated.”

“Huge incentive to keep it going. And to cover up when exposure was threatened. If Mary Lou posed any sort of threat, the obvious solution was to eliminate her.”

“Bullet and impalement. Speaking of which, here’s my contribution to the database. Through some fancy detective footwork, I located a retired guard supervisor at Quentin who actually knew Raymond Degussa. He’s certain Degussa was responsible for not two but three inmate contract killings and maybe as many as five others. In-house hit man, the gangs hire them to keep their own noses clean. With all that, they just couldn’t get any evidence on the asshole. When Degussa wasn’t offing people, he did all things that make parole boards salivate. Attended church, served as a pastor’s assistant, volunteered to make Christmas toys for ghetto kids, worked as a volunteer library clerk. And get this: He went regularly for counseling. This is a guy who appreciates the value of therapy.”

“Bet he does.”

“And here’s the fun part, Alex: This supervisor, God bless him, told me all the hits featured some kind of impaling and a combination MO, which is unusual for prison killings, mostly it’s cut and run. Degussa cut all right- your basic throat and multiple body slashing by shiv. But he followed it up with a coup de grâce through the neck or chest with some sort of pointed object. In a couple of cases, the objects were found: sharpened fountain pen, meat skewer purloined from the prison kitchen. Raymond’s definitely our bad guy.”

“He has no record of sexual crimes?”

“His sheet’s what I told you- larceny, drugs, armed robbery. But those are only the things he gets caught for. Who knows what he does in his spare time? Starting tonight, I’m switching Sean Binchy from surveilling Gull to watching Degussa. I’ll be there at the start, to make sure he doesn’t get into trouble. Watching a sweating shrink’s one thing, this bad boy’s another.”

“Gull’s off the screen?”

“On the contrary. Now that we know the scam’s real, we’ve got something to use against him. Assuming you still see him as the weakest link.”

“If you want to lean on someone, he’d be my choice.”

“I want badly to lean,” he said. “A couple more things. The address Christi Marsh gave is a mail drop, big surprise. She only rented the box for two months, and the clerk has no recollection of her. Did you check the paper this morning?”

“Not yet.”

“They finally ran the photo. Page thirty-two, at the bottom, along with three sentences asking anyone with knowledge to call me. No calls yet. On the Quick family front, I tracked down sister Kelly. She stayed in Boston to work at a law firm. But she just took a sudden leave of absence, supposedly sick grandmother in Michigan.”

“You think she could be well west of Michigan.”

“I phoned the house but no answer, have a call in to Eileen Paxton just in case she got sisterly, again. How about we get together, sooner rather than later, to talk about Franco Gull. I have a few ideas about the fine art of social pressure.”