“Angie didn’t seem freaked when we talked to her,” I said. “She blinked when you showed her the picture—but that’s still pretty cool.”
“True,” he said. “Cool girl. A pro.”
“In terms of Jerry’s role in the scam, maybe he worked for Sonny as a fixit guy, some kind of procurer. What if he hired Angie away from the club for more than sex on the side? A hooker/stripper might know some cons, and cons are raw meat for the scam.”
“Jerry’s a pimp . . . They’d have Bennett Hacker and Ray Degussa to supply cons.”
“For all we know,” I said, “it was Jerry who put Hacker and Degussa in contact with the others. Degussa is a bouncer, and a guy like Jerry who frequents strip clubs would meet bouncers. Through Degussa, Jerry met Hacker. He introduced the two of them to Sonny Koppel, who just happened to have an interest in some halfway houses.”
“Jerry’s being Sonny’s tenant was a front, and Sonny spun us that yarn about Jerry not paying his rent to snow us.”
“And to distance himself from Jerry. An enterprising fellow like Sonny would’ve seen the opportunity. He’s got the halfway houses and, because of Jerry Quick, the contacts. Toss in an ex-wife with an interest in prison reform and her partner, a guy with a twenty-year history of making money off misery, and it would’ve seemed perfect.”
“Meeting of the nasty little minds,” he said. “Perfect till it wasn’t.”
I said, “Gavin’s accident started the downward spiral. He underwent personality changes, turned into a stalker, got busted, and needed court-ordered therapy. Sonny could fix that, by sending Gavin to someone who could be counted upon to say the right things to the court. But that good deed came back to bite him, because Gavin started thinking of himself as a muckraker. He snooped and found some serious muck.”
Milo closed his eyes, and sat without moving. For a moment I thought he’d fallen asleep. Then he sat up and stared at me, blankly, as if he’d been dreaming.
I said, “You still with me?”
Slow nod.
“Jerry lied to us about the referral, made up the story about Dr. Silver being his golf partner precisely because he wanted to hide his ties to the group. He suggested it was a sex crime. Another attempt to deflect you.”
“Dear old Dad,” he said. “Claims to be a metals dealer, but he’s really a pimp.”
“With Gavin’s stalking problem, Jerry probably figured he was being a great dad by setting him up with Christi. And Gavin seemed happy, bragged to Kayla about his sex life with his new girlfriend. The only trouble was his brain injury continued to skew his thinking. He took down license numbers, including his father’s. Someone found out, and that got him and poor Christi Marsh killed. Mary Lou figured it out, and it scared the hell out of her. Bilking the Department of Corrections is one thing, murder’s another. Maybe she pressured Sonny and Larsen to drop the whole thing. She knew Sonny carried a torch for her, thought she had him under control. But cornered, Sonny wasn’t harmless, at all. And neither was Albin Larsen.”
“If Bumaya can be believed about Larsen, we’re talking monster.”
“Monster with a Ph.D.,” I said. “Clever, calculating, dangerous. Mary Lou overvalued her own charisma.”
“What about Sheila? In the dark about all of it?”
“Sheila’s got serious emotional problems. She and Jerry have been unavailable to each other for years, but he’s stuck by her for appearances. Now one kid’s out of the house, and the other’s dead. Toss in some panic, and it would be the perfect time for him to split.”
“Appearances,” said Milo. “The house, the Benz, B.H. school district for the kids. Then Gavin gets his cranium shaken up, and it all falls apart. What about the impalement? The sexual angle? For simple executions, shooting would’ve been enough.”
“The impalement’s icing on the cake,” I said. “Someone who enjoys killing. Someone who’s done it before.”
“Ray Degussa,” he said. He got up, walked to the door, looked up and down the empty corridor, said, “It’s quiet,” and sat back down. “So Mary scammed but couldn’t handle murder?”