The autopsy was like any other except that Kate focused on the pathologist’s hands and did not look at Dory Quillin’s face, not even when Mitchell’s saw opened her cranium. Fixedly she watched the full-length incision in the torso which other homicide detectives ghoulishly referred to as “canoeing the body.” As always, the chemical smell of the place was corrosive in her nostrils; she felt it invading her clothes, seeping into her pores.
In the chill room, which was quiet except for the pathologist’s drone into his microphone, she observed attentively, asking no questions as the internal organs of Dory Quillin were measured and weighed and evaluated, and the technical terminology for the trauma to the left side of her brain was uttered into the microphone as the official cause of death.
Taylor asked only one question, and in one word: “Drugs?”
“No needle tracks,” Mitchell answered mechanically, intent on his work. “Only slight traces of cocaine in the urine samples. Tissue samples may say differently but right now there’s no other indication.”
Kate and Taylor walked out of USC Medical Center.
Taylor grunted with the effort of loosening his tie. “So now we know. She died from having her head bashed in.”
“Meet you at eleven,” she said curtly, in no mood for his sarcasm. He knew as well as she did that an autopsy could reveal new information and bring new leads in a homicide investigation.
Completing a yawn, Taylor nodded. He never alluded to Kate’s custom of going home immediately after an autopsy unless compelling reasons prevented her.
He said disgustedly, “We gotta waste time checking out the rest of Dory’s useless john list. We gotta waste more time with Dory’s shrink trying to figure out what was in this kid’s fucked-up head. Shit, Kate.”
Kate squinted at him in bright sunlight unusual for a June morning in Southern California. Her jacket felt warm, increasingly uncomfortable. “Finding out what was in her head might give us a way to go, Ed. Marietta Hall seems like our next logical bet.” And probably our last hope, she thought dispiritedly.
* * *
Kate swung onto the Santa Monica Freeway. Twenty minutes later she was in her apartment stripping off every piece of clothing as if it were contaminated, sealing it all inside a plastic bag to be laundered and dry cleaned. She took a paper sack of pepper from the bathroom cabinet, put her face down into it, and inhaled. Sneezing convulsively, tears streaming, she stepped under scalding shower spray. Twenty minutes later, her sanitized body dressed in fresh clothing, she was on her way to San Vicente Boulevard in Brentwood, the windows of the Plymouth open to complete the drying of her hair, the smell and feel—if not the memory—of the autopsy room gone.
* * *
“Christ,” Taylor muttered, his voice so low that only Kate could hear.
Dr. Marietta Hall’s office was a thicket of huge plants—ficus, corn plants, schefflera—a dozen or more of them in low, barrel-sized green pots. Vast hot-colored prints of gigantic orange flowers and red and green birds hung on the bright yellow walls. The doctor’s slab desk was made of ash so lightly finished that the wood looked raw, as did the matching bookcase which overflowed with looseleaf binders and fat textbooks. The desk was surrounded by four thickly cushioned black velvet modular chairs shaped like the inside of a spoon.
Kate looked around for the traditional psychiatrist’s couch and could not locate one amid the shrubbery, unless a hammock qualified; it was strung between four floor-to-ceiling poles painted with black enamel and positioned in front of the picture window overlooking San Vicente Boulevard.
Marietta Hall’s hair hung in two gray frizzy wedges just above her shoulders. Her face, heavily tanned, was etched by two deep wrinkles like parentheses around a wide, thin, sharp-edged mouth. A fine network of crow’s feet lay at the corners of lake-blue eyes that were guileless in their glancing survey of Taylor, penetrating in their assessment of Kate.
She stood to shake hands, a towering woman in white pants and an embroidered denim shirt, her body thin through the arms and chest, thickening out through the stomach and hips. The hand Kate grasped was big, rough-textured and warm, like a farmer’s hand, the grip iron-firm. Kate liked her.
Producing her identification, introducing herself and Taylor, Kate felt somewhat overmatched by the imposing, bristling presence of Marietta Hall in this startling office. “We appreciate you taking the time to see us,” she began.
“Not at all. This is normally lunch time for me.” The doctor’s tones and enunciation were throaty, Garboesque. “And I’m making another of my useless attempts to diet.”
Hurriedly, Kate reached into her shoulder bag for the search warrant. Polite small talk was one thing, but she drew the line at the deadly boredom of diets. She handed the warrant across the desk. “Dr. Hall, we’re investigating the death of a former patient of yours. Dolores Marie Quillin. She was killed Sunday night.”
“Oh, Goddess.” Marietta Hall dropped the warrant onto her desk, sat down abruptly in her desk chair, ran a hand across her face and then into the gray hair, stirring it into unruliness.
“Oh, Goddess, what a tragedy.” The sonorous voice seemed to weight the words with magisterial gravity. She gestured to the detectives. “Do sit down.” She rubbed her face again, the fingertips kneading around her eyes. “And do give me a moment.”
Taylor looked uncertainly at the unusual chairs, raised his eyebrows to Kate, then folded his bulk into one, a look of pleasure spreading across his face. Kate settled herself into the chair beside him; it felt sinfully comfortable. She took out her notebook.
Marietta Hall pressed her intercom. “Jack dear,” she said, “bring me the file on Dory Quillin. It’s under Q.” She flipped off the switch and said to the detectives, “If I don’t tell him he’ll look under K and tell me he can’t find it. The California school system, what are they teaching children these days? It surely can’t be spelling.”
Kate shook her head. “Our own police academy had to put in remedial classes.”
A thin young man in light cotton pants and a yellow tunic came in with a folder. Marietta Hall took the folder and slid in the warrant, then handed it back. “Make a copy of everything in here right away, will you, dear? The original file will be leaving the office.” She dismissed him with a fond smile and a nod.
“A tragedy,” she repeated. “An utter waste that only the Goddess can explain. I must tell you I’m shocked but not surprised. But I hoped, dammit I hoped…I thought she might be one of the ones who could… What happened, as if I couldn’t guess?”
“What’s your guess?” Kate asked before Taylor could answer.
“Some psychopath… I could never make Dory believe that any man she met might be a killer. She’d just grin at me, she thought she could handle anything.” Grimacing, she stared down at the hands clasped on her desktop. “Is that what happened?”
“It may turn out to be so,” Kate said gently. “But the circumstances of her death make it questionable.” Briefly, she described the scene at the Nightwood Bar. “We understand from Mr. and Mrs. Quillin that you treated Dory after she first ran away from home.”
“Before that. I first saw her when she was twelve.” Kate exchanged a startled glance with Taylor.
Marietta Hall ran a blunt fingernail over a pattern in the grain of her ash desk. “The school sent her. She’d made an accusation of sexual molestation against a male gym teacher.”
“Dr. Hall, please elaborate for us,” Kate said tensely, all of her senses alert.
“It was around this time seven years ago, I remember it clearly as yesterday. School was about to let out for summer vacation. I was nearly dead from overwork, but oh Goddess, all those neglected and battered and abused children… In those days I was associated with L.A. County social service as well as the school system, you see. Still do occasional consulting work for the county but…”
Burnout, Kate thought sympathetically. Not much wonder she went into private practice. Who could bear for very long all those children with their broken minds and bodies?
The doctor spread her large tanned hands on the desk and examined them. “Dory claimed the young man had forcibly put his hands down inside her panties, then attempted penile penetration. She was given a pelvic examination of course—there was no physical evidence of any kind. And when it came right down to specifics—to actual times and circumstances—her whole story fell apart.”
She looked up at Kate. “I’m convinced Dory knew very well that it would. It was her way of trying to draw attention to what was really happening.” The doctor paused.
“Which was?” Taylor prompted.
“Obviously, this will take more than a few minutes.” The doctor pressed the intercom. “Jack dear, bring in the coffeepot and two extra mugs, will you?” She lapsed into silence, staring at Kate.
Disconcerted by the gaze, annoyed by the possibility that this psychologist was indulging in theatrics, Kate capped her Flair pen and looked down at her notes until the tunic-clad young man had left the room.
The doctor poured coffee into two mugs and handed them to Kate and Taylor, then filled a blue mug bearing a figure plucking out daisy petals which read I’M SANE alternating with other petals stating I’M INSANE. Kate took several appreciative sips, thinking that she was drinking far too much coffee lately. Placing her mug on a corner of the ash desk, she uncapped her pen.
“I have no proof,” Marietta Hall said in her low resonant tones, “but I’m convinced Dory Quillin couldn’t stand facing another summer away from school. Because she would be constantly accessible and constantly molested. By her father.”
Kate’s pen froze over her notebook, then recorded Marietta Hall’s exact statement.
“Her father.” Taylor’s voice was flat, skeptical. “You suspect this, right? She never actually told you, correct?”
“Of course you’re correct,” Marietta Hall said with some asperity. “You know very well I’d have been required by law to make a police report. I would only rejoice at seeing any child abuser arrested and branded as such.”
“Since she’d lied about this gym teacher,” Kate said evenly, “why did you infer sexual abuse at all?”
“Anyone who works with troubled youngsters automatically looks for it,” Marietta Hall told her, the sharp edge still in her tone, her blue eyes cold. “We have statistics that tell us to look. One out of every four female children in this country is a victim of sex abuse. And ninety percent of that abuse occurs right in the home.”
She crossed her arms, resting her elbows on the ash desk, and leaned toward Kate. “In Dory’s case the pattern was all too familiar, the evidence was classic. She was withdrawn from her peer group—had no friends at all. She was the brightest kind of youngster, yet totally lacking in self-esteem. Fearful, mistrustful of authority figures, myself included. By the time I first saw her she’d burned herself I don’t know how many times, cut herself, fallen and broken bones—you name it. Her parents thought she was accident-prone, but it was the classic self-destructive behavior of a molested child. She slept badly, had frequent nightmares. There were whole periods in her life she’d blanked out. And she was obsessed with all things sexual, she’d ask sexual questions or make sexual references and jokes without any reason at all.”
Marietta Hall ran a disheveling hand through her hair, sighed, took a deep swallow of coffee. “All that was left to complete the pattern was running away, and less than two years later she did just that, and her parents sent her back to me.”
“Why are you so positive it was the father?” Taylor crossed an ankle over a knee and propped up his notebook. “Why not an uncle, a neighbor?”
“Because Dory had turned against him. That’s also part of the pattern, you see. Children always love their parents—they’re stuck with loving them until they have the most compelling reasons to stop. Some children never understand even into adulthood that they have every right to withdraw their love from a parent, they live with the fairytale belief that loving a despicable parent will someday change that parent.”
Kate asked quietly, “Dr. Hall, why wouldn’t she admit to you what was happening to her?”
After a swift glance at Taylor the doctor said slowly, carefully, “Am I correct that you’ve…not known or at least not had an in-depth conversation with a victim of sex abuse?”
“I’ve worked Juvenile,” Kate temporized, realizing that the doctor was giving her a chance to protect herself should she not want to answer so delicate a question in front of Taylor. “But police officers, whatever our sensitivity, don’t and simply can’t have the same relationship with a victim as professionals like yourself.”
“Of course not,” Marietta Hall said, watching her. “And many professionals enter the field because they’re determined not to have other victims suffer as much or as long as they did.”
Kate felt impaled by the gaze. She admitted, “Someone close to me…was molested when she was small.” She shifted with her discomfort, remembering the night Anne had told her of the uncle who had taken her down into a basement and felt her genitals while bringing her hand to his penis and having seven-year-old Anne masturbate him. All those years later Anne had lain in Kate’s arms shaking with the renewed ugliness of memory, the renewed sense of shame and violation…
The doctor nodded. “Often a child never reveals what’s happened because she’s too ashamed, often she even feels somehow responsible. Sometimes the child has been warned into silence.”
Marietta Hall fixed her stare on Taylor and wagged a finger at him. “And if it’s a parent telling you that you must not reveal what he’s doing, you believe him absolutely—after all, he’s your father, he’s the strongest authority figure in your life.”
Taylor abruptly removed his ankle from his knee and sat up straight in the spoon-like chair as the doctor continued, “In Dory’s case I do know this: she was well aware of what commonly happens when a child does come forward—the family unit is smashed. The conflicts suffered by abused children are ghastly beyond all imagination, and Dory was in such agony that she had to tell someone, you see, but rather than accuse her father she blamed a perfectly innocent young man, hoping that all the attention drawn to her would make the abuse stop.”
Taylor cleared his throat. “You said there was no actual sign …no physical evidence—”
“Detective Taylor, many abusers use sexual practice other than intercourse.” An agitating hand stirring her frizzy hair into ever wilder disarray, she leaned across the desk toward Taylor. “A lot of men use that as justification—it’s not intercourse so it really doesn’t count, there’s nothing wrong with putting your penis between your daughter’s legs without penetrating her, there’s nothing wrong with putting your penis into her mouth—”
“I don’t have a daughter,” Taylor uttered from deep in his chair, “only sons.”
“Of course,” Marietta Hall said in her usual throaty voice, leaning back. “Forgive the choice of words. I was speaking generally.” She said in an even softer voice, “Boys also come in for their own share of abuse, you know.”
Letting Taylor reassemble his composure, Kate asked, “Did you convey your suspicions to Flora Quillin?”
Marietta Hall sighed, opened the top drawer of her desk and took out a long thin cigarette wrapped in dark brown paper, and lighted it. An aroma containing a hint of pipe tobacco reached Kate.
“Not that first time. Without an admission of some kind from Dory, I had to be extremely careful about anything I said to her mother. Once the matter of the gym teacher was cleared up, I did convey my suspicion that some kind of abuse had indeed occurred. But Mrs. Quillin was convinced that Dory had concocted the whole episode out of a fevered pre-adolescent imagination.”
From a desk drawer Marietta Hall took out a plastic replica of a human brain, flipped open a hinged flap in the top, and tapped in cigarette ash. “I did hope along with Dory that the attention drawn to her would warn her father off, would cause the molestation to stop. It does stop at some point, you see. When the child reaches a certain maturity, or when the perpetrator finally sees a threat to himself. And I told Dory she had to have help, she—”
Kate interrupted, “Before this incident with the gym teacher, do you think Dory ever tried to tell her mother?”
“If she ran the risk, she lost.” Marietta Hall reached into the brain and stubbed out her cigarette, examined the long butt, tossed it back inside. “There is no greater risk for a child than to tell the mother. It is the ultimate risk. Where else can the child go to find love? If the mother rejects the truth when the child does come forward, that child has nowhere left to turn—she’s literally lost both parents. And I can tell you this: a very common response from many mothers is denial. And I mean complete denial. Denial at any cost. Denial of evidence right in front of their eyes. Because that mother cannot face the ultimate meaning of what that child has told her. Many women see no escape from their domestic situations, and so they turn against their own child because they can’t bear the sight of their own jail cell. Other mothers do something even more despicable—they trick the child into self-blame, accuse her of enticement, make her believe she’s responsible.”
“Dr. Hall,” Kate asked quietly, “you never got so much as an oblique admission out of Dory that this was going on?”
Kate was startled by Marietta Hall’s smile, its brilliance. Then she saw that the doctor’s clear blue gaze was focused beyond her, on her own memories.
“Dory had the most wonderful quicksilver mind. She never trusted me, she wouldn’t trust any adult figure, but she liked me. My sessions with her—it was like pursuing a clever, enchanting little sprite through a maze. I loved being with that beautiful blond child, she was so bright and…well, there are children you work with that you just treasure… And she seemed even that much more precious because of what was going on…”
Taylor said, “She came back here two years later. Did she say anything at all to you then?”
“No, not even then. She came back only because her parents didn’t know what else to do with her, and she’d been willing to see me before. She was much less frightened but no less evasive.”
Kate said, “Her parents indicated to us that by then she was involved with prostitution.”
“Yes. They were so much more astounded by that than I was. She’d fallen in with an older prostitute working out of a Hollywood massage parlor, she’d found the one quick way to make money, to break away from her family whenever she wanted to.” The doctor added wryly, “Dory perceived it as independence.”
Taylor asked, “Was this prostitute a lesbian?”
Marietta Hall looked at him. “How on earth should I know?”
Taylor said, “You’re not aware Dory was a lesbian?”
“Of course. You consider that a major news item?”
Taylor said sarcastically, “I think it’s a little weird that she wouldn’t confirm all your theorizing about her father but she told you she was a lesbian. When did this come out,” he demanded, “the first time you saw her or the second?”
“The second.” Glaring at Taylor, Marietta Hall pulled a hairbrush from a desk drawer and yanked it through her hair; the frizzy strands crackled as they were forced back into the wedges framing the doctor’s face. She said, “It helped immeasurably to explain the depth of her trauma. All molested children are damaged, but one can only imagine the suffering of a lesbian child at the hands of a male child abuser.”
“Tell me something.” Taylor’s tone had changed, from harshness to curiosity. “Do you think the molestation—if it happened—might have turned her into a lesbian?”
“To repeat myself, one out of four women in this country has been sexually abused. Are one-fourth lesbian?”
Maybe, Kate thought, half-amused at the exchange.
The doctor shrugged impatiently. “How can anyone know that? If you’d been molested as a little boy, would that have turned you gay?”
Taylor growled, “Any bastard who ever tried that—”
“Please, spare me all the macho things you’d have done.” Marietta Hall turned to Kate. “The second time Dory was here she told me she had sexual feelings for women, and only for women. And she’d felt that way all her life. She had not, by the way, acted as yet on these feelings.”
Kate asked out of her own curiosity, “How did you handle that? What did you say to her?”
“I told her it was okay to have those feelings. It may be,” the doctor said reflectively, “the first time anyone ever told her a feeling of hers was okay. I warned her not to drop this news on her parents, but, of course, I should have guessed that with so self-destructive a personality, it would be the first thing she’d do. And that was the last time I saw her. I did, however, hear from the parents.”
The doctor smiled sardonically. “The mother called. Said I should be boiled in oil. Accused me of putting sinful garbage in her daughter’s head, threatened to sue. Maybe Dory laid it all on her at once—that she was a lesbian and her father a child molester. Who knows?”
“The male gym teacher,” Kate said, “he’s still in the L.A. school system?”
“No.” She looked stricken. “Oh Goddess, that was—Dory had no way of knowing what she caused with her accusation… The young man envisioned prison bars, I suppose—who wouldn’t? He furnished the names of his lovers—there were only two. Both of them men.”
“Jesus,” Taylor expelled. “Half the world—” He broke off.
Marietta Hall flicked a cold glance over him. “He was a secondary school teacher, just enough people were privy to what he’d admitted… A quiet administrative transfer was arranged.”
Kate said, “We’ll need his name and where to contact him.”
With a sigh, Marietta Hall slid back the cover on a large Rolodex and leafed through it. “This information is seven years old, of course. Carl was such a fine young man—”
“Maybe not so fine,” Taylor said. “Maybe he got even with this kid for messing up his life.”
“Detective Taylor, most people heal their wounds and go on. Few of us go around avenging the pain of our lives. Most of us will settle for simple acknowledgment of our pain.”
“We still need to talk to him.”
“Of course you do,” Marietta Hall said, writing on a scratch pad. “May I trust that you won’t surround his home with a SWAT team?” She tore off the sheet and handed it to Kate.
Smiling, glancing at the paper, Kate said, “I guarantee maximum discretion.” The name was Carl Brickwell, at an address in Modesto, California. Dory Quillin had taken a trip to Central California…
From her shoulder bag Kate took a photocopy of the writing she had found in Dory Quillin’s van, and unfolded it. “Dr. Hall, does this mean anything at all to you?”
The doctor spread the sheet of paper on the desk and peered down at it, massaging under her eyes as she concentrated. Again the numbers stared tantalizingly at Kate:
S285
S288
S290
“It seems like it should,” the doctor finally said. “It truly does. Those numbers bring a vibration, it’s in me somewhere what they are.”
“Take your time,” Kate encouraged.
The doctor ran a fingertip over an S. “This odd shape on each of the letters is intentional, it means something…”
Finally, she shook her head. “Could I keep this copy, think about it?”
“Of course.” Kate rose, took out one of her cards. Taylor struggled out of his chair and onto his feet.
“Jack will have Dory’s file ready for you to take. And I’ll call you if I figure out these numbers. And you will stay in touch with me,” Marietta Hall said, her tone a sonorous order. “I do care very much, you see. I’ve never forgotten that young girl and I never will.”