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CHAPTER
11
I offered to drive her home.
She said, “No, thanks. I’m not far and I like walking. Say hi to your girlfriend, she’s got golden hands.”
I watched her plod away, hands stuffed in the pockets of her tracksuit. Ring concealed.
Moments later, a young mother entered the park with a three-year-old boy. A glance at the broken swing, then me. She left.
I made my own exit, phoned Milo from the Seville.
He said, “I just got Cordi’s mom’s name from her birth records. Our gal was born as Carol Ann thirty-five years ago. County Hospital, mommy’s Renata Gannett, no daddy listed.”
I said, “County could mean tough times financially. How old was Renata?”
“Let me check…seventeen. Teenage unwed mother, good call, Alex. No silver spoon for our gal, I’m feeling a little warmer and fuzzier about her. Haven’t come across any current listing for Mom so she could be deceased. The good news is prelim from the lab is due later today and, God bless, Basia’s got the case. So what’s up?”
I said, “I just talked to someone who met Gannett when she was claiming to be a psychologist.”
I related the backstage encounter with Mare Nostrum and our chat moments ago.
He said, “Called her a cult bitch, huh? She got touchy-feely with a total stranger.”
“To me it sounds as if she was trying to be hypnoidal.”
“What’s that, hypnosis-lite?”
“Basically,” I said. “There’s no formal induction or trance. You use eye contact and rhythmic speech to relax the patient and make them more amenable to suggestion.”
“What about the touching?”
“Sometimes there’s a reassuring pat on the back but jumping around from spot to spot isn’t part of it.”
“She overdid it,” he said. “Manipulating eyes and speech is kosher?”
“If the patient’s informed. There’s nothing exotic about it, Big Guy. All sorts of relaxation techniques can be helpful in therapy. But subterfuge isn’t. In Gannett’s case, sounds like she was told Mare Nostrum was vulnerable and decided to make mind-game play for new business. She had no formal training so my guess is she read about hypnoidal approaches. But like anything else, it takes training.”
“It wasn’t effective with that subject but could’ve worked with others.”
“It’s possible.”
“She took advantage of impressionable people.”
“Vulnerable people,” I said. “And if circumstances changed, that could backfire. Someone starting off compliant then feeling they’d been taken advantage of and growing resentful. I’m not saying that has anything to do with the murder, but anytime you manipulate people, yourun a risk. What Mary Blank told me, combined with everything else we know about Gannett, paints a picture of someone ambitious, slick, and way over her head.”
“That takes me back to Hoffgarden,” he said. “Hadn’t thought of him as vulnerable but did you pick that up?”
“Not in the least,” I said. “The overall feel I got from him was detachment. But his arrest record’s all anger-related so there’s a whole bunch of sensitivity buried somewhere in his head.”
“Potential for a serious backfire.”
“Definitely.”
“Interesting,” he said. “And as of six months ago, he no longer lives in the desert. Guess where he moved?”
“L.A.”
