Flesh and Blood (15 page)

"Trick database," I said. "She was a modern girl."

He frowned. "I'll ask Salander if he ever saw a computer. And I just thought of something else that should be here but isn't. Birth control. No pills or diaphragm in her drawers."

"No medical charges on her Visa either. So she either paid her doctor in cash or used the Student Health Service."

"Call girls get checked up regularly," he said. "High-priced entertainment would have to be especially careful. She had to be using some kind of protection, Alex— Let me check the bathroom again. Why don't you take a look at her books meanwhile, see if anything pops out."

Starting at the top of the left-hand case, I traced two and a half years of required reading.

Basic math, algebra, geometry, basic science, biology, chemistry.

Economics, political science, history, the type of fiction favored by English professors. Sections underlined in pink marker. Used stickers from the bookstore at Santa Monica College.

The neighboring case was all sociology and psychology—dog-eared textbooks and collections of journals stored in transparent plastic boxes. The volumes on the top shelf matched Lauren's classes last quarter. More pink underlining, Used stickers from the U bookstore—the charges I'd just seen on her Visa. Fifty grand a year but she watched her pennies.

Turning to the journals, I opened the first plastic box and found a collection of thirty-year-old issues of Developmental Psychology, each bearing the faded stamp of a Salvation Army thrift shop on Western Avenue and a ten-cent price tag. No receipt, no date of sale. The rest of the magazines were of similar vintage and origin: American Cancer Society thrift, Hadassah, City of Hope. In a copy of Maslow's Toward a Psychology of Being, I found a Goodwill receipt dated six years ago. A few scraps from the same time span turned up in other volumes.

Six years ago.

Lauren had begun her self-education at nineteen, nearly four years before she'd enrolled in junior college.

Intellectually curious. Ambitious. Straight A's. None of that had stopped her from selling her body for a living. Then again, why should it? Knowledge can be power in all kinds of ways.

I took a closer look at the material Lauren had acquired before she'd gone back to school. Most of it centered on human relations and personality theory. No underlined sections; back then, she'd approached her books with the awe of a novice.

I shook each volume, found no loose papers.

Back to the required texts on the top shelf. Nothing illuminating or profound in the pink passages, just another student hypothesizing about what might appear on the final exam.

I was just about to quit when something in the margin of her learning theory book caught my eye. A neatly printed legend that matched the lettering I'd seen on her school papers.

INTIM. PROJ. 714 555 3342 Dr. D.

That flipped a switch: the "human intimacy" study that had run in the Cub three weeks before Shawna Yeager's disappearance. Disconnected Orange County number—the Newport Beach pizza parlor. Same area code, but this number was different.

There was no evidence Shawna had even seen the ad, let alone checked it out, but she had been a psychobiology major . . . living off savings.

Intim. proj.

Right up Lauren's alley? What she considered a "research job"?

But Lauren hadn't needed the money.

Maybe she'd been greedy. Or something else had attracted her to the ad.

Something personal, as Gene Dalby had suggested. Intimacy. A beautiful young woman who faked intimacy for cash.

Dr. D.

As in Dalby? No, Gene claimed to barely remember her, and I had no reason to doubt him. And his research was on politics, not intimacy.

Another of her teachers' names began with a D—de Maartens. The psychology of perception. Lots of D's.

Who was I kidding—I knew whose initial she'd jotted.

You were a great influence on her, Doctor.

The last time I'd seen her, she'd paid for the privilege of unloading her anger—not unlike the pattern she'd adopted with her father.

Years later she'd thought of me, made the notation.

Intimacy. . .

Wanting something from me? Never building up the courage to ask?

I thought of that last, angry meeting, Lauren flashing the wad of bills, unleashing the acid of recrimination. I'd always felt she'd been after more than that.

But what had been her goal when she'd picked up the phone and dialed my service?

What had I not given her?

12

MILO CAME BACK shaking his head. "Nothing—maybe she kept her pills in her purse."

I said, "Here's something," showed him the inscription, told him about the ad that had run before Shawna Yeager's disappearance.

"Ads probably run all the time."

"Not really," I said. "From what I saw, they tend to come and go."

"Did you find any ads before Lauren went missing?"

"No, but she could've seen it elsewhere." It sounded feeble, and both of us knew it. He was enough of a friend not to dismiss me, but his silence was eloquent.

"I know," I said. "Two girls, a year apart, no striking links. But maybe there were other girls in between."

"Blondes disappearing on the Westside? I'd know if there were. At this point I'm not eliminating anything, but I've got a full plate right now: get hold of Lauren's phone records, find out if she had a computer, look for possible witnesses to a pickup. Maybe find some known associates too. There's got to be someone other than Salander and her mom who knew her. If all that dead-ends, I'll take a closer look at Shawna." He returned the textbook to me. "'Dr. D.' You're sure that's you?"

"Theoretically it could be one of her professors—Gene Dalby or another one named de Maartens. Neither of them remembers her. Big lecture classes."

"Well," he said, "I can't exactly interrogate them because of this—hell if it means anything at all. The main thing's still the money. Her job and the way she was killed—cold, professional, the body left out there, maybe as a warning—smacks to me of her getting in someone's way. That's why I'm not jumping on the Yeager girl's case—Leo Riley felt that one was sexual. If Lauren deposited fifty a year, who knows how much she was taking in. And that makes me wonder if some of her income came from supplemental sources. Like blackmail. Who better than a call girl to hoard nasty secrets and try to profit from them."

"That would also be reason to make off with her computer."

"Precisimoso. Big bucks at stake. College profs don't exactly fit the bill."

"Some college profs are independently wealthy. Actually, Gene Dalby is."

"You keep mentioning him. Something about him bug you?"

"Not at all," I said. "Old classmate, tried to be helpful."

"Okay, then—onward."

"So we just let the intimacy project lie? This might be a current number."

He took the book back, produced his cell phone, muttered, "Probably gonna get ear cancer," and punched in the number. Nothing in his eyes told me he'd connected, but as he listened he groped in his pocket for his pad, wrote something down, hung up.

"'Motivational Associates of Newport Beach,'" he said. "Friendly female voice: 'Our hours are ten A.M. to blah blah blah.' Sounds like one of those marketing outfits."

"Intimacy and marketing," I said.

"Why not? Intimacy sells product. Lauren sure would've known that. So this was a moonlight for her. She liked money, took another part-time gig. Make sense?"

"Perfect sense."

"Look," he said, "feel free to follow up on it. Call the other professor too—de whatever-his-name-is. Something bugs you, let me know. Right now what bugs me is no computer. I need a ride back to the station to pick up my car, see if any messages came in, then I'm packing it in. You up for chauffeur duty, or should I lean on one of the boys in blue?"

"I'll drive you," I said.

"What a guy," he said airily as he strode out of the room. As we left the apartment he said, "I'm really sorry the way this turned out."

Nine o'clock the next morning, I phoned Dr. Simon de Maartens at home, and he picked up, sounding distracted. When I introduced myself his voice chilled.

"I already returned your call."

"Thanks for that, but there are still a few questions—"

"Questions?" he said. "I told you I don't remember the girl."

"So you have no memory of her talking to you about doing some research."

"Research? Of course not. She was an undergrad, only grad students are permitted into my lab. Now—"

"The perception course Lauren took from you," I said. "Did the class subdivide into smaller discussion groups?"

"Yes, yes—that's typical."

"Would it be possible to get a list of the students in Lauren's section?"

"No," he said. "It would not be possible— You claim to be faculty and you are asking for something like that? That is appalling— What is your involvement in all this?"

"I knew Lauren. Her mother's going through hell, and she asked me to be involved."

"Well . . . I'm sorry about that, but it's a confidentiality issue."

"Being enrolled in a study section is confidential?" I said. "Not the last time I checked the APA ethics code."

"Everything about academic freedom is confidential, Dr. Delaware."

"Fine," I said. "Thanks for your time. The police will probably be getting in touch with you."

"Then I will tell them exactly the same thing."

Click.

Something bugs you, let me know.

I called Milo. No answers at home, in the car, or at his desk. I told his voice mail: "De Maartens was not helpful. He bears attention."

A live woman answered at Motivational Associates of Newport Beach, informing me in a bored-to-death singsong that the office was closed.

"Is this the answering service?"

"Yes, sir."

"When does the office open?"

"They're in and out."

"Is there another office?"

"Yes, sir."

"Where?"

"L.A."

"Do you have the number?"

"One moment, I have to take another call."

She put me on hold long enough for me to wonder if the line had gone dead. Finally, she came back on with a 310 phone number. I called it and got her partner in ennui.

"The office is closed."

"When will it be open?"

"I don't know, sir—this is the service."

"What's the office's address, please?"

"One moment, I have to take another call."

I hung up and looked it up in the phone book.

The twelve thousand block of Wilshire Boulevard put Motivational Associates' L.A. branch in Brentwood, just east of Santa Monica. A couple of miles from the U and even closer to the Sepulveda alley where Lauren's body had been found.

But no sense dropping by and confronting a bolted door. I booted up the computer and plugged in "Motivational Associates."

Three hits, the first a four-year-old article from the Chicago Tribune about a South Side shelter for battered women and the services it offered. Residential care, medical consultation, individual counseling, group therapy "provided by Motivational Associates, a private consulting group that offers pro bono services, particularly in the area of human relations." The gist of the article was human-interest coverage of several abused women who'd gained emotional strength, and the firm's participation earned no further mention.

The second reference was a shortened version of the Trib piece, picked up by the wire services and distributed nationally. Number three was an Eastern Psychological Association abstract of a paper presented two years ago at a regional convention in Cambridge. "Buffington, Sandra, Lindquist, Monique, and Dugger, B. J. The Multidimensional Assessment of Intimacy: Factor Analysis of the Personal Space Grid Index (PSGI) and Self-Report Measures of Locus of Control, Trait Anxiety, Personal Attractiveness, Self-Concept and Extroversion."

So much for racy research.

The authors' affiliations were University of Chicago for Buffington and Lindquist and Motivational Associates, Inc. for B. J. Dugger.

Dr. D.

I pulled out my American Psychological Association directory and looked up Dugger, betting on a woman. Barbara Jean, Barbara Jo—

Benjamin John. Not the day for me to play the ponies.

Dugger's birth date made him thirty-seven. He'd earned a B.A. in psychology from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, at the age of twenty-one and a Ph.D. in social psychology from the U of Chicago ten years later. Postdoctoral fellowship at UC, San Diego, then a two-year lapse until his first—and only—job: Director, Motivational Associates of Newport Beach, California. Areas of specialty: quantitative measurement of social distance and applied motivational research. The address he'd listed was on Balboa Boulevard, in Newport, and the number was the 714 I'd just called.

Not a clinician, so no need for a state license. That made checking with the Board of Psychology for disciplinary actions a waste of time. I called anyway. Zero.

I tried a pocketful of area codes for residential listings for Dr. Benjamin J. Dugger. Nothing. Scanning his name on the Internet pulled up only the same abstract of the Cambridge paper, which I reread.

Jargon and numbers and high-powered statistics, the arcane nutrients of tenure. Nothing remotely sexy.

Still, it had been Dugger's number listed in Lauren's book, and as much as I disliked de Maartens, that made Dugger the prime candidate for "Dr. D." And he'd been running his ad during the time Shawna Yea-ger disappeared. Milo was probably right about there being no link between the cases, but still . . .

I thought about it some more. Dugger's bio was about as provocative as the owner's manual for a plow.

Weaker than weak. I reread the bio and something shot out at me.

Two time lapses: ten years between his bachelor's degree and his doctorate, another two between finishing school and taking his first job.

Nice first job. Most new Ph.D.'s enter the job market burdened by debt and are forced to accept temporary lectureships and entry-level slots. Benjamin J. Dugger had disappeared for two years, only to return in an executive position.