by Dianne Emley
H P M F D T R B G N S
The letters were derived from this simple wish:
H E L P M E F I N D T H E T R U T H
A B O U T G E O R G I A A N D S T E F A N
What she’d come up with felt right.
She had long ago grown adept at shutting out the phone conversations and sometimes loud jiving among the detectives. The noise level had risen. She’d tuned it out until she detected a tone of anguish that was roiling through the section. She rose and saw Sergeant Early leading Caspers to his cubicle, which was adjacent to hers. Early’s no-nonsense face looked graver than Vining had ever seen it. Caspers trudged as if in a daze.
Detectives were standing in their cubicles and murmuring to each other. Vining’s heart fell to her stomach, yet her head felt as if helium was pulling it from her body. Something terrible had happened.
Caspers heavily sat in his chair and covered his face with his hands. His chest rose in a staccato motion. He might have been crying or gasping for breath.
Vining looked at Early, who told her, “Officer John Chase and his ex-girlfriend were found in her apartment in an apparent murder/suicide.”
Vining didn’t need to fill in the blanks. She knew the drill. The male cop had shot his girlfriend, then himself.
From between Caspers’s hands came a low moan and a barely decipherable, “Oh, God.”
Early rested her hand on his shoulder.
At her touch, Caspers moved his hands from his face. He wasn’t crying, but his hands trembled, and he was doing all he could to maintain control. “I was just with him last night. It was our poker night.”
Kissick came in. It was clear that he’d heard the news. Those in the Detectives Section had moved from their cubicles and offices into the common areas, where they stood in stunned silence. Ringing phones went unanswered.
Early told Caspers, “Lieutenant Beltran is at the scene. Investigators from the Glendale P.D. will want to interview you, but Sergeant Folke and I want to talk to you first in my office. We’d like to do that now. Would you like to get some water or coffee before we begin?”
Caspers wiped his eyes and nodded. “I’ll get a Coke and be right there.”
Early left.
When Caspers rose to follow, Vining grabbed his arm. He touched her hand, nodded, and moved on. Other hands reached out to touch him.
Vining lowered herself back into her chair. Kissick moved to stand in the entrance to her cubicle. She rocked her chair, the tips of her steepled fingers pressed against her lips. She slid her eyes to look at him.
“Murder/suicide?” he said. “Bullshit.”
She again stared straight ahead.
“First Tink, then Vince Madrigal and Trendi. Now John Chase and Alison Oliver.”
Vining spoke through her fingers. “They’re all less than six degrees from the Berryhills.”
He reached to pick up the yellow pad from her desk. “Help me find the truth about Georgia and Stefan?”
“I don’t know if that’s exactly what Tink intended, but I can make that sentence fit into her three sigils.” She reached for the pad and turned to the first sigil she had created, based on the phrase “Find out who King Getty is.” She tore out the page. “Getty wasn’t in Dubai. As far as the jet-setter he claims to be, he’s only made two overseas trips in the past year, one to Paris and one to Majorca.”
“Where he thinks it would be nice to own a house,” Kissick said. “So he pretends that he does. I think we have probable cause for a search warrant for his phone and financial records. I’ll get started on it.”
“Wouldn’t you love to get your hands on the Berryhills’ records?”
“You were ready to buy their herbal tea.”
“I changed my mind.”
He put his hand on her shoulder. She briefly grabbed his fingers.
He turned and left.
She started to throw her sigil about Getty away but instead folded the paper in half and put it inside her top desk drawer.
THIRTY-SIX
Sinclair LeFleur was resting on a divan in her suite, her back propped against pillows, watching her girlfriend, a fellow actor, talking about her new movie on The View. The program was interrupted for breaking news. A stiff-haired female anchor began talking at a breakneck pace, her eyes boring holes through the TV screen, as she reported a murder/suicide in a courtyard apartment in Glendale. The station cut away to a reporter standing on a street crowded with the usual gawkers, police, and coroner personnel and vehicles.
Sinclair muted the television, not wanting to expose herself and her baby to the negativity. When it seemed that the news broadcast would continue indefinitely, she started to get up. It was tough for her to rise from the low divan.
Earlier, Paula had huffed that if Sinclair insisted on reclining on the divan, she should use a chair to help hoist herself up. Paula had dragged a yellow silk boudoir chair that had a low round back from the makeup table and placed it beside the divan.
Sinclair grabbed the back of the chair and started to stand. She felt swollen and heavy, and was amazed that her body was capable of stretching to the size it had.
She was nearly up, pushing against the chair back, when, out of the corner of one eye, she saw a photo of John Chase on television. It was his official PPD portrait. She gasped and swung around to grab the remote control from the divan, throwing off her already tentative balance. She toppled backward, pulling the chair over with her. She fell onto her back, slamming her head against the hardwood floor.
The fall stunned her. It took a moment for her to realize that she was looking at the ceiling. One leg was over the fallen chair and the other was painfully bent beneath her.
The suite’s door flew open and Paula rushed inside, Gig at her heels.
“Funny face, what happened?” Gig kneeled beside her.
“I told you not to lay on that thing.” Paula helped Sinclair get untangled from the chair while Gig straightened her leg and examined it for breaks. Paula draped Sinclair’s arm over her shoulders and helped her to her feet.
Sinclair was still clutching the TV remote. She was barely aware of them or the pain from her hard fall. As they fussed over her, she turned up the TV volume. A reporter was speculating about the motives of the alleged perpetrator, Officer John Chase.
“John Chase?” Gig’s attention was drawn to the flat-screen TV on the wall.
“John…” Sinclair swooned as everything went black.
A pall fell over the PPD, as if the station were draped with a black shroud. Officers took from their lockers the small black bands kept there for the inevitable occasion of a fallen brother or sister and affixed them diagonally across their shields.
In the Detectives Section, work continued at the plodding pace of a funeral dirge. Undercover officers had reported that King Getty was in the Beverly Hills office of his so-called film production company. Kissick sent a plain-wrap car to keep tabs on him and to try to obtain something with his fingerprints and maybe his DNA. Hoping he could show sufficient probable cause for a judge to issue a search warrant for Getty’s telephone and financial records, and his apartment and office, Kissick was preparing an affidavit contending that King Getty had incriminating information about Catherine Engleford’s death.
Sergeant Early sent Caspers home.
Vining knocked on the doorframe of Early’s office. Early was sitting her in her chair, thinking. She gestured for Vining to come in.
“Sarge, I finished my reports and was going to go over everything with Alex.”
Early’s face conveyed that Vining didn’t need to say more.
“I was planning on researching the Berryhills on the Net. I can have Alex—”
Early waved her on. “I can’t have you interviewing witnesses or suspects, but anybody can look at stuff on the Internet. You want to have a staff assistant or cadet do that?”
“Thanks, but I’m focused about what I’m looking for. It shouldn’t take long.”
Vining r
eturned to her desk. She started with the official Berryhill Website, which was an amalgam of Georgia’s folksy warmth and corporate polish. The site had chat rooms where monitored discussion groups hashed out everything from diet tips to dealing with problematic shadow selves. Vining learned nothing of investigative value.
The anti–Berryhill Method sites presented a vastly different perspective. The Berryhills were targets of angry bloggers and others claiming to have been damaged by The Method and that the whole thing was in fact a cult. On YouTube, she found a clip of one of Georgia and Stefan’s TV appearances on a morning talk show in which they and the unctuous female host had a hearty laugh about The Method being dangerous and even deadly.
Two sites in particular, BerryhillKills.com and The MethodCult.org, looked as professional as the official Berryhill site. Each claimed to present the dark side of Berryhill that Georgia and Stefan had spent millions to keep buried.
It was no secret that Georgia had once been a well-known Beverly Hills psychiatrist with a celebrity clientele. The Berryhill corporate patter described Georgia’s dissatisfaction with treating her patients’ mental turmoil through traditional psychiatry. She came to see those methods as mere Band-Aids to these troubled people’s psyches. While in a therapy session with a patient, Georgia had an epiphany. She visualized her patient breaking into three components—mind, body, and spirit or shadow self. All three needed to be nourished as a unit in order to achieve wellness. The Method was born.
The anti-Berryhill sites told a different story. Georgia was a Beverly Hills psychiatrist, they conceded, but the success of her practice was based upon her willingness to prescribe psychotropic drugs. She had been investigated in the death of a patient, a former runway model, who’d died from an accidental overdose of prescription drugs, some of which had been prescribed by Georgia and other notorious “pill doctors.” Rather than subject herself to an investigation by the state licensing board, Georgia turned in her license and reinvented herself as a Mind/Body/Spirit maven.
Stefan Pavel had an equally checkered past, or so his enemies said. According to them, his given name was Stefan Pavel Vladimirescu. He was not from France, as he claimed, but hailed from Bucharest, Romania, where his father was a butcher and his mother worked in a bakery. In Romania, he began a college degree in engineering and then, at age nineteen, moved to Paris, where he studied mathematics at the Sorbonne for less than a year.
He came to the U.S. on a student visa and reinvented himself as Stefan Pavel, French mathematician and bon vivant. Pavel’s nerdy charm, eclectic knowledge of obscure French and Dutch artists, fondness for fine wines and cheeses, and continental manners, plus his natural ability as a con artist, gained him entry into the highest social circles in Manhattan and the Hamptons.
He married vitamin heiress Abigail Chambers. Three years later, she mysteriously drowned when she fell off her yacht during a New Year’s Eve trip they’d taken with a group of friends to the Bahamas. Pavel was awarded only $750,000 from Chambers’s vast estate. Rumor had it that he accepted the settlement and released all claims on the estate in exchange for the powerful Chambers family making the criminal investigation into his involvement in the heiress’s death go away.
Fate made Georgia Berryhill and Stefan Pavel’s paths intersect. She was looking to expand into vitamins and other nutritional supplements. He knew the business. Together, they bought the former Buddhist monastery in Malibu Canyon for a song during a real-estate slump. The rest was Mind/Body/Spirit history.
Vining found it strange that Pavel’s first wife had died from an “accidental drowning,” similar to Tink’s death.
She also learned that a few years earlier, the Berryhills had been sued in a wrongful-death case. The parents of a young woman accused Georgia and Stefan of killing their daughter through starvation and dehydration during an MBS Tune-Up. Defense attorney Carmen Vidal had represented the Berryhills, who had settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.
Since Carmen Vidal was also Cheyenne Leon’s attorney, Vining was now convinced that Berryhill was footing Cheyenne’s legal bills.
Digging deeper, Vining was shocked to come across a familiar name. Five years earlier, Georgia and Stefan had been implicated in the disappearance of a teenage runaway from Las Vegas named Fallon Price. Fallon’s mother had tracked her to the Berryhill compound, where the trail went cold. While at Berryhill, Mrs. Price was told about the fight Fallon had had with one of Georgia’s other “girls.” Around the compound, “Georgia’s Girls” were called “Berryhill’s babes.” Mrs. Price heard whispered rumors that the girls did more than study etiquette and do odd jobs. It was alleged that sex orgies were held at the compound, but this couldn’t be substantiated. “Girls” from Georgia’s program who had gone on to jobs on the outside dismissed such allegations as anti-Berryhill venom.
Vining looked at a photo of Fallon on the Website. She took out Cheyenne’s photo of her with her two friends. Trendi was dead. Fallon was likely dead. They were all Georgia’s Girls. Fallon was seventeen when she disappeared. If true, then Georgia Berryhill lied about taking in only wayward young women who were at least eighteen. It appeared that Georgia had lied about many things.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Sinclair had strange dreams of being tied down mixed with images of John Chase’s suicide and his girlfriend’s murder. In the background, she always heard a steady electronic beeping noise.
“She’s waking up, Doctor.”
Paula was in her bedroom? And why was her bed so hard? Her back hurt. It felt as if someone was fooling around with her down there.
“Let her wake up. We’re dilating nicely. The oxytocin is doing its job.”
Sinclair opened her eyes and saw a white sheet. She realized she was looking at a sheet covering her bent knees. She saw Dr. Janus’s face down there. She felt him pull his fingers out of her.
He smiled as he stripped off his latex gloves. He was wearing green surgical scrubs. “You’re going to be a mother soon, Sinclair.”
With a bald head, pointed nose, and broad, lippy smile, he’d always reminded her of a fish. He especially did so now as Sinclair blinked to clear her vision.
“What’s going on?” she asked. Her voice was weak. She was thirsty.
Paula stood to her left, also dressed in green scrubs, tapping a keypad on an IV infusion pump. Her hair was covered by an elastic cap.
“Contractions should start soon,” Dr. Janus said. His bald head was not covered.
With a start, Sinclair saw the IV needle taped to her left arm. “What’s this? What are you doing?”
She was on the adjustable bed in the birthing room. The back was elevated. Pulling up the U-neckline of the white gown she was wearing, she saw elastic straps crossing her belly. The beeping of the fetal heart-rate monitor was what she had heard in her dreams.
She raised herself to her elbows and slid her legs flat. “You’re inducing labor?”
Only then did she see Gig standing beside her, also in green scrubs, his hair under a cap. He reached over and tenderly stroked her head. “Hear that, funny face? We’re going to be Mommy and Daddy soon.”
She glared at him. “Why are they inducing labor?”
“It’s all for the best, funny face.”
“But why?”
Paula sternly repeated Gig’s words. “It’s all for the best.”
Dr. Janus smiled like a toothy shark. His head looked small on his round body. “We’re concerned about your and your baby’s welfare, Sinclair.”
“What time is it?” The schoolhouse clock on the wall showed two-twenty. In the windowless basement room, she didn’t know if it was day or night. “How long have I been here?”
Dr. Janus kept smiling. Sinclair suspected that he was trying to look reassuring. “Long enough.”
Sinclair gaped at the liquid being infused into her vein. “I don’t want that. That’s not good for the baby.”
“It won’t harm the fetus,” the doctor said.
&nbs
p; “There’s no reason to induce labor. This is crazy!”
“You’re in good hands, sweetness,” Gig said. “Don’t worry.”
Panting, she looked up at him standing over her. She used to think his high-pitched, nasal voice was funny, but now it made her cringe, as did his long, probing fingers on her hair and forehead. His gaze was impassive, as if he was not looking upon his wife who was about to give birth but at a stranger, maybe someone he’d happened upon by the side of the road after an accident and whom he was trying to comfort because it was the right thing to do, while at the same time praying that professional help would arrive quickly so he could get the hell out of there.
Paula and Dr. Janus were near the end of the bed. Paula regarded Sinclair blankly while Dr. Janus maintained his simpering smile. Sinclair blinked and their faces morphed into demons with black holes for eyes and sunken cheeks. Breathing even harder through her mouth, she frantically looked at Gig.
“What’s wrong, baby?” he asked. “You okay?”
She was overwhelmed with fear. John said he’d be there to make sure that nothing happened to her and her baby. She was to call him as soon as she went into labor. Now he was dead and she was trapped.
Gig, Dr. Janus, and Paula all stared at her with cold, clinical eyes. She had to get out. She had to get her baby out.
She grabbed the edge of the bed and started to swing her legs over.
“Honey, where do you think you’re going?” Gig asked.
Paula rushed to her side. “Do you have to use the bathroom? I’ll help you.”
Sinclair pushed herself up into a sitting position. She slapped away Paula’s hands. “Don’t touch me!” She set her bare feet onto the floor. “Get away!”
Paula again approached and Sinclair madly swatted at her.
“That’s okay, Paula.” Dr. Janus intervened, extending an arm between Sinclair and the midwife. “Let Sinclair walk around.”