City of the Dead (Alex Delaware, #37)(14)

Like any astute e-peddler, Dr. Cordi Gannett had used her laptop to market herself assertively. Scores of “friends” on Facebook. But a close look revealed they were folks like Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Albert Ellis, Madame Curie, the Dalai Lama, Paul McCartney, Frida Kahlo, Mother Teresa, and Meryl Streep. Interspersed in that august list were lesser-known actors and musicians.

No sense making a list for Milo; he’d be checking the same sites.

Gannett had also linked to what she called “words to live by, just for you.”

Thirty-five two-sentence pronouncements; kind of a therapeutic haiku. I read a dozen.

Be kind. But don’t let yourself be swallowed up by altruism.

Don’t just think of yourself. But do value yourself.

Don’t jump into anything prematurely. But don’t pass up the wonderful opportunities that come your way.

Pick the right person to be intimate with. But don’t forget less-than-intimate connections because social memory is like muscle memory; you need to practice.

The you-can’t-pin-me-down banality of daily horoscopes.

No sense trying to interview Freud et al., so I returned to Gannett’s homepage and searched for an actual communication from the sub-A-listers.

The only feedback she listed was a slew of anonymous endorsements.

Dr. Gannett helped me more than I could ever imagine. A living treasure. A.M.

Dr. Cordi is so kind and sweet plus she’s brilliant. M.T.

I went to so many other shrinks and until Dr. Cordi I got no help. Call her. Now. B.T.

For all her cyber-exposure, Cordi Gannett had shielded her personal life from view.

I moved on to business and professional sites. The same endorsements verbatim, along with others in an identical gushing vein. Five-star ratings throughout. In the age of automated puffery that means less than zero.

I wondered if the temptation to resume faking her credentials had proved irresistible.

It hadn’t. The titles she gave herself varied from site to site but she’d been careful to keep them ambiguous.

Relationship Counselor, Interpersonal Issues Specialist, Emotional Adjustment Consultant, and in one case, a bit of an ethical stretch with Psychologically Trained Conflict Arbitrator.

I switched to photo sites on the off chance some shots from her modeling days had found their way in. The images were of a type: “Dr. Gannett” behind a desk, aureate hair drawn back in a chignon, wearing a long-sleeved white blouse buttoned to the neck and big, square black-framed eyeglasses.

Beige room, books to her back. The office I’d seen just beyond her corpse. Several of the shots featured links to YouTube videos.

Twenty-five mini-movies ranged from one to three minutes. Most featured ads you could delete in five seconds. Enough time to get the message across from an organic cosmetics company, a manufacturer of cannabis-based sports liniment, a purveyor of handbags sewn from recycled denim, and—in a touch of big-time corporate sponsorships—two term life insurance companies trying to convince you they really cared.

The content of the videos was a rehash of Cordi Gannett’s written advice. Below: the same endorsements.

My custody appointment was an hour away. I’d spent double that time at the screen, felt as if I’d been slogging through bread dough.

Too much of nothing can do that to you.

Just as I returned with a mug of coffee, Milo turned nothing into something.





CHAPTER


    8


The call from his private cell reached me during my first sip.

“What’s up?”

“I caught you,” he said. “Good. What’s the name of the lawyer who tried bringing Gannett in as an expert?”

“Forrest Slope.”

“Unbelievable.”

“He’s relevant?”

“Not in terms of breathing,” he said. “Murdered a couple of years ago, open case. Do you remember when the thing in chambers took place?”

“Let me check…March.”

“He got killed in November. Not here, down in Palm Desert. I found out because I was checking out your bad daddy, Hoffgarden, due to his relationship with Cordi and history of DV. Also, with his being a weight trainer, I figured a strong guy.”

“Strong and big,” I said. “Around six-three and two thirty, all muscle. Why’s that a factor?”

“It’s not for Cordi, but it could be for knocking out Naked then toting him outside figuring to ditch him somewhere. The van shows up, change of plans. Naked gets tossed straight at it, mission accomplished.”

“Naked’s off your radar as the killer.”

“Far from it, he’s right on the screen,” he said. “But learning anything about him means waiting for the lab and I don’t like doing nothing. The scene stinks of up close and personal. I’ve been through Gannett’s place and there’s no sign she had any current love interest, so maybe she and Hoffgarden were still involved on some level. An old flame burning out of control could do a lot of damage.”

I said, “No love life fits what I’ve just seen on her social pages. All business.”

“Really…so maybe she had a deep secret life.”

“Or none at all and she really was all about commerce. In terms of someone removing Naked, why bother when her body was left in the house?”