The Fifth Reflection Read online

  THE

  FIFTH

  REFLECTION

  Also by Ellen Kirschman

  Fiction: Dot Meyerhoff Series

  The Right Wrong Thing

  Burying Ben

  Nonfiction:

  Counseling Cops: What Clinicians Need to Know

  (with Mark Kamena and Joel Fay)

  I Love a Cop: What Police Families Need to Know

  I Love a Fire Fighter: What The Family Needs to Know

  THE

  FIFTH

  REFLECTION

  A DOT MEYERHOFF MYSTERY

  ELLEN KIRSCHMAN

  Copyright © 2017 Ellen Kirschman

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, businesses, locales, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-1-60809-250-5

  Published in the United States of America by Oceanview Publishing

  Longboat Key, Florida

  www.oceanviewpub.com

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  To ICAC investigators and their families everywhere

  I am the owner of my actions, heir of my actions. Whatever

  actions I do, good or evil, of these I shall become heir.

  —Buddha’s Fifth Reflection

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  AS A POLICE psychologist, I’ve always understood that investigating crimes involving children is one of the most emotionally difficult assignments law enforcement professionals can undertake. Fortunately, there are programs such as Shift Wellness (shiftwellnes.org) that support investigators with resources and training.

  What I didn’t know until I started researching this book was the magnitude of Internet crimes against children. Our cherished electronic gadgets, computers, webcams, smartphones, and tablets are playgrounds for pedophiles. Purveyors and collectors of child pornography, often one in the same, need not leave the privacy of their own homes to support a worldwide industry that trades in the suffering of children. I wrote this book to entertain. Still, I ask my readers not to forget the real human suffering that inspired me to write it.

  I am the luckiest of mystery writers to have the support and help of so many law enforcement professionals, mental health colleagues, and subject matter experts. Thank you all for sharing your experiences and responding to my questions. If I’ve left anyone out, forgive me: John Averitt, PhD, Lisa Barrett, MD, Nancy BohlPenrod, PhD, Michael L. Bourke, PhD, Peter Collins, MD, Michael Comer, PhD, Dan Dworkin, PhD, Joel Fay PsyD, Lt. Neal Griffin, Sherry Harden, PsyD, Chaplain Jan Heglund, Agent Anjanette Holler, Paula Kamena, Esq., Sgt. Daniel Ischige, D. P. Lyle, MD, Jon Moss, PhD, Lt. Zach Perron, Sgt. Adam Plantinga, Lt. James Reifschneider, Jane Stevenson, RN, Casey Stewart, PsyD, and coroner’s investigator Andrea Whelan.

  My apologies to Paul Ekman, PhD for taking liberties with his decades-long study of deception and micro facial expressions. For a serious look at his work, go to www.paulekman.com.

  Special thanks to Gil Fronsdal, PhD, Buddhist scholar and co-teacher at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City; writer Ann Gelder who helped in the early days; my editor and beloved sister-in-law, Doris Ober; my calm yet stalwart agent, Cynthia Zigmund; and all the staff at Oceanview Publishing. Last, but never least, my husband, Steve Johnson, who is everything to me.

  PROLOGUE

  IOWA IN NOVEMBER is cold. The sky is as gray as the stubble in the fields, obliterating the horizon. Without a line to show where earth and sky meet, I feel as though I’m floating in space.

  “You okay?”

  My fiancé, Frank, and I are stumbling across a frost-tinged cornfield. Today is Thanksgiving. We’ve been out walking in the frigid air. Trying to move our food-besotted bodies after breakfast the size of a ceremonial banquet. It’s below freezing and the air is so cold it hurts to breathe. There’s a storm predicted, and we can see enormous black clouds boiling in the sky, illuminated by sudden snaps of lightning.

  “If we don’t move faster, we’re gonna get wet.” He grabs my hand and pulls me forward. I can see the back of his sister Daisy’s house where we’re staying, and behind it the houses belonging to his other sisters, Violet, Rose, and Lily. “Next time,” he says, “we’ll come in the summer in time for the corn and tomatoes. Did you know you can hear corn as it’s growing?”

  I know what he’s doing. He’s trying to take my mind off the cold and away from my sore feet. I should have brought hiking boots, but who wears hiking boots in Iowa? The place is as flat as a pancake. The highest point in Pick City is a 700-hundred-foot bump called The Knob. His sisters, all four of them, took me to see it the day after we arrived. Then we went to see the second most popular tourist attraction, The Bridge of Mystery, a railroad bridge built in the 1800s that spans a wide river. Its name derives from the death of a supposedly happy young girl who shocked everyone by jumping off the bridge to her death. Her story provoked a slew of questions about what psychologists, like me, know about people who commit suicide. Why do they do it and what could be done to stop them? My first thought was that the young girl probably jumped out of boredom, but their questions were so earnest I bit my tongue.

  Frank’s sisters, their husbands, their children, and his mother have all been bending over backwards to be nice to me. It’s just that I’m not used to so much conversation or having someone jump up and ask me if I need anything every time I move. I’m an oddity to them. I can feel it. Forget being Jewish—what’s strangest about me is that I have no children and I don’t cook, bake, sew, or can vegetables. Therefore, I don’t have much to talk about. They seem mildly interested in the books I’ve written and happy to talk about the books they’re planning to read come winter when they can’t work on the farm. Any time I compliment their cooking, I get a recipe to try at home, many with Jell-O as the main ingredient. I had no idea Jell-O could be prepared in so many ways and for so many different uses. Add cucumbers, it’s a salad. Add marshmallows, you have dessert. My mother used to make Jell-O for me when I was a kid. Her idea of getting fancy was to add a dollop of whipped cream from an atomized can. I learned everything I know about cooking from her.

  Daisy’s expecting almost thirty for Thanksgiving Dinner. If I was feeding a crowd that size, I’d be curled up in a fetal position under my dining room table. Not Frank’s sisters. Cooking for family is what they love. I can hear them laughing and talking before we even open the back door and step inside.

  The house is in chaos. Tables and chairs squeezed into every available space. Linens, glasses, silverware, and handmade table decorations from four different households laid out on each table. Nothing matches and no one seems to care. Everyone remembers who made which napkins and used them on what occasions, the meals they served and the time Frank, the baby of the family, ate so much sweet corn he was covered in melted butter and had to take a bath.

  Lily asks me to help with the salad; I’m glad to have something to do. She hands me two heads of iceberg lettuce, a tomato, a cucumber, and a bottle of salad dressing for each table. This would be heresy where I live. The only acceptable salad in Silicon Valley is locally sourced, organic kale tossed with hand-pressed olive oil from a boutique orchard in the Napa Valley and imported vinegar that costs forty dollars a bottle. Thanksgiving is the season my friends run themselves ragged cooking
gourmet versions of traditional dishes that need no improvement.

  Forty-five minutes before the guests arrive, Rose realizes she forgot to make the seven-layer bean dip. Violet goes to the store and returns home with four cans of beans, a bag of grated cheese, and a tub of sour cream that she layers into a casserole and puts in the oven before going home to get dressed for dinner. She’s a stout woman with short, blunt-cut gray hair. When she returns, she’s wearing clean jeans and a different sweatshirt hand decorated with dancing turkeys. I decide not to wear the silk top and crepe pants I bought for the occasion and go for something more casual.

  The guests arrive. More friends. More family. More food. There are so many I give up trying to remember anyone’s name or how they are related to Frank, who is seated across the table from me grinning so hard his lips might be permanently stretched out of shape. Dinner is noisy, disorganized. There are mounds of food plated in the kitchen, please-help-yourself-to-seconds. Frank hardly gets a chance to swallow before someone slaps him on the back and peppers him with questions about his life in California as though it were a foreign country.

  We never had Thanksgiving when I was a kid. My mother, social as she is, still thinks holidays are corporate tricks designed to get people to eat too much and spend money they can’t afford. My long-dead father—ever the student radical—considered Thanksgiving and Columbus Day to be monuments to the genocide perpetrated by white settlers against Native Americans.

  Frank’s sister Rose, sitting next to me, asks me for the third time if I need anything more before they serve dessert. As soon as she stands to go to the kitchen, Frank’s mother takes her place. She’s a tiny woman. Probably doesn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds. Her apple doll face wrinkled with age and cigarette smoke.

  “Having a good time?”

  I nod “yes” because, despite my fears about fitting in and the elitist West Coast attitudes I hate to admit I have, I’m enjoying myself a lot.

  “I’m glad to finally meet you. I’ve been worried about Frank, living alone. He’s so much happier now that he found you. Wish my husband was still alive. You’d like him. He’d like you.” She puts her hand on mine. Her skin is soft as chamois. “I’m getting on. I feel good, but who knows? It makes me happy to see him settled. I can tell, you’re good for him.” She blushes. “Listen to me yammering. This is a party. Let’s go get us some dessert.”

  Sometime between the apple pie, the Jell-O ambrosia, and the pumpkin cheesecake, Daisy tells Frank she heard his cell phone go off in the bedroom. He excuses himself and wedges out from the table making jokes about how much more room he had to move around in before he ate dinner.

  “Dot’s the police psychologist. She’s usually the one who gets called in the middle of a party. Not me.” There’s a chorus of jests from the table about screws coming loose and other construction-related calamities befalling one of Frank’s clients. This leads to a long, funny story involving lug nuts and tires. So funny I don’t realize Frank has been gone for nearly ten minutes until he comes back into the room, paler than I have ever seen him. Instead of sitting down again, he stands in the arch separating the living room from the dining room, picks up a water glass, and hits it with a spoon.

  “Sorry, everyone. Hate to interrupt. That call was from my friend JJ in California. Something terrible has happened. She put her daughter to bed last night and when she went to wake her up this morning, she was gone. She’s been missing now for hours. Nobody knows where she is.”

  There’s a chorus of “for cat’s sake” and “great snakes.”

  “Maybe she ran away,” Lily says. “I did that once, didn’t I, Mom? Scared the poop outta you.”

  “Chrissy’s only a toddler.”

  There’s a collective intake of breath. Including mine.

  “I hate to cut our visit short, but we need to leave.” He looks at me. “I called the airlines and got a flight out of Des Moines. Leaves in three hours. We’ll make it if we get going. It’s been great to see everybody.”

  I don’t move.

  “Come on, Dot, we have to pack.”

  Frank’s eyes bore into me for a second too long before he walks back into the bedroom. Then all the eyes and all the questions are on me.

  “Who’s JJ?”

  “Her real name is JoAnn Juliette. She’s a well-known photographer and Frank’s teacher. Actually, she’s his mentor. He’s been studying with her for nearly a year. He was planning to show you his photos tomorrow. He’s very good.”

  “His teacher? Not his friend?” Rose’s perpetually pink cheeks redden with the audacity of asking a personal question. “I never had a teacher call me in an emergency.”

  “They’re close.”

  “How close exactly?” Now her cheeks are scarlet.

  It’s the question I’ve been asking myself from the day I first met JJ last April.

  “She’s taken a special interest in Frank; thinks he has a lot of talent. She’s very charismatic. Enthusiastic.” I stumble over my words. Irritated that I’m the one trying to explain Frank and JJ’s relationship to his family when I don’t fully understand it myself.

  Frank leans into the room and taps the face of his watch with his finger.

  I walk into our bedroom. Frank’s throwing clothes on the bed. My bag lays open and empty next to his. He balls up a shirt and jams it in his suitcase. I’ve never seen him agitated like this.

  “Can we talk about this for a minute?” I say. “I can see you’re upset. JJ must be in a panic.”

  I know what it’s like to have to listen to another person’s pain. It’s what I do for a living. Frank’s an action person. When something breaks, he gets out his tools and fixes it.

  “You can’t fix this, Frank. A missing child is police business. I’m sorry. It must be terrible for you to stand by and do nothing.”

  “That’s why I said I’d go back. She didn’t ask. I volunteered. It’s the only thing I could think to do.” His eyes well with tears.

  “Doesn’t she have anyone else to call? Somebody closer maybe? What about the child’s father?” I feel like a grinch just asking the question.

  “So far as I know they aren’t together. I don’t think she has many friends. She spends most of her time working or with her daughter.”

  He closes the lid to his suitcase and zips it shut.

  “I just wish you would have discussed this with me first—privately. You’ve been asking me to come to Iowa with you almost since the day we met. Now that I’m finally here, I hate to leave early.”

  “Why aren’t you dying to get home to help your cops? You’ve always said the worst cases cops have to deal with involve children.”

  “They’re not going to need me in the middle of an active investigation. Nobody’s even called me to tell me what’s going on.”

  He puts his hands on my shoulders. “I’m sorry we have to cut this short. It’s just something I feel I have to do. JJ’s more to me than a teacher.”

  I stop myself from asking what that might mean.

  “She tried to talk me out of coming home early, but I could tell she was relieved when I insisted. I’m flattered that she called me and happy to be able to give something back. Stay longer if you like, but I’m going to go.”

  “Well then. There’s no more to say. Let’s pack, say our goodbyes, and get out of here.” A whopping sadness fills my chest. It hardly compares to losing a child, although nothing in the comparing makes the feeling go away.

  Frank sets his suitcase on the floor and straightens up, his eyes on me. His face fixed and somber.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Dot. I hope you don’t say it.”

  “Say what?”

  “‘I told you so.’ Because that’s what you think, isn’t it? That if anything ever happened to Chrissy, it would be JJ’s fault.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  I DIDN’T BECOME a psychologist like some of my colleagues who went from BA to PhD on Mommy and Daddy’s credit cards. My parents d
idn’t have credit cards. Didn’t believe in them. My father thought bankers were Shylocks who cheated the poor with exorbitant interest rates and balloon payments buried in the small print. My mother was for simplicity and against needless consumerism.

  I worked my way through college and grad school waiting tables, serving cocktails, and pleading for scholarships. Turns out I am better at reading people than serving them food. I acquired this skill trying to anticipate when the sins of the rich and powerful would send my father on a rant, barging around the house for twenty-four hours, spewing letters to the editor. While my mother, for whom all life’s challenges contain lessons to be learned, regarded my father’s tantrums as an opportunity to practice patience and understanding. With righteous indignation for the underdog combined with the ability to normalize bizarre behavior as my parental legacy, how could I have not become a psychologist?

  Currently, I work as a paid consultant for the Kenilworth Police Department. It’s a moderate-sized agency, seventy-five sworn, located in the heart of Silicon Valley. I didn’t intend to be a police psychologist. I was aiming to be an academic, dazzling graduate students and writing acclaimed books. That was until I got a taste of graduate school, which was only slightly less treacherous than swimming in a shark tank. I fell in love with my advisor, Mark Edison, while I was helping him write a book. We married, wrote two more books together, and when I got my PhD, I joined his forensic practice. Kenilworth PD was his biggest client. Years later, I wrote a book on my own. Mark was happy for my independent success. Or so I thought until he left me for Melinda, his psych intern and twenty years his junior. We divorced. He got the forensic practice. I got Kenilworth PD.

  Police officers are not eager consumers of therapy. They think it makes them weak to have problems. I think it makes them human. Almost every cop at Kenilworth PD regards me with skepticism, worried that I’m reading their minds and getting ready to report them to the chief as unfit for duty. They are not as standoffish as they were when I started three years ago, but it’s still an uphill battle to win their trust, let alone put a dent in the male-dominated culture of rugged individualism. My biggest skeptic is Chief Pence. Maybe he doesn’t like psychologists. Maybe he doesn’t like me. All I know is that we’ve been in a push-pull battle since before he was promoted to chief. He can’t live with me and he can’t live without me. He wants my advice when I least expect it and when I have something to offer, he avoids me.