by John Philpin
I sat in traffic and gazed at the park entrance, the mouth of a giant aluminum monster. I imagined an army of kids in summer, trooping gleefully beneath the demon’s silver fangs, then running for the 1950s-era wooden coaster.
A cop waved me through the traffic snarl.
As they prepared to broadcast from Ragged Harbor to the world, TV reporters and technicians sipped coffee or brushed their teeth over Styrofoam cups. Print reporters tapped at laptop computers. Their TV counterparts wore microphones that resembled wasps clinging to lapels; these were connected to battery packs clipped to the backs of their belts.
A college security guard checked my identification and allowed me to pass, prompting glares from two media people standing near the barrier. I was familiar with news reporters’ sense of entitlement from my Boston years. More recently, they’d given us O.J. with a cast of thousands, instant experts, and Dolby Surround sound, then milked the presidency as if it were a prurient soap opera, frequently reminding us of their obligation to report the news. TV producers and newspaper editors spent more time checking audience share and distribution than verifying the accuracy of their stories.
The campus resembled a ghost town. Many students had gone home. Others probably slept after remaining awake, terrified, all night. A few with vacant expressions stood at the crest of the hill and watched the attack of the minicams.
A light glowed in Stu Gilman’s office at the end of the corridor, but I walked only as far as the room labeled “Student Records.” I had no interest in being twitched at.
The information packet that I received from the dean of studies required that I verify my students’ enrollment status and determine that they had paid all fees due the college. After a half century of often virulent attacks on bureaucracy of any stripe, I was now an instant bureaucrat. At least the mundane chore relieved me of trying to do the impossible: force awareness of a killer’s mind-set.
The records room door was locked, but was easily persuaded to open when I slid back the bolt with my pocketknife’s screwdriver blade. As a lifetime member of the Oscar Wilde fan club, I never apologize for my excesses. I did not want to deal with Gilman, and had no reason to assume that he would have a key to the records room.
“Shit,” I muttered, gazing at the roomful of computers.
My daughter Lane considers me a technophobe. I prefer to think of myself as a neo-Luddite, a Ted Kaczynski without bombs.
I’ve never been clear about whether there actually was a Ned Ludd who knew that rebellious workers in early-nineteenth-century England invoked his name. Gangs of textile workers from Nottingham to Yorkshire smashed machinery to protest low wages and widespread unemployment caused by the introduction of labor-saving equipment. These “Luddites” also claimed that the quality of the material produced by the machines was inferior to the products they made. I suspect that they were right, but in the not-so-merry old England of 1813, it was a no-brainer. A dozen or more Luddites were hanged, and within three years, the movement had been squashed like morning cockroaches in the kitchen sink.
“If we allow it to, progress will kill us all in the end,” I said, staring at rows of plastic and silicon obelisks.
It is not that computers send me into fits of short breath and eruptions of bumpy red sores. I use them. I just don’t like the fucking things, and I especially don’t like the impact they occasionally have on my life. My feelings for IBM and Microsoft are akin to the Hatfields’ toward the McCoys.
I expected a nice, little oak box filled with five-by-eight cards and holding all the information I could possibly want. Instead, I stared at rows of machines. Why did a college the size of Harbor need ten computers to manage the data generated by a couple of hundred students?
“What are you doing in here?” the voice behind me demanded.
I turned and saw Stu Gilman standing in the doorway.
“Rethinking the Industrial Revolution, and checking on my students,” I said.
His head was in high-vibration mode. “How did you get in?”
Gilman’s wide-eyed glare held indignation, shock, confusion, fear, and loathing. His mouth had its own affliction, an involuntary snapping of muscle and nerve that left him somewhere between a sneer and a snarl.
“I opened the door and walked in. Is there some problem?”
He hesitated, then quickly recovered. “No. No problem,” he said, walking to one of the computers and switching it on. “This one has the records you want. Is this something to do with the murders?”
“This is for my seminar, Stu,” I said, sitting at the console and selecting “Students Enrolled” from the computer menu. “Verification of student status.”
“That door is supposed to be locked.”
Gilman’s voice was a pastiche of conflicted feeling—self-conscious distress and raw anger. I tried to find his eyes, but they were doing their best imitation of pinballs popping off a bonus bumper.
“MI paid for these computers,” he said.
“Should’ve invested in something useful like electric guitars,” I said, typing my search criteria. “Les Paul and Leo Fender have done more for humanity than Bill Gates.”
He finally looked in my direction. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“Electric guitars. I’ll be sure to tell you when I’m done. You can frisk me and relock the door.”
The nettled and bewildered little man turned and strode from the office.
I breezed through my list of names until I got to Dawn Kramer. Her tuition payment was overdue. The computer also insisted that Amanda Squires did not exist. I wondered how she felt about that.
I switched off the machine, walked to Gilman’s office, and tapped on the open door.
“Sorry I was so short with you,” he said, patting his few remaining strands of hair. “This place is like a zoo. There are media people all over the village, trying to sneak onto the campus, calling me at all hours.”
“I’m finished with the computer,” I told him. “I shut it down and covered it. You’ll want to lock that door, I guess.”
Gilman’s hands trembled. “How long until you have this murder thing wrapped up?”
Murder thing? Jesus. The man had the sensitivity of a granite slab.
“No idea,” I said.
He turned and gazed out his window at the Atlantic.
“Stu, what does it mean if a student isn’t listed in the records?”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” he said distractedly.
I wondered, but did not ask, why Gilman would have a key to the room and know which computer contained the registration files, but know nothing about student data.
“I guess you’ve got your hands full,” I said.
“What?” he asked, snapping his attention back to me.
“This whole business.”
“What business?”
“The murder thing.”
“Oh. Right. Yeah. The phone’s been ringing off the hook. You can’t blame people.”
His phone was silent.
Stu Gilman was wired, but I did not think that it was only the murders that had him cranked.
CARRYING MY COMPUTER PRINTOUTS, I WANDERED INTO Bailey’s Silo.
I was headed to my classroom when I heard someone playing the piano in an adjacent music room. I hoped it was “someone.” I pictured reels of tape unwinding or, worse yet, a computer regurgitating programmed sound samples.
I was relieved when the nonexistent Amanda Squires looked up from a Steinway baby grand.
“I heard you from down the hall,” I said.
“I enjoy playing.”
She pushed back her shirtsleeves and continued to play the adagio from Brahms’s First Piano Concerto.
“I think that Brahms was infatuated with Robert Schumann’s wife,” Squires said. “He wrote the adagio for her. Schumann attempted suicide around that time. Makes you wonder if he caught the two of them…at something. A friend of mine describes this pie
ce as music written in the key of blue. I like that. There is so much sadness, so much muted rage.”
I considered introducing the subject of the murders, acknowledging Squires’s loss of her friends and the horror that had gripped the campus. Before I could speak, she abruptly stopped playing, turned, and lowered and buttoned her sleeves.
“I think I’m going to enjoy being in your seminar,” Squires said. “Violence isn’t a pleasant subject to study, but some people believe it’s the only choice they have.”
She stood and prepared to leave.
“Oh, I was checking student records,” I said, fumbling with my batch of papers.
“I’m probably not in there yet. I’m a transfer.”
I nodded. “I wondered.”
“Did you want to know about prior course work?”
“There are no prerequisites for the seminar. I have to initial a form that verifies student status.”
“I have my photo ID. I’ll bring it with me tomorrow.”
Squires walked to the door, then hesitated. “I think we’ve all met the only possible prerequisite,” she said. “Experience.”
Before I could react, she left the room and walked down the hall.
I SPENT AN HOUR SORTING THROUGH BOOKS AND ARTICLES to determine what preliminary materials I would copy and offer my students. I wanted a sample of the varieties of ways to view and consider violence and its contexts. When I had that task under control, I headed for the police department to find out if the autopsy photos had arrived.
As I left Bailey’s Silo, Steve Weld waved to me and trotted across the oval. “I just got through with the police,” he said. “I had to verify my alibi. Jesus. I was in Bangor.”
Weld’s tie-dye for the day promoted Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.
“In a situation like this, Steve, everyone’s a suspect.”
Weld shook his head. “You’re every bit the crusty cynic I heard you were. When you started working with Jaworski and his crew, did they ask you for an alibi?”
“No. Good thing they didn’t. I don’t have one.”
Weld laughed. “Any ideas?”
“About?”
“The murders.”
I shrugged. “What about you?”
“I thought you solved them before they happened.”
It was my turn to laugh.
“No,” Weld said. “I don’t have any ideas about the murders, but if I were a cop, I’d jump all over Stu Gilman.” “Gilman? Why?”
Weld hesitated. “He knows everything that goes on here, but he never says shit. He lies. Drives a car worth more than I make in a year. Wears a diamond pinkie ring. You’re the crime shrink. You figure it out.”
I was no more interested in getting into personal squabbles with Weld than I was with Gilman.
“He probably told you guys that he was at home in Portland, right?”
Weld did not wait for a response. “If he did, that’s bullshit. He was at the Clear Skies, the airport motel and restaurant. I saw his silver Jag parked there when I headed out of town Friday night. I told the police.”
He held up his hand. “Don’t try to tell me he had a drink at the bar and went home after I drove through.”
“You seem certain that he didn’t.”
The teacher gazed at the administration building. “He’s used the Clear Skies for meeting MI clients ever since the incident two years ago,” he said, still looking away, his voice softer. “I’m not accusing Gilman of killing anyone. The man is an encyclopedia. That’s all. He has to be. He works for Melanie Martin.”
“What incident?” I asked.
Weld shook his head. “Talk to Jaworski.”
“Steve, we’ve had two brief conversations, and both times you’ve left me with the feeling that all the closets around here are filled with skeletons.”
Weld turned to face me. “Doc, you may just be as smart as they say you are,” he said, and walked off.
I DROVE DOWN THE HILL, MUTTERING ANGRILY TO MYSELF about people who talk in riddles.
I wound my way through the media encampment to the rear of the ancient brick municipal building that housed the police department. Reporters who were not huddled at the college entrance or the end of Crescent Street lurked on the sidewalk in front of the town offices. I had been out of the camera’s eye for years and wanted to keep it that way.
Soot-coated black-and-yellow civil defense signs led me through the basement. I climbed the front stairs and arrived in a small waiting area, where the department dispatcher checked my ID. He punched buttons on his console, mumbled into a telephone receiver, then directed me to the chief’s office.
Jaworski met me in the corridor. “Got somebody in here I’d like you to meet, Lucas,” he said, leading me into his oversized room with a view of Main Street.
A red-haired woman in her middle thirties stood near a table to my left and talked into a cell phone. She had parked her charcoal jacket over the back of a chair, revealing a pager clipped to one hip and a Walther nine-millimeter semiautomatic handgun on the other. Her briefcase, laptop, and plastic bottle of designer water—not Maine’s own Poland Spring—rested on the table. She sat, and scribbled in a narrow notebook.
“She’ll be off the phone in a minute. I told you about Karen Jasper. She’s in investigations with the state, went to that FBI school. Sort of stuff you do, I guess.”
“I doubt it,” I muttered.
“What’s that?”
“Like to meet her,” I said, gazing beyond Jaworski at a silent TV that offered a view of the media crews loitering at the building’s front door.
“Wish I’d been here to see me drive by,” I said.
Jaworski glanced at the screen, then back at me. “Our mirror on the world is aimed at us.”
“We’d best be careful. Those autopsy photos come in yet, Herb?”
Jaworski handed me a manila envelope. “Came in an hour ago. I haven’t had a chance to look at them. We’ve got two sets, so you can take your time getting that package back. They’ll probably tell you more than they will me anyhow. You’ve got another set of reports in there, too. Don’t ask me which ones. I copied them and stuck them in the envelope.”
Karen Jasper put down her phone, swung around in her swivel chair, and said, “I’ve checked NCIC, VICAP, and our own computers. Our focus is Stanley Markham. This is the work of a traveling pro, and we have no other pros on the road in the Northeast right now. We had a hit in southern California, but that guy is taking kids under twelve. Who the hell are you?”
She directed her rapid-fire report at Jaworski. The final remark was for me.
“Karen Jasper, I’d like you to meet Dr. Lucas Frank,” Jaworski sputtered.
Jasper glared at me.
I had showered, and had changed my socks and underwear, so I could not imagine why she was firing such a pissy expression my way. Perhaps she had heard of my disdain for all bureaucratic hacks.
Trying to make nice, I stuck out my hand. She ignored my gesture.
“I’m recommending that you request federal assistance,” Jasper said to the chief.
See what I mean? I never enjoy my meetings with people like Karen Jasper. I usually go away feeling that I’ve met someone who has missed her or his calling—you know, inventory management, or maybe even pyramid sales.
Jasper planned to fill her plate: a main course of Markham, with a side order of pale people in suits wandering around with copies of The Wall Street Journal tucked under their arms looking for a private place to take a shit. Not that they’re not perfectly nice people.
“Karen, I mentioned Lucas to you. He’s the one—”
“I’m familiar with your work,” she said through her continuing glare. “We spent an entire class on the early contributors to the field. All that history is interesting, but has little contemporary relevance.”
Ouch. If I were sensitive about my age, “early contributors,” however accurate, would have stung.
In the late sixties and ear
ly seventies, the few people in the U.S. who examined crime scenes for the leavings of a personality were trained and educated broadly in criminology, psychology, and sociology. They probed their own minds, then plunged into the streets with the cops. They knew they had to acquire a feel for the setting of slaughter and for the mind of the veteran homicide detective whose intuitive leaps were the inspiration for investigative shrinks.
Too many from my generation remained in university offices and played with statistics. Some wrote scholarly, theoretical treatises. Others had established lucrative private practices consulting on issues related to violence that they read about in their brothers’ and sisters’ articles. Most of their advice was common sense, but they saw it as a chance to turn a profit on fear. They also shaped a national belief that pure science could explain the vagaries of human violence.
Art and intuition were out; math and science were in. The new generation, of which Karen Jasper was surely a member, followed their household gods to the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. A few independent thinkers ventured to Europe and found that even more quantifiable work was under way. The governments and universities that funded research wanted cleanly calculated accountability. They loved bar graphs and pie charts.
Jasper was crisp, pure business. All she needed was an infomercial and a bar code to slap on her product, whatever it was.
I thought of James Brussel, the New York psychiatrist who was responsible for the existence of “the field.” “Surely Dr. Brussel merited—”
“Same class,” she snapped, cutting me off. “Brussel was an urban myth. He wrote his own book, then the folk tales took over. I don’t have time for this.”
She swung back to the table and flipped open her laptop.
Jaworski glanced at me with an expression of helplessness.
I grinned at him. Maybe this was going to get fun. “Ms. Jasper, if Brussel’s analysis of George Metesky, New York’s ‘Mad Bomber,’ was a myth, why did your federal colleagues rely on it when they did their profile of the Unabomber?”