by Mike Markel
“Anyone else?”
“One more. William Daley was suspended for a semester for pulling a knife on his freshman roommate.”
“He got off easier than the girl who sold the papers?”
“He claimed the roommate and a bunch of guys on the floor were bullying him because he was gay.”
“Oh, I see.” I nodded. “Two wrongs make for a light punishment.”
“Something like that, I guess.” Ryan looked at me. “That’s all that Mary Dawson highlighted.” He straightened the papers and put the clip back on them.
I looked at my watch. “Let’s head over now.”
“This isn’t a murder investigation, right?”
“No, just a routine investigation,” I said. “We want to know if Virginia told any of the kids she was sick.”
“Mary Dawson saw right through that.”
“Well, then I’ll have to sell it a little better.” I stood up. “You just sit there and look dreamy. One of the girls will get all woozy and tell us something we didn’t know. Count on it.”
“You know, that’s kind of insulting. I’m not just a piece of meat.”
I turned to him and put on a sad face. “You pretty much are.”
He thought about it a second. “Yeah, you’re right.”
Ryan was super-smart, honest, hard-working, generous—an excellent detective in every way. He was sure to be chief of police someplace, soon, probably before I made detective first grade here in Rawlings. So the last thing I was going to do is tell him how much I admired and cared for him.
Chapter 6
I knocked on Daryl Sorenson’s half-open office door and stuck my head in. “Professor?”
He was sitting at his desk, his head cradled in his palms as he stared at a sheet of paper on his desk. “Yes, Detectives.” He looked up. “Come in, please.”
It was a minute before eleven. Ryan and I remained standing. “How’d you do on contacting the students?”
Daryl Sorenson stood and came out from behind his desk. He handed me the sheet of paper. It was the roster. “I marked the three students we couldn’t get hold of.”
“Great.” I handed the paper to Ryan. “Thanks.”
“This way.” Professor Sorenson led us out of the department offices and down the hall to the conference room. The fourteen students were already there, seated in thinly upholstered armless chairs arranged in a horseshoe pattern. A couple of them were chatting with each other in low tones, but most were silent. They looked antsy, unsure why they had been summoned.
Daryl Sorenson, Ryan, and I sat at a rectangular table at the front of the room. Sorenson spoke. “For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Daryl Sorenson. Chair of sociology.” His tone was somber. The students were paying close attention. “First, I want to thank you for coming in. We have two guests today, who will tell you why you’re here. I’m going to let them introduce themselves.” He turned to me.
“My name is Karen Seagate. I’m a detective with the Rawlings Police Department. This is my partner, Detective Ryan Miner. I, too, want to thank you for coming in.” The students were silent, motionless. “As I’m sure you’ve figured out, this has to do with Professor Virginia Rinaldi. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Professor Rinaldi has died.”
There were gasps, and a few of the young women started to cry. Nobody said anything.
“We want to ask you a few questions about the class last night at Professor Rinaldi’s house. But I want to start by having each of you tell us your name. Can you start, please?” I pointed to a young woman sitting at one end of the horseshoe. As she introduced herself, I glanced over at Ryan, who was drawing a seating chart. After we got through the fourteen names, I thanked them.
“Okay, first question. Did Professor Rinaldi say anything to any of you individually—or to the whole class—about how she wasn’t feeling well? Anything like that?”
They all shook their heads. One girl spoke up. “She told me she was feeling pretty good.”
“Had she said anything earlier—you know, not yesterday, but around the office or at a previous class—that she was sick or something?”
The girl said, “No, it wasn’t anything like that. It was more about how—you know, if you didn’t grow up in Montana, and it’s April and there’s frost in the morning—she was feeling good because the weather was changing.” A couple of students laughed awkwardly.
I nodded. “Okay, I get you.” I paused. “Anyone else have anything about her being sick?”
A small guy with big, thick glasses and a mop of spiky black hair spoke up. “Can you tell us how she died? She have a heart attack or something like that?”
“We haven’t conducted the autopsy yet, so we don’t really know. All I can say is, she apparently fell down the stairs in her house.”
“When did it happen?” he said.
I shook my head. “We don’t know yet. Sometime between around ten pm and early this morning.” I paused. “Did Professor Rinaldi seem upset or distracted during the class last night?”
A bunch of the kids shifted in their seats. One girl leaned over to another and whispered something. I turned to Ryan, who looked down at his seating chart.
“Andrea,” he whispered to me.
“Andrea, what is it?” Everyone was looking at her. It was clear they all knew something but didn’t want to say it out loud. I waited a moment. “Listen, Andrea.” I glanced around the horseshoe to take in everyone. “What you say in this room is confidential. We’re not recording it. We’re not gonna talk to the newspapers or the TV stations. If you know something that can help us understand what happened, please tell us.” I turned to Andrea. “What was it happened last night?”
“So Professor Rinaldi takes a break in the middle of the class. She went upstairs.” Andrea paused a second. “She got in a fight.”
“A fight?”
“Not a physical fight. I mean shouting.”
“Who was she fighting with? Could you tell?”
Andrea looked around at the other students. A couple of them nodded, signaling her to say it. “I couldn’t tell who she was fighting with—except it was a woman.”
“What were they fighting about? Could you make it out?”
Andrea shook her head no.
The girl next to her cleared her throat and started to speak. “I don’t think any of us knew who it was when it was going on.”
“What do you mean?”
“We couldn’t recognize the voice, and the sound was muffled. They were inside a room—”
“What do you mean you didn’t know who it was when it was going on?”
A guy said, “A door opened, and Professor Rinaldi came downstairs—you know, the break was over.”
“And she didn’t say anything about the fight?’
“No, she didn’t say anything. She just started the class again.”
“So you never did figure out who it was she was fighting with?”
“Ten, fifteen minutes later,” the guy said, “a woman comes stomping down the stairs. She’s carrying a backpack. She storms out, slams the door behind her.”
“You saw her?”
Now all the students nodded.
“Who was it?”
“Someone named Krista,” the spiky hair said.
I put out my palms. “Who’s Krista?”
Andrea said, “We don’t know a last name or anything. She was a guest at one of the earlier class meetings. Professor Rinaldi brought in guest speakers sometimes.”
“What was Krista doing in Professor Rinaldi’s house?”
There was a long silence.
“Andrea, I asked you a question. What was Krista doing in the professor’s house? Was she supposed to participate in the class or something?”
Andrea started to blush. “When Krista spoke at our class, Professor Rinaldi described her as a sex worker.” Andrea glanced down at her hands in her lap.
“Tell me about that class.” I looked at Andrea, but it was clear the topi
c was too much for her. “Someone say something.” I gestured toward a young woman seated halfway around the horseshoe. She looked like she was watching a tennis match, her head still but her eyes going back and forth as people talked. “What’s your name, please?”
“Abby.”
“Okay, Abby, were you at that class? When Professor Rinaldi brought Krista in as a speaker?”
Abby nodded.
“Why was Krista there?”
Abby cleared her throat and sat up a little straighter. She was a strong, athletic looking girl of nineteen or twenty with straight blond hair cut short around her right ear but longer on the left side, swooping down to her jaw. She shook her head to snap the hair back into place. “I think the point was that sexual exploitation exists in small towns and rural America. Not just in the big cities.”
“So Krista is a local woman. And she’s a sex worker of some kind, is that right?”
Abby nodded, her hair falling over her left eye. She brushed it back. There was a long, thin scar on her temple, beneath the fringe of hair.
“Did Professor Rinaldi tell you more about Krista? What kind of work she did?”
Abby looked around at the other students to see if they knew, then she shook her head.
A guy spoke. “Professor Rinaldi always said it wasn’t about individuals. It was about social and economic issues. That was what was important, she would say.”
“What did Krista say during that class? Abby? What did she say? What was she there for?”
Abby took a deep breath. “Professor Rinaldi asked her to tell us a little about her life. Krista said she came from Europe—”
“She say which country?”
“All she said was Europe.”
“Okay, go on.”
“And she came to the United States when she was a teenager. She was uneducated, no skills, no money.”
“Did she elaborate on how she got here? Did she come here to be a student at Central Montana?”
“She didn’t go into details, but I got the impression she was tricked into coming here.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like she thought she was going to be working in a hotel or something, maybe as a nanny for some rich people. But whoever arranged for her to come here forced her into the sex business. I think that was the point.”
I glanced around at the other students, whose faces told me that was the gist of it.
“So Krista is still a sex worker, presumably here in Rawlings or nearby. And she’s still being run by someone or some group, is that right?” Nods told me I had it right. “When Krista was talking—during the class—did she seem upset? Was she depressed?
A girl spoke up suddenly. The way the other heads turned toward her, I got the feeling they were surprised that she was saying something. “My brother came back from Afghanistan couple years ago.” She paused, her eyes tearing up. “He was really messed up. Krista seemed like my brother.”
“What do you mean?”
“My brother … his voice was real flat. And his face. It didn’t have any expression. He couldn’t work or anything.”
“Has he been diagnosed with PTSD?”
Now the girl started to cry. She shook her head, then covered her face and lost control. The student sitting next to her put her hand on the girl’s shoulder.
“Thank you for sharing that …” I turned to Ryan, who whispered “Donna” to me. “Thank you, Donna. I know that wasn’t easy.” I swept my eyes around the room. “Is that what the rest of you saw? That Krista had a kind of blank look?”
Most of them nodded.
“You don’t have a name for Krista? I mean, a last name.” Nothing.
Ryan said, “Do any of you have a photo of Krista? From that class or last night?”
A guy said, “The professor was strict about that. All devices were turned off all the time.”
I said, “You didn’t see Krista come into the house last night, right? She was already there when you arrived for the class at six?”
Nods of agreement.
“Do any of you know what Krista was doing upstairs last night?”
A good-looking guy with a couple days’ stubble was slouched in his chair. “Upstairs is where they keep the bedrooms, right?” He put on a leer and looked around the horseshoe for approval. When he saw the dirty looks coming in from both sides, the leer slid off his face. He shrank into his chair. I glanced over at Ryan, who was writing something on his seating chart.
I said, “So Professor Rinaldi never mentioned the fight with Krista during the rest of the class?”
Half the kids nodded their heads.
“Didn’t that seem a little odd?”
A girl with dyed red hair said, “That was Professor Rinaldi. I remember once she told us that she wasn’t our friend. She was our professor. She wasn’t into talking about herself—and she didn’t ask us about ourselves. She said she was there to help us understand how to ‘do sociology.’ I remember that phrase because it sounded … so odd.”
“What do you think she meant by that?”
“What I got out of it is that she didn’t want us to think of ourselves as students who learned about sociology—that would be, like, she knew all about the subject, and she’d pour that information into us and then we’d know about it, too. That would be a waste of everyone’s time, she said, because all we’d accomplish is that we’d duplicate her own biases and gaps. But if we learned how to ‘do sociology,’ we’d be researchers. We’d be right there, creating new information.”
“What did you think about that?”
The girl with the red hair laughed. “Nobody’d ever said anything like that … I don’t know about the rest of you,” she said, her eyes sweeping the room, “but no one had ever said anything like that to me. That was the thing about her.” Here she started to lose control. “She treated us like adults who could do things on her own.”
I scanned the room and waited for anyone else to add a comment, but they were silent.
“One last question: did Professor Rinaldi ever mention her son, Robert? Did she talk about him much?”
I got the same vacant looks. One boy said, “Who?”
A girl said, “He the one in the pictures above the fireplace?”
I nodded.
“He’s kinda cute,” the girl said.
“Okay,” I said, “let’s stop there. Like I said, thanks for helping us out here. My name is Seagate. If you think of anything else that could help us, please get in touch with the Rawlings Police Department, ask for me.”
Daryl Sorenson stood and walked over to the door. He spoke a few words to some of the students as they filed out. Then he looked over at me and Ryan, nodded, and left the room.
I noticed Donna had stayed in her chair. She had stopped crying but hadn’t quite pulled herself together. She looked like she wanted to speak to me. Ryan stayed back behind the table at the front as I drifted over to her.
“Donna, I want to thank you for speaking up.”
She nodded. “Sorry I broke down like that.” She tried to force a smile. “I haven’t said anything out loud about my brother to anyone on campus.”
“He getting any help? You know, the VA?”
She took a breath. “Randy committed suicide. Right before Christmas.” She pinched her eyes shut, then wiped at them with her fingers.
“I’m very sorry to hear that.”
She nodded, then stood up straight like she wanted to change the subject. “Some of the guys in this class.” She shook her head. “Like Martin. The one who made that remark about Krista being upstairs? They’re such …”
“Assholes?”
“Exactly. Everything’s about sex to them. If you’d seen Krista during that class, when she was trying to tell us about her background? It would have made you cry, what she’d been through.”
“Yeah, well, guys like Martin are insecure. They think if they talk about sex the girls’ll think they’re real studs or something.”
<
br /> She rolled her eyes. “I just think they’re … well, what you said.”
“Just keep your distance from them. Live your life. Don’t worry about those guys. They’re harmless. They just need to grow up.”
Donna reached out and touched my arm, then turned and walked out of the room.
I walked over to Ryan, who was sitting at the table, making notes on his seating chart.
Chapter 7
Ryan sat at his desk in the detectives’ bullpen, staring at his screen, a sandwich in his left hand and a pen in his right.
“Any stone-cold killers in the class?” I had just gotten back from the break room, where I had nuked some leftovers from last night. It wasn’t that Ryan and I decided to eat lunch separately when we were at headquarters. It was more that Ryan liked to work through lunch, so I couldn’t talk to him, anyway.
“Not that I’m seeing.” He took a long swallow from his bottle of water. “But I’m a little afraid of getting on the roads when these kids are driving. Half of them have moving violations. No blinkers. Running red lights. Inattentive driving. Failure to yield. The works.”
Ryan is twenty-nine. A few of these kids are his age; the rest are the same age as some of his younger siblings. But I guess having a family can make a young guy think like an old fart.
“Anything jump out at you?”
“Not really. Of the kids at the meeting this morning, the only one who’s interesting is this guy Martin Hunt.”
“Which one was he?”
“The jerk who made that comment about Krista being upstairs at Virginia’s house because that’s where the bedrooms are.”
“Yeah, what’d he do?”
“Possession of controlled substances. He’d steal his brother’s Ritalin and his parents’ Valium and Ambien.”
“Personal use?”
“Some of it.” Ryan took another bite of his sandwich. “But some he’d sell—”
“That’s trafficking.”
“The amounts were too small and he was too young.” Ryan looked down at his notebook. “And he gave them to some girls.”
“Because he’s a nice guy?”
“For sex.”
“That’s statutory rape.”
“Not if the girls and their parents won’t file a complaint.”