Recantati's face reddened at the mere thought, it seemed, that we would be exploring such intimate aspects of Dakota's life. He was silent.
"We could walk right over to her office now, with both of you. That way you can make sure that Ms. Cooper and I don't do anything to cause trouble here."
Time to soften the approach while we had him on the line.
"You understand, sir, that not everything Detective Chapman is talking about may be necessary," I said. "It's entirely possible that Lola's death will prove to be related to her husband's efforts to get rid of her, and not to the campus community at all. We're exploring that angle first, of course. Nobody wants to involve the school or the kids, except as a last resort."
Foote was harder to fool. "Suppose I can gather together some of the political science faculty for you on Monday morning. We'll make the library available to you for interviews, so our staff members don't have to be carted downtown. Then we'll move on to talk with the students, but only if we must."
Not a bad compromise. "I've got to be in court for a hearing at nine-thirty on Monday. So if we can say two o'clock for you to have some people lined up, that will give you the morning to contact whoever you haven't been able to reach over the weekend. Shall we take a look at Lola's office while we're here?"
Foote buzzed the secretary and asked her to have the head of security bring the passkey up to us as quickly as possible. Within minutes, Frankie Shayson knocked on the door and came into the room. "Hey, Mike. Alex. Haven't seen either of you guys since that racket they threw when me and Harry left the job. Never dull, is it?" The former detective from the two-six squad, the neighborhood precinct, crossed the room and grabbed Chapman's hand as he greeted us warmly. "Want me to take 'em upstairs, Ms. Foote?"
She was obviously unhappy that we had an independent connection to the college, and she wasn't about to let him take us to Dakota's office alone. "If you give me the key, I'll return it to you later today." She reached out her hand to take the ring from Shayson, motioning to Recantati to come along.
The three of us marched down the hallway behind Sylvia Foote and up two flights of stairs to a turreted corner office. On the wall next to the door, instead of a nameplate, there was an ink and pen drawing, two inches by three inches, of a small piece of the U.S. map, with the word badlands written in the middle. The Badlands of Dakota.
Foote unlocked the door and entered first, followed by Chapman.
"Jesus, the feng shui in here is for shit."
Recantati continued to look lost and overwhelmed. "Sorry, Detective?"
"Don't you know anything about the principles of negative energy? This place is a hellhole, just like her apartment. First of all," Chapman said, kicking a box of books out of his path into the room, "all entrances should be free from obstruction. You need a generous flow into the working environment. And she's got too much black fabric in here. Bad karma-symbolizes death."
Chapman worked his way around the room, looking at books and papers that were piled on the floor, careful not to touch or disturb surface items. Foote had taken Recantati aside and was whispering something to him. I took the moment to stifle a smile and ask Chapman a question. "When did you become an expert in the Chinese art of feng shui?"
"Attila's been shtupping an interior decorator for the last six months. That's all you hear about when you work a tour with him. The office is beginning to look like a Jewish princess's idea of a Chinese whorehouse. 'Don't leave your toilet seat up 'cause your fortune will flow down into the sewer.' See, dried flowers like this?" Mike pointed at the dusty arrangement on Dakota's windowsill. "Lousy idea. Represents the world of the dead. Gotta use fresh ones."
Marty Hun was one of the guys in the Homicide Squad. Mike had nicknamed him Attila.
"We'll get Crime Scene over here this afternoon. I'd like them to process the room for prints and take some pictures. Okay with you two?"
Mike moved behind Lola's desk, noting in his steno pad what lay on top of it and sketching a general outline of the office. The smile was erased from his face, and with his pen he shifted some of the papers on top of the blotter. "Who's been in here since last night?"
"No one," answered Foote.
"I'll betcha my paycheck you're wrong on that count."
Foote approached the desk from the opposite side and placed her palm on a stack of books as she leaned over to see what had caught Mike's attention.
"You wanna get your hand off there?"
She straightened up and brought her arm down to her side.
Mike pulled open the top middle desk drawer by putting his pen into the brass handle. "It's too neat. Way too shipshape, both on top of the desk and in this first drawer. Right where you'd keep whatever it was you'd been working on most recently, or something that was pretty important. Every other pile is sloppy and out of line. Even the stack of mail is too fastidious. Somebody went through some of this stuff and couldn't resist just patting these papers into order. Nothing major, but it's just not in keeping with Lola's messy style. Maybe a careful once-over can come up with a print or something. She chew gum?"
Recantati looked to Foote and then shrugged. "Not that I ever noticed."
It was Chapman's turn to whisper now, leaning over and speaking only to me. "Let's lock up the office and get Crime Scene over here immediately. There's a wad of Wrigley's in the wastebasket. It's great for getting DNA. All that juicy saliva will tell us exactly who's been messing around in here."
Mike turned back to face the others. "Ever hear Ms. Dakota talk about a 'deadhouse'?"
Foote glanced at Recantati before both of them looked at us blankly. "Sounds more like your line of work than ours."
As Mike walked from behind the desk, he stared at a small corkboard affixed to the wall by the window. "You know who any of these people are?" he asked.
Foote moved in next to him, and Recantati looked over his shoulder. "That's a photograph of Franklin Roosevelt, of course, and this one's Mae West. I believe that woman in the corner, in period dress, is Nellie Bly. I can't place the other man."
"Charles Dickens, I think." My undergraduate major in English literature kicked in.
Foote stepped back and turned away, but continued speaking. "I'm not sure who the people are in the photos with Lola herself, but I assume they're friends and relatives. That other snapshot is one of the young women Lola taught last semester, in the spring."
Mike must have thought, as I did, that it was unusual for one student's picture to be singled out to be on the board. He asked the obvious question. "Know her name?"
Foote hesitated before she spoke. "Charlotte Voight."
"Any idea why Lola would have her picture up here?"
Dead silence.
"Can we talk to her?"
"Detective Chapman," Foote answered, sinking onto the cushion of the sofa against the far wall, "Charlotte disappeared from the school-from New York-altogether. We have no idea where she is."
Mike's anger was palpable. "When did this happen?"
"She went missing last spring. April tenth. Left her room early one evening, in the midst of a bout of depression. No one here has seen her since."
6
Chapman wanted to preserve the integrity of Dakota's office for the Crime Scene team to photograph and fingerprint, so he led the unhappy pair of administrators back down to Foote's quarters to finish the conversation.
"And now we're gonna play 'I've Got a Secret' and hope the dumb cop doesn't figure out what kind of problems we got here at school, right? Who was this Voight kid and what do you think really happened to her?"
Foote picked up the story. "Mr. Recantati wasn't appointed until this fall semester, so he's not to blame for not remembering to bring up Charlotte's disappearance." The osteoporosis that had stooped Foote's shoulders seemed even more pronounced as she sat hunched in her chair, calling up facts about the missing girl.
"Charlotte was a junior-twenty years old. Came to us with a very troubled background. She w
as raised in Peru, actually. Her father's American, working down there for a large corporation. Her mother was Peruvian. Died while Charlotte was finishing high school. The girl was extremely bright, but had had a long battle with depression and eating disorders."
Mike was taking notes as Sylvia Foote talked.
"We didn't know until she got here, of course, that she had a history of substance abuse as well. I doubt that she would have been better adjusted at any other college in the States. There were no relatives anywhere in this country, and when one of those black moods overtook Charlotte, she'd just disappear for days at a time."
"Surely someone found out where she'd been, once she returned?" I asked.
"She was never very open or direct about it. Freshman year she dated a Columbia student who lived in an apartment off campus, and she'd spend time with him. Then she got involved with some Latinos from the neighborhood, the source of her drug supply, we believe."
"What did her roommates think?"
"She didn't have any. Charlotte requested a single when she applied to King's, and she lived a pretty solitary existence. She didn't number many of the girls among her friends. D'you know the kind? She preferred the company of men. Not boys, and generally not other students. She was restless and isolated from most of the school social life. Thought herself much too worldly for most of the kids she met here."
"Didn't you get the police involved when she disappeared?"
"Certainly we did. You must know how it is. They won't even consider a missing person's report until forty-eight hours have elapsed. Nobody noticed Charlotte was gone for most of that time. The girls in the dorm assumed that she'd gone off to party with her drug crowd, and the professors had grown used to her cutting classes. The Twenty-sixth Precinct has a record of the report we filed. I made the notification myself, after I called her father."
Chapman looked up. "What'd he have to say about all this?"
Foote lowered her head. "He didn't even come to New York. Not then, or later. He had just remarried, which engaged most of his emotional interest, and seemed to believe that Charlotte would show up eventually, when she needed his money or his help. He thought it was just a gimmick to get his attention."
"Anybody check out her room?"
"Yes, the detectives from the precinct. Undisturbed and unremarkable. Her credit cards were never used, her bank account was never tampered with-"
"Make a list, Coop, when you do your subpoenas for Dakota. Let's get bank records, credit card information, and phone records for Voight, too. Her computer still around?"
Foote shrugged. "I imagine when the semester ended in June that all of her belongings were shipped back to her father in Peru, but I'll check that for you."
"And line up some of her classmates for Monday, some of the kids that she lived near in the dorm or hung out with in class. The former boyfriend, too."
Recantati knew that he was in over his head. "Can we slow this down? I think you're making some quantum leaps here that will serve no good."
"Welcome to the real world, Professor. Wake up these it-can't-happen-here nerds and make them get involved in all this. You do it, or I will." Chapman slapped his steno pad against the palm of his hand to drive home his point.
The sharp buzz of the intercom startled me. Foote's secretary's voice came through the speakerphone intercom. "Professor Lock-hart is here for his four o'clock meeting with you. He thinks you might want him to join you now."
"No, no. Tell him I'll leave him a message and reschedule for early next week." She turned her attention back to us. "What else do you need by Monday?"
I spoke before Mike could. "Every detail about every criminal incident that has occurred on this campus and to your students, whether here or wherever they're living in the city."
"That's hard to put together quickly. There's no, well…" Recantati was stammering.
"I guess you're not familiar with the Cleary Act, Professor?" I asked.
This was Sylvia Foote's territory, and she stepped in to spare Recantati the embarrassment of his ignorance about an important administrative function. "We're in the process of putting together that information now, Alex. I can certainly give you whatever reports and referrals we have."
"Then we'll see you here, on Monday. We've each got a beeper," I said, handing my business card to both Foote and Recantati. "If you need us for anything at all, or want to bring something to my attention, just give a call."
As we walked out of Foote's office, her secretary told us that Detective Sherman and his partner from the Crime Scene Unit were on their way up to Dakota's office. Mike nodded to me to follow him up the staircase to watch them get to work.
"So what's the Cleary Act?"
"About fifteen years ago, a student named Jeanne Cleary was raped and strangled to death in her dormitory at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. The bastard who killed her was also enrolled at the school. He was a drug addict with a history of deviant behavior who had broken into her room to burglarize it while she was sleeping. Her parents fought a long, tough battle to get federal legislation to make it mandatory for every campus official to report the statistics of criminal occurrences at their schools."
"At least it gives the applicants an idea of what the problems are at each college."
"That's the point. It's got to be in all the admissions literature, so families making decisions about where they're sending their kids can assess the risks. What kind of security measures the school has, how it handles crime reporting, what kind of disciplinary measures the administration enforces-all that sort of thing."
"Does it work? Do any good?"
"It's a great idea, but I haven't seen one school anywhere near this jurisdiction that reports it accurately. Not Columbia, not NYU, not Fordham, not FIT. Do you know there are more than twenty college campuses in Manhattan alone, from those large universities down to small commercial colleges that just have a single building? I can give you ten criminal complaints a year taken from students who report to the local precinct or to my office for every one you'll see in the numbers supplied to the government-and to the parents-by the schools. They all want to fudge it."
The door to Dakota's office was open and Sherman was beginning to document everything in sight with his camera and flash.
"Get a shot of that bulletin board on the wall by the window, Hal. And watch your mouth-I got Cooper with me."
"Hey, Alex, how goes it? Understand Kestenbaum's got a hush-hush preliminary finding of a homicide on this broad. So much for the accidental death theory they were floating last night, I guess. Tough break on that verdict last week in the case from the bus station. Sorry the stuff we came up with wasn't too helpful. Helen took the loss pretty hard."
One of my assistants had just had a not guilty verdict the previous Thursday. Her victim had been beaten in the face so badly that she was unable to identify her attacker. The fact that thousands of people a day passed through the Port Authority terminal made it impossible to get a clean set of fingerprints from the corridor in which the attack occurred, and the circumstantial case had been too weak for a jury to believe in.
"Cooper trains her troops not to look at an acquittal as a loss, Hal. Just figure Helen came in second place… right behind the defense attorney. Most other jobs, that gets you the silver medal. No harm in that."
"What do you want me to do after I dust these surfaces?"
"I want copies of as much of the paper as you can give me. Originals if it's not worth trying to lift prints off this stuff."
Sherman removed the gum from the wastebasket with a pair of tweezers, slipping it into a small manila envelope and labeling it with the date and number of the Crime Scene run. "I'll drop the copies off at your office. Gotta get to midtown. Just had a double homicide called in. Guy in a Santa suit did a stickup at a doughnut shop, using a ten-year-old customer as a shield. The owner had a licensed pistol. Plugged Santa and one of his aging elves before they could make it back into their getaway sleigh."
"Best of all possible dispositions, eh, blondie? Case abated by death. Perps blasted into the great hereafter-God's own Alcatraz-by a law-abiding citizen just trying to make a living. Give the doughnut man a kiss for me. You gonna make it to the party later, Hal?"
"Depends on whether the good guys or the bad guys are winning. Have one on me."
It was the night of the Homicide Squad's annual Christmas party, and although our moods were not festive, Chapman and I wanted to be there for a while to wish our colleagues some holiday cheer. Darkness had enveloped the city early, and the temperature had dropped substantially during our hours at Foote's office. I pulled on my long gloves and raised the collar of my coat as Chapman held open the front door of the building and we trudged uphill toward Broadway to get the car. Tiny white lights decorated the trees on College Walk and candles rested on windowsills in some of the dorm rooms.
As the motor idled, I watched the groups of college kids, seemingly oblivious to the bitter cold, making their way from classrooms to living halls to dining facilities. There were bunches talking on the great steps of Low Memorial Library, which was festively adorned with a giant wreath, and I imagined they were making plans to meet at parties or nearby bars and apartments. It wasn't much of a stretch to recall the feeling of invincibility in that period of my life, the sense of security the academic community offered-the endless possibilities of youth, fueled by intelligence and energy.
Yet one year ago, the Columbia campus had been rocked by the death of a talented and popular athlete, found in her dorm room with her throat slashed, killed by another student she had been dating, who threw himself in front of a subway car hours later. That followed the similar killing of a brilliant law student the preceding year, also by a former boyfriend who had stabbed her repeatedly.
The DeadHouse Page 5