Black Diamond Fall

by Joseph Olshan

  The words fall heavily between them, and Sam can see Mike stiffen with alarm. “What are you telling me, Sam?” he says at last.

  “I’m telling you, Mike, that sometimes I think about not going on.”

  Mike has fallen into dismayed silence.

  “But don’t worry,” Sam manages to say with lightness in his voice. “You don’t have to put me on suicide watch. Not yet. I’m just trying to tell you that whenever I think he might actually be gone, dead, it’s . . . And now these letters that he supposedly wrote me and seem to have been read and deleted by somebody. I have to see them.”

  “Why haven’t you?”

  “Something about forensic people looking at how they were sent or accessed. Because they were deleted after they were read—supposedly by me—they had to be retrieved. And I had no way of doing that, of retrieving them.”

  “They told you what was in them, didn’t they?”

  “Not the words, themselves. Just that the emails were . . . conciliatory. And passionate.” A slimy, nauseous feeling comes over him. “I don’t remember if I gave my password to Luc or not. How could somebody else have gotten it?”

  “Maybe the person didn’t have a password but was able to hack into your computer anyway. Accessing, reading and deleting somebody’s email is probably not that hard for a computer geek.”

  “That geek would have to know when Luc wrote the emails and be able to read them before I got to them. I checked that account fairly frequently. At least a few times a day. Three different emails were read at three different times.”

  Mike ponders this for several moments. “Ah, so that’s why it’s harder for you to prove you didn’t read them.”

  They can hear Gina moving around downstairs and then seem to stop moving, almost as though she’s listening for them.

  “I can tell she’s about to call me down to leave . . . Babe?” Mike calls out. “I’ll be there in a second. Just finishing going over something with Sam.” Then he turns to Sam, “But if Luc took off once before—”

  “When he was fifteen—”

  “I guess we can’t assume anything until . . . they find him, right?”

  Sam nods at the grim thought. “But you know what?” he says. “As hard as it is for me, can you imagine what it’s like for his parents, waiting like this? What kind of hell is that?” Sam sees Mike looking at him with his downcast, different-colored eyes.

  Mike says, “My mom’s younger sister died when they were kids. She told me my grandmother never got over it.”

  “I’m sorry. I know I’ve gotten us on a downer.”

  “Yeah, I think you have,” Mike says with a laugh. “You’re just going to have to try and focus on getting better, doing your rehab exercises. Leave the world-worrying to those of us who can walk without crutches.”

  A bounty of newly fallen snow thunders as it plunges off the roof, and hearing it, Panda begins barking nervously downstairs. “Jenkins mentioned that Luc’s mother might want to see me,” Sam says softly.

  Mike looks bewildered. “Really? Why would she want to see you?”

  “Who knows? Any number of reasons, I guess.” He pauses. “When we were flying back to Boston today, I had this weird dream about her.” Sam goes on to describe the dream that he had of meeting Eleanor Flanders at an art opening and confessing to her that he’d lost his own son and how she’d gotten really furious when she found out he was lying.

  February 19; Carleton, Vermont; 31 degrees, unseasonably warm, chance of freezing rain

  The police department’s IT forensic division has finished combing through the hard drive on Luc Flanders’s computer and Jenkins has dropped in to see his roommates to clarify a few of their findings. At a kitchen table stacked with thick textbooks and some small bullet-like aluminum cans of Red Bull, Will McKinnon and Charlie Taft sit slumped in their chairs with an air of defeat. Already they have given their version of the last few hours they had spent with Luc Flanders, how they’d left the apartment for Skylight Pond armed with a blue tooth speaker, some beers and their hockey sticks. According to both Taft and McKinnon, Luc had seemed untroubled, certainly more upbeat than he’d been a few weeks earlier when he and Elizabeth had broken it off. When that had happened, for several days running he’d returned to the apartment, drunk a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon, and fallen into a babbling, incoherent sleep.

  Jenkins begins reading through a list of student names furnished by Taft and McKinnon and Elizabeth Squires; all of these students have been contacted, in some cases, questioned, about their acquaintance with Luc Flanders. They’ve been asked the last time they saw him, and if he’d said anything that seemed noteworthy or alarming. Bits and pieces here, snippets of casual conversation there, had yielded no clues at all. After Jenkins finishes reading through the list of names, he says, “Now, did anybody come to this apartment other than people on this list?”

  A few moments of reflection pass. Finally, “Yeah, a girl from my hometown,” Taft offers. “Named Courtney Markwell. A student at UVM. She’s been down here a few times.”

  “From Newport?” Jenkins clarifies.

  “Right.”

  “How much time has she spent here?”

  “Let me think.” The young man stammers and looks discomfited. With dark hair, dusky skin and large brown eyes, he looks like a highborn Latino, maybe a Spaniard or even a patrician Argentinian. Jenkins concludes that the Latin blood must derive from the mother, Taft being such a New England–sounding surname. Beefy and muscular with a thick neck, he doesn’t have the ideal physique for a soccer player. “She spent the night a couple of times.”

  “Part-time girlfriend?”

  “Not really. We hang out.”

  “So when she spent the night with you, Luc was in his room?”

  “When he wasn’t with that dude,” Taft says with unmistakable rancor.

  “So could he and Courtney Markwell have had a conversation or”—he searches for a better word—“an ‘interaction,’ without your knowing about it?”

  Taft looks taken aback. “You mean like hooking up?” His face is flushed and purposeful, and Jenkins finds this noteworthy.

  “Not necessarily. Perhaps more like saying hello or . . . maybe even chatting when you weren’t necessarily in the room.”

  “You know what he’s saying,” Will McKinnon tells his roommate irritably.

  Taft is clearly the Beta in this situation and, probably, in the roommate hierarchy. McKinnon, the Alpha, on the other hand, seems awfully cocksure of himself in the way twenty-two-year-olds can be before life intervenes and they get broken or, at the very least, taken down a few pegs. McKinnon is finely hewn like any college athlete but like his roommate, almost unnaturally muscular.

  “Well,” Jenkins says, “you cast a wide net with the hope that some related facts turn up. Sometimes you even stumble on them.” He watches the expressions change on the faces of Luc Flanders’s roommates. “So”—he turns to Taft—“Courtney Markwell is at UVM?” Easy to stop by and have a word with her, he thinks.

  “Not there anymore,” Taft informs him. “Dropped out.”

  “Because?”

  Taft looks cornered. “Couldn’t hack it.”

  “What year was she?”

  “Freshman.”

  “You’ll get me her contact information?”

  “Sure.” Taft grabs his nearby phone, scrolls through it effortlessly, then reaches around a fat tub of protein powder with the hologram of a bodybuilder on it and grabs a yellow Post-it in the middle of the kitchen table, as well as a pencil with a sharpened point but whose eraser has been chewed off, and writes the name and phone number carefully. Jenkins notes the meticulous care he gives to his handwriting, not necessarily what he’d expect from an oafish jock. But then again, this was Carleton College, No. 8 in the U.S. News and World Report’s ranking of small colleges. On
ce finished, Taft places the note on the table, adhesive side up.

  Jenkins takes out the legal pad with his notes and peruses them. Then, looking between both men, he says, “So we got access to Luc’s email,” noticing that the news makes both men flinch and stiffen. After all, this must seem like a dire measure that reinforces, in a far more concrete way, that something has gone terribly wrong in their friend’s life. “Somebody signed on to his email account: Flanders@Carleton.edu at seven p.m. the evening Luc didn’t come back, and we’ve traced the computer to where the email was accessed. It was in McCullough Student Center.”

  Both men are staring at him, zombie-like.

  “Is there any reason to believe that Luc didn’t come back to your place but showed up at the computer center at seven p.m. on the night he went missing?”

  Taft and McKinnon look at one another quizzically. And McKinnon shrugs and says, “No.”

  “Did he have a habit of going there?” Jenkins asks.

  “Not that I know of,” McKinnon says. “Far as I know, he always worked in his room.” He turns to Taft.

  “Ya, I suppose he could’ve gone there.”

  “Or somebody just logged in under his name,” Jenkins suggests.

  “Then they would have had his user name and password,” Taft says.

  “That’s stating the obvious,” McKinnon says.

  Jenkins continues, “He has two email addresses, his Flanders@Carleton.edu account and an AOL account: Flandersman@AOL.com. So at the same time that Luc or somebody with his sign-on information logged into his Carlton.edu account at the student center, they also logged into his AOL account. And an email that was sent at two p.m. and not yet read was then unsent. Which, you both probably know, can be done with AOL if the intended recipient hasn’t read it.”

  “I have an AOL account,” McKinnon offers. “Unsent plenty of drunken emails. Push of a button.”

  “Exactly,” Jenkins says. “And this particular email that was sent and then unsent was to Sam Solomon.” Jenkins watches the reaction of discomfort this evinces. Both of these men seemed bewildered to learn that Luc had been carrying on an affair with another man, a man old enough to be his father. “And the email urgently requested a meeting.”

  “Maybe Luc unsent the letter because he had second thoughts about it?” McKinnon says.

  “Certainly possible,” Jenkins says, sitting on the fact that three other emails sent by Luc Flanders to Sam Solomon were actually read. “Now, according to both of you, Luc’s car never left the street, is that correct?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Taft says.

  “So if Luc met up with Sam Solomon on the night of February eleventh—”

  “The guy picked him up,” McKinnon interrupts.

  “‘The guy’?” Jenkins asks.

  “Sam Solomon,” McKinnon says snidely.

  Jenkins waits a few moments, knowing the next question is crucial to his investigation. “That name make you angry?”

  “Of course it does,” McKinnon says.

  Jenkins keeps his eyes squarely on McKinnon, whose face has colored deeply. “And why is that?”

  “Why is that?” Taft interjects. “Because he probably killed Luc.”

  Now looking at Taft, Jenkins says, “One thing we do know. Even if Sam Solomon came up to Carleton, he would not have had enough time to . . . kill Luc and dispose of his body and get to where he was going in Boston and arrive when he did. Anybody dumped on the side of the road would have been found by now. The ground is frozen. The lakes are frozen. And a deep layer of snow is not easy to get through, especially after it has settled and congealed. That’s why I’m told, not too long ago in rural parts of Vermont, people who died up here during the winter were stored in barns until they could be buried in the spring.”

  “I’m from the Northeast Kingdom, so I know all about that,” Taft says. “My grandfather died in December and they couldn’t bury him until April.”

  “So where did they keep him?” McKinnon asks.

  “In an old car.”

  McKinnon bursts out laughing.

  “Could he have killed Luc and then dumped him in Lake Champlain?” Taft asks. “Parts of it never freeze.”

  “Too far north,” Jenkins says reasonably. “Certainly not enough time for him to go even farther north to get rid of a body and then head south to Boston.”

  “Maybe he drove the body all the way to Boston,” McKinnon says. “Then tossed him in the ocean.”

  “Obviously possible, but from our point of view, again hard to justify time-wise. He’d still have to stop in some place like Revere or Southie and drag the body to the beach.”

  “Or carried him,” Taft says thoughtfully.

  Then McKinnon says, “Okay, this is getting gruesome.”

  Jenkins, ever mild-mannered, says, “Back to emails. Let’s say somebody and not Luc Flanders logged into his email accounts, then we’d like to find out who this person is.”

  After a short silence, McKinnon turns to Jenkins and says, “And what about Elizabeth?”

  “I plan to speak to her next.”

  “I spoke to her yesterday,” McKinnon says quietly. “She went home for a couple of days. To chill out. All of it was really getting to her.”

  February 19; Route 7 to Burlington, Vermont; 30 degrees, light freezing rain

  Jenkins leaves the apartment building and, heading toward his car, stops and pivots around to glance up at the kitchen window. He can see the silhouettes of Taft and McKinnon sitting where he left them, in quiet discussion.

  They’re notably defensive, curiously agitated. Angry.There seems to be a pronounced bubbling over of anger in university kids these days. Jenkins doesn’t believe this anger was so manifest when he went to college back in the 1980s. Many of his former FBI colleagues remarked how hard it has been to wrap their heads around the rash of campus shootings that occurred in recent years, much less the decision of some universities to allow concealed weapons—to give the students a way of protecting themselves against unstable and violence-prone contemporaries who lose their cool over academic pressures or rejection in a world distorted by opportunistic social media.

  A freezing drizzle slows Jenkins’s travel up Route 7 to his home in Burlington, and the trip takes close to an hour. He listens to the icy hiss of the drops striking the windshield. Looking out into the decreased visibility of the roadway, he thinks about text messaging and photograph posting, instant pastimes that lead to self-absorbed kids, demanding and impatient kids. A hierarchy of cool and uncool. Among the uncool are always the campus shooters, who blame their violence on feeling invisible among the ranks, or the lack of interest shown to them by the opposite sex? As far as he knows, none of the perps in the history of campus shootings were gay.

  And as far as he knows, Carleton College itself has never had a single homicide or violent assault other than fights between drunken kids or horned-up guys trying to aggressively coerce reluctant coeds to have sex. Abduction and possibly murder would certainly seem beyond the ken of this particular place. And yet in 1971, a Carleton freshman had been on her way to take an exam when she stopped and told her friends she needed to run back to her dorm to get a pencil. Then she completely disappeared; and back in her room, the police found her wallet and all of her possessions. There were no computers with email and Internet histories back in 1971.

  Jenkins makes a note to himself to ask one of his IT forensic guys to research campus disappearances to see if there might have been any pattern among the disappearances of forty-five college-age male students who, over a period of years, were found drowned and inebriated mainly in the Midwest¬—but also at a few campuses on the East Coast. A theory advanced by two retired New York City detectives: that these forty-five men had been the victims of serial murders committed by a group of people who identified their crimes with “smiley face�
�� graffiti found scrawled on buildings or roadway signs near the bodies. The FBI, while Jenkins was a member of its corps, had debunked and vilified the theory.

  Four people—at a guess—might possibly have found a way to access Luc Flanders’s computer: Will McKinnon; Charlie Taft; Elizabeth Squires; and Sam Solomon. However, there could be yet another student—or even professor—on campus, someone with whom Luc may have had a secret relationship and who then found a way to gain access to his personal particulars. Jenkins has spoken to the soccer players who know Luc, and there seems to be nothing about any of them that would suggest any meaningful relationship. The general consensus is that Luc Flanders is a bit of a loner.

  Just after eight in the evening, Jenkins arrives at his house on South Willard Street, a brick Victorian that has been in his wife’s family for generations. Because Connie is a medical researcher at the University of Vermont, she keeps long hours—deliberately long, Jenkins has always surmised. It was her job that brought them back to Vermont from the Washington, DC, area, Jenkins already on the verge of retiring from the FBI and therefore welcoming the change. He’d grown up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and has always yearned for a quieter, rural life.

  While he was in Quantico and Connie at the NIH, they’d postponed having children. Neither at the time could commit to taking a substantial sabbatical from work, and they didn’t want their child raised by a nanny. Beyond this, Connie always professed—sometimes proudly and sometimes with regret—that she wasn’t the maternal type and therefore did not consider herself a good candidate to be a parent. Around that time, Jenkins got caught up in an investigation of one of the lesser-known religious cult mass suicides in which several children were involved and died innocently, and this only amplified his fear about being a father who conceivably could lose a child and be destroyed and dismantled by grief. With what he now realizes was impulsivity, without mentioning it to his wife, Jenkins made an appointment to get a vasectomy.

  Connie, understandably, was furious that he’d never even consulted her. And yet she never asked him to have his vasectomy reversed, which to him definitively proved her ambivalence about having children.