She stepped aside, and I walked into the foyer and took off my coat. The boy, Paul, was lurking in the entrance to the living room.
“Paul, take Mr. Slate’s coat,” said Mrs. Kramer.
The boy took my coat without a word and without meeting my eyes and hung it on a coat rack in the foyer.
Grubbs kept his jacket on, and we both followed Kramer’s widow through the foyer toward a living room on the right.
Grubbs stopped me at the entrance to the living room.
“Slate, I need to speak with Mrs. Kramer first,” he said. “Alone.”
I had expected Grubbs to insist on a solo interview. “I’ll wait,” I said.
“Mr. Slate, why don’t you sit in the library while I speak with the captain? It’s just across the foyer.” Susan Kramer pointed to the room to the left of the foyer, where Kramer had introduced me to the two FBI agents, with its floor-to-ceiling books, red silk upholstery, and writing table under the window.
I nodded. Grubbs followed the widow into the living room and closed the door behind him.
Unfilled with people, the library in the Kramer home looked comfortable. Warm. Used. I sat in the big armchair in the corner between the front window and the bookshelves, where Paul Kramer had been sitting while the two FBI agents interviewed him. One of the shelves across the room was devoted to family photographs: Don and Susan Kramer and the kids on a beach; a larger framed copy of the picture of Kris that Kramer had given me in my office.
I studied the room for clues to Kris’s disappearance or Kramer’s murder, but as far as I could tell there were none, so I took out my iPhone and pretended to be checking my email.
Susan Kramer sat composed and straight-backed across her living room from me. Grubbs had spent a little over ten minutes with her before he came out to take my place in the library. Only the right thumb and index finger fidgeting with the ring on her left hand betrayed any emotion. She smiled a little, but only with her mouth.
“Tell me again about how Don came to hire you?” she said.
I told her about Kramer’s visit on Saturday.
She nodded a little, tentative, vague. “Don didn’t always tell me every detail of his schedule. But he told me he was going to speak with someone else. Someone who had been recommended to him by someone he knew.”
I told her I had known her husband years earlier when he worked in Montgomery.
She shook her head. “I know I sounded foolish the other day, maybe even belligerent. I should not have treated you in that manner. After all, ‘What use is it for a man to say he has faith when he does nothing to show it?’ Don told me later you were a person he’d been told had – helped – several people with – missing children. It’s just that I thought I should have been consulted.”
“Well. Helping people with interesting problems – including missing children – is something I’ve done, a little, in the last few years. And no, you don’t sound foolish, Mrs. Kramer. You sound like a woman who… .”
Tears began to well in Susan Kramer’s eyes before I finished a sentence I wished I hadn’t begun.
“I’m sorry, I… .”
She shook her head and dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. “I’m just trying to hold together right now, and I’m not sure I can handle this discussion and talk to the police on the same day. Maybe if we talked a little later?”
“I understand. I’ll check in with you tomorrow. In the meantime I’ll make some inquiries on my own.”
“Is that really necessary? I mean, with the FBI already looking, and now the police investigating, and so long as my faith is strong, it seems to me that, I don’t know, is this really necessary?”
“I don’t blame you for asking. Don seemed to think so, and sometimes it helps to have someone outside law enforcement in these matters.”
Mrs. Kramer stood. “Thank you, Mr. Slate. I’m sure Don had his reasons. We appreciate your help.”
“Just one more thing before I go.”
“What is it?”
“I’d like to see Kris’s room.”
Susan Kramer shrugged, a gesture that seemed to fortify her. “All right. I’ll show you. Right this way.”
She led me to the stairway in the foyer. “Kris’s room is to the left at the top of the stairs, straight down at the end of the hall. The door is closed, and the FBI agents already looked through it, but go on in. I don’t know if it will help. She was only here on visits, really, since she moved to the campus.”
I waited. “Oh. I’m not going up with you. I don’t like to go in there since she … since she went missing. Was there something else?”
“Yes. Your husband and I didn’t talk about any facts. I know only that Kris is missing. I know it’s difficult, but could you tell me how you learned… .?”
“Kris’s roommate, or suitemate, at school. She called my husband at his office in the morning. Said that Kris told her she was going to the library to study the night before. Her suitemate said she stayed up reading and then went to sleep. When she woke up the next morning, Kris wasn’t there and her bed hadn’t been slept in. She tried her cell phone and didn’t get an answer. That’s not like Kris. She was an athlete. She wasn’t into parties or anything. She treasured her sleep. Always, since she was little… .”
“Thank you, Mrs. Kramer. What is Kris’s roommate’s name?”
“Akilah. Akilah Ziyenge. One of her soccer teammates.”
“Okay. I’ll just go up and look at the room now. I can let myself out.”
The door to the room was closed. I opened it, went in, and closed the door softly behind me.
The air inside was still, the room silent. It was the room of a typical teenage girl post-Title IX, a girl consumed with active sports, not music or drugs or boys.
A sleigh bed, framed by windows, stood in the center of an outside wall. A net bag half-filled with scuffed soccer balls occupied one corner.
Cream walls almost completely covered with posters of soccer stars in action. In one, Mia Hamm raised her arms in triumph, a huge smile splitting her face. Another poster featured a grimacing Hope Solo crouching to prepare for a penalty kick.
And one small poster almost hidden by posters of recent or active players featured an ageless Pelé, body parallel to the ground in a bicycle kick, the great thigh muscles looking as inhuman as oiled machinery.
I didn’t search any drawers or look under the bed for clues. The Birmingham police, detective novels to the contrary, would have been as thorough as the KGB. After absorbing the visual patterns, I stood at the foot of the bed, closed my eyes and entered into the stillness of the closed room, the only movement my breath. My inhalations and exhalations connected us; I was the room, the room was me.
What do you have to tell me, Kris? Are you out there somewhere? What are your secrets? Why have I heard different versions of when you were last seen? Do you want to be found?
After a couple of minutes, I didn’t have any more answers than I’d ever had, so I opened the door, closed it softly behind me, walked down the stairs and let myself out of the house.
Grubbs was waiting in his car with the engine running. When I got in, he drove away without a word.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The board of trustees of Alabama Southern probably started every meeting with a prayer that God would move the campus to another location.
If they didn’t, they should.
Alabama Southern squatted just off I-20 near the rotting old stadium called Legion Field, in a neighborhood otherwise filled with crack houses, shot houses, shooting galleries, boom boxes and nightly gunfire.
Businesses move. Upwardly mobile couples build, buy, sell, trade, swap houses like old men at a coin show.
But once a college decides on a campus location, it’s pretty much stuck there. During real-estate bubbles or during the recessions that follow, there isn’t much of a market for a nice, clean-but-lived-in early-70’s biology building.
So Alabama Southern opted for the only alterna
tive: they got serious about security long before September 11, 2001. They surrounded the campus with a twelve-foot fence of brick pillars and wrought-iron spikes. They installed gates with twenty-four-hour guards and security cameras.
To a visitor from out of town, these measures probably seemed paranoid or elitist. To Birmingham natives, they were no more than a display of common sense.
I had an appointment with the chief of the campus police at two o’clock in the afternoon. After Grubbs dropped me at the hotel, I had a sandwich sent up to my room, read through the notes in the qui tam file again, then took off my shoes, lay down on the bed, and rested for twenty minutes. Then I washed and dried my face, put my shoes and coat back on, collected my rental car, and took the ramp to I-59/I-20 South.
The Alabama Southern campus sat just east of the interstate off the Arkadelphia Road exit. I had a note from Leon Grubbs to show to the campus cop manning the gate a hundred yards inside the road approaching the campus. The cop nodded when he saw my note and told me to wait. He stepped inside his little guard house and spoke into his radio. Then he raised the red and white stick gate and gave me a half-wave, half salute.
The administration building could have housed the HQ at a Marine base: three stories, rambling, an indeterminate beige concrete on the exterior.
Inside, the building had a peculiar odor; not unpleasant, a mix of county courthouse and floral shop. An office directory on the wall near the elevators directed campus police department visitors to the basement.
I took the stairs.
Square green plastic signs suspended from the ceiling pointed to the right above the legend: Director of Campus Security. The chief’s office suite occupied the northwestern corner of the basement.
An efficient-looking woman wearing a dark blue police uniform, who could have been any age from late twenties to fifty, sat at a computer desk. She had short dark brown hair and unpolished fingernails. She was busy at a keyboard but paused when I walked in.
“You must be Mr. Slate,” she said.
“It’s just Slate. I have an appointment with the chief.”
She nodded without smiling. “The director is expecting you. It will be just a moment. Take a seat if you wish.” She turned back to the keyboard.
On the wall facing her desk were framed photographs of a man in a police uniform with persons of note who had presumably visited the campus at some time: George H. W. Bush, Eddie Murphy, Hillary Clinton, William F. Buckley, Jr.
The odds of my appearing on the chief’s wall seemed slim.
“Mr. Slate?”
“Just Slate.”
“Oh, yes. Slate. Well, the director is ready for you. You may go on in.”
Chief John Miller looked too young for a Southern police chief, even of a college police department. The face was unlined, and the nearly-black hair looked as though he spent too much to maintain it.
Miller wore a dark gray business suit with a white button-down shirt. The coat hung on a wooden coat rack in the corner behind the door. His tie had red and white stars sprinkled on a blue background. I felt more comfortable already.
We shook hands, and Miller sat behind a large desk with lots of overhang. I sat across from him in a dark red leather chair. More photos of Miller with celebrities hung on the wall behind the desk. I didn’t see any family pictures.
Miller got right to the point. “I understand that Don Kramer hired you to investigate the disappearance of his daughter.”
“Your understanding is correct.”
Miller shrugged. “I’ve always tried to know something about the people who come to see me. Especially if they’re coming to investigate a missing student. Kris Kramer’s disappearance takes on a little more meaning for all of us now that her father appears to have been murdered.”
I shrugged. “For some maybe. Any young woman’s unexplained disappearance merits immediate investigation. Miss Kramer became important to me when her father hired me.”
“Understood.” Expressionless, Miller nodded.
“How long have you been Director of Campus Security?”
One corner of Miller’s mouth turned up, just a little.
“They gave me that title in January of 2002. I’ve been chief of the campus police here for almost fifteen years.”
“Lots of policemen became directors of security after September 2001.”
“Lots of new titles, a little more money. Nothing else different.”
“You have a lot of missing students here at Southern?”
Miller shook his head. “Three in my time here. One turned up in New Orleans with her boyfriend. Another turned out to be a Jane Doe admitted to the psych ward at the charity hospital in Atlanta.”
“And then Kris.”
“Then Kris. I was counting Kris in the three, but the other two were last seen on this campus. Officially, Kris Kramer is not missing from campus. She was last seen somewhere else.”
“Where?”
Miller’s eyes widened a hair. “I would have thought you already knew that.”
I shrugged. “You don’t know, you ask a question.”
Miller nodded. “My department’s investigation showed that Kris was last seen by her mother when they were both leaving Park Plaza downtown.”
“Her father’s law office.”
Miller opened an ivory folder on his desk and scanned it.
“Correct. Afternoon of Thursday January 19. Mother and daughter had been to see the father at his law firm. My notes say the mother drove to Indian Hills Academy to pick up Kris’s little brother. Kris has not been seen on campus since.”
Susan Kramer had told me Kris’s suitemate saw Kris the evening before she disappeared, not that she was the last person to see Kris. Mrs. Kramer had also said that the suitemate had called Kramer’s law office when Kris did not answer her cell phone. Don Kramer had believed that Susan Kramer was the last person to see Kris before her disappearance. “Did your people interview anyone here on campus?”
“Sure. Roommate, soccer coach, professors. Not much there. She didn’t show up for any classes and appears not to have spoken with anyone here after she left the campus on Thursday.”
“Would you mind if I looked through your file?”
“No, but I can do better than that.”
He turned to a keyboard at his left and typed a few strokes. The office door opened, and Miller’s secretary walked in and took the folder.
“We’re on the same team. Celeste will make a complete copy for you. Anything else you need, let me know.”
“There is something I need. I need to interview Kris’s roommate.”
Miller gestured toward the monitor. “Transcript of our interview with the roommate is in the file. I probably shouldn’t even be giving you that, but, hey, maybe you see something we didn’t, it helps locate the girl. But as to an interview, I have to say no. No interviews with the roommate. No interviews with any students.”
“Sounds pretty cut and dried, Chief.”
“It’s the law, Slate. You’re a lawyer. Buckley Amendment. Kid breaks his leg at a frat football game, we need a release to call his mother.”
Miller stood. “The file you’re getting will give you some information that might help you look for Kris Kramer. But you will not find any other student’s name. This school will not get sued on my account.”
I stood and shook Miller’s hand. “Just one thing. Since we’re on the same team, I assume your people won’t mind if I hang around campus and talk to the few people here who aren’t students. Am I right?”
“You’re welcome here on my – on the campus, but I don’t think you’ll learn much. Kris wasn’t here when she disappeared.”
“More than I knew yesterday, Chief.”
Celeste had a copy of the material from the department’s file in another ivory folder for me as soon as I stepped outside Miller’s office. Efficient. Or in a hurry to get rid of me. One thing I knew. Miller was damn sure – and damn glad — the girl hadn’t disa
ppeared from campus.
The athletic complex was on the back side of the campus, down the hill toward the interstate.
A thick copse of woods separated the campus from the highway, and the soccer stadium where both the Alabama Southern men and women played NAIA soccer games was the last clear space before the woods. The Physical Education department and athletic offices occupied a low three-story beige structure that hugged the hill above the stadium.
There was no receptionist or security desk on the ground floor. A black locator board with white letters indicated that the soccer offices were on the second floor. A sweeping cast iron circular stairway in the center of the building led to the second and third floors.
The second floor corridor walls were filled with photos of former soccer players, framed media guide covers, framed photos of teams from each year of the program with won-loss records and statistics.
Kris Kramer was a freshman. No team picture for this year. No team picture might ever include Kris Kramer.
I continued down the hall until I reached the end of the corridor. The men’s soccer head coach’s office was on the left, the women’s on the right. Both had doors of pebbled glass with the coaches’ names etched inside an opaque strip at eye level.
The name of the women’s coach was Sarah Kronenberg.
There were no lights on the men’s side. A narrow band of light striped the carpet at the bottom of the women’s coach’s office, however, and light filtered weakly through the translucent glass into the corridor.
I pushed on the door. It opened onto a small office with a couple of inexpensive waiting-room chairs and a desk.
The room was empty. To the right of the desk was a solid wooden door. I crossed to the door. I could hear faint sounds inside. I knocked twice and opened the door.
Inside, a woman with a blonde pixie haircut was sitting on the dark blue carpet with her back against a sofa covered in burgundy vinyl. She wore gray sweatpants and a black long-sleeved tee shirt. Her feet were bare.
A flat-panel television monitor hung on the opposite wall. A couple of remotes lay on the floor beside the woman. In front of her on the carpet was a notebook computer. Aside from the light from the monitors, the room was dark.
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