The Deadhouse (7 page)

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 was 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.

I began to think of all the cases I had handled with students from
schools throughout the city and to make a mental list of what the
relationship was between victim and offender, so I could pull the files
and examine the facts. For the students at King's, the illusion of the
sanctity of the university setting was about to be shattered.

"Want to stop by my place and relax for a bit before we head to the
soiree?" The party was held at the Park Avenue Armory, on Sixty-sixth
Street, just a few blocks from my home.

"Sure. Is Jake gonna be there tonight?"

"No. He doesn't get back to New York until Sunday." The schedule
Jake Tyler had as a political correspondent and stand-in anchor for
Brian Williams on
NBC Nightly News
made his life even less
predictable than my own. It was a pleasure, for a change, to be
involved with a lover who had no complaints about my unavailability
when I was called out on a major case.