"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."