Never Tell (11 page)
Authors: Alafair Burke
H
ow can you drink this? It tastes like burnt motor oil.” Rogan scrutinized the name of the coffee shop printed on the side of the cup in his hand. “
Coffee Monster?
More like monstrous coffee.”
In the hour since Rogan had joined her in the car at Seventy-fourth and Madison, another three news vans had arrived outside the school. Ellie was on her second helping of java from the coffee shop across the street. “It’s right here. It’s caffeine. Whatever. Hey, there’s our guy.”
In the sideview mirror of their parked Crown Vic, Kenneth Wallace looked pretty much the same as he had in the photograph Rogan had found online, posing for a team shot at a run-for-cancer-research 5K. Same dark-blond tousled hair, thin face, slightly crooked nose as if from a break. Ellie could certainly understand why this guy was the campus dreamboat.
She started to open the car door as Wallace turned to walk in their direction, but Rogan reached across her and held the door shut. “Hold up.”
They watched as reporters swarmed the physics teacher. Even through the closed window, she could hear their questions. “Are you a parent? Do you teach at Casden? Did you know Julia Whitmire? We’ve heard that the school is refusing to make a statement, even to parents. Why are students being told not to speak with us? What is Casden trying to hide?”
The teacher held up his palms to block his face. His brisk walk turned into a jog, and the reporters finally gave up once he hit Madison Avenue.
“
Now
we go,” Rogan said. They hopped out of the car and caught up with him just as he crossed Madison at a diagonal, ducking into a café around the corner on Seventy-third.
Once he’d placed his order—something called a Panini Americano—they identified themselves. She saw him eyeing the door and wondered if he was considering bolting.
“I guess I don’t need to worry about being seen. The rest of the teachers were too afraid of the reporters outside to leave campus for lunch, and our headmistress is infamous for bringing in her own portion-controlled meals.”
“And you?” Ellie asked.
“A guy’s got to eat. I told the vultures I had nothing to say, and now, voilà—” The man behind the counter handed him a white bag and a paper cup. “I can eat this sandwich and pretend I’m in Paris. Plus the coffee’s a hell of a lot better than
that
crap.”
Rogan gave his Monster Coffee cup another look of disapproval before tossing it in the trash. “You mind eating here?” he asked. “We’d like a few words with you. Probably better to do it away from the vultures.”
Ellie ordered two coffees from the counter before scoping out a small corner table.
“We’ve been surprised at the school’s reluctance to cooperate,” Ellie said. “On the one hand, we’ve got Julia’s parents so eager for answers they’ve announced a cash reward. Meanwhile, Julia’s own school has—well, it sounds like you know.”
“Our headmistress, Margaret Carter—have you met her yet?”
Ellie nodded.
“She rounded all the teachers up this morning to break the news about Julia. She expressed the appropriate amount of sadness, etcetera, but the message was clear. She’d be the point person for all communications, even with students—and it was pretty obvious she was going to remain as tight-lipped as possible.”
“And yet,” Rogan said, “you leave the building for lunch. You’re sitting here with us.”
He finished swallowing a huge bite of his sandwich before speaking. “I graduated first in my class in college with a degree in physics. Then I got a master’s at UC Berkeley. I’m about two years away from finishing my Ph.D. thesis. I wanted to be an astronaut.”
“Past tense?” Ellie asked.
“Turns out you may as well want to be a rock star. And until I get a Ph.D., there’s no tenure-track jobs to be had. Then you’ve got the private sector, where it’s pretty much impossible to do interesting work without somehow being part of the military-industrial complex.” He smiled. “I know, I should have been born earlier. I’m, like, the youngest hippie in America. And so, at least for now, I’m Mr. Wallace, mild-mannered physics teacher to the future leaders of the Free World. But I’ll tell you what: there’s no way I let some bureaucrat like Margaret Carter dictate what I can and cannot say when one of my students is dead.”
An antiauthoritarian free-spirit might be just the type to cross boundaries with an underage student. Ellie decided to let the topic rip. “We’ve been told you and Julia had a particularly close student-teacher relationship.”
He smiled and looked up at the ceiling. “Ah, classic. These kids are totally predictable. Let me guess: the always-provocative Marcus Graze?”
Her silence resolved any doubt.
“That would be the same Mr. Graze who just got a D for refusing to show any of his work on most of his assignments this semester. Pretty sure he’s cribbed some answers here and there from his peers.”
“So you don’t mind telling us where you were Sunday night?” she asked.
“Depending on the time, either with my wife’s family in Boston, or next to my wife on a plane headed back to New York. You can check with her if you’d like. Her family, too. The airlines, whatever you need.”
She nodded.
“Don’t get me wrong. God knows, Julia tried. So have others, but trust me, I’m quite unavailable.” Wallace pulled out a wallet from his back pocket and flipped it open to a photograph of a knock-out gorgeous brunette and a tiny baby. “This amazing woman is my wife. In addition to being breathtakingly beautiful, she’s a wonderful mother and a brilliant physician to boot. I’ve been off the market since I met her my freshman year in college. When these girls at the school start sniffing around, I wonder if it’s because I put out this air of complete unattainability. It’s like they all want the designer handbag that’s back-ordered for five months. It’s probably for the best that the attention seems to fall to me, because, honestly? I know some pretty decent guys who might not have been able to resist. Julia was—precocious. And more persistent than most. Pretty aggressive for such a young girl. She may have even told Marcus Graze something happened with me, just to have a story to tell.”
“You make her sound pretty troubled. Did anyone ever try to help?”
“There are too many of them to help, quite frankly. I saw my share of indulged kids at Occidental and Berkeley, but the crew here? Part of it’s the wealth, but a lot of it’s generational. They’re pressured to be absolutely perfect, and yet simultaneously told they can do no wrong. No one ever says no to them. If something isn’t right, it’s someone else’s fault. They blame someone like me for their D, or they call a doctor for a diagnosis.”
Ellie was glad he raised the topic. “We’re under the impression that the students take prescription drugs like they’re multivitamins.”
“That’s not just here. I mentioned that my wife’s a doctor? She might be even more idealistic than I am. She refuses to take handouts from the pharmaceutical industry or to write prescriptions people don’t need—especially for children who have nothing wrong with them. Between the two of us, we’ve managed to make ourselves broke, but at least we can look ourselves in the mirror. Get this.” He had abandoned his sandwich on the table, now animated by the current conversation. Ellie could imagine him as a college lecturer. “I talked to Maria—that’s my wife—about this last year when I found out a bunch of students had taken Ritalin and Adderall to help study for finals. It turns out the number of kids on psychotropic drugs is staggering. There have been cases of two-year-olds on Prozac. They now permit diagnosis of ADHD in children as young as four. And Maria thinks almost all of the diagnoses are bogus. Then, about ten percent of kids who
haven’t
been diagnosed take their friends’ drugs, just to get high. Was Julia messing with that kind of stuff?”
“You’ll understand we can’t tell you her medical history,” Ellie said.
“Well, the rumor is she killed herself but that her parents think otherwise. I’m not sure which is worse.”
Ellie did. She knew which was worse. And she knew why Bill and Katherine Whitmire so desperately needed another answer.
“At any other school, we’d expect to get access to every single student to find out what she may have been going through, who she was seeing, whether she was having problems. But here, kids are even shutting down their Facebook pages. Is it possible Julia was being bullied?” She wouldn’t be the first teenager to kill herself after a relentless campaign of torment that kids were capable of launching these days, typical schoolyard teasing now amplified by a thousand with a turbo boost from technology.
“I hate to say this, but Julia would have been more likely to be the bullier than the bullied in that kind of scenario. They’re pulling down their profiles because the school put the fear of God in them—no, worse, the fear of tackiness. Some kids might trade a lung for the infamy of some lame song on YouTube, but Casden’s all about propriety. The headmistress made it very clear: even if they set their pages to ‘private,’ all it takes is for one friend to cooperate with the media.”
“Next thing the kid knows,” Rogan said, “his party pictures are on the front page of a tabloid, the poster child for prep school dysfunction.”
“Exactly. So to make sure nothing is taken out of context, no Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, all that nonsense. One of the administrators told me that the school even hired a public relations firm to search the Internet for stories about the school and have the negative ones
scrubbed
. It’s like
1984
.”
“But we saw parents lobbying the headmistress. They were angry, and they wanted information. Won’t a private school need to listen to that kind of pressure?”
Wallace was back to his sandwich, pausing to swallow before responding. “It’ll be interesting to watch the fallout. The kind of people who send their children to this school are used to having their way. But it’s ultimately about supply and demand. You wouldn’t believe some of the family names we’ve turned down. Even the head of the Fed needed a friend to pull strings to get his kid in. Parents can complain, but at the end of the day, what are they going to do? Yank their kids? There are a hundred other families lined up who are willing to tell themselves that two dead teenagers is just a coincidence.”
“Is it?” Rogan asked. “Just a coincidence?”
Wallace crushed the empty wrapper of his sandwich into a tight ball. “I think even I have said enough at this point, Detectives.”
As they were heading back to the car, Rogan’s cell phone buzzed. “Rogan. . . . Yeah. . . . Can’t you just tell me? . . . All right. We’ll be right down.”
“Now what?”
“That was the CIS detective. He found something on Julia’s laptop.”
M
ost law enforcement jobs came with cool-sounding titles, as with the forensic scientists who worked as
criminalists
, or the dispatchers, who were
communications technicians
. Even the clerical staff at least got nifty acronyms—
PAAs
, short for police administrative aides.
And so, unsurprisingly, the cops who did the increasingly important work of analyzing computers for the NYPD weren’t merely detectives: they were CIS detectives.
Typically, a victim’s computer would have been inspected at the precinct by one of the department’s “computer associates”—civilians who tended toward the long-haired, lanky, Dungeons & Dragons techno-nerd variety, more comic-con than
Columbo
. But when the daughter of Bill Whitmire was involved, Rogan had sent the laptop directly to headquarters to be examined by a CIS detective.
Because Julia was dead, they did not need a court’s permission to search every byte of the computer’s data. They could read her documents, follow her Internet surfing trail, and pore over her e-mail history. With her death, Julia had lost any right to privacy.
Today’s CIS detective introduced himself as Peter Pettinato. From the first glance, Ellie could see he was not the usual only-left-the-basement-to-answer-the-door-for-carry-out type. He was an actual grown-up with short black hair and an equally tidy mustache. There were, however, signs of a creative personality. His cubicle was decorated with photographs of his pets and a few appearances he’d made in local theater productions. In place of a typical office chair, he sat on a bright blue yoga ball.
As Pettinato reached for the closed laptop on his desk, Ellie noticed a sticker of a yellow bird with a white belly on the back of the computer, right above a sticker that read: “Mean People Suck.”
The bird image was familiar. Where had she seen it before?
The Brady Bunch
? Something about it reminded her of the oldies repeat-channel she used to watch when she was little. That was it.
The Partridge Family
! It wasn’t an identical cartoon, but the bird reminded her of
The Partridge Family
.
“Yo. Earth to Hatcher. You there, girl?”
Rogan waved a hand in front of her eyes, as if to check her sight.
“It’s like that parakeet hypnotized you for a sec.”
“Sorry.” The bird sticker made her sad. Sadder than Julia’s water-pruned and lifeless body in the bathtub. With all the emphasis on the Whitmires’ wealth and Julia’s life of privilege and precociousness, Ellie had neglected to remember that she was still only a sixteen-year-old girl. A part of her had still been childlike. It was yet another fact Ellie had overlooked during that initial callout to the townhouse.
Pettinato motioned for them to look over his shoulder. “All right, so here’s what seems relevant based on what you told me yesterday—suspected suicide, slit wrist, found in the tub. You asked me specifically to search for first drafts of the goodbye note, or for any Internet research about depression or suicide. I got zilch on both fronts. The only documents I found on the hard drive all appeared to be school papers—Shakespeare, Civil War, that kind of stuff. I didn’t find any Googling for methods of death, for mental heath issues, for anything like that.”
“So what
did
she look at online?” Rogan asked.
“Typical teenage fare. Facebook. Twitter—though that was more one-way communication.”
“What does that mean?”
Ellie braced herself for the usual loud sigh that followed questions that struck CIS detectives as stupid, but Pettinato showed no signs of attitude. “It’s how a lot of quote-unquote
real people
use Twitter. They don’t actually post—or tweet, in the lexicon. But they have accounts so they can follow their favorite celebrities. She followed twits like those big-butt sisters and smack-talking rap stars. That kind of nonsense. So, anyway, Facebook. Twitter. Lots of online shopping. Fashion sites. Yelp for reviews of restaurants and clubs and stuff. Celebrity gossip like
TMZ
,
Us Weekly
, and Perez Hilton. Really, not all that much activity as far as surfing goes. But I did find one hit over the weekend to a blog about childhood sex abuse. I thought maybe that could be related, you know?”
If Julia had been abused, it would put her eating disorder and promiscuity into context. It would also make her a prime candidate for suicide.
“And explain to us exactly how you can be sure Julia accessed the blog?” Rogan asked. “And, to be sure, we’re not total Luddites—we get history windows, time stamps, etcetera. It just helps when you break it down.”
Pettinato was waving away the explanations. “I may be CIS, but I’m also a detective. I get it. So, like you said, there’s a history window involved. If we open Safari here . . . that’s the Internet browser”—he smiled at the exaggeratedly elementary level of the tutorial—“and hit Show All History, and then look at this column called Visit Date? Now we have a list of every site she went to, and the date and time when the visit occurred. And here, on Saturday night, you’ll see three entries for this blog.”
He clicked on the link and the website opened. “Second Acts: Confessions of a Former Victim and Current Survivor.”
Pettinato scrolled down the screen slowly so they could get a sense of the subject matter.
“Can you tell if she’d been following the blog for long?” Rogan asked. “Or going to other websites related to sex abuse?”
“No, this is the only one.”
“It could be a complete fluke,” Ellie offered. She herself had wound up at countless unintended online sites thanks to random hyperlinks, pop-up ads, mistaken mouse clicks, and search-engine snafus.
“That’s what I thought at first,” Pettinato said, “but I swear there’s a reason I thought you’d want to see this.”
He pulled up the history page again, and this time Ellie noticed that the “Second Acts” blog was listed three consecutive times. “Wait a second. Why are there three entries in a row if she only went to the website once?”
“Ah. Because the fact of three different entries in the history window doesn’t mean three separate visits to the blog. Otherwise we’d see the names of other websites in between if she was doing other surfing. Those three entries are for navigation within the blog itself. See: if we click on this first entry here”—he moved the cursor and clicked accordingly—“we pull up the home page for the blog. This is the main page, what you get whenever you enter the main website address. Got that?”
He looked to both Rogan and Ellie for confirmation they were following his step-by-step tour.
“Okay. Then we go back to the history to see what happened next. We click on this second entry, and now we see the comments that came in response to the blog post for that day.”
Rogan nodded. “So Julia would have first seen the post of the day on the home page, but then she clicked to see the comments.”
“Correct. Now here’s what’s interesting. If you click on this third entry in her history, it takes you to the ‘Create Journal Entry’ box in the comments section.”
“Meaning that she posted a comment?” Rogan asked.
“Well, I can’t tell you that with a hundred percent certainty just from the laptop. The only way to do that would be if she had a keystroke recorder on her computer. But, yeah, I’m pretty confident that’s what happened.”
“Explain to me how you know that?” Ellie said. Pettinato was a detective—and perhaps a talented one at that—but she didn’t want his inferences. She needed to conclude for herself that two and two added up to four.
“Okay, but if I’m right, am I allowed to claim the hundred-thou reward? Just saw it online.”
“I’m quite sure the three of us aren’t eligible.”
“What I know for certain is that the three listings in her history correlate to these three actions. One, she pulled up the home page Saturday at 10:02 p.m. Two, she pulled up the comments, also at 10:02 p.m. And, three, she pulled up the page for entering comments at 10:03 p.m. Now, if you look here on the blog post that went up on Saturday, there’s only one comment posted within ninety minutes of that time, and it was finalized at 10:04 p.m.”
She understood now why Pettinato had concluded that Julia was the author of the comment posted at 10:04.
“And here’s the kicker.” He pushed back from the laptop to make sure they could get a clear look. “This is the comment that was posted that night.”
“If you thought that night twenty years ago was bad, wait until you see what I have planned. You won’t remember a single time on the clock. Maybe a day on the calendar if you’re lucky. Maybe a week. Or maybe I’ll keep you busy for a month. One thing I know for certain: You will not live to write about it.”
Ellie remembered the physics teacher saying that Julia was more likely to have been bullying someone else than being bullied herself. Julia may have only been sixteen years old, but these were not the words of a normal teenager.
“I assume you have no idea why your victim would say such a thing?” Pettinato asked.
They both muttered their no’s, still taking in the new information.
“Now, here’s where things get really perplexing. Your victim died Sunday night? Well, that’s all and well if we’re right about her posting the one comment on Saturday night. But guess what? There have been five other threats since Monday. Unless Julia Whitmire is surfing the Web from the afterlife, someone else out there is continuing whatever she started.”