The Man Who Killed His Brother

  “But”—he smiled warmly—“that’s a few years in the future. Right now, Julian is busy getting our files ready for computerization, It’s a huge job. First he had to get copies of everything from each individual school. And now he has to put all that data in a usable form. Fortunately he’s an expert at it. That’s why the board hired him.”

  Kirke listened to all this without any particular show of respect, but at least he didn’t interrupt. On the other hand, he didn’t waste time when the chairman finally finished his little speech. Right away, he asked Ginny, “Do you have consent from the parents?”

  “Not in writing,” she said evenly. “We’ve spoken to them, that’s all.”

  “We’d be violating the confidentiality of our students if we opened our files without some kind of written permission.”

  “That’s right,” Stretto said. Nobody even looked at him.

  “In any case,” Kirke went on, “I don’t think it would be worth your trouble.” His voice held just a hint of a sneer. “What could you possibly find? From our point of view, all runaways are the same. They’re all having trouble of some kind. They all miss school for a while. Eventually most of them return. If some of them have something in common, you wouldn’t find it in our files.”

  Innocent as sugar, Ginny asked, “You don’t keep any record of the runaways who end up dead?”

  “Dead?” Stretto demanded. “Are these girls dead?”

  Now she let him feel some of the bite in her tone. “In the past two years, seven junior-high girls in this school system have run away from home and died.”

  “But”—the chairman was groping—“what does that have to do with us?”

  “Those seven girls are connected in some way. And they’re connected to the girls we’re looking for. We want to find them before the same thing happens to them. We can’t afford to overlook anything—and one possibility is that there are facts buried away in your files that could help us.”

  “This is very upsetting.” Stretto looked upset. “Of course we want to help in any way we can.” Probably because he didn’t have any better ideas, he latched onto what Kirke had said earlier. “If you’ll get written consent from the parents, we’ll show you everything we have.”

  “We don’t have time to do that,” Ginny snapped. “Those seven girls died as a direct result of whatever made them run away. The process has already started for two more.” She was laying it on thick. “Every delay could be fatal.” I wanted to applaud.

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Fistoulari.” If you could trust his face, Paul Stretto really was sorry. “There’s nothing I can do.” But if he wanted us to believe him, he blew it a second later by turning to Kirke and asking, “Is there, Julian?”

  Kirke said, “No.” He made the word sound like he’d chewed it out of pig iron.

  Ginny considered for a moment. Then she said, “Give me the notes, Brew.”

  I dug them out and handed them over.

  “Mr. Stretto,” she said grimly, “we have reason to believe that these girls didn’t just die. They may have been killed. Murdered.” She stressed the word. “Each girl sent her parents a note. I have some of them here, and I’d like you to read them.”

  One by one, she put the Christie, Larsen; and Hannibal notes in front of him.

  He was confused, but her tone didn’t leave him any choice. He read them, then read them again.

  “Now please read these two,” she said as she showed him Alathea’s note, and Mittie’s. “They were written by the girls we’re trying to find.”

  He read them too, but he seemed to have difficulty understanding what they said.

  “They’re all written on the same kind of paper,” Ginny observed roughly. “The watermarks are identical.”

  A minute later I was surprised to see a change come over Mr. Paul M. Stretto, chairman of the board of education. All of a sudden, he didn’t look like a man who just happened to have an electable face. He looked like he’d earned it. “Julian,” he said in a completely different tone, “get Martha and Astin in here.”

  If all this made any impression on Kirke, he didn’t show it. He just got up and left the room. When he came back, he had a man and a woman in tow. The man looked worn out, like a pencil that’s been sharpened too often, but the woman bristled with energy.

  Stretto introduced us. The man was Astin Greenling, curriculum vice-chairman for the board. The woman was Martha Scurvey, budget vice-chairman. Aside from Stretto and Kirke, they were the only full-time members of the board. The other elected members served part-time.

  Stretto gave Greenling and Scurvey a quick summary covering most of the facts, then handed them the notes.

  Neither of them seemed to grasp the significance of what they read. Greenling muttered, “You’d think we didn’t teach penmanship at all.” Scurvey gave a sigh that puffed out her cheeks. “If this kind of thing gets out, we’re in trouble. We already have a hard enough time selling our budget to the legislature.”

  “I didn’t call you in here for your opinions,” Stretto rapped out. Under his hair paint, he must’ve been a secretly decisive man. Or else he was doing a damn good imitation. “I simply want witnesses so that there won’t be any confusion. These notes have convinced me that Ms. Fistoulari is right. As of now, I’m instructing Julian to give her our complete cooperation. I don’t know what’s happening to these girls, but I want it to stop.”

  There was silence in the room. Then Scurvey said, “Wouldn’t it be better to call the police?”

  “Leave that to me, Martha,” the chairman answered.

  Finally I figured out what he was doing. He was putting on a show for two influential—i.e., voting—members of the board. A display of power to consolidate his position. When a diplomat does it, it’s called statesmanship. But it was a gift horse, and I didn’t look it in the mouth. All I cared about was getting to see those files.

  Stretto dismissed us. I picked up the notes, and we followed Kirke back down the hall to his office. There I gave him our list of names. Mostly because I didn’t like him, I watched him carefully for a reaction to any of the names, but I didn’t spot one. For all he cared, apparently, I’d read them out of the phone book. He wrote them down, then left us in his office.

  He came back with the files fast enough to prove that he knew his job. But he didn’t leave us alone while we read them.

  It took us half an hour to go through them all. I hated to admit it, even to myself, but as far as I could see Kirke was right. The files didn’t do us any good. I took a few notes—the girls’ schedules on the days they disappeared, the names of their teachers, things like that—but the information didn’t help. If Ginny found anything interesting, she didn’t say so. But I didn’t expect her to, not with Kirke hovering over us.

  When we were finished, she thanked him—which I thought wasn’t called for—and led the way out of his office. As I followed her through the door, he stopped me. He stood up close and whispered so that Ginny couldn’t hear him, “Do you always tag along behind her like this?”

  “Like what?”

  He shook his head, dismissed the question. “You’re wasting your time. By the time they reach junior high, most girls are nothing but little whores. There’s nothing special about the ones that run away. Did you know that we’re having a near-epidemic of VD among the junior-high boys?”

  I wrapped my left hand around his upper arm and dug my fingers in until his face turned white. “Watch your mouth,” I whispered back at him. “You’re talking about my niece.”

  I gave his arm an extra squeeze to remember me by, then hurried after Ginny. I was grinning, but I wasn’t amused.

  Once we were outside the office and on our way back to the parking lot, Ginny asked me, “What was that all about?”

  “Kirke didn’t much like the way he got overruled.”

  She nodded sharply. “Sonofabitch.”

  I agreed with her. But the main thing bothering me was the feeling that it was all was
ted. We weren’t getting anywhere.

  9

  We didn’t talk about it. Ginny had a pinched look between her eyes, the one that meant she was thinking hard. I had no idea what she was thinking about, but I learned long ago to leave her alone when she looks like that.

  I didn’t even ask her where we were going. She headed straight for her Olds, opened the door and got in. I wedged myself into my Torino and followed.

  We ended up at Mountain Junior High, where we had another session with Vice-principal Rumsfeld. She wasn’t exactly overjoyed to see us again, but this time Ginny had a much clearer idea of what she wanted to know, and the vice-principal wasn’t the kind of woman who could turn us down if there was any chance at all of helping one of her students. She took us to meet Alathea’s PE teacher, and the two of them showed us Alathea’s shortcut between her fifth and sixth periods.

  “We don’t normally allow our students outside the school buildings unsupervised,” Ms. Rumsfeld said sternly, “but I understand that this was something of a special case.”

  “Alathea had an awkward schedule,” the PE teacher said. “She had a hard time getting from the gym to her next class before it started. She asked permission to take this shortcut. I didn’t see any reason to turn her down. She was a very dependable girl.”

  Very dependable. Yes. That’s what I had to keep in mind. I didn’t know any of the seven dead girls. For all I knew, every one of them might’ve been a raving lunatic. But I knew Alathea. She wasn’t crazy, or on drugs, or a whore.

  With the vice-principal and the PE teacher guiding us, we needed about five seconds to see why Alathea had wanted to use the outside route. For someone in a hurry, it was much easier than going through the buildings. But it was also a perfect place to disappear from, if that’s what you had in mind. The buildings stood close to the street, and on that side most of them—the gym, the auditorium, one end of the library—didn’t have any windows. Alathea hadn’t just been alone, she’d been out of sight.

  Which fit with what Ginny’d learned about Rosalynn Swift and Esther Hannibal. But it didn’t mean anything to me. If you wanted to run away from school, would you do it when you were surrounded by kids and teachers, or when you were alone?

  But Ginny seemed satisfied with whatever it was we’d learned. She thanked Ms. Rumsfeld and the PE teacher, told them we wouldn’t bother them again if we could help it. Then we left.

  This time she led me all the way down Paseo Grande to the Murchison Building. Back to her office.

  Ted was there waiting for us. He looked like he’d spent the day in a dryer at the laundromat—hot, thirsty, and about two sizes smaller. But his eyes weren’t bulging the way they did last night. They were sunken and sizzling, as if they were being cooked from inside by whatever he was thinking.

  He didn’t say anything until we were settled in Fistoulari Investigations’ back room. Then he confronted Ginny. Standing in front of her with his hands on his hips, he looked like the losing end of a cockfight, plucked half to death and still ready to peck anything in sight. “You’re wasting my time,” he said.

  That surprised her. She looked at him hard. “I thought you wanted to help.” Even sitting down, she was practically his size.

  “I want to find Mittie. This way isn’t getting me anywhere.”

  Well, off and on I’d been thinking the same thing myself, but for some reason it irritated me to hear him say it. Apparently I felt that nobody but me was allowed to disagree with Ginny—which makes even less sense when you think about it. But I didn’t get a chance to argue with him. She was working on what he said faster than I was. “Why not? Didn’t you get anything?” she asked.

  “Oh, I got what you wanted, all right.” He took two half sheets of paper out of his pocket and tossed them on the desk. “I know we’re in a grubby business, but it isn’t supposed to be this bad. Nailing people who screw around, clearing people who don’t—that’s what we’re supposed to do. Not this. It was bad enough talking to those Consciewitz people. They’re lunatics—all that stuff about an ‘uncle in Detroit’—but they miss their daughter so much it’s making them sick. They were practically desperate to make me take their note. They say it proves she didn’t run away. I don’t know how, their explanations didn’t make any sense. As far as I can tell, believing she didn’t run away is the only thing that stops them from killing themselves.

  “But May-Belle Podhorentz’s parents—My God, Ginny! I practically had to extort that note out of them. It’s the only piece of her they had left. After what happened to her, they had to put up with some half-wit cop who gave them a bunch of shit. They spent ten months being eaten alive by fear and shame and God knows what else. Then I came along. Next time, just ask me to rape the rest of their kids. It’ll be easier.”

  Ginny still hadn’t even glanced at the notes on her desk. But if Ted made her mad, she kept it to herself. She just held her eyes on him and asked, “Did they say if they thought May-Belle’s note was written under duress?”

  “They didn’t say, and I didn’t ask. I was too ashamed of myself.”

  She considered for a moment, then said, “All right. I don’t really need that. What about the schools?”

  “Nothing,” Ted rasped. “May-Belle Podhorentz and Dottie Ann Consciewitz were just like Mittie: They disappeared when nobody was watching them.”

  Ginny sat up straighter in her chair. “What do you mean?”

  “What do you think I mean? None of them walked away from their friends or disappeared in the middle of a class or snuck out the back way during lunch. They all waited until they were alone. May-Belle was a piano student. One of the practice rooms was assigned to her during her third period. She didn’t show up for her fourth-period class. Dottie Ann liked PE, and she had a job in the gym during fifth period. She sorted uniforms and equipment. Alone. She didn’t make it to sixth period. And Mittie—”

  He started to shout. “It was the same goddamn thing with Mittie!” He couldn’t help himself. “What the hell do you care? What does all this prove? We’re not getting anywhere, and you know it!”

  Ginny never flinched. “I think that what we’re doing is pretty obvious. What else would you suggest?”

  That stopped him. But not because he didn’t have ideas of his own. His expression reminded me of the way he’d left the diner the night before. He had something in mind, no question about it. Whatever it was, however, he stopped because he didn’t want to say it out loud.

  “Spill it, Ted,” I said softly. “We’re all in this together.”

  He didn’t move a muscle.

  I went on. “And you need us. You don’t have a client. You can’t hire yourself to look for your own daughter. You’ll lose your license.”

  I knew a thing or two about losing a license.

  Then he turned to face me. His cheeks were as pale as frostbite. “I don’t give a shit about that,” he said. “I don’t want any of this to be true.”

  I held his eyes.

  Thickly he asked, “What do you think about—about prostitution? Where does that fit in?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” I was trying to guess what he really had in mind. “That’s probably the only thing the coroner was right about. They have to get money somewhere. How else are girls that age going to do it?”

  Something like a spasm of rage or disgust jumped across Ted’s face. He turned on his heel and left the office.

  Ginny stared after him for a long time, frowning grimly. Then she picked up the notes he’d left on her desk. She read them, studied them, checked the watermarks, then handed them to me.

  They fit the pattern exactly—paper, watermark, torn edge, handwriting, everything. When I compared them with the notes we already had, I saw that May-Belle Podhorentz’ was word-for-word identical with Mittie’s.

  After all, sixteen months is a long time for whatever bastard dictated these notes to remember exactly what they said.

  “I should have told him what we’ve got,” G
inny said. Still thinking about Ted.

  “He didn’t want to hear it.” That was my first reaction. Then I said, “Besides, we haven’t got anything.”

  “That depends on what you’re looking for,” she replied in a musing tone. “Things are starting to fit together.”

  “Oh, good.” Being sober doesn’t do much for my temper. “Now if the fit just made sense, we’d be getting somewhere.”

  It was her turn to stay calm. “We are getting somewhere. If Marisa Lutt’s parents have a note like these, we’ll have a case that can stand up under any kind of pressure—even if that fucker Acton tries to get us out of the way.”

  “That isn’t what I meant.” Even I knew how important those notes were.

  She looked at the ceiling for a moment, then said, “I take it you didn’t notice anything interesting in what Ted told us? About how Mittie, May-Belle, and Dottie Ann disappeared?”

  “It’s the same story as Alathea,” I said sourly. “I knew all that already. I read it in Kirke’s files. So what?”

  “I’m going to have to check it out with the other schools. This is too iffy to take chances with. But I think there’s something important in those files. According to them, these girls didn’t just run away from school—they ran away during school. Never after or before. During. And every one of them was alone on a regular basis at some point in the school day. Being alone didn’t happen by accident on a particular day.”

  “Which proves what?” She was on the edge of something. I could feel it. But I didn’t have the dimmest notion what it was. I was like Ted—I had ideas of my own, and they didn’t seem to relate to what Ginny was thinking.

  “I don’t know yet. Files don’t always give a very clear picture of what really happens.”

  That was true enough. But it still didn’t mean anything to me. Even if the other files checked out with the schools themselves, that only showed that every one of the girls had a regular chance to run away. Opportunity, nothing more.