“I’ve got one more question, though,” Mike said, his voice betraying, or so I feared, ever deeper disappointment in my having kept things from him. “What does Derek Franco’s recruitment, or attempted recruitment, of the Gunderson boy tell us that we didn’t suspect already?”
“ ‘Suspect’ being the key word, Doctor,” Colleen answered. Then she added only, “Vicky?”
And it was at last time for Vicky to deliver what she had plainly been thinking would be her knockout blow: “You must realize, Doctors, that Derek’s interaction with Danny Gunderson not only offers a more complete picture of his activities, but of the methods used by the organization above him. For instance, the geographical profile developed by Dr. Chang—yes, she told Mei-lien about it—has to be expanded to include at least Washington and Essex Counties. Also, you can’t say how many kids this group may have smuggled south since Derek Franco disappeared; meaning, during the period that the Kurtzes have been staying on your farm. All of which you would have known, if you hadn’t been so caught up with making your own little world up there, complete with—”
But even Mike had had enough of Vicky’s tone, now: “Okay, okay, damn it. Listen, Vick—all of you—there hasn’t been a minute when our personal activities have blinkered our pursuit of a solution to this case. Period. So to quote my esteemed colleague, just drop—”
I touched Mike’s shoulder, however, somewhat intrigued by Vicky’s words, as well as by her attitude: she’d found something, all right, but she hadn’t found it. And there was at least meager comfort in that. “So that’s your big issue with us, Vicky?” I said. “You think that Dr. Li and I have been swanning around like a couple of lovestruck boys, just attending to the case when we could find the time—I mean, between classes and romancing and all? And tell me this: has it seemed to any of you that we’ve done a below-par job of teaching at any point in this session?”
And with that, the initiative began to swing back: the three who had never had much interest in Vicky’s accusations to start with—Linda, Frankie, and Mei-lien—became very uncomfortable, and even Colleen paused, glancing up at her ceiling as she considered the question. They all quietly answered in the negative, but Vicky, sticking to her guns, declared, “Well, whatever the quality of the classes, the quality of the investigation was slipshod—I’m not backing off that.”
“As opposed to your own, Vicky?” I said, to which she nodded emphatically. “Watch out, now that you’ve graduated, Ms. Ferrier: tunnel vision, cognitive bias, whatever you want to call it, can get you in deep trouble, if you’re overinvested in a personal motive.”
“What?” Vicky’s jaw dropped. “Me? That’s been your problem!”
“So you’ve thought,” I said, nodding. “But you’ve been wrong.”
“Not if you apply the Theory of Context, I’m not,” Vicky shot back. “Which, you’ll remember, Dr. Jones, was the subject of my thesis.” For a moment I considered Vicky’s very skilled command of a hundred-year-old philosophy, and her ability to make it work regarding several notorious modern cases: context—to Vicky as to me, just as to the man who had founded the school, Laszlo Kreizler—was everything; and context was obviously what she honestly thought she was pursuing at that moment. Not the context of the killer, nor even of the victim, but context in its most elusive yet often most intriguing form: the context of the investigator, the biases that make the detective pursue some leads and underplay or flat-out ignore others. And just then it was Vicky herself who was slipping up, and handing me a rare opportunity, bitter though it was.
“Indeed I do remember,” I answered. “And it was a first-rate piece of work. Which is more, I fear, than I can say for your present reasoning.” I glanced around the screens. “What about the rest of you? Do you hold to this idea that Dr. Li and I have been blinded by our personal lives?”
“Well, Doctor,” Linda answered cautiously, “Vicky did make a compelling case…”
“But I got a feeling that case ain’t gonna hold up, Vicky manita,” Frankie added.
Colleen had suddenly gripped her forehead. “The Faust Dialectic—damn it, Vicky…”
I looked to Mike quickly. He’d determined at last what I was up to, but he knew he couldn’t stop me; so he just shrugged as I replied, “Okay—now would be the time to open the file I sent you.”
“The Faust Dialectic…” Colleen repeated bitterly, scanning the short but crucial document within the file. “Fuck. At first I assumed you meant Derek—I guess we all did. But you’re saying…?”
I traced an invisible line on the desk with one finger—then cut it. “Yes. It refers, in this instance, to Ambyr Kurtz. She was Derek Franco’s handler. She sent him, credit card in hand, to meet with Danny Gunderson, after Danny heard a rumor from a friend at Morgan Central School about the possibility of finding a wondrous new home and asked some questions—just as she sent her brother and Derek up this hollow to meet us. And of course, she was the first and perhaps the greatest of Derek’s romantic fantasies, even when he was just a lonely, troubled boy. Understandably so…”
Several silent minutes passed, only the rain outside making any sound. The Councillors kept going over the file I’d sent; all save Vicky, who continued to stare at me. But her expression had changed, now, to reflect so much of my own heartbreak that I could barely stand to look up and smile a little at her before turning back down to the desk to suppress my own emotions.
“The best friend’s big sister,” she said quietly. “It’s so obvious we didn’t even consider it. A steadily developing confusion of surrogate mother and romantic ideal. And you’re sure?”
“I am,” I said simply, “for reasons that are, in part, personal, and don’t need to be discussed here. It’s enough, for our purposes, to consider these factors: first, the extraordinary number of dead throwaways that were either known to her or lived in her area—”
“Which sounds awfully close to statistical thinking,” Linda said gently, without looking up.
“It could, Linda,” I answered. “But in this case, it is far closer to proving Dr. Chang’s exercise in geographical profiling: except that now we’re not looking for a predator’s stalking ground, per se, we’re looking for an area in which a blind woman and a fairly seriously challenged kid might operate comfortably and without drawing attention to themselves; and we have that. The only mistake they made was getting a little too ambitious and contacting a kid in Essex County, then having Derek meet with him repeatedly in Cambridge. But simply on a behavioral level…” I had to steel myself, now: “She’s manipulated almost everything and everyone in the parts of the case directly relating to the dead and missing kids themselves. There’s Derek, of course, who in fact needed constant, close supervision. Then there was the way she orchestrated our own involvement with her family, by dispatching Lucas to join our team, which her own superiors doubtless thought would keep them at least a little ahead of us, and that we only circumvented occasionally and by chance, as in the case of the Gunderson boy, when I told neither Lucas nor her anything about what we were up to beforehand. And there were smaller things, too, such as her frequent and overly emphatic protestations that she wanted to solve the case, and the fact that she goes almost unmentioned in Derek Franco’s departure note: there was no need to say goodbye to someone who was aiding his escape, after all. All we lack now is the why and how of the death scene stagings; I suspect, however, that the theory Dr. Li and I advanced on that subject is very close to the mark.”
“But…how long?” Vicky was keeping her voice very quiet. “How long have you been sure?”
I shrugged, as yet unable to face her. “Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters,” she said more urgently. “If you knew from the beginning, it’s nothing short of—well, I don’t know. But if you found out later—then how can you stand to go on with it?”
Taking a very deep breath and finally turning up to face her I explained, “I did not know from the beginning; and once I thought I d
id, I could go on because I held the image of each dead child fast in my mind. That was all that mattered, and still is. That, and…” I tried to steel myself: “That and one other thing—and listen to me, all of you, because this is important.” I saw them all snap to it appropriately. “Each of you, during your career, is going to become personally involved with someone you suspect, even know, is part of the problem you face. The involvement may be a friendship, romance, whatever. What matters is, what do you do? Let them know, betraying the case but honoring the relationship? Or ignore the discovery, thereby honoring the case but betraying the relationship? Or, do you enter that worst of purgatories, by trying to honor both the relationship and the solution of the case?”
Vicky’s gaze became slightly horrified. “Is that what you’ve been doing?”
“Strangely enough, it is not,” I replied. “Nor am I asking all these questions because I expect answers—you can’t answer them, until you get there, any more than you can sit in judgment on how I’ve dealt with it.”
They all absorbed that, Vicky the first to speak: “Well, I guess that’s commendable, in some pretty dark way. But you’re really sure that you’ll be able to maintain the act for the rest of the case? That you can just cut off your feelings?”
“It will be no act, Vicky,” I breathed, again feeling a rise of emotion in my throat that I hoped didn’t show in my words. “And I won’t be cutting off any feelings. But—we do what we must…”
As the others went back to their reading (as much to escape the sad tension as anything else), Vicky tried hard to find something, anything, to say in the face of my despair. “You know,” she eventually came up with, “you did a really amazing job on the four dead kids that you knew about. Both of you. We were all pretty much amazed by your ability to connect those dots, and to build profiles, not just of the perpetrators, but of the victims and the probable circumstances of their deaths, supported by physical evidence, without being officially in on the case. I’m—sorry, for what I thought…” It was her turn to try to laugh without succeeding. “Chalk it up to youth.”
“No need to chalk it up to anything,” I answered. “It happens to us all. Just have to watch it.” She nodded appreciatively, and then, one by one, the others finished their examination of the new file, and all save Frankie turned up to stare at me with uniformly dumbfounded expressions, not quite able to tell if they were facing their familiar teacher or some kind of newly revealed monster: a look I knew well. “Okay,” I said, gathering as much strength as I could. “So, in light of all this, where do we go?”
“Well,” Colleen said, still looking annoyed, “there’s some things we need to recalibrate, obviously—but there’s a couple we don’t, so we probably ought to get straight to those.”
“Fine,” I answered, checking on Mike, who wasn’t quite done absorbing all he’d heard. I clapped a hand on his shoulder as I began to pace again, both as reassurance and telling him he needed to get his game face back on. “Such as?”
“Okay…” Colleen flipped through that seemingly endless notebook of hers. “There’s this question of what happened in Hoosick Falls, and the suspicions of this pathologist, Bill Johnson: he implied that there was some kind of FBI involvement in this case. Which is where it gets good…” And a pleased little smile came into her usually unreadable features. “We’ve all been impressed, as Vicky says, by your theory concerning the first four dead kids being suicides: without being independent criminal investigators, you just couldn’t have done it. But the question remains: why? Sure, they hadn’t found the right families the first time out, but when you consider this organization, they had to have experienced that before, and have dealt with it, probably by finding better spots for any kids who came back. So what was wrong with these four? What drove them to thinking that they just had no hope?” She flipped through her notebook and pulled out several loose printed documents. “We couldn’t be sure, of course. But it was another very big coincidence: recorded visits made by each of the dead kids to the Office of Children and Family Services—in Albany. An office that just happens to be located in the same complex—”
Having stopped my pacing suddenly, I turned: “In the same complex as the New York State Adoption Service,” I said. Even Mike had begun to stand at the news, leaning forward eagerly on the desk. “What exactly made you think to look there?” I asked anxiously.
“Details,” Colleen said. “And what was Dr. Kreizler always saying, Doctor?”
My answer was quick: “ ‘The keys will always be in the details.’ ”
“That’s right,” Colleen continued, our expressions pleasing her. “And when we checked the files that were first opened on all four of them after their parents and then they themselves disappeared, we found out that, without explanation, they all reappeared at the OCFS office later—just before they died. But we didn’t find that pattern among any other kids labeled as ‘throwaways.’ ”
“But what makes you think that they went back of their own volition?” I asked, starting to pace again; because I had suddenly become convinced that a new element had been introduced, one that transcended the merely intellectual. “And you still haven’t answered my first question: what made you think to look there, in the first place?”
“Well,” Colleen began uncomfortably, “the first thing was, they went to the main office, not to the satellite office in Fraser, which you might have expected—”
“Except that there is no ‘satellite office’ in Fraser,” I answered slowly. “So try again.”
“There isn’t?” Affecting consternation, Colleen flipped through her notes. “I was sure—”
But then Mike stepped in: “Hey, guys?” He shook his head and stuck a thumb in my direction. “ ‘The Sorcerer of Death,’ remember? If I smell bullshit, he already knows which cow.”
“Bulls aren’t cows, Mike,” I said absentmindedly, staring at the students as their silent discomfort grew. “There’s something going on here that you’re not telling us. This isn’t the kind of brainstorm that you just have out of the blue, and there’s no chain of evidence that gets you there. No…Personal experience is behind it. One of you has been through this, or something very like it…” I stood suddenly still, expecting a response; but each of them seemed to be waiting for somebody else to speak up. “Frankie,” I went on carefully. “How is it that you know your way around the Arizona Department of Child Safety so readily? And still have a contact who you ‘deal with there sometimes’?”
Frankie shrugged without looking back at me. “Just a buddy of mine.”
And then it was time to risk provocation: “Old family friend, I suppose.”
To which Frankie began to shake his head, smiling ruefully. “I guess I shoulda known better, eh, Doc? El Brujo, no shit. Okay—not a buddy of mine. My old caseworker.”
I nodded, feeling rotten for putting him on the spot, but needing more. “And your family?”
“My family is—was—just my folks and me,” he said, his mood darkening further. “They went back to Mexico six years ago.”
I took a moment to study his expression. “ ‘Went back’?”
“Okay, fine,” Frankie conceded, leaning back in his desk chair and forcing a smile. “You got me, Doc. Yeah, I’m one of ’em, I’m a fuckin’ throwaway kid; but in my case, it’s kinda the throwaway process in reverse, if you know what I mean.”
“I’m not sure I do,” Mike said.
“Then ask Dr. Jones,” Frankie laughed: the brave laugh of the injured, one I could spot from a mile off. “Los deportados, dude, just two more of them, that’s what my parents are. But I was born here—I had to go with them, at first, but I was born here. And by the time I was fourteen, I’d had enough. It was hard to leave them, but I mean…You people up here, you have no idea. Mexicans are good people with a good country, but the government, hijole…Anyway, to do what I wanted to do, to do this, which I knew even then was what I wanted—” And I was reminded of Lucas’ present determin
ation to pursue the same discipline, at roughly the same age Frankie had been. “I mean, first off, I would have been living and working in war zones, which I’d actually learned to handle pretty well—but to be in law enforcement and be independent? You know how hard it is to do it here, just imagine it down there.”
“But, I mean—you were fourteen, Frankie,” Mike said. “How did you survive?”
“Until I got emancipated?” Frankie’s black eyes now began to display the actual weight of what he was talking about. “Shit, I didn’t wanna get into this. But here’s the thing: this is what all these kids, these dead kids, went through. The system in this country, for kids who suddenly find themselves without any families—by no fault of their own—is just crawling with catch-22’s. And at first I hit every one of them, because I didn’t know shit. First up: no school without home or family, either natural or foster, and I didn’t have either. So that meant work. But then the child labor laws step in—which, ideally, they should, provided the rest of the system is working right. But it ain’t, you know that: the foster care program is a fucking game rigged for thieves. I had one hope: I was already pretty good at fixing computers. I used to do it for one of the big gangs down south, and no, I won’t tell you which one. But they were hacking the shit out of businesses all over Latin America, working the machines so hard they’d fry ’em, and me and some other kids, we’d fix ’em, because our hands were still small.” He splayed his fingers out before him, trying to rally. “Unlike the bestias gigantes you see now—”
“Frankie…” Colleen warned.
“Yeah,” he said, darkening again. “Anyway, between fixing the computers and watching the hackers, that’s where I got my skills. And by the time I was fourteen, I could pass for older, anyway, and so I kinda fucked with my passport records a little bit and boom!—I got my emancipation and working papers. Went to work in the repair department of a Best Buy, started making decent money, got a room down in one of the barrios here in town—but most kids like me had no shot at any of that. They were on the streets, and they had no families or skills and couldn’t pass; couldn’t go to school, and the child labor laws said they couldn’t work even if they had something they could do. So what the fuck is left, Docs? I think you know: they could either go into the foster program, which most didn’t want to do, or take the other open roads: become drug dealers, go to work with guys robbing houses, or—they just started tricking. Boys and girls, fresh meat brings a lot of money.”