Fair Game (4 page)

But if Baker hadn’t voluntarily walked and he hadn’t killed himself…what
had
happened to him? Tucker was right about the unlikelihood of being snatched off a college campus.

As often as not, the key to any violent crime lay within the character of the victim. So who was Terry Baker?

Before he’d left the Baker house, Elliot had asked Pauline to let him take a look at Terry’s bedroom, but the bedroom had been turned into a guest room after Terry’s departure for college. Anything Terry had needed, he’d taken with him. The souvenirs and mementos of his childhood had either been tossed or packed away. In Elliot’s personal and professional experience, that was unusual. His own parents had kept his bedroom ready and waiting for him right up through graduate school. His years in law enforcement had more often than not confirmed his own experience.

But if you knew how to read between the lines, you could glean quite a bit from the bare facts. Going by GPA and an impressive course load, Elliot deduced the kid was a high achiever who was charting his future based on what his parents—his father in particular—planned for him. But Baker had also taken classes in architecture every semester since starting PSU. Not your normal pre-law elective. Architectonics and Architectural Theory were not your normal electives, period. On top of that, Architecture was a competitive major. Not easy to get into these classes. Either Baker had been exceptionally gifted or someone had pulled strings on his behalf. Maybe both.

Another telling thing was the lack of interviews with close friends. Baker didn’t seem to have any. Certainly no one close enough to know he’d been seeing someone. But if he’d had the guts to tell his parents, knowing his father’s feelings on his being gay, the relationship had meant something to him. Not necessarily love. The boyfriend, Jim Feder, might have served to establish precedent. It was hard to say without talking to one of the two men involved.

Elliot set the files on the nightstand and snapped out the yellow ginger jar lamp. The sharp silhouette of the pine trees fell across the floor boards. Through the bank of windows he saw the new moon, large and luminous, like the old man in the moon peering into his window. An old man with a face like green cheese. So close he could almost make out every pockmark crater and scar.

Sliding down into the flannel sheets and down-filled pillows, Elliot closed his eyes. He’d skipped his nightly stretches and his knee was aching, but it was a distant echo of pain, nothing unusual. Something he was learning to live with. He could hear the sigh of the pines outside, hear the gentle creak of the cabin. It reminded him of something…something pleasant. The lap of water against the side of a boat…the occasional plop of a fish…warm arms around him as the ocean rocked them to sleep…

“Good morning, Professor Mills!”

At the chirpy greeting, Elliot glanced up from Steven Hyslop’s
Eyewitness to the Civil War.
Mrachek, Leslie hovered in his office doorway.

“Morning, Leslie.” He set the book and his lecture notes aside, nodded in invitation and she left the safety of the doorway in one long, leggy step and dropped gracefully into the chair in front of his desk. She pulled a notebook from her backpack and offered him a couple of neatly typed pages.

“My essay on John Ford’s West.” She smiled hopefully into his eyes.

That’s right. He was supposed to take an unofficial look at her work before she committed to handing it in for a grade. Elliot glanced at the neat sheets in the clear plastic binder.
John Ford’s West,
read the title. His gaze dropped to the first paragraph.

When film critic André Bazin described John Ford’s
Stagecoach
(1939) as “the ideal example of the maturity of a style brought to classic perfection,” he employed a brilliant metaphor, that of a “wheel so perfectly made that it retains its equilibrium on any axis in any position.”

Ah. There it was. The first paragraph of Thomas Flanagan’s review for
The New York Review of Books.
Almost word perfect. What a pity Elliot didn’t have a dollar for every time this damn review popped up in student essays; he’d have a cushy retirement fund by now. He reached for his coffee and sipped it as he considered the best way to approach this with her.

Leslie, filling in the silence, said, “If you could just let me know if you think I’m on the right track…”

Andrew Corian’s voice echoed from down the hall. Elliot could pick out about one word in three. “Automatism…cretins…instinct…freshness…”

“Well, Flanagan is certainly a useful source.” The phone on his desk rang and he cravenly went with the diversion—Leslie looked like a crier to him.

“Mills.”

Too brusque as usual. Damn. He heard the disconcerted hesitation on the other end before a female voice said, “Professor Mills. This is Sandie, President Oppenheimer’s assistant. The president would like to speak to you. Please hold.”

The president.
Sandie sounded like she thought she was putting through
the
president rather than the top administrator of a university. Elliot shook his head and realized Leslie was watching him attentively.

“Elliot,” Charlotte Oppenheimer’s cool New England tones greeted him a few moments later. “How are you, my dear? We missed you at Monday’s fundraiser.”

Uh oh. Elliot didn’t do fundraisers. He didn’t do sports events. He didn’t do anything resembling a social affair if he could help it. He’d gotten out of the habit, which was probably just as well for everyone else. When you were in law enforcement your circle of acquaintanceship tended to narrow to other law enforcement.

“I was sorry to miss it,” he lied, as though he hadn’t entirely forgotten about it. “How did it go?”

“It went well. Very well. Your department raised fifteen hundred dollars to expand the celebration of Black History Month.”

“Terrific.” The month before that it had been the celebration of Women’s Studies and the month before that the celebration of Asian Studies. He was glad there was so much to celebrate. He was. But there were limits to his patience and nervous energy. Standing around chitchatting with parents pretty much exceeded them.

“It was. We’re all delighted. However, I was calling for another reason. I wondered if you were free for coffee?”

“Now?”

“I realize these are your office hours, but something has come up that’s rather urgent.”

Elliot’s eyes met Leslie’s shining, expectant ones. He said, “Yeah. Of course. No problem.”

“Wonderful. We’ll see you in, shall we say, fifteen minutes? I’m working at home rather than my office this morning.”

Elliot agreed, dropped the phone in its cradle. He ignored Leslie’s obvious disappointment, saying, “I apologize. Something’s come up.”

“Oh.”

“I’ll read this over the weekend and mark down my thoughts. I should have it for you Monday. How’s that?”

“I… Sure. Thank you, Professor.” A polite kid, she managed to summon a smile, though dimmer than her usually brilliant one.

Elliot ushered her out, locked his office and headed across the crowded campus. He overtook and passed Ray’s large, gray-uniformed figure pushing his eternal utility cart, brooms, mops and buckets rattling, as the small rubber wheels jounced over the rough cement walkway.

“Morning, Ray.”

Ray threw him a suspicious sideways look and grunted something that could have been anything from “morning” to “fuck you.”

Elliot’s inner ex-law enforcement officer wondered briefly what the story was with the maintenance man. Granted some people just had an aversion to cops and ex-cops, but Ray seemed to treat everyone to that same sparkling personality. Maybe he just hated his job. Mopping up other people’s shit was no picnic—as Elliot could testify.

The president’s house was one of the oldest buildings on the PSU campus, a brick mansion in the traditional Tudor-Gothic style surrounded by coral rose bushes.

Sandie, President Oppenheimer’s assistant, opened the door to him and led him through to a long room with beautiful windows overlooking the roses. The furniture was all white, the furnishings a clever mix of navy-and-delft-blue florals and checks. The overall effect reminded him of Blue Willow pattern china.

“Elliot.” Charlotte came to meet him, offering both hands. She looked older than her fifty-seven years, but she was still what they used to call a “handsome” woman: a little heavy, a little matronly, but elegant and beautifully groomed in a gray silk pantsuit the exact same shade of her hair.

“How are you, my dear? How are you feeling these days? We get so little opportunity to see you.”

It wasn’t
exactly
a criticism, or if it was, it was the gentlest kind.

“I’m settling in,” Elliot replied, which was what he always said. “Still finding my way around.” If he was still finding his way around after seventeen months, he was permanently MIA, but Charlotte probably knew it was the geography of the heart he was struggling with and not finding the science building.

“And how’s Roland? Still working on the book?”

“That’s what I hear. I think it’s his way of getting out of helping me refinish my kitchen cabinets.” Totally bogus. Roland had done the cabinets all on his own before Elliot was even out of the hospital, but Elliot didn’t want to discuss that book, that memoir of Roland’s misspent youth as an outlaw radical. He loved his dad and admired the strength of his convictions, but his feelings were mixed about a book wherein Roland celebrated trying to bring down the institutions Elliot had sworn to protect and uphold.

“And how are you adjusting to island life?”

“I like it.” That at least was the truth. Elliot hadn’t cared for Seattle. He liked the quiet and solitude of Goose Island for all its inconveniences.

“No problem with the ferry?” She was smiling, but Elliot began to feel uneasy. Why exactly was he here? He sensed that under the gracious poise, Charlotte was worried—thus the stalling with small talk. She was not ordinarily a woman who beat around the bush. In fact, most of the time she reminded him of SAC Montgomery.

As though she read his mind, Charlotte said, “Elliot, the reason I dragged you over here this morning is we’ve had something come up and I thought perhaps I might consult you unofficially.”

“Consult me?”

Charlotte started to speak, but paused as Sandie brought coffee in on a tray. Charlotte thanked her assistant, reminded her to hold all calls, and Sandie departed. Next came the rigmarole of how much cream, how many lumps of sugar, would Elliot like a cookie, and then, finally, Charlotte seemed to steel herself.

“I don’t know if you’re aware that a few weeks ago one of our students disappeared from campus. A young man by the name of Terry Baker.”

Old habits died hard. Elliot raised his eyebrows in inquiry and waited to see where this was going before committing himself.

Charlotte cleared her throat. “Terry was an excellent student and, by all accounts, very responsible, but kids are kids. It’s not that we didn’t take his departure seriously, but there was no evidence whatsoever of foul play.” She held Elliot’s gaze with what he felt was almost defiant steadiness. “However, another young man is now missing.”

Elliot set his cup down. “When you say ‘now missing’…?”

“Gordie’s aunt, with whom he lives, reported him missing to the police. Unlike the Baker boy, Gordie
is
the kind of young man who takes off at the drop of a hat, but his aunt seems to believe that his absence is different this time and we must respect that.”

“Gordie…?”

“Lyle. He’s a junior, but this is his first year at PSU. He transferred in from Cornish. He’d had some trouble there.”

Elliot reached for his cup again. “What kind of trouble?”

“Brawling with other students.” Charlotte hesitated. “He threatened an instructor. We haven’t had any problems with him so far, and to be honest, if his aunt hadn’t gone to the authorities, I would have preferred to let Gordie return to us in his own time.”

“Are you aware of any connection between Terry and Gordie?”

“No. It seems unlikely. They appear to be very different types of young men. They were in completely different fields of study.”

“You don’t think their disappearances are related?”

“I don’t, no. Well, to be strictly honest, I don’t know. But it could very easily be a coincidence, don’t you think?”

“Like you, I don’t know.” Elliot finished his coffee and put the cup on the silver tray covering half the coffee table.

“But it is possible?”

“Are you asking my professional opinion? I don’t want to offer it when I don’t know the circumstances of Lyle’s disappearance.”

Charlotte grimaced. “Since Ms. Lyle has seen fit to drag the police into this, it’s only a matter of time before the media gets wind. Once the news breaks that we’ve had two boys reported missing within a month, it’s going to be all but impossible to keep the university out of it.”

“I’m afraid you’re right about that.” Elliot recognized her position, but he couldn’t fault concerned family members for going to the police.

“Given your previous experience with the FBI, I was hoping that you might be able to…shed some insight into what we can expect.”

“Well…” Elliot’s smile was rueful. “It depends on how seriously the police take the aunt’s story. And whether the FBI concludes the cases are connected.”

Charlotte physically recoiled. “The
FBI?
”

It was time to come clean. “This is one of those weird coincidences you have in law enforcement,” Elliot told her. “It turns out the Bakers are friends of my dad’s. He recommended they talk to me, and the upshot is, I’ve already agreed to look into Terry’s disappearance. I haven’t done much beyond talk to the special agent in charge of their case at the Bureau, but I can put you in contact with him. In fact, I’d strongly recommend communicating this new information.”

Charlotte said urgently, “But we don’t want the FBI involved.”

“They’re already involved.”

“Oh my
God.
” Charlotte gazed unhappily out the window at the sunlit rose garden. “I had no idea the Bakers went to the FBI. We’ve heard nothing.”

Not good. Another indication that Tucker had basically written Terry off as a runaway. Well, he always had been one for snap judgments.

Yet, ironically, he heard himself defending the lack of progress. “The Bureau is investigating, but there are contradictory indications. Terry might have left school voluntarily.”

“Of course he did.
Why
would anyone assume there has been a crime? There are so many other possibilities.”

Elliot recognized the inevitable signs of wanting to bargain with bad news. “It’s possible this second boy’s disappearance is a coincidence. I don’t know the circumstances obviously, but instinct tells me a second runaway in such a short time span is kind of unlikely. Still, I’ve seen weirder things. Either way, you can best control the spin by taking the initiative and going to the Bureau rather than waiting for them to come to you.”

Charlotte reached absently for a ladyfinger cookie. As she nibbled, she brooded. “Did you say you know the agent in charge of Terry Baker’s case?”

“Special Agent Lance? I’ve worked with him before.”

“And is he…discreet?”

Discreet. Not the first word that came to mind with Tucker. Not that Tucker was
in
discreet. He wouldn’t have lasted long at the Bureau if that were the case. Elliot hedged, “He understands why publicity would not be in the best interests of the college and the students.”

Charlotte said quickly, “It’s not as though we were trying to cover anything up. The university policy is to disseminate information regarding security issues to students as quickly as they arise. We all understand that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Elliot nodded, recognizing an official spiel when he heard one. And, in fairness to the university, there
was
an excellent information network in place with security issues addressed weekly via the campus newspaper. The Safety Committee and the Director of Security met regularly, and emergency alert/warning information could be communicated campus-wide instantly via an outdoor wide-area broadcast loud speaker system, cell phones, text messaging and email notifications. Horrific things happened and sometimes it was no one’s fault.

No one but the perpetrator.

Charlotte brightened. “Perhaps you could act as a liaison between the university and the, er, Bureau?”

Elliot instantly opened his mouth to decline, but he hesitated. Really why not? He was already involved and it strengthened his position with Tucker and the Bureau just that bit more. Plus it gave him authority to question Gordie Lyle’s aunt. He said neutrally, “I can do that, if you feel it’ll help. It would probably simplify things.”

Charlotte’s relief was tempered. “Obviously we want to keep the university out of the spotlight as much as possible. We’re very proud of our safety and security initiatives at PSU. Our crime rate is historically low compared to the rest of the city.”