Stalking Death (6 page)

Chapter 4

I did not yell out, "Aha! The plot thickens." But I wasn't as surprised as I would have been if he hadn't spent so long playing silly games with this information. Way in the back of my mind, I wondered if I was performing some strange form of marriage counseling alongside my consulting. One thing was certain. Mrs. Chambers was pissed as hell at her husband for telling me this. She'd abandoned her stillness in favor of an angry rustling. I knew if I looked back at her, I'd see those cold, dark eyes beaming icy rays in his direction. Chambers had gone back to playing with his papers.

Pissed as hell was not a nice expression. I'd been trying for months to excise it from my speech. But it was surprisingly easy to fall into bad habits, and hard to fall out of them. Even in the middle of this professional consultation, my mother's voice was in my head, chiding me about my language. Lately her voice has been there way too much. Mostly asking about pregnancy, or my lack of it. My loss. Something my mother should understand. Suddenly I was very tired.

I wondered if they had children. She didn't act like a nurturing person, but there are all kinds of parents in the world. There were no children's pictures anywhere in the room, which was the usual practice in the business. But then, most of what I'd experienced at this school didn't follow the usual practice. For everything about this matter, I had to maintain that difficult pairing—an open mind and a watchful eye.

Meanwhile, it was getting late and the only other people in the room were silently at war. It was time for me to take charge. I flipped to a fresh sheet of paper. "Okay, here's your situation. You have a minority student who claims to be the victim of a stalker. The stalker's behavior has involved, according to her, phone calls to her at all hours of the day and night, and, most recently, pornographic pictures and messages which have been left in her room. Right so far?"

I put on my best "we are going to get along and get to work" expression. Chambers grunted. Mrs. Chambers sniffed loudly and, when I turned, she looked pointedly out the window. It was dark and there was nothing to see. I was losing patience. It was inconsiderate to the point of being antisocial to sit behind someone in a meeting involving only three parties. Good thing I wasn't here to teach manners.

"To complicate matters, the student has identified her stalker as the grandson of a prominent alumnus and important donor, correct?" He nodded. "And your internal investigation has indicated that what she says is untrue?" Another nod.

"Dean Dunham conducted the investigation and you didn't involve the local police department? Dean Dunham didn't consult them or ask for advice?"

"He already told you," Mrs. Chambers snapped. "We wanted to handle the matter quietly. Todd, she's supposed to be working for us, isn't she? So why is this girl being so uncooperative?"

Ignoring her, I asked, "So no one ever checked the documents or her room for fingerprints or anything like that?"

"We don't have that capacity," Chambers said. "I doubt that any school's security services do."

"What about phone records? Is there anyway verify her claims about harassing phone calls, at least as to frequency or source?"

"If they had come from him, they would have been part of the internal system. There wouldn't be any records. But the calls were never made, so it's a moot point," Chambers said.

"Your investigation consisted of?"

I waited while he played with paperclips. Finally, he said, "Interviewing her and interviewing people in her dorm."

"And there's a written report?"

"Craig just reported his findings to me."

"Surely you anticipated..." I stifled the words, anxious, given what I was hearing, to try and save this man from himself. "Did she tell you how she identified her stalker?"

"She said she recognized his voice."

"What about the boy? Her alleged stalker. Did you interview him?"

Miriam Chambers' voice was an icy blast from behind me. "Aren't you listening? You think we gave any credence to her crazy claims?"

"I would have assumed," I said quietly, "that you would have listened to both sides before dismissing such a serious claim. Doesn't the school have a harassment policy? A written procedure for handling such matters?"

"Of course we do," Chambers said, "all schools do. But in this case we felt..."

"What? That she wasn't entitled to be accorded the same procedural safeguards as any other student? That he shouldn't be subjected to a hearing on the matter?"

"I think we were entitled," he began, "when the accusations were so outlandish... to deal with it before it got to the formal accusation stage."

His wife cut him off. "We're trying to keep this quiet, Ms. Kozak. Whose side are you on here, anyway?"

"Well, it hasn't been kept quiet, has it?" I countered. "You have one very unhappy student who is determined to make it as public and noisy as possible and your failure to follow your own procedures hasn't helped. You've said she was already difficult, perhaps known to be a trouble-maker. Didn't you anticipate that she might react this way?"

"We expected her to cooperate. That she'd be grateful," Mrs. Chambers said. "Frankly, I don't see why all these questions are necessary, why any of this is. We only asked you here because we wanted your advice about the letter. Because we wanted things done right."

I'd already explained why I was asking questions. If she didn't want to hear it, fine, but the words had been spoken.

Something I've learned from my years in headmaster's offices and trustee's boardrooms—you can talk until you're blue in the face but you can't make people listen.

"Are your trustees informed about the situation?"

Chambers opened his desk drawer, selected a large paperclip, and carefully fastened some papers together. "Our chairman, Charles Argenti, has been kept abreast of the developments. The rest of the board, well..." He shrugged. "Charles and I hoped it wouldn't be necessary."

"And you consulted your legal counsel?"

"They sent one of their associates out last week. Nice girl. She seemed to think there wasn't any problem."

His statement ruffled my feminist feathers. All the people in positions of authority he'd mentioned were men, and he'd referred to them by title. Come to the one woman involved, he calls her a girl and omits her name. He'd done the same with Shondra Jones. Maybe I was being too sensitive. I'm a hell of a sexism barometer.

"You told her about Shondra Jones' accusation, whom Shondra had named, and why that was significant? Did you share your concerns that Shondra might have a strong reaction to your dismissal of her complaint? Did you show her the pictures? Brief her on your written procedures for handling sexual harassment complaints?"

My father's a lawyer, and lawyers always say you shouldn't ask a question if you don't already know the answer. So far, I hadn't asked anything I didn't believe I knew the answer to. Todd Chambers wasn't the first naïve headmaster I'd ever met, and he certainly wasn't the first person to make a situation worse by trying to sweep it under the rug. I just needed to know how bad things had gotten.

I also needed a softer tone. This guy was my client, not Shondra Jones. However irritating his naïveté might be, however badly he'd bungled, I had to take these situations as I found them.

"We gave her the facts."

He was getting sullen as I dismantled the house of cards he'd constructed, spoiling his fantasy that things were under control, his problem solved, and that all he had to do to tidy up was send that letter. How he avoided thinking about strategies for dealing with a 6' 3" minority woman who claimed she was being stalked and was mad as hell escaped me. But whatever he was trying to do, that didn't absolve his lawyer of her responsibility to ask the important questions.

"I'm surprised she let you off so easily," I said. "It's hard to believe any lawyer, hearing that a female student who claims to have been the victim of a stalker who leaves images suggesting sexual violence in her room has had those claims dismissed, and hearing that the claimant has essentially been called a liar and a fraud, would say you didn't have anything to worry about. Especially when it all took place without the benefit of the school's written procedures."

I hesitated, but there were things I had to tell him. He was being frighteningly complacent in the face of a potential disaster. "Todd, I'm sorry to be saying this, but I think you have a lot to worry about. Just for starters, you have a ton of negative publicity to worry about. You have a frightened female student population to worry about. You have a potential lawsuit for slander to worry about. Stalking is a crime in most states, so you have a failure to report an alleged crime to worry about."

I forced myself to stop. I was dumping it on him too fast. Better take it slowly, give him a head's up about potential issues I saw, and lay out a strategy after I'd gathered the facts.

Miriam Chambers rose with an angry rustle. "How many times do we have to tell you." Her voice was unsteady. "There was no stalking. There is no stalker. The girl is a mental case. She needs help. That's our only problem."

I hadn't yet asked what kind of support and services they'd offered Shondra. Somehow, I didn't think they'd be responsive to that question right now.

I looked down at my notes. "Tomorrow, I hope I'll be able to talk with the people involved. And we needed to begin devising a management strategy. Your biggest challenge will be communication—reassuring your student body and their parents that there is no stalking problem on your campus and that the students are perfectly safe, without doing so in a way that will embarrass or enrage Shondra Jones."

"That's impossible," Miriam Chambers said flatly. "She's already enraged."

My neck was getting sore from swiveling around. "It's unfortunate that it's gone that far. We'll have to find a way to calm her down. Show her that St. Matthews cares about her and wants only the best. Do you disagree, Mrs. Chambers?"

She glided down the room to join her husband, setting a possessive hand on his shoulder. Her previously expressionless face had congealed into an icy, dismissive glare. It was a practiced look, and probably normally quite effective. But if looks could kill, I'd have been dead a thousand times. So far, knock on wood, not even the real killers had succeeded. If she meant to intimidate me, she'd have to work pretty damned hard.

"I think you should get the school's attorneys back here," I said. "Get their feedback on the details of your investigation. On your failure to follow your own procedures. Get them to clarify the issue of slander. Get their sign off on not involving the local police."

Todd Chambers put a cautionary hand over his wife's and manufactured a yawn. "Excuse me," he said. "Long day. I'm afraid I'm losing my concentration. What if we get together again in the morning?"

He was the client. "What time?"

"Eight-thirty?" he suggested. "Come to the house. We'll give you breakfast."

Miriam Chambers looked like that was the last thing on earth she wanted to do, but she nodded.

"Fine," I agreed. "Could you arrange for me to meet with Dean Dunham afterward? And the faculty residents from her dorm? And, of course, Shondra herself?"

He nodded.

A thought struck me. "What about her brother? You said he was very protective toward his sister. How is he reacting to all this?"

"Oh, Jamison is a very sensible boy. I think he'll stay out of this."

"Well, you might check in with his advisor and his coach, see what's going on." This was so basic. Chambers was supposed to have his fingers on the pulse of his school, and he hadn't considered this? Maybe there hadn't been time, if they'd just delivered the bad news to Shondra. But he'd said she had inflamed the whole community, and that took time. "When did you tell Shondra you couldn't substantiate her claims?"

"Tuesday evening."

And it was Sunday. She'd had plenty of time to get steamed up. "And what form did that communication take?"

"You know," Chambers said, "you make me feel like I'm on the hot seat here. You sound more like a cop than a consultant."

"Todd, my specialty is damage control. I can't help if I don't know the situation."

But his remark had gotten me thinking. Not long ago, someone had mistaken me for a cop. At the time, I'd thought it was ridiculous. But hanging around with them so much, was some of it was rubbing off? A natural curiosity. A deep skepticism about everyone's story. A sensible instinct to test the offered version of the facts. I'd have to watch myself. The last thing I needed was to start scaring away clients.