Dakota.
Foote unlocked the door and entered first, followed by Chapman.
'Jesus, the feng shui in here is for shit.'
Recantati continued to look lost and overwhelmed. 'Sorry, Detective?'
'Don't you know anything about the principles of negative energy? This place is a hellhole, just like her apartment. First of all,' Chapman said, kicking a box of books out of his path into the room, 'all entrances should be free from obstruction. You need a generous flow into the working environment. And she's got too much black fabric in here. Bad karma-symbolizes death.'
Chapman worked his way around the room, looking at books and papers that were piled on the floor, careful not to touch or disturb surface items. Foote had taken Recantati aside and was whispering something to him. I took the moment to stifle a smile and ask Chapman a question. 'When did you become an expert in the Chinese art of feng shui?'
'Attila's been shtupping an interior decorator for the last six months. That's all you hear about when you work a tour with him. The office is beginning to look like a Jewish princess's idea of a Chinese whorehouse. 'Don't leave your toilet seat up 'cause your fortune will flow down into the sewer.' See, dried flowers like this?' Mike pointed at the dusty arrangement on Dakota's windowsill. 'Lousy idea. Represents the world of the dead. Gotta use fresh ones.'
Marty Hun was one of the guys in the Homicide Squad. Mike had nicknamed him Attila.
'We'll get Crime Scene over here this afternoon. I'd like them to process the room for prints and take some pictures. Okay with you two?'
Mike moved behind Lola's desk, noting in his steno pad what lay on top of it and sketching a general outline of the office. The smile was erased from his face, and with his pen he shifted some of the papers on top of the blotter. 'Who's been in here since last night?'
'No one,' answered Foote.
'I'll betcha my paycheck you're wrong on that count.'
Foote approached the desk from the opposite side and placed her palm on a stack of books as she leaned over to see what had caught Mike's attention.
'You wanna get your hand off there?'
She straightened up and brought her arm down to her side.
Mike pulled open the top middle desk drawer by putting his pen into the brass handle. 'It's too neat. Way too shipshape, both on top of the desk and in this first drawer. Right where you'd keep whatever it was you'd been working on most recently, or something that was pretty important. Every other pile is sloppy and out of line. Even the stack of mail is too fastidious. Somebody went through some of this stuff and couldn't resist just patting these papers into order. Nothing major, but it's just not in keeping with Lola's messy style. Maybe a careful once-over can come up with a print or something. She chew gum?'
Recantati looked to Foote and then shrugged. 'Not that I ever noticed.'
It was Chapman's turn to whisper now, leaning over and speaking only to me. 'Let's lock up the office and get Crime Scene over here immediately. There's a wad of Wrigley's in the wastebasket. It's great for getting DNA. All that juicy saliva will tell us exactly who's been messing around in here.'
Mike turned back to face the others. 'Ever hear Ms. Dakota talk about a 'deadhouse'?'
Foote glanced at Recantati before both of them looked at us blankly. 'Sounds more like your line of work than ours.'
As Mike walked from behind the desk, he stared at a small corkboard affixed to the wall by the window. 'You know who any of these people are?' he asked.
Foote moved in next to him, and Recantati looked over his shoulder. 'That's a photograph of Franklin Roosevelt, of course, and this one's Mae West. I believe that woman in the corner, in period dress, is Nellie Bly. I can't place the other man.'
'Charles Dickens, I think.' My undergraduate major in English literature kicked in.
Foote stepped back and turned away, but continued speaking. 'I'm not sure who the people are in the photos with Lola herself, but I assume they're friends and relatives. That other snapshot is one of the young women Lola taught last semester, in the spring.'
Mike must have thought, as I did, that it was unusual for one student's picture to be singled out to be on the board. He asked the obvious question. 'Know her name?'
Foote hesitated before she spoke. 'Charlotte Voight.'
'Any idea why Lola would have her picture up here?'
Dead silence.
'Can we talk to her?'
'Detective Chapman,' Foote answered, sinking onto the cushion of the sofa against the far wall, 'Charlotte disappeared from the school-from New York-altogether. We have no idea where she is.'
Mike's anger was palpable. 'When did this happen?'
'She went missing last spring. April tenth. Left her room early one evening, in the midst of a bout of depression. No one here has seen her since.'
6
Chapman wanted to preserve the integrity of Dakota's office for the Crime Scene team to photograph and fingerprint, so he led the unhappy pair of administrators back down to Foote's quarters to finish the conversation.
'And now we're gonna play 'I've Got a Secret' and hope the dumb cop doesn't figure out what kind of problems we got here at school, right? Who was this Voight kid and what do you think really happened to her?'
Foote picked up the story. 'Mr. Recantati wasn't appointed until this fall semester, so he's not to blame for not remembering to bring up Charlotte's disappearance.' The osteoporosis that had stooped Foote's shoulders seemed even more pronounced as she sat hunched in her chair, calling up facts about the missing girl.
'Charlotte was a junior-twenty years old. Came to us with a very troubled background. She was raised in Peru, actually. Her father's American, working down there for a large corporation. Her mother was Peruvian. Died while Charlotte was finishing high school. The girl was extremely bright, but had had a long battle with depression and eating disorders.'
Mike was taking notes as Sylvia Foote talked.
'We didn't know until she got here, of course, that she had a history of substance abuse as well. I doubt that she would have been better adjusted at any other college in the States. There were no relatives anywhere in this country, and when one of those black moods overtook Charlotte, she'd just disappear for days at a time.'
'Surely someone found out where she'd been, once she returned?' I asked.
'She was never very open or direct about it. Freshman year she dated a Columbia student who lived in an apartment off campus, and she'd spend time with him. Then she got involved with some Latinos from the neighborhood, the source of her drug supply, we believe.'
'What did her roommates think?'
'She didn't have any. Charlotte requested a single when she applied to King's, and she lived a pretty solitary existence. She didn't number many of the girls among her friends. D'you know the kind? She preferred the company of men. Not boys, and generally not other students. She was restless and isolated from most of the school social life. Thought herself much too worldly for most of the kids she met here.'
'Didn't you get the police involved when she disappeared?'
'Certainly we did. You must know how it is. They won't even consider a missing person's report until forty- eight hours have elapsed. Nobody noticed Charlotte was gone for most of that time. The girls in the dorm assumed that she'd gone off to party with her drug crowd, and the professors had grown used to her cutting classes. The Twenty-sixth Precinct has a record of the report we filed. I made the notification myself, after I called her father.'
