'Yes,' she said. 'Like finding out your baby-sitter is a werewolf. You say he has facilities to make these things?'
'Yes. Not just a collector, a producer. A distributor.'
'A collector would be bad enough,' Susan said.
'Now, my dear, consenting adults in the privacy of their home…
'Not for a man doing what he does. That's bullshit if you're Poitras. But to produce… could it be the wrong man?' 'Ugly fat guy,' I said, 'dresses like he's got a charge at Woolworth's.'
Susan nodded. Her face was sharp with concern. 'What are you going to do?'
'Eventually I'm going to blow the whistle on him, but first I want to see if he knows where April is.'
'Eventually?'
'I didn't hire on to clean up the state,' I said. 'I hired on to find April. First things first.'
'But-'
'No,' I said. 'Don't give me the well-being-of-themany-against-the-one speech. The many are an abstraction. April is not. She rode in my car. I'm going to find her first.'
'One of the rules,' Susan said. There was no smile when she said it.
'Sure,' I said.
'How much is it for April?' she said. 'How much for you?'
'Doesn't matter,' I said. 'It's a way to live. Anything else is confusion.' Susan sat and looked into her coffee cup. 'I disapprove,' she said.
I nodded.
'But it's yours. There are things you disapprove of that I do anyway,' she said.
I nodded again.
'So first you find April, and then you…' She made a twisting gesture with her right hand, turning the palm up and quickly down again.
'Then I air out the Student Guidance and Counseling Administration,' I said.
'Yes,' she said. 'And in the meantime I might do some research.' 'See whether Poitras recruits?' I said. She nodded. 'I'll bet he does,' I said. She nodded again.
Chapter 22
By Monday night we knew that Poitras almost certainly recruited, and on a pretty good scale. I spent Monday staring alertly at his town house on Beacon Street. Susan spent Monday on the phone to people she knew in high school guidance offices around the state. In nearly every case of a dropout, male or female, there was clear evidence of contact with Poitras.
'Either he met the students during crisis intervention sessions,' Susan said to me on the telephone, 'or at coordinative evaluation conferences or he's been a resource person during attempts at therapeutic redirection.'
'You are, I hope, quoting,' I said.
'You mean the jargon? You hear it so much you get used to it.'
'Talking like that will rot your teeth,' I said.
'Never mind that. I checked back in my own files on
Amy Gurwitz and April Kyle. He talked with both of them not long before they dropped out.'
'How long?'
'Well, it's hard to say,' Susan said. 'A kid doesn't just one day drop out. First he or she starts to cut classes and that increases in frequency and after a while it blends into having left school. He spoke to both of them within two weeks of the missing persons report to the Smithfield police-that we could be precise about.'
'How usual is that?' I said.
'That a man in Poitras's position would talk with the students?'
..Yeah.'
'It's not improbable,' Susan said. 'But it's not entirely routine, either. Most people yat the state level have no contact at all with students.'
'An educator's dream,' I said.
'Counseling reports and S.I.J.'s are routinely sent to his office,' Susan said, 'but the amount of personal contact is sort of unusual. But not so you'd comment on it unless you discovered that your experience was typical - you know, that he was doing this everywhere.'
'What is an S.I.J.?' I said.
'Student-in-jeopardy forms.'
'Ah, of course,' I said.
'So Poitras, assuming that my sample is representative, had a ready list of children ready to drop out of school, beset with emotional problems, vulnerable to anyone who'd want to exploit them.'
