LITMIR.BIZ

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white, middle-class, gang-less school. But we have guns here.” He took a deep breath. “We have guns, we have knives, we have drugs, we have pregnancies, we have diseases, we have suicides and overdoses. We have every urban problem you can think of, including violent crime—theft, robbery, rapes, assaults. But this?”

      “Never any murders before?”

      “One in the five years I’ve been here. Two boys fighting over a parking space. One of them just pulled out a thirty-two and shot the other in the head. You don’t recall that?”

      “I wasn’t in Devonshire five years ago,” Decker said.

      “I thought we’d hit rock bottom then.” Gordon sighed. “Even though we beefed up our security afterward, it took a long time to calm jittery nerves. Lord only knows what this is going to do.”

      “Tell me about Cheryl’s crowd.”

      “Cheryl’s crowd …” He hesitated, trying to formulate his thoughts. Just then, Kathy returned to the room. Her face had been splashed with water. She was pale but no longer green. Gordon turned to his ally. “Kathy, who were Cheryl’s friends?”

      “Lisa Chapman, Trish Manning, Jo Benderhoff—”

      “Boyfriends,” Decker interrupted.

      “She hopped around.” Kathy sat down. “Steven Anderson, Blake Adonetti, Tom Baylor, Christopher Whit—” She stopped talking. “I think she went to the prom with Chris Whitman. At least I saw them there together. I remember them because they made such a beautiful couple.” The VP tapped her foot. “You know, I think something was wrong. Cheryl looked upset.”

      Decker wrote as he spoke. “Is that hindsight talking or was there some definite incident you remember?”

      “Nothing precise. She just looked … sad. I noticed it because it marred her otherwise stunning appearance.”

      “Did the boyfriend seem upset?” Decker asked.

      She shrugged. “Chris is always hard to read. Also I’m more tuned in to the girls. All I remember about Chris is that he looked great. He always looks great.”

      “He’s a handsome boy,” Gordon added. “A gifted cellist.”

      “More than gifted,” Kathy added. “He was professional quality.”

      “He didn’t belong here,” Gordon continued. “He should have been in Juilliard.”

      “Then why was he here?” Decker asked.

      Both Gordon and Kathy shrugged ignorance.

      “Don’t tell me,” Decker said. “He’s a quiet boy. A loner with social problems.”

      “Not at all,” Kathy said. “He has friends. As a matter of fact, he’s quite popular. Very well liked with the boys as well as the girls.”

      An ember ignited in Decker’s brain—a familiar profile. He said, “You said he was hard to read. What did you mean by that?”

      Kathy thought a moment. “Chris is very … even-tempered. A trait like that stands out when you’re dealing with a thousand hormonally imbalanced adolescents.”

      Decker said, “More adult than the rest of the kids?”

      Kathy nodded. “Yes.”

      Gordon suddenly spoke up. “Kathy, isn’t Christopher an emancipated minor?”

      “I think he’s eighteen now, Sheldon.”

      “But he came in as an emancipated minor,” Gordon said. “I remember that clearly. Despite all the divorce and broken homes, very few kids have their own apartments.”

      Bingo! In his notepad, Decker wrote: WHITMAN, CHRIS. NARC? CALL VICE. “So Christopher Whitman has his own place?”

      “I believe he does,” Gordon said.

      “Is he a druggie?” Decker asked.

      Gordon looked at Kathy. She said, “I don’t recall him ever getting busted, but he hangs out in the druggie crowd.”

      “But as far as you know, he isn’t a user.”

      “As far as I know, yes.”

      “And you saw him with Cheryl at the prom last night,” Decker said.

      “Yes. I couldn’t swear he came with her. But he and Cheryl were hanging out together.”

      “And she looked sad. Any idea why?”

      Kathy shook her head no.

      Decker was quiet. According to Jay Craine, the coroner, Cheryl was probably pregnant. If Chris Whitman, her supposed boyfriend, was a narcotics officer and knocked her up, he’d be finished as a cop.

      Talk about motivation for murder.

      “I’ll need Chris Whitman’s address,” he said. “Cheryl’s address as well. I’ll also want all the addresses of her friends—male and female.”

      Gordon looked at Kathy. She stood up. “I’ll pull those for you right now.”

      “I’d like to come with you,” Decker said. “Take a look at Whitman’s transcript.”

      Kathy eyed Gordon. He waved his hand. “Let him see it.”

      Decker followed Kathy into the registration room—a long, cavernous hall filled with banks of metal files. She went to an area marked CURRENTS, sifted through the ws and pulled out Whitman’s file.

      “Here you go.”

      Decker studied the particulars. According to the files, Whitman was almost nineteen—old for a high school student. He had transferred as a junior from St. Matthews High in Long Island, New York. All that was listed from his prior education was about a year’s worth of mediocre grades. Nothing written in the space reserved for PARENT OR GUARDIAN. Though he had provided the school with his current address and phone number, there was no emergency listing. He showed the papers to the girls’ vice principal.

      “The vitals are incomplete.”

      Kathy took the transcript. “He came as a junior, mid-semester. Sometimes the schools just send a partial. The rest of the transcripts usually follow.”

      “Anything else in his file?”

      Again, Kathy plowed through racks of folders. Finally she shut the file and shook her head, a troubled expression on her face. “There’s nothing else listed under his name.”

      “In other words, the boy’s a cipher.”

      Kathy gave him a sheepish smile. “We have lots of kids here, Sergeant.”

      Decker said nothing. He went back into Gordon’s office and gathered up the Polaroids still resting on his desk. The rigor-laden corpse had turned into a person named Cheryl Diggs, a victim snuffed out by a madman. Since she could no longer speak for herself, Decker would have to be her voice.

      He regarded Sheldon Gordon. Elbows resting on his desk, the principal sat with his head in his hands.

      “This is going to be so traumatic for the kids.” He raised his eyes. “It’s going to scare the wits out of the girls here. Every single boy is going to be seen as a potential rapist/murderer.”

      Decker thought of his daughter. For a decade plus, Decker had worked juvenile and sex crimes in the Foothill Substation of LA’s San Fernando Valley. Every so often, he had unwittingly exposed his daughter to the horrors of angry, unbalanced men. He often wondered if he had skewed her perception of the male gender.

      He glanced at a Polaroid of Cheryl Diggs. At the moment, with Cindy being alone in New York, a campus rapist on the loose, he wondered if her skewed perception wasn’t an asset.

      Whitman lived on a nondescript side street populated by twenty-year-old apartment buildings

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