“We don’t permit bullying at the school,” Karin said quickly.
“But at a different school, he would be?”
“At a different school, different conditions would apply. Who knows?”
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
“Not necessarily. Bullying depends on a lot of factors. As far as I can see, it’s as much a matter of chemistry as anything else. Someone becomes a victim with as much random chance as falling in love. All I can say is, here, no one person or group picked on the boy. If anything,” she added, almost reluctantly, “James picked on some of them. He tripped one of the kindergartners and broke his wrist—although that may have been an accident. I saw him pinch a second-grade girl.”
The chemistry of bullying, Allen thought, and wrenched his mind away from the image of shiny black glasses. “Did you talk to the boy’s father about it?”
But instead of answering, she asked, “You don’t need any dessert, do you? What do you think about dancing?”
“In the abstract, or the particular?”
“Would you like to go dancing with me? Not here,” she explained. “There’s a place a few doors down that has ballroom dancing on Thursday nights. My husband and I go sometimes, but he’s on the East Coast just now.”
“If you don’t mind my size tens landing regularly on your toes, I’d be willing to make an effort.”
Ballroom dancing was a skill Allen had left behind with his high school graduation, but he managed not to step on her feet too seriously. Because he was so rusty, it took him a while to realize that in the process of guiding him around the floor, the woman’s hands were covering rather more ground than was really necessary: By the end of the first song, she had managed to feel her way around most of his belt line and up both armpits. When the song ended, he leaned close to her ear to murmur, “How about we sit this one out, and you tell me why you’re patting me down?”
Her blush was delectable, but she did not protest the accusation. Back at the table, he took the chair beside her, so they could talk without raising their voices.
“So, Ms. Karin Rao, why do you imagine I might be wearing a gun?”
“You said you weren’t working for Mark O’Connell. I wasn’t sure if I believed you, and if I did, I wanted to know if maybe you were like him, just not with him.”
He reared back in surprise. “Are you telling me that Jamie’s father wears a gun?”
“My stepfather’s a police detective. American. I know what a gun worn under clothes looks like.”
Oh shit, Allen thought as the first half of her statement sank in. A cop’s daughter, just what I need, oh shit.
“Why are you asking questions about the boy?” she was saying.
“I’m asking questions about the father.” Did she set me up? She had hours to do it.
“Is that because you already know where the boy is?”
Allen sat back sharply. Get up and go, now, before her reinforcements storm in. She must have seen something of the apprehension in his face, because suddenly she smiled, and moved in so close that an onlooker might have thought they were about to kiss. She said to him in a low, firm voice, “He’s a troubled boy, is James, but it’s hardly surprising, with a father like that. Anything I can do to help you keep that man away from his son, just let me know.”
Allen laughed in relief and delight, and her smile deepened.
“You can begin,” he suggested, “by telling me what you know of the man.”
“Have you met him?”
“No.” Just spent a week and a half listening to his voice and watching him torment his son.
“I only met him once,” Karin told him. “At Back-to-School night in October. Really nice man, enthusiastic about the boy, good questions, sympathetic. And very attractive—he has these sparkling blue eyes and a little dimple in his chin. But then there was the gun—this was before our metal detectors went in. A gun seemed a little extreme for an investment counselor. And when I talked with him on the phone a month or so later, I began to wonder. It was . . . It’s hard to explain. It was almost as if, on the phone, without the physical charm, I was talking to a different person. As if he wasn’t working so hard to be a great guy, when I wasn’t there in front of him. Face-to-face, he seemed to hang on my every word; on the phone, he didn’t seem at all interested in what I had to say. He seemed, in fact, on the point of hanging up in boredom. I’m sure that doesn’t make much sense to you, especially since you’ve never met him, but the result was that although after our parent-teacher conference I’d been thinking of Mark O’Connell as a great guy who’d been through a lot—lost his wife, trying to do his best by his problem kid—after talking with him on the phone, I started to reevaluate. Anyway, that was our first phone conversation.”
“And the second?” Allen asked.
“The second one was, frankly, scary.” She shot him a glance to see how he was taking the statement, and seemed reassured at his reaction. “I even told Kluger about it, but he just climbed on his sexist high horse and all but patted me on the head. It wasn’t my imagination,” she insisted.
“I’m not arguing with you,” Allen told her. “Why’d you call him in the first place, if I may ask? Do you call all the parents?”
“I try to contact each parent every two or three months, not only when there’s a problem, but when their child has done a particularly good job, or if something happened I think they should know about. The classes are small enough, it’s not difficult to do. And it helps a lot, to keep the parents involved.”
“But not Mark O’Connell?”
“I know, I’m driveling. It was so awkward, it makes me uncomfortable to talk about it. But what happened, the second call I mean, came out of something James had written in one of his essays that rather alarmed me. The assignment was to describe a scene in a kitchen, using all one’s senses, and employing metaphor and simile to explore nuances without making obvious parallels—although of course I didn’t put the assignment in those words for the class. In his story, James was describing a woman dropping a plate of food onto the floor, and he wrote something along the lines of, ‘The meat hit the linoleum dead flat, with a crack like a wide leather belt hitting naked skin.’ You can see why it caught my attention.”
“I sure can.”
“Anyway, I might have thought it was just some flight of imagination, or something he’d picked up somewhere, but for the way he reacted when I asked him if he’d ever been hit like that.”
“He denied it.”
“Absolutely and strenuously. And laid me a nice side trail to lead me away from a phone call. Which I probably should have followed.”
“What happened?”
“I have no idea. I mean, I called the father, and found him home even though James had said he was out of town. I asked him—very gently, I thought—if he was having any difficulties with James at home. You know, not accusing him or anything, just suggesting that boys of that age, particularly those who had lost a mother, often acted out and went through a period of misbehavior. I suppose it was too ham-fisted, because instead of admitting that yes, he did find James a handful sometimes and needed to discipline him strongly, in about two minutes flat he somehow managed to turn the conversation around and was soon quizzing me in this quiet voice about the boy’s misbehavior at school, saying that he’d hoped all would go well here, that James had seemed to respond so well to the sterner structure—his words—and how disappointed he was that James had given me problems. It took me aback, how smoothly the man turned things completely over on me, and then before I could do more than protest that it wasn’t at all what I’d meant, he thanked me and hung up. When I tried to ring him back, the line was busy, and stayed that way until after ten o’clock. I didn’t know what to do. My husband even offered to go with me to James’s house and check that things were okay, but I couldn’t help thinking that was a bit extreme. And I couldn’t very well call the police over a creepy conversation with a parent—a wealthy, upsta
nding, involved parent who would then yank his kid out of school and probably threaten to sue over being accused of beating his kid.”
“And did he?”
“Beat James? That’s why I said I had no idea what happened that night. James came to school the next morning, and he was fine physically—no bruises I could see, no limp, no indication of soreness or distress, but I have to say, he certainly acted like a beaten child—the startled eyes, the jumpiness . . . He even raised an arm as if to fend me off when I appeared beside him without warning.”
“Abuse isn’t always physical,” Allen noted; she was on it in a flash.
“You do have James hidden away!”
“Me? Nope. Like I told you, I’m interested in the father. But I have seen men like him before. You say he carried a gun? Even to a parent-teacher conference?”
“I also saw him one time with a group of other men, maybe three or four, coming out of a restaurant when I happened to be driving by. One of them, I’m quite sure, was armed. They all looked like crooks. And I overheard James talking about guns one time, he seemed remarkably knowledgeable.”
To an Englishwoman, he reflected, any knowledge about guns might appear extreme. “When you say the men looked like crooks, what do you mean?”
She thought for a moment, her eyes slowly coming to focus on a clot of high-spirited young professionals near the busy bar. “You see those three men in the suits over there? When you have a group like that, they’re interacting—even if they’re all business, they bounce off each other. Each of them is always aware of himself through the eyes of the others. Well, men like those I saw with Mark O’Connell don’t do that. They’re only aware of others as either people they can take advantage of, or people to watch out for. Victims or threat. You can see it in their body language,” she elaborated, and the precision of her pronunciation made Allen wonder if his companion was accustomed to the amount of wine she’d put away.
“You’re talking about sharks,” he told her.
“Yeah, human sharks.” She nodded, and Allen hid his disappointment. To Karin Rao, the word “crook” described any sort of ruthless businessman. She hadn’t been all that much help, after all.
“Well, Karin,” he said, “you’ve got to be up in the morning, and I have to go see someone tonight. The pizza was great, and I’m sorry I’m not a better dancer.”
Obediently, she stood up and gathered her coat around her, swaying slightly as if to the music. He handed her the purse she’d left on the back of the chair and followed her out of the dance hall, a solicitous hand hovering near one elbow.
Outside on the street, she blinked owlishly around her. Allen asked, “Did you drive?” There was no way he was letting this woman behind a wheel, but she shook her head.
“No, I live just around the corner. The walk will do me good.”
“I’ll go with you, I could use some air, too.”
It was four blocks, into the world of condos and duplexes that lay behind the main road. The Rao home was in a ten-year-old condo, through a courtyard with a fountain and security gate and up a set of external stairs. He shook her hand formally, and thanked her again.
“I hope you can help James,” she told him, sober again.
“Look, I know you like Jamie, but really I have nothing to do—”
“Did I say I liked him?” she interrupted. “I don’t remember saying that.”
He gaped at her. “Well, surely . . . I mean, you gave him the books for his birthday, you seem very concerned as to his welfare—”
“I’m a teacher, he is one of my students. Or he was, until he disappeared. Certainly I felt sorry for the boy, since there was obviously something terribly dysfunctional about his relationship with his father, and I felt—still feel, clearly—some degree of responsibility to intervene if I can, but no, I wouldn’t say I liked the boy. He struck me as secretive and manipulative, and I tried never to take my eyes off him.”
Allen was speechless, as if he’d just been fluently cursed to perdition by a parakeet. She saw it, but this time her smile was a wintry thing that belonged on a face decades older.
“Mr. Ellis, despite what the press would have us believe, bad kids are created, not born. When a teenager murders a child or shoots up a school, it isn’t because he’s innately wicked, it’s because his parents are. I believe this in my bones. I even have the optimism to trust that James O’Connell is not too old to be saved from his father’s influence. But that doesn’t mean that I have to close my eyes to wickedness, or to pretend that I like a child I feel sorry and responsible for.”
“What . . . what didn’t you like about the boy?” he demanded, but that was too strong for the teacher in Karin Rao, who hastened to correct him.
“I should say less ‘dislike’ than ‘mistrust.’ And even with that, it would be very difficult to explain why I do not. James simply made me uneasy. And when I had talked to his father, I began to understand why. Please, Mr. Ellis, if you are in any position to do so, get the boy some help. Before he hurts someone.
“And before you ask, no, he has not done so yet, not that I know.”
“But you think he could?” Allen asked, but she was turning away.
“I hope I’m wrong,” she said firmly. “Good night, Mr. Ellis.”
There was nothing he could do but say good night to the closed door. And, as he reached to shut off the pen-shaped tape recorder in his shirt pocket, to add under his breath, “But I would have sworn that Jamie liked you.”
He drove back to the motel without paying much attention to the streets. Twenty-four hours earlier, he’d arrived with the simple intention of pinning down O’Connell’s location on August the twelfth, but since then he’d uncovered an unsuspected side to the man. He’d known O’Connell was a sadistic abuser, but now it was as if Allen had caught a glimpse of some creature in the undergrowth. A tiger—or a two-legged killer in black pajamas. He shook off the image and speeded up: too much imagination.
Back at the motel, an email from Alice gave him seven numbers, with no time restrictions or area code. He glanced at his watch, saw that it was barely ten-fifteen, and punched the digits into his cell phone. He got the notes and recording of a wrong number, so he hung up and tried it beginning with the local San Jose code. This time a woman said hello into his ear, with music and voices in the background.
“I’m sorry to call so late, but I was given this number by a friend—” he began.
The woman interrupted. “Is now good for you?”
“I . . . sure.”
“Fourth and Pine, there’s a phone booth.”
“Sorry?” he said, but he was talking to a dead line. He sighed; too many years of this damned cloak-and-dagger stuff. He looked at the screen of his laptop, wondering if he was expected to memorize the number and consign the email to electronic oblivion, the modern equivalent of eating a secret message. But in the end he just shut down the connection before changing his dancing clothes for the dark jeans, navy sweatshirt, and soft-soled shoes he’d need later.
At Fourth and Pine there was indeed a phone booth, tacked up to the side wall of a huge furniture retailer. The phone was ringing as he pulled up, a lonesome tremor in the night. Yanking hard on his brake, he jumped out of the car and sprinted to the booth before it could stop.
He snatched the receiver up and said, “Have you been calling all this time, or did you see me drive up?”
“I knew how long it would take you to get there,” the mystery woman replied. She had a very nice voice—businesslike, but low enough to be sexy.
“So where am I going now?”
“Are you armed?”
“Why does everyone ask that?” Allen complained. “Do I look like someone who goes around with a gun in his belt?”
“Are you?”
“No, I’m not armed. So if you want me to shoot someone for you, you’re out of luck. All I could do is rip off this damned receiver and beat them with it.”
“Don’t do that, this
is one of the few pay phones in the valley that still takes incoming calls. You see the sign for the liquor store?”
Allen looked down the street, then reversed to look the other way. “Yes.”
“Drive in that direction. Halfway between you and it, there’s an alley with a white mailbox on the right. Come down that and park in the garage.”
The phone went dead again. Clearly, this woman had learned her social skills from Alice.
He got back in his car, found the alleyway, and drove down it to an open ground-floor parking area that held five other cars. He got out of his rental car, locked it, and waited for further instructions. On the other side of the garage, a rumbling started up, then stopped. Elevator doors parted.
Looking at the small, enclosed, brushed-steel cubicle, Allen began to wish he actually was armed. That was Alice’s email, he told himself. There’s no reason to think this is some kind of a trap. Get in the elevator.
He did, in the end, step into the elevator, but it took an effort to allow the doors to slide shut without leaping forward to thrust his hands between them; he was sweating when they opened again at four, the top floor. He swallowed, and put his head out.
The high, featureless corridor could have been anything from legal offices to the service entrances of retail shops, completely institutional except for a peculiar five-foot-wide wrought-iron chandelier overhead, its ornate black vines and leaves studded with a dozen or so pointy bulbs. Two doors on this side of the corridor, the elevator and one with a knob; five metal doors on the other, all painted the same pale yellow as the walls and nothing to distinguish them, not even numbers. He straightened, stepped out, and allowed the elevator to close behind him, expecting one of the yellow doors to draw itself open as dramatically as the elevator had. They remained shut. With a mental shrug, he walked down the corridor to the one at the far right and grasped the knob; to his surprise, it turned unhindered.
He stepped into a dim, air-conditioned room the size of the first-floor parking garage, a combination of living space and high-tech dream. Two of the walls resembled a NASA control center: a mosaic of screens, printers, long metal desks with multiple hard drive towers, and assorted machines whose purposes he couldn’t immediately identify. Half of them were on a raised platform, either to incorporate an original difference in the floor level or to provide electricity and ventilation for the machines. The platform had three ramps, one at either end and one in the center. The third wall seemed to be where the inhabitants ate and slept, with the only screened-off space in the entire area behind a full-length maroon leather sofa. Above the kitchen table was an enormous flat-screen television on which a network drama was playing—the source, he decided, of the noise he’d heard behind the woman’s voice. The center of the giant room was an open expanse of polished wood, clear of furniture. As Allen stepped away from the door, he saw that all five entrances opened directly into the space. He also noticed that the doors were extremely solid-looking, and that the wall into which they were set, which from the other side had seemed to be everyday Sheetrock, was nearly as substantial as its doors. The locks on the doors themselves would have occupied a locksmith for hours.