The Finishing School

35

TED SIEBERT wasn’t the only reason Melanie had come to Holbrooke. She planned to pay a surprise visit to Dr. Harrison Hogan. She’d dug up some interesting stuff on the good doctor as well, and she was hoping he could explain it away. Hogan was her best source inside the school, and she hated to think he was keeping a dirty secret.

Melanie made her way to Hogan’s office and rapped on the frosted-glass window of his closed door.

“Yeah!” Hogan called.

She poked her head in. “Hi.”

“Oh, hey. What brings you here?” Hogan asked.

“I wanted to let you know, Ted Siebert found the girls’ files.”

He smiled good-naturedly. “Great. I’m glad they weren’t lost, especially since it probably would’ve been my fault.”

“Do you have a minute?”

“Sure, come on in,” he said, leaning back and putting one Nike-clad foot on his messy desk. “What’s up? Any leads on where the girls got the drugs?”

“We’re working on it,” she said, taking a seat. No reason to enlighten Hogan about Brianna Meyers’s autopsy results and the drug-smuggling angle. Especially since she now suspected him of hanky-panky with one of the victims.

“Actually,” she said, “I’m here because I have a few questions for you about Whitney Seward.”

Did she detect a slight trace of alarm in his eyes, or was she imagining it? But Hogan didn’t move from his relaxed position, just ran fine hands thoughtfully through his shaggy hair.

“Sure,” he said casually.

“I was hoping you could tell me a bit more about your relationship with Whitney.”

“Okay. No problem. Nothing much to report, you know? I think I mentioned yesterday, I was her college adviser. I also taught her tenth-grade biology, and I would’ve had her in chemistry next semester. Oh, and I was helping her out with English, too, which she was failing, but that wasn’t entirely her fault. Mrs. Stein is an old battle-ax, and she couldn’t get past the fact that she loathed Whitney on a personal level. By the way, Melanie, I’m brewing up some green tea with echinacea. You want some? Good herbal remedy in this weather.” He gave her a concerned look, which she tried not to interpret as a diversionary tactic.

“No thanks. So, in your various roles, how much contact did you have with Whitney Seward?”

“Contact?”

“Phone calls, e-mails, visits, that sort of thing?”

“Can I ask, did Patricia say something to you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just…don’t believe everything you hear.”

“Is there some bad feeling between you and Mrs. Andover, Doctor?”

“Call me Harrison.”

“It’s better for the investigation if we keep things on professional terms.”

“Oh.” He seemed somewhat taken aback. “Okay, if you’re more comfortable that way. Well, how to put this? Patricia favors some…uh, unorthodox methods of maintaining control of staff members she sees as threats. Unfortunately, I fall into the threat category. Not only am I popular with the student body, but I question Patricia’s authority too often for her taste. She hates that.”

“You’re suggesting Mrs. Andover would actually lie to the federal government about you?”

“Sounds crazy, right? But welcome to my world-that’s Holbrooke for you. I guarantee, if Patricia said something about me and Whitney, she did it for some Machiavellian reason of her own.”

“Mrs. Andover didn’t say a word. I happened to subpoena Whitney’s telephone and e-mail records. They show an awful lot of contact between the two of you.”

Hogan shook his head from side to side slowly, as if he couldn’t believe his ears. “You know, it’s really sad to me how things get misinterpreted in this day and age. That’s one of the worst by-products of the child-abuse scandals of the past decade, if you ask me. Because my friendship with Whitney Seward was totally aboveboard. The kid was messed up, and I tried to help. End of story.”

“So the nature of the interaction-”

“Look,” he interrupted, “I’m not saying Whitney never came on to me or even maybe sent me a suggestive e-mail now and then. But I’m trained in adolescent psychology. If a girl like Whitney behaves in an overtly sexual manner toward an older male authority figure, I see it for what it is. A normal developmental phase. I take it in stride, and I work with the student to overcome the transference issues, even transform the crush into something positive.”

“Such as?”

“Well, did you see Whitney’s grade in my biology class? The kid worked hard for me.” Hogan looked at her carefully as he said this.

“But if Whitney was sending you suggestive e-mails, that’s hardly ‘nothing to report,’ as you said a moment ago.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Not to my mind.”

“Reality’s in the eye of the beholder. Maybe you should stop and ask yourself what assumptions you bring to the table.”

PATRICIA ANDOVER, it turned out, brought some pretty serious assumptions to the table.

“Harrison was sleeping with Whitney,” the headmistress declared flatly when Melanie confronted her on the subject.

“How do you know that?”

“Because! Whitney was sending him naked pictures of herself. I don’t suppose he mentioned that to you?”

“No. He said she’d sent him suggestive e-mails. He didn’t say anything specific about naked pictures.”

“Of course not.”

Melanie had to admit, Hogan’s nonchalance about the whole thing was suspicious. Had it been an act-or the calm of true innocence? Or was Patricia Andover lying about the pictures?

“Tell me more about these naked pictures. Have you actually seen them?” Melanie asked.

“With my own eyes. I make it my business to know what’s being done with school computers, for liability reasons, you see. These were absolutely pornographic. Whitney in…various poses. With her genitalia exposed.”

Melanie certainly believed that such pictures existed, since she’d seen similar ones on the blog. But that didn’t necessarily mean they’d been sent to Hogan.

“I’d like to get copies of the pictures and the covering e-mails, Mrs. Andover. This may have some connection to what happened with-”

“No. I’m very sorry, but that won’t be possible. I erased them all.” Patricia looked suddenly flushed, with a faint dew of perspiration on her forehead. Melanie had serious doubts as to whether she was telling the truth.

“You erased them? That seems very strange to me. Weren’t you planning to do anything about the fact that one of your teachers-at least as far as you believed-was having a sexual relationship with a student?”

“Oh, Jesus,” Patricia dropped her head into her hands and kneaded her eyebrows. The Yorkie lying on a satin dog bed in the corner perked its head up, then jumped into Patricia’s lap and began licking her face. “Yes, darling, Mommy’s upset,” Patricia said, stroking the dog, which settled into her lap.

“Frankly,” Melanie continued, “that seems quite out of character for you, based on what I’ve observed about how carefully you run this school.” In other words, I don’t believe you.

“What can I say? I reacted emotionally, out of deep disgust. Everybody’s human.”

“What are you planning to do about this alleged sexual relationship?”

“I’ve already confronted Harrison. He knows he’s going to be suspended as soon as the gala is over and the endowment campaign closes. But given the furor over the ODs, I couldn’t do it before then without hurting the school. I promise you, Harrison won’t be left alone with any of the girls between now and then.”

“When you confronted him, did he admit to having a sexual relationship with Whitney?”

“No. He denied it.”

“So what do you plan to use for proof if you deleted the e-mails?”

“Look, I made a mistake. I’ve admitted that. What do you want me to do?” Patricia said. This woman was a tough opponent; she had her story and she was sticking to it. But Melanie was pretty convinced she was lying. Maybe the e-mails had never existed at all, or maybe they’d existed but Patricia had never erased them. Either way, it looked like Melanie would have to get a search warrant and check through Holbrooke’s entire computer system, which was going to be an annoyingly time-consuming process.

“You’re not planning to go public with this, are you?” Patricia asked.

Melanie hesitated. She wasn’t, but let the headmistress sweat it. “I haven’t decided yet.”

“If you ever did, I can tell you what Harrison’s defense would be: that Whitney sent the e-mails unsolicited and that he didn’t stop her, because he was playing therapist.”

“You don’t believe him?” Melanie asked.

“Psychobabble. Lies.”

“Well, like I said, it seems to me you’re going to have a difficult time making your case, since you destroyed the best evidence. Anyway, I’m not wasting any more time on Dr. Hogan right now. Let me ask you about another staff member. I’ve found Ted Siebert somewhat…difficult. Hostile.”

The headmistress nodded, smiling. “That’s Ted for you. He’s a good lawyer.”

“Is there anything about him that I should know about?”

Patricia flushed again. “No. Not that I’m aware of.”

Melanie studied the headmistress’s face. She had the feeling she just wasn’t getting straight answers out of this woman. “Hmm. Okay. One more question, then, Mrs. Andover, and I’ll let you get back to work. I’m sure you understand, we need to cover all bases. This is simply a matter of gathering information for the record.”

“Fine. Fire away.”

“Where were you on Monday night when the girls OD’d?”

The headmistress stroked her dog, considering for a moment. “May I ask why you’re interested in my whereabouts, Miss Vargas?”

“As I said, only as a matter of routine. We’re asking the same question of everyone we interview.”

“Of course. I understand. I appreciate how thorough you’re being. Well, I must confess to being rather dull. I was home alone on Monday night with the doggies. I took a bath, drank a glass of wine, and turned in early.”

“Okay, thank you.” Melanie made a note on her yellow legal pad, then looked coolly back at Patricia. “You wouldn’t happen to know, would you, where James Seward was then?”

Patricia went bright red. Her mouth fell open a split second before she was able to get any sound out. “James Seward? I…uh, no, I don’t,” she said, then closed her mouth again, doing her best to act as if that were a perfectly normal question.

AFTER DELIVERING the wiretap lecture at ENTF headquarters, Melanie searched out Ray-Ray Wong. She found him speed-typing reports in his pathologically neat cubicle.

“Holbrooke is apparently a hotbed of corruption and lies,” she said cheerfully. “Let me ask you, from what you saw on the blog, did Whitney Seward send any of her dirty pictures to a Holbrooke e-mail address?”

“What’s a Holbrooke e-mail address look like?”

“I think it’s the person’s first and last name, at Holbrooke dot e-d-u.”

“Definitely not. I would have noticed something that obvious. Why?”

“Because Patricia Andover claims to have intercepted dirty pictures that Whitney sent to Hogan.”

“Hogan, the school psychologist?”

“Yes.”

“There weren’t any. I’m sure of it. Could Andover be making that up for some reason?”

“Hogan says she is. But Whitney’s cell-phone records say different. I went through them very carefully when we were working on the wiretap affidavit. It turns out Hogan is all over them, going back almost a year. Long calls, late at night, mostly between her cell and his home telephone, some to his cell and his office. The volume can’t be explained by ‘You’re failing English’ either, though that’s what he claims.”

Ray-Ray shrugged. “Doesn’t surprise me if he was bangin’ her. All those longhaired sixties throwbacks are morally corrupt.”

“We need to subpoena Hogan’s phone records to see what else comes up and get a warrant for the Holbrooke computer system as well, to track down the e-mails. Someone figured out how to access Whitney’s blog and take it off the Web altogether. Maybe it was Hogan. Maybe he erased all the e-mails to himself, and that’s why you didn’t find them.”

Ray-Ray looked at her like she was insane. “Not for nothing here, ma’am, but we’re up on a drug wire on an extremely viable target, and so far it ain’t going too well. Very few pertinent phone calls. We should be concentrating on that, instead of trying to find out if Hogan was in Whitney’s pants. Let’s just agree he was and move on, all right? I mean, it’s a safe bet.”

“We should definitely pursue the wire aggressively, but we can’t just drop other leads. What if the drug smuggling isn’t why the girls died? What if there was something strange going on at Holbrooke?”

“Brianna Meyers had balloons of heroin in her stomach! How can that not be why they died?”

Melanie frowned. He had a point there.

“Esposito and the drug-smuggling angle are what matters,” Ray-Ray continued. “Not who was bangin’ Whitney. Shoot me for thinking that-I’m a DEA agent.”

Melanie sighed. “Oh, hell, maybe you’re right. I’m just frustrated that we don’t have more leads on Carmen Reyes.”

“Yeah, about that?”

“What?”

“I hate to be a downer, but it occurred to me: If Carmen’s not a drug dealer, if she’s just a witness like you said, who stumbled across something at Whitney’s house…” Hehesitated, looking uncomfortable.

“Yeah? Spit it out,” she said.

“Don’t you think Esposito’s killed her by now?”