“You make her sound pretty troubled. Did anyone ever try to help?”
“There are too many of them to help, quite frankly. I saw my share of indulged kids at Occidental and Berkeley, but the crew here? Part of it’s the wealth, but a lot of it’s generational. They’re pressured to be absolutely perfect, and yet simultaneously told they can do no wrong. No one ever says no to them. If something isn’t right, it’s someone else’s fault. They blame someone like me for their D, or they call a doctor for a diagnosis.”
Ellie was glad he raised the topic. “We’re under the impression that the students take prescription drugs like they’re multivitamins.”
“That’s not just here. I mentioned that my wife’s a doctor? She might be even more idealistic than I am. She refuses to take handouts from the pharmaceutical industry or to write prescriptions people don’t need—especially for children who have nothing wrong with them. Between the two of us, we’ve managed to make ourselves broke, but at least we can look ourselves in the mirror. Get this.” He had abandoned his sandwich on the table, now animated by the current conversation. Ellie could imagine him as a college lecturer. “I talked to Maria—that’s my wife—about this last year when I found out a bunch of students had taken Ritalin and Adderall to help study for finals. It turns out the number of kids on psychotropic drugs is staggering. There have been cases of two-year-olds on Prozac. They now permit diagnosis of ADHD in children as young as four. And Maria thinks almost all of the diagnoses are bogus. Then, about ten percent of kids who haven’t been diagnosed take their friends’ drugs, just to get high. Was Julia messing with that kind of stuff?”
“You’ll understand we can’t tell you her medical history,” Ellie said.
“Well, the rumor is she killed herself but that her parents think otherwise. I’m not sure which is worse.”
Ellie did. She knew which was worse. And she knew why Bill and Katherine Whitmire so desperately needed another answer.
“At any other school, we’d expect to get access to every single student to find out what she may have been going through, who she was seeing, whether she was having problems. But here, kids are even shutting down their Facebook pages. Is it possible Julia was being bullied?” She wouldn’t be the first teenager to kill herself after a relentless campaign of torment that kids were capable of launching these days, typical schoolyard teasing now amplified by a thousand with a turbo boost from technology.
“I hate to say this, but Julia would have been more likely to be the bullier than the bullied in that kind of scenario. They’re pulling down their profiles because the school put the fear of God in them—no, worse, the fear of tackiness. Some kids might trade a lung for the infamy of some lame song on YouTube, but Casden’s all about propriety. The headmistress made it very clear: even if they set their pages to ‘private,’ all it takes is for one friend to cooperate with the media.”
“Next thing the kid knows,” Rogan said, “his party pictures are on the front page of a tabloid, the poster child for prep school dysfunction.”
“Exactly. So to make sure nothing is taken out of context, no Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, all that nonsense. One of the administrators told me that the school even hired a public relations firm to search the Internet for stories about the school and have the negative ones scrubbed. It’s like 1984.”
“But we saw parents lobbying the headmistress. They were angry, and they wanted information. Won’t a private school need to listen to that kind of pressure?”
Wallace was back to his sandwich, pausing to swallow before responding. “It’ll be interesting to watch the fallout. The kind of people who send their children to this school are used to having their way. But it’s ultimately about supply and demand. You wouldn’t believe some of the family names we’ve turned down. Even the head of the Fed needed a friend to pull strings to get his kid in. Parents can complain, but at the end of the day, what are they going to do? Yank their kids? There are a hundred other families lined up who are willing to tell themselves that two dead teenagers is just a coincidence.”
“Is it?” Rogan asked. “Just a coincidence?”
Wallace crushed the empty wrapper of his sandwich into a tight ball. “I think even I have said enough at this point, Detectives.”
As they were heading back to the car, Rogan’s cell phone buzzed. “Rogan. . . . Yeah. . . . Can’t you just tell me? . . . All right. We’ll be right down.”
“Now what?”
“That was the CIS detective. He found something on Julia’s laptop.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Most law enforcement jobs came with cool-sounding titles, as with the forensic scientists who worked as criminalists, or the dispatchers, who were communications technicians. Even the clerical staff at least got nifty acronyms—PAAs, short for police administrative aides.
And so, unsurprisingly, the cops who did the increasingly important work of analyzing computers for the NYPD weren’t merely detectives: they were CIS detectives.
Typically, a victim’s computer would have been inspected at the precinct by one of the department’s “computer associates”—civilians who tended toward the long-haired, lanky, Dungeons & Dragons techno-nerd variety, more comic-con than Columbo. But when the daughter of Bill Whitmire was involved, Rogan had sent the laptop directly to headquarters to be examined by a CIS detective.
Because Julia was dead, they did not need a court’s permission to search every byte of the computer’s data. They could read her documents, follow her Internet surfing trail, and pore over her e-mail history. With her death, Julia had lost any right to privacy.
Today’s CIS detective introduced himself as Peter Pettinato. From the first glance, Ellie could see he was not the usual only-left-the-basement-to-answer-the-door-for-carry-out type. He was an actual grown-up with short black hair and an equally tidy mustache. There were, however, signs of a creative personality. His cubicle was decorated with photographs of his pets and a few appearances he’d made in local theater productions. In place of a typical office chair, he sat on a bright blue yoga ball.
As Pettinato reached for the closed laptop on his desk, Ellie noticed a sticker of a yellow bird with a white belly on the back of the computer, right above a sticker that read: “Mean People Suck.”
The bird image was familiar. Where had she seen it before? The Brady Bunch? Something about it reminded her of the oldies repeat-channel she used to watch when she was little. That was it. The Partridge Family! It wasn’t an identical cartoon, but the bird reminded her of The Partridge Family.