“Name doesn’t ring a bell.”
“No reason it should. Evan’s a good kid.”
“Did he steal the iPhone?”
“No, of course not. That’s my point. He started dating Carrie Mills. Carrie’s ex Danny Turner was furious about it.”
“So Turner posted that pic.”
“Yep, but I can’t prove it. That’s the shit-bird anonymity of online shaming. Did you see that girl who just walked past us?”
“The one you sent to your office?”
“Yeah, that’s Cathy Garrett. She’s a sixth-grade girl. Sixth grade, Nap. So a few weeks ago, Cathy accidentally left her phone in the bathroom. Another girl found it. So this other girl takes the phone, snaps a close-up of her, uh, privates, and then sends the pic to Cathy’s entire contact list, including her parents, her grandparents, everyone.”
I make a face. “That’s sick.”
“I know, right?” She grimaces and puts both hands on her lower back.
“You okay?”
“I’m eight months pregnant, remember?”
“Right.”
“I feel like I got a school bus parked on my bladder.”
“Did you ever catch the girl who took the pics?”
“Nope. We have five or six suspects, all twelve-year-old girls, but the only way to know for certain . . .”
I hold up my hand. “Say no more.”
“Cathy’s been so traumatized by the whole thing, she pretty much visits my office every day. We talk, she calms down, she heads back to class.”
Keren stops and looks back over her shoulder. “I should get to Cathy now.”
We start walking back.
“Your talk about the anonymity of online shaming,” I say. “Is this your way of telling me you don’t believe Hank exposed himself?”
“No, but you’re making my point for me.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know because I can’t know. That’s always the problem with this sort of innuendo. You want to just dismiss it. But sometimes you can’t. Maybe Hank did, maybe he didn’t. I can’t unring that bell, and, sorry, that’s wrong.”
“You’ve watched the video of Hank, right?”
“Right.”
“Any idea who filmed it?”
“Again, I have no proof.”
“I don’t need proof.”
“I wouldn’t want to cast aspersions without evidence, Nap. That’s what the online shaming does.”
We reach her office. She looks at me. I look at her. Then she lets loose a long sigh.
“But I can tell you that there is an eighth-grade girl named Maria Hanson. My secretary can give you her address. Her mother, Suzanne, has come to see me frequently to complain about Hank. When I tell her that there is nothing that legally can be done, she becomes particularly agitated.”
Principal Keren looks through the glass at Cathy. Her eyes start to water.
“I better get to her,” she says.
“Okay.”
“Damn.” She wipes the tears from her eyes with her fingers and looks at me. “All dry?”
“Yeah.”
“Eighth month,” she says. “My hormones are on crack.”
I nod. “You having a girl?”
She smiles at me. “How did you guess?”
She waddles away. I watch her through the glass as she takes Cathy in her arms and lets the young girl sob on her shoulder.
Then I leave to find Suzanne Hanson.
Chapter Fifteen
Westbridge doesn’t have a poor side of town. It has a poor acre, maybe.
There’s a grouping of aging three-family houses located between a Ford dealership and a Dick’s Sporting Goods near the town center. Maura and her mom moved in here the summer before our senior year. They sublet two rooms from a Vietnamese family after Maura’s father cleaned them out and ran off. Maura’s mom worked a few part-time jobs and drank too much.
The Hanson family lives on the first floor of a rust-brick edifice. The wood stoop groans as I step up. When I ring the bell, a big man in mechanic’s coveralls comes to the door. The name “Joe” is stenciled on the right chest pocket. Joe does not look happy to see me.
“Who are you?” Joe asks.
I show him my badge. A woman I assume is Suzanne Hanson comes into view from behind him. When she sees my badge too, her eyes widen, probably in parental worry. I reassure them right away.
“Everything is fine,” I say.
Joe remains suspicious. He steps in front of his wife and gives me narrow eyes. “What do you want?”
I pocket my badge. “Several concerned citizens have filed complaints against a man named Hank Stroud. I’m looking into them.”
“See, Joe?” the woman I assume is Suzanne says. She slides in front of her husband and pushes open the door. “Come in, Officer.”
We move though the front room into the kitchen. She offers me a seat at the table. I take it. The floor is Formica. The table is round and faux wood. The chair is chipped-white Windsor. There is a clock above the door that uses red dice for numbers. The inscription on top reads FABULOUS LAS VEGAS. Toast crumbs litter the table. Suzanne sweeps them with one hand over the table’s side and into her free palm. Then she dumps the crumbs into the sink and runs the water.
I take out a pad and pen for show. “Do you know who Hank Stroud is?”
Suzanne sits across from me. Joe stands over her, his hand on her shoulder, still eyeing me like I’m here to either shoplift or bed his wife. “He’s that horrible pervert who hangs around the school,” she says.
“I assume you’ve seen him more than once,” I say.
“Almost every day. He ogles all the girls, including my daughter, Maria. She’s only fourteen!”
I nod, trying on a friendly smile. “You’ve seen this personally?”
“Oh, sure. It’s terrible. And by the way, it’s about time the police got on this. You work hard, you scrape together enough money to move to a beautiful town like Westbridge; I mean, you expect your kids to be safe, right?”
“Definitely,” I say.
“And what do you have? Some hobo— Do people still say ‘hobo’?”
I smile and spread my hands. “Why not?”
“Right. Hobo. He hangs around our children. You move to a town like this and every day you have to see this bum—that’s what he is, I know you shouldn’t use the word—this bum every day lurking around your children. It’s like this giant, awful weed in a beautiful flower garden, you know?”
I nod. “We need to pull the weed out.”
“Exactly!”
I take some pretend notes. “Have you ever seen Mr. Stroud do more than ogle?”
She’s about to blurt something out, but now I notice the hand on her shoulder gently squeeze to silence her. I look up at Joe. He looks back at me. He gets why I’m here. I get that he gets it, and he gets that I get that.
Shorter: The game is over. Or is just beginning.
“You posted a video of Hank Stroud, didn’t you, Mrs. Hanson?”
Her eyes are aflame. She shakes Joe’s hand off her shoulder. “You don’t know that.”
“Oh, I know it,” I say. “We already ran a voice analysis. We also traced down the Internet IP address from which the video originated.” I give what I said a second to land. “They both confirm that you, Mrs. Hanson, filmed and posted that video.”
This is a lie, of course. I ran no voice analysis or Internet trace.
“And what if she did?” Joe asks. “Not saying she did or she didn’t, but if she did, there’s no law against it, is there?”
“I don’t care,” I say. “I’m here to find out what happened, that’s all.” I look her straight in the eyes. She looks down a second, then back up at me. “You filmed Hank. If you keep denying it, you’re just going to piss me off. So tell me what you saw.”
“He . . . he pulled down his pants,” she says.
“When?”
“You mean like the date?”
“For starters, sure.”
“It was maybe a month ago.”
“Before school, after school, when?”
“Before school. That’s when I see him. I drop my daughter off at seven forty-five A.M. Then I stay and watch her walk all the way in every day because, well, wouldn’t you? You drop your fourteen-year-old daughter off at this beautiful school, and there is a creepy pervert right across the way. I don’t understand why the police don’t do something.”
“Tell me exactly what happened.”
“I told you. He pulled down his pants.”
“Your daughter was walking. And he pulled down his pants.”