Jonathan Kellerman - Flesh And Blood

I named the courses.

“Let’s see,” he said. “Herb Ronninger is out in the Indian Ocean somewhere studying violent preschoolers – his class pulls over six hundred, so even if he were here I doubt he could help you. De Maartens and Hall are young-buck new-hires, and Learning and Perception tend to be a bit smaller. Let me call them for you.”

“I already tried their offices. Do you have home numbers?”

“Sure.” He found and copied the listings, handed them to me.

“Thanks.”

“Lauren Teague,” he said, putting his glasses back on. He opened a bottom desk drawer, rifled papers for a while, pulled out a list of names and grades. “Yeah, she was enrolled all right… Did well, too. Very well – eighteenth out of 516… Good, solid A’s on all her exams… B plus on her paper.” More scrounging produced another list: “‘Iconography in the Fashion Industry.’ Oh, her .”

“You remember her.”

“The model,” he said. “I thought of her that way because she looked like one – all the basics: tall, blond, gorgeous. And when I read the paper, I figured she’d been writing from experience. She also stood out because she was quite a bit older than the average junior – pushing thirty, right?”

“She’s twenty-five.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, she seemed older. Maybe because she dressed maturely – pantsuits, dresses, expensive-looking stuff. I remember thinking, This girl has money. Kind of aloof, too. She used to sit in the back by herself, take notes constantly. Never saw her with any other students… So why’d I give her a B plus on the paper?… If the students want them, I hand them back, don’t know if she picked hers up… but I do keep a comment card…” Bending low, he began tossing papers out of drawers, created a high pile on the desk. “Okay, here goes.” He flourished a stack of rubber-banded blue index cards. “My notes say, ‘High on anger, low on data.’ If I remember, it was a bit of a screed, Alex.”

“Anger at the fashion industry?” I said.

“From what I recall. Probably the usual feminist stuff – woman as meat, subservient roles coerced by unrealistic conceptions of femininity. I get at least two dozen every quarter. All valid points, but sometimes they substitute passion for facts. I really can’t remember this particular paper, but if I had to guess, that would be it. So she left without telling Mom. Is that an aberration?”

“According to Mom.”

He scratched his chin. “Yeah, as a parent that would worry me.” Placing his feet on the floor and his hands on his knees, he looked at me over the rims of the half-glasses. “It’s funny – actually it’s anything but funny – your coming around about a missing student. When you first told me, it gave me a start. Because something like this happened last year. Another girl – some kind of campus beauty queen. Shane something, or Shana… Shanna – I don’t recall her exact name. Left her dorm room one night and never came back. Big stir on campus for a few days, then nothing. It affected me more than it might’ve because Jan and I had just sent our Lisa off to Oberlin. She was fine in the separation-anxiety department, but we weren’t doing so well. I’d just started to settle down – had stopped phoning the poor kid twelve times a day – and this Shanna thing happens.”

“She was never found?”

He shook his head. “Talk about the ultimate parent’s nightmare. There’s no word I despise more than closure – pop-psych crapolsky. But not knowing’s got to be worse. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the Teague girl – it just reminded me.”

“Gene, in terms of the research job, is there something I might’ve missed? I checked federal, state, and private grants, including part-time positions.”

He thought awhile. “What about something off-campus? Paid subject positions. You see ads in the Daily Cub . ‘Feeling low or moody? You may be clinically depressed and qualify for our cool little clinical trials.’ Pharmaceutical outcome studies, obviously the FDA or whoever’s in charge doesn’t see a problem using paid participants. The Cub ’s out of circulation till next quarter, but maybe you can find something. Still, what would that tell you about where she is?”

“Probably nothing,” I said. “Unless Lauren signed up for a study because she had a specific problem – as in depression. Depressed people drop out.”

“Her mother wouldn’t know if she was that low?”

“Hard to say. Thanks for the tip, Gene – I’ll look into it.”

I got up, placed the coffee on a table, and headed for the door.

“You’re really extending yourself on this, Alex.”

“Don’t ask.”

He stared at me but said nothing.

No longer a clinician, but he knew enough not to press it.

THE STORY WAS easy to find.

Shawna Yeager.

Beautiful face, heart-shaped, unlined, crowned by a tower of pale ringlets. Almond eyes, shockingly dark. Pixie chin, perfect teeth, beauty undiminished by grainy black-and-white miniaturization, the cold, metal frame of the microfiche machine, the stale air of the research library microfilm vault.

I stared at lovely glowing shoulders exposed by a strapless gown, sparkly things dotting the bodice. The gown Shawna Yeager had worn at her coronation as Miss Olive Festival. Silly little rhinestone crown pinned to the luxuriant curls, happiest-girl-in-the-world grin.

The contest had taken place two years ago in her hometown, an aggie community east of Fallbrook named Santo Leon. Shawna Yeager held a scepter in one hand, a giant plastic olive in the other.

The Daily Cub article said she’d graduated fifth in her class at Santo Leon High. A single paragraph summed up her pre-college history: small-town beauty queen/honor student travels to the city to attend the U. Shawna had surprised her friends by not pledging a sorority, choosing instead to live in one of the high-rise dorms. Turning into a “study grind.”

She’d majored in psychobiology, talked about premed, used her beauty contest winnings and income from a summer teacher’s aide job to pay her bills.

She’d been enrolled for only a month and a half when she left the dorm on a late October night, informing her roommate that she was heading to the library to study. At midnight the roommate, a girl named Mindy Jacobus, fell asleep. At eight A.M. Mindy woke, found Shawna’s bed empty, worried a bit, went to class. When Shawna still hadn’t returned by two P.M., Mindy contacted the campus police.

The unicops engaged in a comprehensive search of the U’s vast terrain, notified LAPD’s West L.A. and Pacific Divisions, Beverly Hills and Santa Monica Police, and West Hollywood sheriffs of the girl’s disappearance.

No leads. The campus paper carried the story for a week. No sightings of Shawna, not even a false report. Her mother, Agnes Yeager, a widowed waitress, was driven to L.A. from Santo Leon by a representative of the chancellor’s office and provided living quarters in a graduate student dorm for the duration of the search.

A Cub follow-up – still no news – said the search had lasted three weeks.

After that, nothing.

I returned to the microfilm librarian, filled out cards, obtained spools from the Times and the Daily News for the corresponding dates. Shawna’s disappearance merited two days of page 20 media attention, then a senator’s drunken son crashed his Porsche on the I-5, killing himself and two passengers, and that story took over.

I returned to the Cub spool, wrote down the reporter’s name – Adam Green – and studied Shawna Yeager’s beauty contest photo some more, searched for a resemblance to Lauren.