BLUE BLOOD RUNS COLD (A Michael Ross Novel Book 1) (3 page)

              No one on campus had any reason to like the campus police, and every officer who worked on the force knew it.

              Despite having full investigative powers, the campus officers were not respected by the officers in town. There were no detectives on campus, no commissioners, and no internal affairs division. The campus police were seen as rent-a-cops carrying around fine books, earning a check for doing next to nothing. The fines that they did hand out, as often as not, were not paid until that student discovered a hold placed on his or her account that prevented registration for classes, dorm assignments, among other things. When there had been an incident of a gun going off on campus on the old soccer field, the university had been obliged to call in the state police. The student in question had brought his father's gun to college for a reason only he had known about. That had been three years ago. Ever since then, whenever Theodore encountered anyone from the local police, he received a cold aloofness that he knew came from a lack of respect. He could not be trusted to handle even a simple illegal possession charge. He was simply a glorified ticket-writer in the eyes of the officers who worked in the borough of Shippensburg.

              It did not surprise him, therefore, that when he got the call at 8:40 in the morning that a student had turned up dead, he had not been invited to survey the scene to determine if the incident should be put down as a possible homicide or as an accident. Despite having served for fifteen years as an officer for the Harrisburg City Police Department—a beat where homicide was not uncommon—all of that had been forgotten when it came time for the university to handle the situation. If his services would be required, he would be asked by someone directly. He decided that he would not force himself upon the scene just to get in a pissing match over jurisdiction. By rule, everything that happened on the campus fell under the jurisdiction of the campus police. In practice, the town police and the state police were called upon to deal with serious situations, rare as they were.

              When another call came in at 9:37 in the morning, he thought that he had finally been asked to weigh in upon the matter. The call came from the Office of Social Equity, which had two people and one intern, none of whom had ever made any significant difference on campus for as long as Theodore had been around. As far as he was concerned, the office had been created to placate some disadvantaged person or other and had not been abolished for reasons owing to the university's already poor public image. The people there softened the blows, instead of stopping blows from coming.

              The woman who ran the office, named Melinda Rumberger, was possessed of a smooth, calm voice that went up in pitch the more she felt provoked or panicked. That had been more often than Theodore had cared to admit, for he, unlike the other officers on campus, had often been invited to have discussions with the administrative staff about improving conditions at the university. From the first meeting, Theodore had suggested that Shippensburg break off from the PASSHE system and become, if not completely financially independent, then at least closer to being in control of their own destiny. The state government of Pennsylvania held the purse strings of the university; as such, bureaucrats and politicians alone decided how much money would be given out. That, he felt, was the root of all the problems which had plagued Shippensburg for the duration of his employment. He had received dull, blank stares from everyone gathered around the large table. When Theodore kept his head up through the long, drawn-out silence, the administrators in the room looked away, or focused on the food they had brought with them. This had especially been the case for Dr. Rumberger, who turned her entire body away from him as though she didn't want to listen to anything he had to say.

              After that sunny day in late September, he continued to attend the meetings out of courtesy. He never ventured an opinion, and always spoke as briefly as possible when called upon. Though he never allowed his irritation to creep into his manner or his tone of voice, it always came to the surface whenever he had anything to do with the administrators. He cleared his throat and picked up the phone on the third ring, looking at the unique four digits at the end of the telephone number on his caller ID that identified the office from which the call originated.

              A shrill voice came over on the line, one which was deliberately lowered in volume. Melinda said, “Hello, is this the police station?”

              “Good morning, this is Chief Kenny speaking, how can I help you?”

              A heavy, relieved sigh, then the rustling of papers. “Chief Kenny, thank god. I didn't know who else to call. Everyone is away in an emergency meeting.”

              Theodore called upon his eighteen years of experience upholding the law then. He had pulled drunks by the arm into the station who promptly puked all over the floor. He had reported to accident scenes where mangled, still living bodies had to be carried off on stretchers while passing cars slowed down to get a glimpse of the mayhem. He had raided chop shops and drug labs, each time chasing people who ran. People always ran. He had answered the call for highway chases that ended up filmed by helicopter crews, later to be released on television shows. He had also filled out a mountain of paperwork, both physical and digital, which had by turns stressed him out and exhausted him. By comparison, the concerns of college life, secluded as they were from the rest of world, always struck him as petty, even unimportant. That allowed him to be calm through everything the university threw at him, including a woman calling his office phone in the morning with urgent business.

              He said, “Calm down, Dr. Rumberger. What's the situation there?”

              She blurted out, “Students! Students! Hundreds of them! They're-they're-all at once!”

              Theodore pulled a notepad out of his breast pocket and flipped it open. He held the phone between his chin and his shoulder while he prepared to write. “What is your situation? Do you require assistance?”

              “Yes, I require assistance! I can't handle all of them at once! Oh god, now they're chanting things. They're chanting things, hundreds of them! Come at once, and send all the men you have!”

              She said the last sentence in a higher volume than any of the previous ones. For his part, Theodore could not see what might be wrong with hundreds of students gathering in a single location all at once. Such things happened all the time—at events, at concerts, at the homecoming football game. The only concern that he'd ever had at such events was that students would drink too much alcohol.

              He said, “I'll come myself, and bring one other person with me. Is there anything else I can help you with?”

              “No, that-that should do. I just, I wouldn't know what to do if they all came storming in all at once.”

              He thought,
you'd probably have to get off your butt and do something for once
. He said, “Yes, all right. Thank you for calling. I'll be there in five minutes.”

5

              The meeting in the employee dining area had been far from productive. Lorraine had suspected that the discussion would devolve into recriminations, either real or imagined. She had permitted the Women's Center Director, Zoe Lupinski, to attend without having been invited. Throughout the meeting, Zoe looked pensive, worried. The woman didn't speak up, even though she had never hesitated to be vocal before. She had always been active and vibrant whenever an event in any way related to feminism or women's rights was held. She worked sixty-two hours a week on a salaried pay scale. She stayed until ten o'clock at night some Saturdays just to be there personally for whatever enjoyment or enlightenment she hoped to impart to the student body. Today, sitting in front of so many people in suits, many of whom she knew on a first-name basis, she sat in place, biting her bottom lip. Lorraine had never seen the woman so out of sorts before.

              She wanted to ask Zoe's opinion when the meeting abruptly came to an end. The hour that she had allotted for the meeting had come and gone. The president of Shippensburg University knew at once that nothing had come of the meeting. No one had offered any real, tangible solutions. She stood up in her chair, an action that evoked quick, frightened reactions from the administrators present, who hid their emotions at once behind stony, impassive expressions.

              She said, “Gentlemen, ladies, I'm afraid we can't stay here forever talking about what we must do. The business of the day must carry on. Those of you who had planned to leave in the early afternoon today, well, I'm afraid you might be staying a bit longer than you anticipated. We have a dead student on campus, and Ravney Hall might end up being condemned. I'm afraid that all your other business must be put to one side while we handle this as best we can. Some of you may be getting calls from the press, from parents, or from the Price family. I don't think I have to advise you as to what you have to do today and in the coming weeks. You're all professionals. You all know your jobs. You've been doing the best you can with bad situation after bad situation. Well, here's another one. We'll just have to work hard and get through it.”

              She walked away from the meeting as the other administrators talked amongst themselves, gathering up their suit coats, loosening, straightening, and tightening their ties. She knew that her words could have had the opposite of their intended effect; instead of motivating people, if they thought her disingenuous, they could be turned off. All the more reason for them to keep filling out applications for other universities, which she knew had become a hobby of everyone who pushed papers at Shippensburg. She wondered if there was anything she could do right, besides taking the blame and resigning her position. At the meeting, she had gotten the sense that it might soon come to exactly that.

              In the hallway, Zoe caught up to her. The other woman's heels click-clacked on the polished floor. She held her handbag close against her side, as though she was afraid that someone might snatch it up at any moment. A sliver of blood dripped down her chin from where she had bit her lip open. She had short hair which she could not grow out, for she was a cancer survivor. She was thin and short, almost to the point of being emaciated. For that, Lorraine envied her, for the woman always had a granola bar ready to hand, yet never gained weight.

              Zoe said, “Lorraine, I think...this one might be a bad one.”

              Lorraine tried not to stare at the other woman as though a flower had just sprouted from her forehead. She was not sure that she succeeded. She said, “What do you mean, 'a bad one?'”

              “I've been here twenty-six years. I've seen good times and less good times. This time is a bad time.”

              Though Zoe always bragged that she had one of the longest tenures of employment at Shippensburg University—first as an English instructor, then as an assistant to the Dean of Student Affairs, then as the director of an office she herself helped create—Lorraine often found herself caught up by Zoe's youthful appearance. She was fifty-five years old, a woman who had been diagnosed with breast cancer at forty-two, but who nevertheless came out of it strong and healthy. Her age only betrayed itself in her hands, where wrinkles had started to take over. Otherwise, she could have been thirty-five years old.

              Lorraine said, “I'm not sure what you're trying to say.”

              “The students here, they've really been pushed to the breaking point. They already know that college education can be a waste of money. They know that there's few enough jobs to be had out there. Still, they're here, they're still trying. You wouldn't believe the things I've heard in my office.”

              “Yes, you told me about that the other time. You said that you had become a counselor on top of everything else.”

              Zoe wiped away the blood with the back of her hand. She said, “That's right. Every April, we have Take Back the Night here. We try to inspire students to stand up and march for a cause. The multi-cultural office does the same thing with Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. The students don't really march. They just follow each other around, until they reach the end of the path. I think this time, with Jolanda dead, I think the same thing will happen. They'll follow each other around until they reach the end of the path.”

              They had been walking away from the dining area to the stairwell which sat beneath an enclosed bridge that connected Old Main—the administrative building—to Pearson Hall, which housed the Women's Center, and a small, cramped room on the third floor that served as the university's fiction writing club. When Lorraine turned her attention away from the woman in front of her, she saw students walking in the snow and the slush. Some of them had somber looks on their faces. Others looked determined in a way that she had never seen before. She recognized the determination that comes when a person is simply fed up, and is willing to risk anything and everything to make things right.

              She said to Zoe, “I think you might be right.”

              Zoe took a step back from the crowd of students passing by the double glass doors that led outside. She said, “I was hoping I wasn't.”

              Lorraine rolled her shoulders, trying to get the kinks out. She tried not to yawn, though she could already feel fatigue clawing at her, demanding that she go home and get some sleep. She had not slept well since taking over as the interim president. She suspected that, if she was forced to resign, she would sleep better than she had in months.