Milo said, “What was the student’s name?”
“All I know is his first name. Errol. That’s all Manny told me and I resisted the temptation to find out more. Because frankly, I was horrified, and after what I’d gone through with my husband I’d developed a severe allergy to horror.”
She played with an earring. “Not going to get into detail but David had some sort of neuromuscular disease. Not ALS, nothing they could even put a name on.”
“So sorry you had to go through that.”
“So am I,” said Hannah Gardener. “That’s why I’ve changed my life. I’m also allergic to bullshit and so I concentrate on what’s important. That’s why I really don’t want to talk about this anymore. Now or in the future.”
She got up, walked to the door and opened it. “Sorry if this seems rude, but end of discussion. I appreciate what you’re doing and hope you succeed but I want nothing to do with it and I trust you’ll respect my wishes.”
Milo said, “We appreciate your talking to us.”
“Sure,” said Hannah Gardener. “But I hope it turns out to be useless and you solve it some other way.”
—
Walking through the lobby, Milo said, “A kid gets a bad grade. Go Buck, out of the mouths of babes and old cops.”
In the car, he said, “Errol. That shouldn’t be hard to find.”
—
It wasn’t.
A call to the Coroner’s pulled up the death certificate, filed fourteen months ago.
Errol Morgan Moffett, seventeen. Cause of death: asphyxiation due to hanging. Manner of death: suicide.
Home address in Woodland Hills.
Milo said, “That’s an hour’s drive from Hamilton each way, minimum.”
I said, “It was probably the only magnet he got into.”
“Dedicated parents.”
“Like she said, devastated parents. It’s easy to see them blaming Rosales. The question is, how far did they take it.”
“Let’s try to find out. Starting with who are these people.”
“Facts, not theory,” I said. “Unlike the maps on her walls.”
“Huh?”
“She collects antique reproductions from when cartographers just made stuff up. The largest one had the world shaped like a cloverleaf. Another had an octopus—”
“You notice stuff like that? And could still concentrate on the main topic?”
“It’s not that hard.”
“Yeah, yeah, don’t tell me aboutyourphysics tests.”
Chapter
34
Back in his office, he printed Errol Moffett’s death certificate, studied it in detail, and passed it to me.
