“No,” said Mindy, “no way. Shawna wanted to be a doctor, not a centerfold. That’s not the kind of money and fame she wanted. None of us want that. It’s demeaning.”
“Shawna entered beauty contests,” said Milo.
“And hated it—Miss Olive Oil, whatever. She told me she only did it for the prize money and because she figured it would look good on her U application. She wasn’t that kind of girl.”
“What kind is that?”
“A bimbo. She was smart.” Another quick study of the ceiling. White knuckles around the gold pen. One hand let go and began tracing the outline of her narrow hip. Her face had turned salmon pink. Her eyes jumped around like pachinko balls. .
“Demeaning,” she said.
Milo smiled at her. Let it ride.
21
As MINDY RETURNED to her office the corridor filled with people.
Milo said, “That Chinese food made me thirsty.”
We rode a crowded elevator down to the med school cafeteria. Amid the clatter of trays and the odors of mass fodder, we bought Cokes and settled at a rear table. Behind us was a cloudy glass wall looking out to an atrium.
“So,” he said. “Mindy.”
“Not a terrific liar,” I said. “Her complexion wouldn’t cooperate, and she was squeezing that pen hard enough to break it. Especially when she talked about the photos. Adam Green said they were loose black-and-whites, not magazine pages. Mindy tried to make him out as some nut, but he seemed pretty credible to me. And Mindy’s explanation makes no sense. Why would her boyfriend keep skin mags in her room? Green wondered if both Shawna and Mindy had followed up on a solicitation to pose. That would explain Mindy’s nervousness.”
He nodded. “Especially now that she’s an old married woman.”
“You didn’t press her on it.”
“I felt I’d gone as far with her as I could. For the time being. Even if Shawna did pose for nudies, there’s no proof it was really a Duke gig, and not some con man with a business card. Fact is, I can’t see Duke using some psycho photographer—too much at stake. And I can’t exactly march into Tony’s corporate headquarters and demand access to the photo archives.”
His beeper went off. He read the number, cell-phoned, couldn’t get a connection, and stepped outside the cafeteria. When he returned he said, “Guess who that was? Lyle Teague. Mommy doesn’t call me, but Daddy does.”
“What did he want?”
“Have I gotten anywhere, was there anything he could do? Forcing himself to be polite—you could just about see his hands clench through the phone lines. Then he slips in a question about Lauren’s estate. Who’s in charge, what’s going to happen to her stuff, do I know who’s handling her finances?”
“Oh, man.”
He shook his head. “The vulture circles. When I told him I had no idea about any of that, he started to get testy. Poor Lauren, growing up with that. Sometimes I think your job’s worse than mine.”
He bought another Coke, emptied the can.
I said, “The one thing Mindy did confirm was Shawna’s attraction to older men. That and a Duke angle—real or not—does provide a possible link between her and Lauren.”
“Dugger,” he said.
“Older man, rich, smart. A psychologist, no less. He fits Shawna’s list. And talk about business cards—he’s got paternity to back it up. For all we know he uses the magazine as a lure. Same for the intimacy study.”
“Double life, huh? Mr. Clean by day, God knows what after hours?”
“Even by day he’s strange,” I said. “He has no current clients but keeps that lab going. Putting people in a strange little room and measuring how close they get to each other. Sounds more like voyeurism than science to me. And he was running ads prior to both Shawna’s and Lauren’s disappearances.”
“His staff said Shawna had never been to Newport.”
“So he destroyed records. Or met Shawna another way. Taking glam pictures, or he used some other premise. Mindy said Shawna got all dressed up for that weekend thing back home. She didn’t buy the story, assumed the obvious: a date. Shawna was eighteen years old, hungry for the finer things, talked openly about digging older guys. It wouldn’t take a genius to seize upon that and exploit it. And here’s something else to think about: A year has passed between Shawna’s disappearance and Lauren’s death, but that doesn’t mean there’ve been no victims in the interim.”