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Staton’s dismissal, but they couldn’t—the boy’s death stirred up a hornet’s nest. But even with his reputation, Staton still managed to get a job at Golden Hills Elementary School in San Francisco. Doesn’t that seem weird to you? I mean, they must have been aware of his record.”
    “Maybe he had the right connections.”
    “No one took the trouble to look into his background. The principal at Golden Hills liked the guy because he knew how to enforce discipline, but a number of students and teachers I talked to said he was a bully, one of those candy-asses who grovel to their superiors and become viciously cruel the moment they get a little power. The world’s full of guys like that, unfortunately. In the end, the principal put him on the night shift to avoid any trouble. Staton’s shift ran from eight p.m. to six a.m.”
    “Maybe he was killed by someone he’d bullied at this Boys’ Camp.”
    “Your dad’s looking into the possibility, though he’s still clinging to the theory that the murder is gay-related. Staton was into gay porn, and he used hustlers.”
    “What?”
    “Hustlers—male prostitutes. Staton’s regular partners were two young Puerto Rican guys—your dad questioned them, but they’ve got solid alibis. Oh, and about the alarm in the school, you can tell the Ripper kids Staton was supposed to set it every night, only on the night in question he didn’t. Maybe he was in a hurry, maybe he planned to set it after he got back.”
    “I know you’re still holding out on me,” Amanda said.
    “Me?”
    “Come on, Kabel, spit it out.”
    “It’s something pretty weird—even your dad’s stumped by it,” said Blake Jackson. “The school gym is full of equipment—baseball bats, gloves, balls—but the bat used on Staton didn’t come from the school.”
    “Don’t tell me: the bat was from some team in Arizona!”
    “Like the Arizona Devils? That would make the connection to Boys’ Camp obvious, Amanda, but it didn’t.”
    “So where did it come from?”
    “Arkansas State University.”
     
    According to Celeste Roko, who had studied the astrological charts of all of her friends and relatives, Indiana Jackson’s personality corresponded to her star sign, Pisces. This, she felt, explained her interest in the esoteric and her irrepressible need to help out every unfortunate wretch she encountered—including those who neither wanted nor appreciated her help. This made Carol Underwater the perfect focus for Indiana’s indiscriminate bursts of compassion.
    The two women had met one morning in December 2011. Indiana was locking up her bike and, out of the corner of her eye, noticed a woman leaning against a nearby tree as though she was about to faint. Indiana rushed over, offered the woman a shoulder to lean on, led her to the Holistic Clinic, and helped her up the two flights of stairs to Treatment Room 8, where the stranger slumped, exhausted, into one of the rickety chairs in the waiting room. After she got her breath back, the woman introduced herself and explained that she was suffering from an aggressive form of cancer and that the chemotherapy was proving worse than the disease. Touched, Indiana offered to let the woman lie down on the massage table and rest for a while. In a tremulous voice, Carol Underwater said she was fine in the chair but that she would be grateful for a hot drink. Indiana left the woman and went down the street to buy a herbal tea, feeling bad that there wasn’t a hot plate in the consulting room so she could boil water. When she got back, she found that the woman had recovered a little and even put on brick-red lipstick in a pathetic attempt to smarten herself up. Pale and ravaged by the cancer, Carol Underwater looked simply grotesque, her eyes standing out like glass buttons on a rag doll. She told Indiana she was thirty-six, but the wig and the deep furrows made her look ten years older.
    So began a relationship based on Carol Underwater’s