overhead fixtures that emitted a fake, sunny glow, and kept at a consistent 72 degree temperature year-round. That counted a lot with Alice as she had to be outside so much, enduring the ridiculous Chicago weather extremes, and maybe she liked the pretend sunlight as there was almost never actual sunlight in Chicago. I preferred that basement coffee shop across the quad. It was located near the steam pipes and was usually uncomfortable and dimly lit with fluorescent lights. But the coffee was better, and I didn’t feel like I was on the set of Baywatch, getting a fake tan. Alice called the coffee shop I liked “that dump.”
When I got to the brightly lit, pleasantly warm, but not too warm, coffee shop, I stopped and got a cup of French Roast. It was the least offensive of their coffee blends. Today’s other featured coffees, I saw with horror, were “Maple Bacon” or “Spicy Taco.” I slapped a lid on my French Roast before it could get contaminated by bacon or taco flavoring. I looked around for Alice, and I spotted her back through the window. She had abandoned the fake interior and was sitting at an outside table, smoking. Nicotine was her go-to stress response like caffeine was mine. We had each promised the other to cut down on our drugs of choice. We were not succeeding.
I walked up to the table. Like all good cops, she was aware I was behind her, and she just said, “Don’t” without looking around.
She got up and took the half-smoked cigarette over to one of those black, outside cigarette disposal units that looked like an upside-down sledge hammer, ground it out and shoved it into the slot. She turned and clumped back toward the table, her sturdy cop shoes crunching the dry leaves littering the flagstones.
She sat back down, took out her notebook, and only then did she look up at me, her deep brown eyes opaque. She was still shut down.
“What you got?”
“Hello, Alice, glad to see you too. How are you? How are Shawna and Jim?”
“Always so damn cute,” she muttered, but her heart wasn’t really into pushing back at me. Then her shoulders relaxed a little under her dark, uniform jacket, and she softened her tone as I knew she would whenever I brought up her daughter, Shawna, who was six.
“Last spelling test, 100 percent,” Alice bragged. “She purely loves school.” She glanced at me under her fringe of dark hair. “Must be you rubbing off on her.” She paused and then went on more seriously, “And Jim is good too, I mean, now that he’s driving that truck and out of the house. Hard to have him gone so much, though.” Then she stopped, I assumed not wanting to share too much. But I thought she knew I understood.
Her husband, Jim, had been a firefighter in their south suburban town, but budget cuts had eliminated his job, and he’d been out of work for almost eighteen months. Then he’d gotten a truck driving license and, it seemed, a good job. But I bet it was hard on them, his being on the road. I knew Alice had family around to help with Shawna, as her hours were no picnic either. As a widow now for six years, I knew well what it was like to have to do solo parenting. And Alice knew that I knew.
“Sounds like it’s tough,” I replied neutrally. “But hey, 100 percent on the spelling is great. The boys do okay in spelling, but they complain that it is so dumb now that there’s spellcheck.” Yes, at seven they knew spellcheck on the computer.
Alice hmphed, opened her notebook, and clicked her pen. She was done with chit-chat.
I took her cue and just summarized what Jordan had said when he’d come to my office about John Vandenberg. Then I went on to Jane’s call with the information from Rev. Dunn about white supremacist wannabe’s using the chat rooms of violent video games to recruit and also to communicate. Perhaps they had used a chat room to plan the hanging of the noose. Jordan had implied John Vandenberg had acted alone, angry at the hiring of a Muslim professor in Philosophy and Religion and then at the title of his planned lecture.
“I don’t know, though, Alice, if that’s right, either that John Vandenberg hung the noose, or if he did, that he did it alone. There’s some white guy students here who even tried to get Richard Spencer to come speak. It could be a larger group,” I finished.
“Who’s he?” Alice said, pausing in her writing and looking up quizzically.
“You know, that neo-Nazi, rich idiot who’s always quoting Germans and saying ‘Heil Trump’ and so forth?”
Alice looked blank for a minute.
“White guy?”
“Yeah. Sort of a professional white guy, really, with rich parents so he doesn’t actually have to do anything to support himself. He keeps claiming ‘America belongs to the white man,’ and tries to get on to college campuses and talk about stuff like that under the banner of ‘free speech.’”
“And you think I pay attention to mess like that? Give a little shit like that any space in my brain? Do you think I’d let that filth come near me and mine?” Alice sat up straight and glared at me, her whole body rigid with anger.
“No. Of course not,” I said. “I’m just saying we need to know who the enemy is.”
Oh, hell. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized I’d made a huge mistake. Alice’s face went from anger to blank like someone had pulled the blinds closed. And someone had. Me.
“You think I don’t know who the enemy is?” she ground out between clenched teeth, her lips barely moving. “You think I haven’t known that all my life, had it shoved in my face every day, on the street, on a bus, in school, in this damn job for this ‘oh we’re so liberal, white people we don’t see you’ school? Do you?”
“Yes, you do know that. I shouldn’t have said what I did. It was stupid and blind. I’m sorry.”
She looked away, taking deep breaths.
I just waited.
“Try to think before you open your damn mouth, okay?” she said, still not looking at me.
“Yeah. Okay.” I wanted to say “sorry” and “I feel awful for what I just said,” and a bunch of other white, guilt-type phrases, but I figured the least I could do was shut up and not make it worse.
Alice opened the zip on her jacket and took out a little metal case that I knew held her cigarettes and lighter. She tapped the tip of a cigarette on the stone-topped table, put it between her lips, and lit it. She took a big drag, inhaling like this was her first gasp of air after having been choked. Then she took another short pull. She glared up at me, daring me to say anything.
I continued shutting up.
“They use these video games to plan stuff?” Alice said, puffing again while looking down at her notebook.
She was all business.
“That’s what Jane told me Rev. Dunn had said,” I replied evenly. “Yeah, in short, they go online, play the game, and then use the chat room to communicate. And they all use screen names, weird ones, Jane reported, though God knows what they consider weird. We can’t just look at the chat rooms of these games and see that it’s students.”
I paused, thinking. Alice took another drag.
“But we might be able to tell from what they’re saying to each other. I mean if they sound like they’re talking about our campus.”
She paused, looking at
