"Okay. Be friendly. Don't lean on him. Don't put him in a spot where he has to choose. Not yet." Malcolm stood up and walked to the window and looked out at the parking lot of the motel, at the orange sodium lights and the pickup trucks and the humid dark beyond them, full of insects. "And fourth. Let me make some calls."
"What calls?"
"Just some calls," said her father. "Tonight. I'm going to find out some things. And then I'm going to come home on Thursday, and I'm going to go and talk to some people at that school. Politely. Through proper channels. In uniform." He paused. "And everybody who had anything to do with what happened in that gym today is going to learn something about consequences."
There was a long silence on the line.
"Dad," said Alana slowly. "You're scaring me a little."
Malcolm Johnson looked at his own reflection in the dark glass of the motel window. A big man with a shaved head and a gray beard and a scar through one eyebrow, standing very still, with a phone to his ear and his other hand flat against the glass. He made himself breathe. In for four. Hold for four. Out for four. He made his shoulders come down.
"I'm sorry, baby," he said, and his voice was gentle again. "I don't mean to. I'm not going to do anything crazy. You know me. I don't do crazy. I do careful." He paused. "But somebody hurt my daughter on purpose today. And then smiled about it. And I'm not going to let that go. Not because I'm angry. Because it's wrong. And because if she did it to you, she's done it before, and she'll do it again, to some other kid whose daddy isn't me." He turned away from the window. "Now put your mother on. And get some sleep. Ice and elevate. Twenty on, twenty off."
"Twenty on, twenty off," Alana repeated. And then, very quietly: "I love you, Dad."
"I love you more," said Malcolm Johnson. "Always have. Always will. Even when you call me sir."
He talked to Renée for twenty minutes. She was angrier than he was, in the way Renée was always angrier than he was, out loud, in a low furious voice, walking up and down the kitchen of the rented house in Westfield. He let her be angry. He agreed with all of it. When she had finished, she said, Malcolm, what are you going to do? And he said, I'm going to do it right, baby. And she was quiet for a moment and then she said, okay. I trust you. Don't make me regret it.
Then he hung up, and sat down at the little round table by the window of the motel room, and pushed the training binders to one side, and opened his laptop, and began.
He did not do anything that any parent could not have done. That was important to him. He would think about it a great deal afterward, and he would be glad of it. He had friends who could have found out a great many things about Madison Cross and her family in a very short time, by means that were not available to ordinary parents, and he did not call any of them. He did not need to. Most of what he needed to know was public. It usually is. People just don't look.
He found the Westfield Public Schools website. He found the school board. Five members, elected. The vice chair, in her second term, was a woman named Patricia Cross. There was a photograph of her. Blonde, smiling, pearls. He found the minutes of the school board meetings for the last four years, which were posted online in long, dull PDF files that he suspected nobody had ever read in their entirety. He read them. It took him two hours. He found the vote approving the construction of the new athletic wing at Westfield High School, three years ago. Eleven point four million dollars. Awarded to the low bidder, Cross Construction and Development, LLC. He found the note, in small type at the bottom of the page, that Board Member P. Cross had recused herself from the vote. He found, eighteen months later, a change order on the same project for an additional two point one million dollars, for upgrades to the gymnasium and locker rooms. He found that the change order had been approved by a vote of three to one, with one abstention. He found that Board Member P. Cross had not recused herself from that vote.
He wrote it all down, carefully, with page numbers. He did not draw any conclusions. It was not his job to draw conclusions. There were people whose job that was, and he knew how to find them.
Then he did something else.
He went to the website for the Westfield High School cheerleading program. It was a nice website, built by somebody who knew what they were doing, with photographs of state championships and trophies and girls in navy and gold flying through the air. There was a page called OUR HISTORY, and on it, at the bottom, were the rosters of every varsity squad for the last ten years. He read them all. Then he went to the archived pages of the school newspaper, which were also online, and he read the sports sections for the last four years, and he cross-referenced them with the rosters.