Beyond the Point(43)

“Someone on the football team just forwarded them to me. It was a zip file. I didn’t know . . . I . . . What are you doing?”

Clicking maniacally, Dani toggled through the photos, pressing Print on each one. She snatched the photos off Locke’s printer. The pages felt warm in her hand.

“What are you going to do?” he repeated. “Where are you going with those?”

Without answering him, Dani limped out the door. As she made her way down the stairs and outside, Dani couldn’t stop thinking about Lisa Johnson. Three weeks earlier, she’d found Dani in the library and tearfully admitted that in the fall, she was transferring to Tulane.

“I can’t do it,” Lisa had said. “I can’t go to war, D. And even if that wasn’t happening . . . Coach Jankovich. She . . . she’s ruined this place for me.”

For her part, Coach Jankovich had acted as if it was a personal victory. “It was only a matter of time,” she’d said in response to the news, as if Lisa had finally been outed as a weakling, rather than acknowledging her role in breaking her down so far that Lisa no longer saw a future for herself at West Point. Dani had spent hours trying to convince Lisa to stay, to no avail. It felt like a personal failure, losing a teammate. Her first failure as the next team captain.

And she wasn’t about to let these photos be her second.

IN THE HOLLEDER Center, most offices were reserved for football coaches. Since spring football practice was in session at Michie Stadium, and the rest of West Point’s coaches were on recruiting trips, the entire place was empty and quiet. Unfortunately, it was harder than ever to recruit competitive players, now that the U.S. was engaged in an all-out war on terrorism—whatever that meant. Dani still didn’t understand the long-term strategy of a war against a network of people that had no flag, no country, no identifying characteristics other than hate.

How do you defeat fear? How do you defeat evil? It seemed like a never-ending task that could lead to never-ending conflict. How would they ever know that they’d won?

But the war was only one reason that recruiting had become so difficult. Fluorescent lights lit the corridor outside of Coach Jankovich’s office, and one flickered, like a fly had been caught in its electrical circuit. It couldn’t hurt to change a lightbulb or put a little effort into updating the facilities, Dani thought. But West Point wasn’t like other colleges; they practically needed congressional approval to turn up the air-conditioning. And if recruiting had been difficult for Coach Jankovich before, it was about to get much harder. No one wanted to send their daughter to a place where she’d be treated like a piece of meat.

Taking a deep breath, Dani knocked on the coach’s office door.

MINUTES LATER, THE printed photos were spread out over Jankovich’s already-crowded desk, an array of identical bodies, like images from a crime scene.

“How did you get ahold of these?” the coach asked.

Each photo showed the same person from a different angle, decapitated by the top edge of a camera lens: light skin, thin waist, round breasts, hairless between her legs. A headless body—bare for the entire corps to devour.

“My friend received them in a forwarded e-mail.”

“How do you know this is our locker room?” she asked, lifting one photo in her hand.

“The carpet, see?” Dani pointed to the distinguishing black and gold lines. “And the . . . well. I know it’s ours, because I know who that is.”

Blood rushed to Dani’s extremities as she watched the coach inspect the photos, turning them from side to side. What is she looking for? Letting out a massive sigh, Coach Jankovich ran a hand through her short hair, and it stood askew, pointing in different directions. She suddenly looked Dani directly in the face, her steel-blue eyes narrowing.

Silence spread between them, leaving the room devoid of oxygen. Dani coughed, took a breath, and tried again.

“I think we should report this. Someone hid a camera in our locker room and is now—”

“The damage is already done, wouldn’t you say?”

“Coach, I—”

“Doing that is going to cause a huge scandal. There will be news crews. A massive witch hunt. We have a hard enough time recruiting girls without something like this. Every one of our recruits will renege on their commitment, Dani. Is that what you want?”

“No. But this isn’t about basketball—”

“Of course it’s about basketball! So someone snapped a few nudie photos in the locker rooms. Big deal. It’s not exactly rape we’re dealing with here.”

“Does it have to be, for it to be wrong?”

The coach steeled her gaze.

“Whoever did this used a digital camera,” Dani continued pleadingly. “The angle is bad. That’s why you can’t see the face. They were taken from above—like someone stashed a camera above our lockers or something. And they’re not photos. You see the time stamp here? They’re still shots. Whoever did this has video footage. The camera could still be there.”

“Well, then, we will remove it.”

“We can’t just do that, Coach . . . if it’s there, it’s evidence.” Dani hated how exasperated she sounded. She wanted to reach across the desk and shake her coach into caring. Into understanding.

“Jesus, Dani. You sound like you think you’re on some crime show or something. We’ll deal with it internally and move on.”