taxes from the seething, blood-seeking criminal hordes. Until this very moment, the police, the judges, the prosecutors—they were all on his side. They were all his friends. Now here he stood, on the other side. He could think many things. Whose fault was it? What if he’d done things differently? Suppose he’d never met Cary or Jeffrey or James “Jimmy” Labate or Sal Piazza or any of the rest of them? He thought of these things but he kept coming back to another, darker, more impenetrable question that buzzed and whined inside his skull like a gnat. And that question was this: What would his family think when they learned the truth about Francis Warrington Gillet III?
CHAPTER TEN
May 1976
Warrington awoke in a stranger’s house, as he did every school day morning. It was not his house, and it was not his choice. Warrington was seventeen, in his junior year at the Gilman School, an exclusive all-boy prep school located on sixty-eight acres in an affluent corner of the city of Baltimore. It used to be called the Gilman Country School for Boys, but the trustees—in an effort to make the school seem a bit less pretentious—dropped the “Country.” It was one of those schools that made a point of wearing its history on its sleeve, rhapsodizing about its founders and insisting that it catered to students “from all backgrounds and segments” when it really served only the sons of the affluent and influential. They were Warrington’s classmates, and—truth be told—he fit right in.
He and his peers were being prepared “for college and a life of honor and service.” This was not a matter of choice. They were to become “men of character,” although the type of character was never specified. They would learn to go out and conquer the world, or at least acquire as much of it as possible. Some of Warrington’s peers had started Gilman in kindergarten and were planning on making it all the way through to the bitter end, spending twelve of their most formative years lugging satchels of books across the rolling green lawns that took them from grade to grade. Warrington was one of the Gilman lifers.
He and his 971 classmates all wore identical navy blue suit coats, white shirts and school ties, usually accompanied by khakis and Top-Siders without socks. Some—like Warrington—had their initials monogrammed in shirt cuffs. They were the sons of senators, CEOs, tycoons, moguls, big-time lawyers, big-money doctors. There was lots of old money and even a little new. He fit right in. He was just like nearly all his classmates—white, wealthy and without restrictions to opportunity. Nearly every one of them saw the world as his for the taking.
Like everybody else at Gilman, Warrington read the entire Lord of the Rings cycle, smoked massive quantities of dope and listened to Neil Young records day and night.
But Warrington also knew he was unlike his classmates. Almost every student came and went to school every day, being that it was a day school. Only two students actually lived on the Gilman grounds, in a little apartment that was part of the headmaster’s home. One of those two was Francis Warrington Gillet III. Warrington was aware that the other kids got to go home and see their moms and dads and siblings and dogs every night. All the other kids were well aware that Francis and his roommate, the son of a United States congressman, did not.
The symbolism of his involuntary living arrangements sometimes gnawed at Warrington’s very soul. Mostly he tried not to think about it, especially on these days in the middle of the 1970s when he was late once again for the morning chore known as algebra II.
Every junior had to take it. Warrington hated it. It did not highlight his strengths. It was unpleasant. He was pretty lousy at it. The combination of waking up alone in the headmaster’s house and the prospect of wrestling around with algorithms was enough to make him want to hide back under the
CHAPTER TEN
May 1976
Warrington awoke in a stranger’s house, as he did every school day morning. It was not his house, and it was not his choice. Warrington was seventeen, in his junior year at the Gilman School, an exclusive all-boy prep school located on sixty-eight acres in an affluent corner of the city of Baltimore. It used to be called the Gilman Country School for Boys, but the trustees—in an effort to make the school seem a bit less pretentious—dropped the “Country.” It was one of those schools that made a point of wearing its history on its sleeve, rhapsodizing about its founders and insisting that it catered to students “from all backgrounds and segments” when it really served only the sons of the affluent and influential. They were Warrington’s classmates, and—truth be told—he fit right in.
He and his peers were being prepared “for college and a life of honor and service.” This was not a matter of choice. They were to become “men of character,” although the type of character was never specified. They would learn to go out and conquer the world, or at least acquire as much of it as possible. Some of Warrington’s peers had started Gilman in kindergarten and were planning on making it all the way through to the bitter end, spending twelve of their most formative years lugging satchels of books across the rolling green lawns that took them from grade to grade. Warrington was one of the Gilman lifers.
He and his 971 classmates all wore identical navy blue suit coats, white shirts and school ties, usually accompanied by khakis and Top-Siders without socks. Some—like Warrington—had their initials monogrammed in shirt cuffs. They were the sons of senators, CEOs, tycoons, moguls, big-time lawyers, big-money doctors. There was lots of old money and even a little new. He fit right in. He was just like nearly all his classmates—white, wealthy and without restrictions to opportunity. Nearly every one of them saw the world as his for the taking.
Like everybody else at Gilman, Warrington read the entire Lord of the Rings cycle, smoked massive quantities of dope and listened to Neil Young records day and night.
But Warrington also knew he was unlike his classmates. Almost every student came and went to school every day, being that it was a day school. Only two students actually lived on the Gilman grounds, in a little apartment that was part of the headmaster’s home. One of those two was Francis Warrington Gillet III. Warrington was aware that the other kids got to go home and see their moms and dads and siblings and dogs every night. All the other kids were well aware that Francis and his roommate, the son of a United States congressman, did not.
The symbolism of his involuntary living arrangements sometimes gnawed at Warrington’s very soul. Mostly he tried not to think about it, especially on these days in the middle of the 1970s when he was late once again for the morning chore known as algebra II.
Every junior had to take it. Warrington hated it. It did not highlight his strengths. It was unpleasant. He was pretty lousy at it. The combination of waking up alone in the headmaster’s house and the prospect of wrestling around with algorithms was enough to make him want to hide back under the
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