Shadows Still Remain by Peter de Jonge Page A

time on all your applicants?”
    â€œHardly. But Francesca was an exceptional young woman, and NYU wasn’t the only school to recognize that. We had to beat out Stanford and Duke and half the Ivies. The good half.”
    As Tomlinson talks about Pena’s lost potential, O’Hara revisits the elegant black-and-white photographs, and the ebony sculptures made of cow shit, and it all comes together. At the elite forty-thousand-dollar-a-year colleges, a qualified minority like Pena is the prize at the bottom of the Cracker Jack box, the one they all fight and drool over, and at NYU, Tomlinson is the designated drooler. “I’m going to need her entire file,” says O’Hara. “Everything you got, from application to transcripts.”
    â€œI’m afraid I can’t give you those. It would directly violate our confidentiality agreements.” For the first time since O’Hara arrived, Tomlinson smiles at her instead of down at her.
    â€œThis has to be a PR disaster for NYU,” says O’Hara, taking her time and almost enjoying herself despite the throbbing in the back of her head. “One of your most promising students has just been murdered. Not only that, she was raped and horribly mutilated. Every parent who is thinking of sending theirkid here must be getting seriously cold feet. I know I would if I was in their position. Well, how do you think those parents will feel when they learn that the school and its administration aren’t cooperating fully with the investigation?”
    â€œDetective,” says Tomlinson, teeth bared in what might be mistaken for a smile. “Do you always have a problem with women of color?”
    Some folks, thinks O’Hara, don’t waste any time pulling the race card . Particularly ones who refer to themselves as “women of color.” Sounds like a bad soul band .
    That’s not to say Tomlinson is entirely off base. You don’t grow up like O’Hara, broke and Irish in Bay Ridge, without a little redneck in you, and probably more than a little. And it doesn’t help that Tomlinson is taller, skinnier and better dressed, with a Harvard PhD on the wall, compared to her own dime-store GED. But does Tomlinson really think O’Hara is going to admit to it? And what would it mean anyway? O’Hara doesn’t say a word, just smiles back, and five minutes later, when she leaves Tomlinson’s office and heads across Washington Square, there are two large folders under her arm.
    In the gray afternoon light, the park looks nothing like it did during the snowy vigil. Both the grounds and demographic seem far shabbier, and no one in sight has anything to do with the university. Rosy-cheeked college kids have been replaced by people with not nearly enough money and way too much time, and the matinee crowds that have gathered around the malodorous dog runs skew heavily toward the gimp and insane. Dodging small-time pot dealers and clipboard fanatics, O’Hara walks the east-west length of the square, picks up a venti at Starbucks and enters Elmer Bobst Library, the redbrick edifice on the southeast corner. With its fourteen-story atrium, the balconies have become the favorite jumping-off points for student suicides—two in the last fifteen months—and as O’Hara crosses the checkerboard marble floor said to hypnotize the susceptible, she notices the Plexiglas barricades the school has built on every floor to thwart them. After she identifies herself as a cop, a guard tells her about the reading rooms on even floors. She gets off at twelve and takes a seat at an empty mahogany table, carefully placing her coffee on the carpet beside her feet. Floor-to-ceiling windows face north over the park toward Midtown, and far below through the leafless branches she can see the grid of sidewalks where a homeless man is moving in tight manic circles, the twelve-story remove turning schizophrenia into modern dance. To