But friends disagree markedly on the nature of the ‘Secret.’ Advocate president and It Girl alumn Brooke M. Lampley ’02 remarked, “I just thought it meant he was gay. Isn’t that what people imply when they say they have a ‘secret’?”

But Jamie H. Ginott ’01, his best friend of four years, derided the Gay Theory: “Being gay doesn’t have shock value anymore. That’s so 1995. I thought maybe he had witnessed something—like an assassination or someone tampering with a voting booth in Palm Beach. Maybe…” Ginott shuddered as she paused. “Maybe he was killed for his secret.”

Still, the most significant clues—and perhaps the only way to make sense of Soman’s disappearance—involve the state of his dorm room when HUPD arrived. “We’ve heard from his friends that Soman wasn’t exactly a clean freak. But the room was spotless—the garbage emptied, all the clothes hung up, everything in its place. No fingerprints, footprints or trace of a human presence. He must have completely cleaned and dusted the room before he left. Only two things were out of place,” said one officer.

“Yeah, two things caught our attention,” confirmed another officer, thankful for being re-assigned from the PSLM sit-in to the Soman case (“Those PSLM kids are great,” she said, “but boy, they reek”). “First of all, there was this strange song being played over and over on his mp3 player. It was programmed for repeat. But you know, it just wasn’t that great a song.”

Elisabeth S. McKetta ‘01, a longtime friend of Soman, teared up when asked about the song. “‘Back for More’ by the A-Teens,” she said, wiping her eyes. “We both loved that song. It had such depth of meaning: ‘When you think the party’s over / Look over your shoulder / I’ll be coming back for more.’ I think it tells us a lot about what Soman was thinking when he vanished.”

“Isn’t that song about a booty call?” asked Victoria C. Hallett ’02 incredulously. “I think he left it playing as a joke.”

“The other thing that caught our eye,” said the officer, “was the incomplete e-mail on his computer desktop.”